Welcome to From the Pulpit and Classic Sermon.
Each week we bring you a different message
from some of history's greatest speakers in the
Christian faith and powerful sermons from modern preachers
too.
This week we have John Piper with his
message, Are You Wasting Your Life?
Father, my heart's desire tonight is that in
part because of what we do here now
together there would be no wasted lives in
this room and in the hearing of my
voice and there would be no wasted deaths.
I pray that you would bring a significance
and a power and a meaning to the
lives in this room and I pray that
you would use that significance and power and
meaning to make every death count for your
glory.
Whether it happens quickly or whether it happens
50 or 60 years from now.
I pray, Lord, that if we're not able
to trade in our pain or shame or
suffering in this life we would not postpone
the joy but rather find it in the
pain, in the shame, in the suffering.
So come now and help me to make
your word plain.
Grip, I pray, these young people and don't
let them waste their lives.
In Jesus' name I pray, Amen.
So here we are gathered on the 29th
of December 2003 and the body count as
we meet from the earthquake in Bam, Iran
is at about 25,000.
That's a lot of human lives snuffed out
at 528 in the morning.
And you feel the personal weight of it
when you read about a father digging through
the blocks of his house looking for a
daughter and a wife and uncovering a dead
hand and passing out for grief.
Or when you read about a little baby
being found alive in the grip of a
dead mother puts a face on it.
And what makes this event here at the
end of 2003 feel so apocalyptic for some
of us is not the magnitude of it,
though it's ten times bigger than 9-11,
but how many other events were packed together
with it, right?
Thirteen people buried in a mudslide in California.
Six buried under an avalanche in Utah.
One hundred and eleven dead in a plane
crash in Benin.
One hundred and ninety-eight dead in poison
from gas in China.
All packed together in a few days at
the end of the year.
And it just takes your breath away and
makes us ask what would Jesus want us
to learn from this about not wasting our
lives?
And I think if we go to Jesus
and ask Him that, He has something ready
to say to us and it's found in
Luke 13.
You don't need to go there.
This is not my main text.
I just want to read you what Jesus,
I think, would say.
Do you remember the situation?
Some people came to Jesus and told Him
about this atrocity in which Pilate had killed
people while they were offering their sacrifices and
he had taken their blood and mingled it
with the blood of their sacrifices just to
mock them.
And they came to Jesus and said, What
about that?
Give an accounting of the Almighty here.
And here's what Jesus said.
Do you think that these Galileans were worse
sinners than all the other Galileans because they
suffered this way?
No, I tell you.
But unless you repent, you will all likewise
perish.
Or those 18 on whom the tower in
Siloam fell and killed them, do you think
that they were worse offenders than all the
others who live in Jerusalem?
No, I tell you.
But unless you repent, you will all likewise
perish.
Now, don't make a mistake here.
Jesus could weep with those who wept.
Jesus had compassion almost everywhere He turned.
But He knows, and you know, that after
a season of extraordinary wracking grief in calamity,
it begins to ease up and the questions
come.
And when they come to Jesus with these
questions, He does not settle for sentimentality.
Trying to make everybody feel good.
Trying to get God off the hook.
That is not the way Jesus responds.
Jesus says, are you astonished at the magnitude
of this calamity in Galilee or at the
magnitude of the calamity of the falling tower
in Siloam?
I will tell you what to be astonished
at.
Be astonished you weren't under the tower.
Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
Means, everybody in this room deserves to die
and perish tonight.
That's the way Jesus answered this inquiry about
whether God could give an accounting of the
deaths of the tower and Pilate's atrocity.
So, when you compare that earthquake to us
tonight, I think Jesus would say, unless you
repent, the thing you should be astonished about
is that this hotel hasn't come down on
all of us.
Our wonderment shouldn't be that 25,000 people
perished in a moment, but that we have
not yet been snuffed out.
That's what should amaze us, Jesus says.
So, I conclude from this event and this
sets the stage for my message that your
life is in God's hands.
Your life hangs by a slender thread of
sovereign grace tonight.
You belong to God.
He made you.
You exist for Him.
