Don't Waste Your Life

For me [John Piper] 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!"

This was the story that gripped me more than all the stories of young people who died in car wrecks before they were converted - the story of an old man weeping that he had wasted his life.

In those early years 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

Another riveting force in my young life - small at first, but oh so powerful over time - was a plaque that hung in our kitchen over the sink. We moved into that house when I was six. So I suppose I looked at the words on that plaque almost every day for twelve years, till I went away to college at age eighteen.

It was a simple piece of glass painted black on the back with a grey link chain snug around it for a border and for hanging. On the front, in old English script, painted in white, were the words:

Only one life,
'Twill soon be past;
Only what's done
for Christ will last.

To the left, beside these words, was a painted green hill with two trees and a brown path that disappeared over the hill. How many times, as a little boy, and then as a teenager with pimples and longings and anxieties, I looked at that brown path (my life) and wondered what would be over that hill.

The message was clear. You get one pass at life. That's all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.

I am fifty-seven as I write, and that very plaque hangs today on the wall by our front door. I see it every time I leave home.

What would it mean to waste my life? That was a burning question. Or, more positively, what would it mean to live well - not to waste life, but to...? How to finish that sentence was the question. I was not even sure how to put the question into words, let alone what the answer might be.

What was the opposite of not wasting my life? "To be successful in a career"? Or "to be maximally happy"? Or "to accomplish something great?" Or "to find the deepest meaning and significance"? Or "to help as many people as possible"? Or "to serve Christ to the full"? Or "to glorify God in all I do"? Or was there a point, a purpose, a focus, an essence to life that would fulfill every one of those dreams?

- John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

I can't pinpoint exactly when I became a Christian, but I was baptised on 16 Apr 06 (Easter Sunday). So today is the 5th anniversary of my baptism.

Looking back, I don't know what I was doing for the first 20 years of my life. I'm just glad that it wasn't worse.

"Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that."" - James 4:13-15 (NIV)