It's been a long journey, and we've come a fair way through this preaching/Bible study series at dBay Baptist. I hope the young people have been able to find tangible things to pull out of John Piper's book "Don't Waste Your Life" and have found ways to practically integrate some of the ideas from the book into their lives.
Piper's final chapter is his prayer for all those who have read his book. A prayer that cries out the hope that no one at the end of their life would look back and say "I've wasted it."
O God, you know I tremble now for fear that many of the ones who call you Lord have made themselves the prize and glory of your grace. How many, Lord have made your love a witness to their worth! Is then their joy a resting in your worth or in their own? So many decades have gone by in which the constant message from the world, and even from some ministers, is this: that love means making much of man. And so when men, with this assurance, ponder what your love might mean, they say the same: God's love means making much of man. For proof they ask: Don't you feel loved when someone calls attention to your worth?
And I answer: Once I did. When life was better than the Lord, and not the other way around. There was a time love felit like this - when I could not conceive of any joy greater that the honor of my name. Whan I was so absorbed in me that it was inconceivable for joy to rise by my admiring rather than my being admired. Oh, yes, I've known what it is like to call the praise of men an act of love and justify this craving with the readiness to give the same...
But now (thanks to your might grace!) I see it is an imitation... Oh, what a history of deeds and revelation you have wrought to make yourself the centre of our joy and take back for yourself the place of honor in the world - to be the One your people treasure more than life... Oh what a grand design! To make our joy the echo of your excellence. To make our pleasure proof that you now hold the place of Treasure in our lives. The make the gladness of our soul the essence of our worship, and the mirror of your worth. To make yourself most glorified in us, O God, when we are satisfied in you. How could I, Lord, have ever been so blind to think that being loved by you means making much of me and not yourself?...
No, Father, love is this: At great expense you made yourself my glory and my boast. The cost was infinite by which you made yourself the Treasure of my life. You sent your Son, the blazing center of your beauty and you love. You gave him up to mockery, betrayal, thorns, the whip, the rod, the fists, the mails, the same, and death. For what? To swallow up your wrath, and satisfy your righteousness, and bury all my sins as far as east is from the west and in the deepest sea, so that I might come home... This is your love, O God, not to make much of me, but do whatever must be done so that I waken to the joy of making much of you through all eternity.
~John Piper, DWYL, p184-186
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