God made life.
He knows what life is for.
And He has a right to take it
and a right to give it whenever He
pleases.
Do you remember Job?
First chapter?
All ten of his children in an Iran
-like calamity because the house fell on all
ten of them and killed them.
And Job gets the word.
And here's what it says happened.
He tore his robe, saved his head, fell
on the ground and worshipped and said, The
Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Or as he said 12 chapters later, In
His hand is the life of every living
thing and the breath of all mankind.
Do you remember Hannah?
She wanted a baby so bad and she
was barren for years.
And then God heard her prayer and she
conceived and bore Samuel.
And when she offered up Samuel, she sang
a song.
Listen to one of the lines in Hannah's
song.
1 Samuel 2.6 The Lord kills and
the Lord brings to life.
The Lord brings down to sheol and raises
up.
She had read her Bible well or learned
it well from tradition.
Deuteronomy 32.39 See, now that I, even
I, am He and there is no God
beside me, I kill and I make alive,
I wound and I heal and there is
none who can deliver out of my hand.
If any of you lives through the night,
or if I do, it will be sheer
grace.
Jesus' brother, James, was tremendously gripped by this
truth.
I think James would have looked out across
America and seen almost nothing but pride and
arrogance because of what he said in chapter
4.
Come now, you who say today or tomorrow
we will go up to such a town
and trade a while and make profit.
What?
You don't know your life.
You are but a vapor.
You ought rather to say, if the Lord
wills, we will live and do such and
such.
But as it is, you boast and all
such boasting is evil.
Which means, if the Lord lives, if the
Lord wills, John Piper will finish this message
and not keel over.
And if the Lord wills, you will not
fall out of your chair dead tonight.
And if He wills the opposite, you will,
and He will have done you no wrong
because your life is in His hands.
He made you, He owned you, the Lord
gives, the Lord takes, and He never does
anyone wrong.
Whether He takes them at one month, one
year, one decade, or one hundred years, you
belong to God and He may do with
you as He pleases.
You are His.
And therefore He knows what life is for.
And the only way not to waste a
life is to key off of the Almighty,
to know what He would have you be.
Jesus has something to say about it because
He's really jealous that you don't waste your
life tonight.
Really jealous.
You're all students.
Most of you are students.
And therefore, most of your life is in
front of you.
For most of you.
Not all of you.
Some of you have already lived most of
your life.
But for most of you, it feels like
it could go on a long time.
And Jesus is very jealous that you not
waste it.
If He were here, I think He would
say, a person's life does not consist in
the abundance of his possessions.
Life is not about accumulation.
It's not about getting stuff.
I think that's what Jesus would say to
you right off the bat in America.
And then He would tell a parable.
A land of a rich man produced plentifully.
And he thought to himself, what shall I
do?
For I have nowhere to store my crops.
And he said, I'll do this.
I'll tear down my barns, build bigger ones,
and there I will store all my grain
and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, soul,
you have ample goods laid up for you
for years.
Relax.
Eat.
Drink.
Be merry.
And God said to him, fool, I tell
you, I don't ever want to hear that
word addressed to me from God.
Fool.
This night, your soul is required of you.
And the things you prepared, whose will they
be?
So it is with everyone who lays up
treasure for himself and is not rich toward
God.
Oh, how jealous Jesus is tonight that you
do not waste your lives.
You have a gift.
And it is called life.
And it's not about accumulating things.
This night, your soul may be required of
you.
And then whose will all those toys be?
No sane person on his deathbed ever comforted
his heart with his possessions that his life
was well spent.
So hear Jesus.
If anyone would come after me, let him
deny himself and take up his cross and
follow me.
For whoever would seek to save his life
will lose it.
And whoever loses his life for my sake
and the gospel's will save it and not
waste it.
It is possible to waste your life.
Few things make me tremble more at age
58 than wasting my life.
You'll read about this in the book if
you read it.
I grew up in a Christian home and
this was hanging over the sink in the
kitchen from the time I was a tiny
little child.
And every morning I would get up and
run into the kitchen and there it would
be.
Only one life which will soon be passed.
