Don't waste your life notes

Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake and

the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, it is better to lose your

life than to waste it. If you live gladly to make others glad in God,

your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will

be full. This is not a book about how to avoid a wounded life,

but how to avoid a wasted life. Some of you will die in the service

of Christ. That will not be a tragedy. Treasuring life above

Christ is a tragedy.

Please know that I am praying for you, whether you are a student

dreaming something radical for your life, or whether you

are retired and hoping not to waste the final years.

For me as a boy, one of the most gripping illustrations my fiery

father used was the story of a man converted in old age. The

church had prayed for this man for decades. He was hard and

resistant. But this time, for some reason, he showed up when my

father was preaching. At the end of the service, during a hymn, to

everyone’s amazement he came and took my father’s hand. They

sat down together on the front pew of the church as the people

were dismissed. God opened his heart to the Gospel of Christ, and

he was saved from his sins and given eternal life. But that did not

stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled

face—and what an impact it made on me to hear my father

say this through his own tears—“I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!”

God awakened in me a fear and a passion

not to waste my life. The thought of coming to my old age

and saying through tears, “I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” was a

fearful and horrible thought to me.

Only one life,

’Twill soon be past;

Only what’s done

for Christ will last.

“I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” Somehow

there had been wakened in me a passion for the essence and the

main point of life. The ethical question “whether something is

permissible” faded in relation to the question, “what is the main

thing, the essential thing?” The thought of building a life around

minimal morality or minimal significance—a life defined by the

question, “What is permissible?”—felt almost disgusting to me.

I didn’t want a minimal life. I didn’t want to live on the outskirts

of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and

pursue it.

that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth

and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist.

Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for

being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and

opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of

my soul-food from centuries ago.

CS Lewis - He helped me see what is there in the world—things

that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have,

but having them, ignore.

If there is only one life to live in this world, and if it is not to

be wasted, nothing seemed more important to me than finding

out what God really meant in the Bible, since he inspired men to

write it.

Matthew Arnold called “severe discipline.” He showed me the

obvious: that the verses of the Bible are not strung pearls but

links in a chain. The writers developed unified patterns of

thought. They reasoned. “Come now, let us reason together, says

the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18). This meant that, in each paragraph of

Scripture, one should ask how each part related to the other parts

in order to say one coherent thing. Then the paragraphs should

be related to each other in the same way. And then the chapters,

then the books, and so on until the unity of the Bible is found on

its own terms.

I thank God that Edwards did not waste his life. It ended

abruptly from a failed smallpox vaccination when he was fiftyfour.

But he had lived well. His life is inspiring because of his zeal

not to waste it, and because of his passion for the supremacy of

God.

[The] glory of God [does not] consist merely in the creature’s

perceiving his perfections: for the creature may perceive the

power and wisdom of God, and yet take no delight in it, but

abhor it. Those creatures that so do, don’t glorify God. Nor

doth the glory of God consist especially in speaking of his perfections:

for words avail not any otherwise than as they

express the sentiment of the mind. This glory of God, therefore,

[consists] in the creature’s admiring and rejoicing [and]

exulting in the manifestation of his beauty and excellency. . . Jonathan Edwards

God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing,

all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God

by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the

spheres of life. Enjoying and displaying are both crucial. If we try

to display the excellence of God without joy in it, we will display

a shell of hypocrisy and create scorn or legalism. But if we claim

to enjoy his excellence and do not display it for others to see and

admire, we deceive ourselves, because the mark of Godenthralled

joy is to overflow and expand by extending itself into

the hearts of others. The wasted life is the life without a passion

for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.

Glorify does not mean add more glory to God.

It is more like the word magnify. But here too we can go

wrong. Magnify has two distinct meanings. In relation to God,

one is worship and one is wickedness. You can magnify like a

telescope or like a microscope. When you magnify like a microscope,

you make something tiny look bigger than it is. A dust

mite can look like a monster. Pretending to magnify God like that

is wickedness. But when you magnify like a telescope, you make

something unimaginably great look like what it really is. With the

Hubble Space Telescope, pinprick galaxies in the sky are revealed

for the billion-star giants that they are. Magnifying God like that

is worship.

