Don't Waste Your Life

A life is a horrible thing to throw away. To demonstrate this point, John Piper retells a story his evangelist father often told of a man who came to saving faith in Jesus Christ at an old age. Piper writes:

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 as he trusted in Jesus Christ's substitutionary payment for our sins at the cross. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face--"I've wasted it! I've wasted it!" (Piper, Don't Waste Your Life, 12).

Let me say here, that even though there is a strong sense in which this man was correct; by God's mercy, even a life that is almost totally wasted away by temporal pursuits can still be redeemed. After all, our present lives are only a small blip on the radar of eternity. And because this is true, this man's life really wasn't wasted; it was only just beginning.

Having said that, why wait another moment? If you haven't repented of your sins and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ, the sin-bearer, the scape-goat, do it now. You only have one life to live. Don't waste it by living for yourself when you can invest it instead for the glory of God in Christ.