Only what's done for Christ will last.
Which communicated to me over the years as
a child, you can waste your life.
You can really waste it.
It was built into my heart as a
little child.
Don't waste it.
My dad told the story.
One of the most moving I can remember
as a little kid hearing my father preach
as an evangelist.
And my father's eyes could really blaze in
preaching.
He always began the sermon with a joke.
But it wasn't very long before his eyes
were blazing and he was telling stories that
would make you cringe.
And one of them was a revival meeting
in which at the end of the meeting
an old man that everybody had been praying
for for decades evidently walked to the front.
I think age something like 78.
And just wept and wept and wept as
my father sat beside him on the pew.
And all he could say was, When I
heard my dad tell that story and I
heard it numerous times.
And I remember that plaque.
I felt with every fiber of my being,
I will not waste it.
You get one crack and there's no replay.
And you can throw it away or the
opposite.
I'm 58 almost.
A couple of weeks.
And the river of my life is really
flowing fast over the precipice of my days.
And I don't have any idea how long
the Lord may give me.
And my zeal not to waste my life
is as alive today as it's ever been,
perhaps more so because it feels so short
before I stand before the Judge, King Jesus,
and give an account of my life.
What a tragedy in America.
This is one of the biggest tragedies in
our culture.
That billions of dollars are invested every year
to get people my age to waste the
rest of our lives.
Billions of dollars invested to persuade us and
lure us, at any cost it seems, to
waste the rest of our lives.
It's called retirement.
And in sum, it goes like this.
You've worked for it.
Now enjoy it.
Twenty years, perhaps, of play, leisure, ease, while
the world, uncared for medically, uneducated, filthy water,
poverty stricken, unevangelized, sinks under the weight of
healthy 65-year-old people playing bridge and
shuffleboard and collecting shells and fishing and golfing
their way into the presence of King Jesus.
And you know what?
You're going to join them unless, at this
stage in your life, you make some very
radical decisions, very radical commitments, very radical choices
about where your treasure is.
Do not assume you won't be sucked in
because every stage of your life in this
Disneyland called America, there are powerful forces angling
to get you to waste your lives.
It will take a massive work of grace
to rescue you from the clutches of this
culture.
For many of you are totally enslaved.
And I pray on the way to being
set free.
So now, the question is, what is the
unwasted life?
You're all worked up about us not wasting
our lives.
Tell us what the unwasted life looks like.
Tell us the pathway so that it will
be written over our lives at the end,
this life was not wasted.
What would that be?
And now, if you have a Bible, I
do invite you to turn.
If you don't, that's okay.
I'll read the text for you.
But we're going to go to Philippians 1
for the answer.
This text means almost more to me than
any other when it comes to asking the
question, how can I not waste my life?
Whether it's age 18, 28, 38, 58, 88,
this text is the answer.
I preached on this text almost 24 years
ago now when I candidated for the pastorate
of Bethlehem, which is just a little ways
away.
So it has a very special, powerful place
in my memory, in my life, and I
wanted to have a place like that for
you.
Philippians 1.
We'll just read a couple of verses here.
20 and 21.
And you will hear, I hope, Paul's passion,
which is the opposite of the unwasted life.
Philippians 1.20 It is my eager expectation
and hope that I will not at all
be ashamed, but that with full courage, now
as always, Christ will be honored.
Or you could use the word magnified.
Shown to be magnificent.
Christ will be magnified, honored, shown to be
magnificent in my body, whether by life or
by death.
Paul's all-consuming passion is to so live
and so die that Christ would look great.
The unwasted life is the life that puts
Christ on display as supremely valuable.
I'll say it again.
The unwasted life is the life that in
everything you do, in life and death, puts
Christ on display as supremely valuable.
You have life given by God for this
one main reason.
Make Christ look great.
That's why you exist.
My expectation and hope is that Christ will
be shown to be great in my body,
whether by life or by death.
And so there are two parts.
Life and death.
Let's just take one at a time.
How in Paul's mind and in Paul's life
is Christ honored, magnified, shown to be great
in his life?
The answer is given in chapter 3, verse
7.
Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss
for the sake of Christ.
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of
the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my
Lord.
For His sake, I have suffered the loss
of all things and count them as rubbish
in order that I might gain Christ.
How does Paul make Christ look great?
Answer, by experiencing Christ as such a treasure
that everything else in his life is as
nothing by comparison.
I count everything, money, as loss.
Food as loss.
Looks as loss.
Friends as loss.
Family as loss.
Job and success as loss.
Graduation as loss.
In comparison with the treasure that Christ has
become for me.
How do you make Christ look great in
your life and thus not waste it?
Money is given to you so that you
might use money in a way that shows
money is not your treasure.
Christ is.
Food is given to you so that you
might eat it in such a way that
it will be plain food is not your
treasure.
Christ is.
Friends, family are given to you so that
you might live with them in such a
way that it will be plain to the
world they are not your treasure.
Christ is.
Computers, toys, houses, lands, cars are given to
you so that you might use them in
such a way that it will be plain
to the world these are not your treasure.
Christ is.
You talk about lifestyle implications.
Wartime living.
The way we display the supreme worth of
Jesus is by treasuring Him above all things
and then making choices which make the joy
we have in His supreme worth manifest.
Get it.
And if He is not that for you
tonight if He is not that treasure for
you pray all night if you have to
that your heart would be so changed that
you would now treasure Jesus above everything in
your life.
That's the way Paul says He magnifies Jesus
in life.
Now what about death?
My eager expectation and hope is that Christ
will be honored in my body whether by
life or by death.
How do you magnify Christ in death?
Remember that little incident at the end of
Jesus' earthly pilgrimage where a disciple was following
Him and the other disciple said, What about
Him?
And Jesus said, It's none of your business
about Him.
The day will come when you stretch forth
your hands and people will lead you where
you don't want to go.
And John inserts the interpretation by this he
showed by what manner of death he was
to glorify God.
Peter was probably crucified upside down and it
was planned as a way of glorifying God.
Takes your breath away what God may have
in store for some of you if you
really want your life not to be wasted.
The answer to the question How can my
life and my now death magnify the worth
of Christ is given in verse 21.
For to me to live is Christ and
to die is gain.
How is dying gain for Paul?
The answer is given in verse 23.
My desire is to depart and be with
Christ for that is far better.
That's gain.
So, the way you show the infinite value
of Jesus for the world to see in
your dying is to experience your dying as
gain.
Because it means more of Christ.
But do you see what that implies about
the proportion of affection you have for Christ
compared to everything you leave behind?
Namely, everything.
If death is to be gain Christ must
be more precious to you than everything you
leave behind.
And when a person dies like that the
world looks on and says this Christ must
be valuable.
Jesus Christ is most glorified in you in
your dying when you are most satisfied in
Him in your dying.
That's what verse 21 teaches.
So, in summary, here are the essentials of
the unwasted life.
Number one, life and death are given to
you.
They are gifts.
Life is a gift.
Death is a gift.
And they are given to you in order
that you might use them to display the
supreme worth of Jesus Christ.
That's the pathway of the unwasted life.
And therefore, you must cultivate a supreme valuing,
treasuring of Jesus Christ above all things.
I count everything as loss for the surpassing
value of knowing Christ Jesus.
If you're not there tonight, labor in prayer
and in meditation and in wrestling with God
that you might get there so that with
all authenticity you might be able to say
I count everything as loss for the surpassing
value of knowing Christ Jesus.
And then thirdly, this treasuring of Him which
displays His worth is most clearly seen by
what you are willing gladly to risk and
sacrifice for the surpassing value of more of
Jesus.
Let me say that one again.
In fact, I'll say all three of them
again just by way of summary.
First, you have life in order that you
might display the supreme value of Jesus.
The way you display the supreme value of
Jesus is by treasuring Him, being satisfied in
Him above all other things in life.
And thirdly, that treasuring and display becomes most
vivid by how much you are willing to
risk or sacrifice if He calls in order
to have more of Him.
Listen to the radical way Paul puts it
in 2 Corinthians 12.
You remember the situation?