We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream

and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life.

God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him

look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite

worth that he really is. In the night sky of this world God

appears to most people, if at all, like a pinprick of light in a

heaven of darkness. But he created us and called us to make him

look like what he really is. This is what it means to be created in

the image of God. We are meant to image forth in the world what

he is really like.

For many people, this is not obviously an act of love. They do

not feel loved when they are told that God created them for his

glory. They feel used. This is understandable given the way love

has been almost completely distorted in our world. For most people,

to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our

Western culture serves this distortion of love. We are taught in a

thousand ways that love means increasing someone’s self-esteem.

Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving

someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees.

This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is

doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our

highest affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction.

We were made to see and savor God—and savoring him, to

be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth

of his presence. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not

to love them. To make them feel good about themselves when

they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking

someone to the Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors.

Sometimes people say that they cannot believe that, if there

is a God, he would take interest in such a tiny speck of reality

called humanity on Planet Earth. The universe, they say, is so

vast, it makes man utterly insignificant. Why would God have

bothered to create such a microscopic speck called the earth and

humanity and then get involved with us?

Beneath this question is a fundamental failure to see what the

universe is about. It is about the greatness of God, not the significance

of man. God made man small and the universe big to

say something about himself. And he says it for us to learn and

enjoy—namely, that he is infinitely great and powerful and wise

and beautiful. The more the Hubble Telescope sends back to us

about the unfathomable depths of space, the more we should

stand in awe of God. The disproportion between us and the universe

is a parable about the disproportion between us and God.

And it is an understatement. But the point is not to nullify us but

to glorify him.

God loves us best by giving

us the best to enjoy forever, namely himself, for he is best.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that

whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”

(John 3:16). God loves us by giving us eternal life at the cost of

his Son, Jesus Christ.

But what is eternal life? Is it eternal selfesteem?

Is it a heaven full of mirrors?

God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing

and admiring him forever.

what must love do? It must rescue us from our addiction to

self and bring us, changed, into the presence of God.

So here is the question to test whether you have been sucked into

this world’s distortion of love: Would you feel more loved by God

if he made much of you, or if he liberated you from the bondage

of self-regard, at great cost to himself, so that you enjoy making

much of him forever?

God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation

is the most loving act. Anyone else who exalts himself distracts

us from what we need, namely, God. But if God exalts himself,

he calls attention to the very thing we need most for our joy.

If great paintings could talk, and they saw you walking through the

gallery staring at the floor, they would cry out, “Look! Look at

me. I am the reason you are here.” And when you look and exult

in the beauty of the paintings with those around you, your joy

would be full. You would not complain that the paintings should

have kept quiet. They rescued you from wasting your visit. In the

same way no child complains, “I am being used” when his father

delights to make the child happy with his own presence.

Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish

it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price

of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain.

the apostle Paul said that his life and ministry were riveted

on a single aim: “I decided to know nothing among you

except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). That

is astonishing, when you think of all the varied things Paul did,

in fact, talk about. There must be a sense in which “Jesus Christ

and him crucified” is the ground and sum of everything else he

says. He is pushing us to see our lives with a single focus, and for

the cross of Christ to be that focus.

You may not be sure that you want your life to make a difference.

Maybe you don’t care very much whether you make a lasting

difference for the sake of something great. You just want

people to like you. If people would just like being around you,

you’d be satisfied. Or if you could just have a good job with a

good wife, or husband, and a couple of good kids and a nice car

and long weekends and a few good friends, a fun retirement, and

a quick and easy death, and no hell—if you could have all that

(even without God)—you would be satisfied. That is a tragedy

in the making. A wasted life.

Few things, if any, fill me with more longing

these months and years than the longing that my children not

waste their lives on fatal success.

This longing transfers very easily to you, especially if you are

in your twenties or thirties. I see you, as it were, like a son or a

daughter, and in these pages I plead with you as a father—perhaps

a father who loves you dearly, or the father you never had.

Or the father who never had a vision for you like I have for you—

and God has for you. Or the father who has a vision for you, but

it’s all about money and status. I look through these pages and

see you as sons and daughters, and I plead with you: Desire that

your life count for something great! Long for your life to have

eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without

a passion.

whatever you do, find the

God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your

life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it.

