“I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider this story from the February 1998 Reader’s Digest: A couple ‘took retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball and collect shells….’ Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: ‘Look, Lord. See my shells.’ That is tragedy.
“God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without 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.”
Every sane human being has a desire to be known for something, anything people will remember them for. The wasted life is one where you leave nothing behind; your life was simply a vapor that is swept away in the wind. Perhaps the great tragedy that can happen to us in this life is to realize, as we come to the end of our time on earth, that we have done nothing that lasted. That we had wasted our entire time in this world.
God has placed each of us on this planet for a specific purpose. In every human being is the potential to change the world. The saddest thing that can happen is you get to heaven and realize the purpose for which you were placed on earth was left uncompleted.
The wasted life is one of self-centeredness. Everything we live for would be only to benefit ourselves; passion for God is limited to solely words. Our actual lifestyle revolves around us.
We spend our entire lives making money, playing golf, watching movies, and playing games. But at the end of it all, none of these amount to any value that lasts. Each of these things are not wrong in and of themselves, but our lives were created for more than this. If the only legacy we live behind is that of temporal things, then we have wasted our God-given talents and opportunities.
To make this more real to you, take your current age, then add one hundred years. At that time in the future, think about what will matter in your life. In one hundred years, no one is going to care about all the material things we so often fight about and waste so much time on. It won’t matter how nice of car you owned, how large your house was, or the size of your bank account. We seem to forget that living for the few decades we have on earth is much too small a thing to spend our only life on.
Please, don’t make the mistake so many others have made. Don’t let you life be wasted on things that are of no importance. Give your life back to God and invest it in His glory; this is the only thing that will matter at all in a thousand years from now.
In the next post on this blog, we will look into how we can invest our lives in eternity. After all, nothing else is of importance on the other side of death’s door.
“You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
-the Apostle Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians
Reagan Schrock, GOA blog manager
Quote taken from the back cover of the book, Don’t Waste Your Life, by John Piper. Scripture quote taken from First Corinthians 6:19-20, ESV.
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