He's got a thorn in the flesh.
We don't know what it is.
It's causing him pain.
He says, Christ, please, take it away.
Three times.
And Christ says, No.
And then Paul says, verse 9, He said
to me, My grace is sufficient for you.
My power is made perfect in weakness.
There's more of Christ.
Do you see that?
My power.
Do you want more of Christ?
Christ's grace.
Christ's power.
Christ's fellowship.
Do you want more and more and more
because He is your treasure?
Paul did.
And therefore he said, Christ says, My grace
is sufficient for you.
My power is made perfect in your weakness.
And then Paul responds, Therefore, I will boast
all the more gladly.
Don't miss that amazing counterintuitive word.
I will boast all the more gladly in
my weaknesses so that the power of Christ
may rest upon me for the sake of
Christ then.
I'm content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, calamities.
For when I'm weak, then am I strong.
Magnifying Christ by being satisfied in Him in
pain and calamity and suffering and insults and
weakness was the passion of Paul's life.
His passion was not the American dream of
escaping insult, calamity, pain, suffering.
His passion was any life and any death
that enables me to know you better, see
you more, and magnify your greatness more.
Bring it on, Jesus.
All I want in my life and death
is to enjoy you more and make your
worth more vivid for the world to see.
So, I ask you tonight, are you going
to throw away your life?
Are you going to buy into the American
dream, minimize suffering, maximize comfort, maximize ease, maximize
security, build bigger barns, work for the bread
that perishes, lay up treasures on earth, covet
the praise of man, and be happy for
80 years and perish?
Is that the way you're going to waste
your life?
Or, are you going to see Christ crucified
and risen and reigning and bearing your sins
as the infinite treasure in your life that
He really is?
And then make life choices that display to
the world His value.
Have you ever wondered why 1 Peter 3
.15 isn't coming true for most of us?
Where it says, always be ready to give
a reason for the hope that is in
you when somebody asks you.
Anybody asked you recently?
You know why?
It looks like our hope is in the
same thing they're hoping in.
The church in America is not where it
ought to be.
We are going to have to make life
choices for this globe, this wracked with pain,
lost, perishing, suffering, hungry, uneducated, without water, without
medical care globe.
We're going to have to make some choices
about how to be invested that will cause
the world to say, hmm, why are you
going there?
What are you hoping in if you leave
all this?
Then maybe 1 Peter 3.15 would come
true for us.
I believe with all my heart that if
God raises up a generation like that who
doesn't waste their lives, the great commission will
come to pass.
Because if you are not the generation, if
this generation does not embrace suffering, does not
embrace pain, does not embrace shame for the
surpassing value and joy of knowing Jesus, you
will simply be passed over and God will
get His work done another way, perhaps by
the new Christendom, as Philip Jenkins calls it,
in the south and in the east.
So, I call you to embrace Christ and
embrace suffering and embrace the reward of knowing
Him.
If your passion is to display Christ, if
your passion is to treasure Christ above all
things, if your passion is to take risks
and sacrifice whatever it takes in order to
display His worth, then the Middle East that
you're committed to, East Asia that you're committed
to, Sao Paulo, Brazil that you're committed to,
then Toulouse, France that you're committed to, then
these commitments will be filled and thousands of
people will see the supreme value of Jesus
Christ in your life and they will believe
and written over their life and your life
and I pray my life will be the
words, this life was not wasted.
This life gladly displayed the supreme worth of
Jesus Christ.
Let's pray.
Oh God, no words of mine, but only
the power of the Holy Spirit can raise
up a generation in which 200,000 young
people will say, I'm going.
I'm laying it down.
I will count Jesus Christ as precious above
all things.
I will risk my life.
I will indeed, if you call, sacrifice my
life in order to display among the unreached
peoples of the world the sweet beauty and
infinitely satisfying glory of Jesus Christ.
You've been listening to From the Pulpit in
Classic Sermon Series.
This week you heard John Piper with his
message, Are You Wasting Your Life?
Tune in next week to hear Keith David
talk about compromising Christianity on From the Pulpit
in Classic Sermons.