And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste

your life.

being dead to the world does not mean having

no feelings about the world (see 1 John 2:15; 1 Timothy 4:3).

It means that every legitimate pleasure in the world becomes a

blood-bought evidence of Christ’s love, and an occasion of

boasting in the cross. We are dead to insurance payments when

the money is not what satisfies, but Christ crucified, the Giver,

satisfies.

Living to magnify Christ is costly. This is not surprising. He was

crucified. He was treated like a devil. And he calls us to follow

him. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and

take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). He says it will

probably not go better for us than for him. “If they have called

the master of the house Beelzebul,1 how much more will they

malign those of his household” (Matthew 10:25).

But suffering with Jesus on the Calvary road of love is not

merely the result of magnifying Christ; it is also the means.

Bonhoeffer’s book was a massive indictment of the “cheap

grace” that he saw in the Christian Church on both sides of the

Atlantic. He believed in justification by grace through faith. But

he did not believe that the faith that justifies could ever leave people

unchanged by the radical Christ they claim to believe. That

was a cheap response to the Gospel. “The only man,” he said,

“who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the

man who has left all to follow Christ.”3

What you love determines what you feel shame about. If you

love for men to make much of you, you will feel shame when they

don’t. But if you love for men to make much of Christ, then you

will feel shame if he is belittled on your account.

Whenever something is of tremendous value to you, and you

cherish its beauty or power or uniqueness, you want to draw others’

attention to it and waken in them the same joy. That is why

Paul’s all-consuming goal in life was for Christ to be magnified.

Christ was of infinite value to Paul, and so Paul longed for others

to see and savor this value. That is what it means to magnify

Christ—to show the magnitude of his value.

God’s glory shines more brightly when he satisfies

us in times of loss than when he provides for us in times of

plenty. The health, wealth, and prosperity “gospel” swallows up

the beauty of Christ in the beauty of his gifts and turns the gifts

into idols. The world is not impressed when Christians get rich

and say thanks to God. They are impressed when God is so sat-

isfying that we give our riches away for Christ’s sake and count

it gain.

But what must happen in this conflict with famine and sword

if you are to be called more than a conqueror? One biblical

answer is that a conqueror defeats his enemy, but one who is more

than a conqueror subjugates his enemy. A conqueror nullifies the

purpose of his enemy; one who is more than a conqueror makes

the enemy serve his own purposes. A conqueror strikes down his

foe; one who is more than a conqueror makes his foe his slave.

If Christ is an all-satisfying treasure and promises to provide all

our needs, even through famine and nakedness, then to live as

though we had all the same values as the world would betray

him. I have in mind mainly how we use our money and how we

feel about our possessions. I hear the haunting words of Jesus,

“Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall

we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after

all these things” (Matthew 6:31-32). In other words, if we look

like our lives are devoted to getting and maintaining things, we

will look like the world, and that will not make Christ look

great. He will look like a religious side-interest that may be useful

for escaping hell in the end, but doesn’t make much difference

in what we live and love here. He will not look like an

all-satisfying treasure. And that will not make others glad in

God.

There is no doubt that if we lived more like this, the world

would be more likely to consider whether Jesus is an all-satisfying

Treasure. He would look like one. When was the last

time someone asked you about “the reason for the hope that

is in you”? That’s what Peter said we should always be ready

to give an answer for: “Always be prepared to make a defense

to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in

you” (1 Peter 3:15).

Why don’t people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably

that we look as if we hope in the same things they do

THE CREDIBILITY OF CHRIST HANGS ON HOW

WE USE OUR MONEY

The issue of money and lifestyle is not a side issue in the Bible.

The credibility of Christ in the world hangs on it. “Fifteen percent

of everything Christ said relates to this topic—more than his

teachings on heaven and hell combined.”1 Listen to this refrain

that runs all through his teachings:

• “You lack one thing: go, sell all you have and give to the

poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow

me” (Mark 10:21).

• “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of

God. . . . But woe to you who are rich, for you have received

your consolation” (Luke 6:20, 24).

