Don't Waste Your Life
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God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion. God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work, not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.
John Piper
God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion. God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work, not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.
THE MAJESTY OF CHRIST IN MISSIONS AND MERCY—A PLEA TO THIS GENERATION
God is closing in on some of you. He is like the “Hound of Heaven” who means to make you far happier in some dangerous and dirty work. Missionaries and ministers of mercy don’t come from nowhere. They come from people like you, stunned by the glory of God and stopped in your tracks. Sometimes it happens when you are going in exactly the oppo site direction.
I urge you in the name of Jesus to wake up, and enlarge your heart, and stretch your mind, and spread your wings. Mount up above your limited life—yes, a very important life, which God does not diminish—and see the great and thrilling big picture of God’s global purposes for the history of the world that cannot fail. “My counsel shall stand,” says the Lord, “and I will accomplish all my purpose” (Isaiah 46:10). “At the name of Jesus every knee [will] bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11). “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).
DON’T TAKE OFFENSE
And as God gives you wings to rise up and see the world the way he sees it, many of you, I pray, will be loosened from your pres-ent situation—job, neighborhood, state, nation, plan—and be called to a direct engagement in this great historic,
global purpose of God as a goer and not only a sender. Let no one who is devoted to local ministry or to crucial secular engagement take offense at this plea. Rather rejoice. You are free to stay or free to go. Many of you must stay. Your staying is crucial for God’s purposes where you are, and it is crucial for his purposes where you are not, but where others may go. There is no need for guilt or resentment. There is great need for joyful partnership.
Those of you who stay—the senders—should keep this remarkable fact in mind: Foreign missions is a validation of all ministries of mercy at home because it exports them abroad. Planting the church in an unreached people means planting the base of operations for all the mercy Jesus commanded for the poor. If we don’t let our light shine before the people at home “so that they may see [our] good works and give glory to [our] Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16), what kind of obe dience will we export to the nations? The Great Commission includes the words, “teaching them to observe all that I [Jesus] have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20). And what did he com mand? He told the story of the desperate wounded man and the good Samaritan who “showed him mercy,” and then said to all of us, “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).
GOD ISSUES A CALL TO THIS GENERATION: LISTEN!
There is a call on this generation to obey the risen Christ and make disciples of all the unreached peoples of the world. I am praying that God will raise up hundreds of thousands of young people and “finishers” (people finishing one career and ready to pursue a second in Christian ministry). I pray that this divine call will rise in your heart with joy and not guilt. I pray that it will be confirmed with the necessary gifts, and a compelling desire, and the confirmation of your church, and the tokens of providence. Fan into flame every flicker of desire by reading biographies, and meditating on Scripture, and studying the unreached peoples, and praying for passion, and conversing with mission veterans. Don’t run from the call. Pursue it.
THE MEANING OF YOUR DISCONTENT
Many of you should stay where you are in your present job, and simply ponder how you can fit your particular skills and rela tionships and resources more strategically into the global pur pose of your heavenly Father. But for others reading this book, it is going to be different. Many of you are simply not satisfied with what you are doing. As J. Campbell White said, the output of your lives is not satisfying your deepest spiritual ambitions. We must be careful here. Every job has its discouragements and its seasons of darkness. We must not interpret such experiences automatically as a call to leave our post.
But if the discontent with your present situation is deep, recurrent, and lasting, and if that discontent grows in Bible-saturated soil, God may be calling you to a new work. If, in your discontent, you long to be holy, to walk pleasing to the Lord, and to magnify Christ with your one, brief life, then God may indeed be loosening your roots in order to transplant you to a place and a ministry where the deep spiritual ambitions of your soul can be satisfied. It is true that God can be known and enjoyed in every legitimate vocation; but when he deploys you from one place to the next, he offers fresh and deeper drinking at the fountain of his fellowship. God seldom calls us to an easier life, but always calls us to know more of him and drink more deeply of his sustaining grace.
AND YOU?
And so it is with many of you. Big issues are in the offing. May God help you. May God free you. May God give you a fresh, Christ-exalting vision for your life—whether you go to an unreached people or stay firmly and fruitfully at your present post. May your vision get its meaning from God’s great purpose to make the nations glad in him. May the cross of Christ be your only boast, and may you say, with sweet confidence, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
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