It’s a life spent living for yourself instead of living for the God of all joy (Matt. It’s a life living for lesser things, cheap things, flammable things (1 Cor. It’s a life spent searching for satisfaction in soul-crushing sin, instead of a life spent savoring in the love and power and riches of the grace of God. Any life other than that is wasted, tragically, because it’s a life spent chasing a thimble of pleasure when you could have a waterfall. 6:17).Ī wasted life, therefore, is any life that doesn’t pursue the never-ending joy that we were created to know in God. 16:11), and he “richly provides you with all things to enjoy” (1 Tim. He has an eternally cascading waterfall of pleasures at his right hand (Ps. He is the fountain of everything good and beautiful and true (Jas. God is so significant that just knowing him is called “eternal life” (John 17:3). Now if you understand who God is, then you realize just how good this news is. Then he redeemed us from our sin, so we are doubly his. This means God has a double-claim on our lives. Not only we made “through him and for him,” we also have been redeemed by him through his death and resurrection. Like a fish was made for the water, like a car was made to run on gas, you were made to know the God in whom we live and move and have your being (Acts 17:28). Jesus tells us, “All things were created through him and for him” (Col. The idea of a “wasted life” is may seem offensive, but that doesn’t make it untrue. In a way, the book’s warning is also a promise of hope: if there are ways for wasting your life, then there must be ways for not wasting it, too.Īnd it was here that I read again those words so often heard but never heeded: Indeed, I felt him speaking to me through the question that day.Īt my friend’s request, we began to read the book Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper. On the second visit, a man who’s now one of my best friends pulled my aside and asked, “What the heck are you doing with your life?” It was a rhetorical question, not unlike most of the questions that Jesus asked. I attended church maybe twice that summer, with several weeks in between. Sometimes I ended up on the floor of my grandparents’ house (they were away for the summer).
When I’d get off from work after midnight, I’d often drive around aimlessly. I spent most of the summer of 2006 working late nights in a restaurant, sleeping long hours during the day, and playing video games whenever I wasn’t working.
It wasn’t until later, during the most desperate time of my life, that I stumbled upon those words again-this time, with a much different outcome. Studd:Īt the time, my sinful cynicism prevented that quote from sinking deep into the soil of my heart. Hardly a month went by without hearing him recite these words of C.T. (“How’s it going, young man?” wham!)īut one of the things I remember most about Jerry was a quote he repeated so often that many people (both then and now) erroneously attribute to him. He once sucker-punched a friend of mine in the gut, and he did with a smile on his face. He liked to swerve his massive black Suburban onto the sidewalks in a (jesting?) attempt to hit unsuspecting students. Jerry (as he liked to be called) was a larger-than-average man with a larger-than-life personality. (But some of it is decidedly not.) The same is true of the school’s (in)famous founder, Jerry Falwell, Sr. The school has a mixed repetition, to put it mildly, and some of it is quite deserved. For better and for worse, I attended Liberty University for undergraduate degree in the early 2000s.
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