• “Any of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot

be my disciple” (Luke 14:33).

• “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle

than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke

18:25).

• “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions”

(Luke 12:15).

• “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and

all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

• “Sell your possessions and give to the needy. Provide yourselves

with moneybags . . . in the heavens” (Luke 12:33).

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LIVING TO PROVE HE IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN LIFE

• “Zacchaeus . . . said to the Lord, ‘Behold, Lord, the half of

my goods I give to the poor. . . .’ And Jesus said to him,

‘Today salvation has come to this house’” (Luke 19:8-9).

• “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field,

which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes

and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew

13:44).

• “[Jesus] saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins.

And he said, ‘Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in

more than all of them’” (Luke 21:2-3).

• “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is

required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose

will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself

and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:20-21).

• “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the

Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. . . . Follow me”

(Luke 9:58-59).

I need to hear this message again and again, because I drift

into a peacetime mind-set as certainly as rain falls down and

flames go up. I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the

world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start

to call earth “home.” Before you know it, I am calling luxuries

“needs” and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin

to forget the war. I don’t think much about people perishing.

Missions and unreached peoples drop out of my mind. I stop

dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mindset

that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do.

But my sense is that in the prosperous West, the danger in the

church is not that there are too many overly zealous people who

care too deeply about the lost, and invest hazardously in the

cause of the Gospel, and ruin their lives with excessive mercy to

the poor. For every careless saint who burns himself out and

breaks up his family with misdirected zeal, I venture, there are a

thousand who coast with the world, treating Jesus like a helpful

add-on, but not as an all-satisfying, all-authoritative King in the

cause of love.

One of the marks of this peacetime mind-set is what I call an

avoidance ethic. In wartime we ask different questions about

what to do with our lives than we do in peacetime. We ask: What

can I do to advance the cause? What can I do to bring the victory?

What sacrifice can I make or what risk can I take to insure

the joy of triumph? In peacetime we tend to ask, What can I do

to be more comfortable? To have more fun? To avoid trouble

and, possibly, avoid sin?

People who are content with the avoidance ethic generally ask

the wrong question about behavior. They ask, What’s wrong

with it? What’s wrong with this movie? Or this music? Or this

game? Or these companions? Or this way of relaxing? Or this

investment? Or this restaurant? Or shopping at this store? What’s

wrong with going to the cabin every weekend? Or having a

cabin? This kind of question will rarely yield a lifestyle that commends

Christ as all-satisfying and makes people glad in God. It

simply results in a list of don’ts. It feeds the avoidance ethic.

The better questions to ask about possible behaviors is: How

will this help me treasure Christ more? How will it help me show

that I do treasure Christ? How will it help me know Christ or display

Christ? The Bible says, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever

you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

So the question is mainly positive, not negative. How can I portray

God as glorious in this action? How can I enjoy making

much of him in this behavior?

Oh, how many lives are wasted by people who believe that the

Christian life means simply avoiding badness and providing for

the family. So there is no adultery, no stealing, no killing, no

embezzlement, no fraud—just lots of hard work during the day,

and lots of TV and PG-13 videos in the evening (during quality

family time), and lots of fun stuff on the weekend—woven

around church (mostly). This is life for millions of people.

Wasted life. We were created for more, far more.

TELEVISION, THE GREAT LIFE-WASTER

Television is one of the greatest life-wasters of the modern age.

And, of course, the Internet is running to catch up, and may have

caught up. You can be more selective on the Internet, but you can

also select worse things with only the Judge of the universe

watching. TV still reigns as the great life-waster. The main problem

with TV is not how much smut is available, though that is a

problem. Just the ads are enough to sow fertile seeds of greed and

lust, no matter what program you’re watching. The greater problem

is banality. A mind fed daily on TV diminishes. Your mind

was made to know and love God. Its facility for this great calling

is ruined by excessive TV. The content is so trivial and so shallow

that the capacity of the mind to think worthy thoughts

withers, and the capacity of the heart to feel deep emotions shrivels.

“For your tomorrow,

I gave my today. Not just for your tomorrow on earth, but

for the countless tomorrows of your ever-increasing gladness in

God.”

