Don't Waste Your Life
To many in this world life is really without significant purpose. It is not that it does not have purpose at all, but that it lacks significant purpose. The underlying purpose of life for many young people is to get enough money together to go to a movie on Friday night with friends. For some it is to be accepted to a particular college. For some it is to land their dream job. Still yet others wish that certain someone would ask them for a date.
For some people their purpose, most of all, is their next drug or alcohol induced “high.” For some, their greatest purpose is to make it those last few years until retirement. For some it is to reach that level of financial security for which they have strove for so long. For some they have so little purpose that they virtually no goals, no ambition, and no real dreams. They are willing to take good things if they are handed to them but are unwilling to put forth any significant effort in order to attain anything of much worth. They are much like John Lennon’s famous song lyrics:
He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where he’s going to
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Sadly, there are countless people who are, quite simply just wasting their lives. They are taking up space and consuming recourses but they really do not contribute much of anything to anyone. They live to play their next video game, watch their next movie, eat their next pizza, drink their next beer, take their next nap, smoke their next joint, sleep off their next hangover, or have their next one-night-stand. Is this really any way to live?
The reason so many live such vain and empty lives which are centered around their own instant gratification is because they have never discovered the secret to life, which it not really that big of secret. When Jesus counseled with the learned Pharisee, Nicodemus in John 3, He told him that “you must be born again.” It was not that a person needed to enter once again into their mother’s womb and experience “physical” birth again, but that they desperately were in need of a “spiritual” re-birth.
John Piper, in his book Don’t Waste Your Life writes, “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.” Most people are utterly wasting their lives. The thought of living for 70, 80 years on this earth and still not figuring it out is sad beyond description, yet there are many who do. It is not uncommon today to see persons forgoing a traditional funeral and having “celebration of life” memorial services with no reference to God or life or death or anything remotely “religious” at all. It is as though God has become either irrelevant or only a memory.
Life is precious. Life is short. Life is a gift from God and therefore must be cherished. Life has no greater fulfillment than when it is lived for Jesus Christ. If life was and is a gift given by God, it is not worthless, even though some do all they can, it seems, to devalue themselves and their existence by their behavior and overt rebellion against their creator. Most people do not realize this, but you are not your own. Either you are enslaved to sin and controlled by it, or you have been bought with a price (the price of Christ’s blood) and you now belong to Him.
We are more “American” than we are “Christian” these days it seems. We view the world through a prism which reveals to us we are “owed” a number of things and we will not give them up. When someone dies what we term “prematurely” in an accident, or of a disease at a relatively young age, notice how people not only exhibit sadness but also some measure of anger directed mainly toward God because of an underlying belief He has somehow short-changed them of something which they were owed. This is what they believe. They have no concept of what the Bible has to say about life and death, only that their personal set of beliefs concerning life and death were not honored with the sincerest of integrity and attention to detail.
Many waste their lives by being unteachable in that they feel they possess all the answers. It is not that they believe they know everything, but that they know enough about the things which really matter. The concepts of sacrifice and service are slowly fading away into the background. Generations of the past have been far more honorable and viewed their lives as not so much their own but as tools for the furtherance of a greater cause. In some cases that led to missions service, in some cases to military service, and other types of service oriented jobs and voluntarism. James Bradley, in his book Flags of Our Fathers, a book which tells the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima woven together with the lives of the six flag raisers in the famous Iwo Jima Memorial. He writes, “When I think of Mike Harlon, and Franklin there, I think of the message someone had chiseled outside the cemetery:
When you go home
Tell them for us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today
When we stand before the Lord one day, it will instantly be clear whether or not we have wasted our life or not.
In Christ,
Pastor Allen Raynor