OGod, who will get in their face and give them something to live

for? They waste their days in a trance of insignificance, trying to

look cool or talk cool or walk cool. They don’t have a clue what

cool is.

Of course, we do not use the word cool to describe true greatness.

It is a small word. That’s the point. It’s cheap. And it’s what

millions of young people live for. Who confronts them with

urgency and tears? Who pleads with them not to waste their

lives? Who takes them by the collar, so to speak, and loves them

enough to show them a life so radical and so real and so costly

and Christ-saturated that they feel the emptiness and triviality of

their CD collection and their pointless conversations about passing

celebrities? Who will waken what lies latent in their souls,

untapped—a longing not to waste their lives?

Jonathan Edwards made it a rule that personal piety to the

neglect of secular duties is hypocritical.

So one crucial meaning of our secular work is

that the way we do it will increase or decrease the attractiveness

of the Gospel we profess before unbelievers. Of course, the great

assumption is that they know we are Christians. The whole point

of the text breaks down if there is nothing for our work to

“adorn.” Thinking that our work will glorify God when people

do not know we are Christians is like admiring an effective ad

on TV that never mentions the product. People may be impressed

but won’t know what to buy.

When man and woman chose to be self-reliant and rejected

God’s fatherly guidance and provision, God subjected them to

the very thing they chose: self-reliance.

In conclusion, secular work is not a waste when we make much

of Christ from 8 to 5. God’s will in this age is that his people be

scattered like salt and light in all legitimate vocations. His aim is

to be known, because knowing him is life and joy. He does not

call us out of the world. He does not remove the need to work.

He does not destroy society and culture. Through his scattered

saints he spreads a passion for his supremacy in all things for the

joy of all peoples. If you work like the world, you will waste your

life, no matter how rich you get. But if your work creates a web

of redemptive relationships and becomes an adornment for the

Gospel of the glory of Christ, your satisfaction will last forever

and God will be exalted in your joy.

If you have pity for perishing people and a passion for the reputation

of Christ, you must care about world missions.

Most men are not satisfied with the permanent output of their

lives. Nothing can wholly satisfy the life of Christ within his

followers except the adoption of Christ’s purpose toward the

world he came to redeem. Fame, pleasure and riches are but

husks and ashes in contrast with the boundless and abiding

joy of working with God for the fulfillment of his eternal

plans. The men who are putting everything into Christ’s

undertaking are getting out of life its sweetest and most priceless

rewards.

O God, you know I tremble now for fear that many of the

ones who call you Lord have made themselves the prize and glory

of your grace. How many, Lord, have made your love a witness

to their worth! Is then their joy a resting in your worth or in their

own? So many decades have gone by in which the constant message

from the world, and even from some ministers, is this: that

love means making much of man. And so when men, with this

assurance, ponder what your love might mean, they say the same:

God’s love means making much of man. For proof they ask:

Don’t you feel loved when someone calls attention to your

worth?

I see it is an imitation.

It has its roots in Eden long ago. The great destroyer of our

love and joy said to our mother, Eve, “God knows that when you

eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.”

Like God! She should have said, “I am like God already.” She

should have seen the trick. But she did not, and oh, how many

do not see it yet today

And so it came into the world, this great inversion we call sin.

And love was made to stand now on its head. I grieve, Lord, just

to put it into words, but here it is with shame: Your love no

longer means that you do what you must do to make yourself our

joy. It has come to mean that you do what you must do so we

can feel our worth.

How could I, Lord, have ever been so blind to think that

being loved by you means making much of me and not yourself?

How could I put my eye to some great telescope, designed to

make me glad with visions of the galaxies, and notice in the glass

a dim reflection of my face and say, “Now I am happy, I am

loved”?

O Father, grant your church to love your glory more

than gold—to cease her love affair with comfort and security.

Grant that we seek the kingdom first and let the other things

come as you will. Grant that we move toward need and not

toward ease. Grant that the firm finality of our security in Christ

free us to risk our homes and health and money on the earth.

Help us to see that if we try to guard our wealth, instead of using

it to show it’s not our god, then we will waste our lives, however

we succeed.