Product Description

Most people slip by in life without a passion for God, spending their lives on trivial diversions, living for comfort and pleasure, and perhaps trying to avoid sin. This book will warn you not to get caught up in a life that counts for nothing. It will challenge you to live and die boasting in the cross of Christ and making the glory of God your singular passion. If you believe that to live is Christ and to die is gain, read this book, learn to live for Christ, and don't waste your life!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7121 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
"Piper is writing at his most humble and transparent, and Lloyd James brings home his message like a trusted friend, the words soothing, encouraging, and inspiring. Fully capturing the tone of the piece, James reads it the way it should be heard, never rushing or forcing a point. Together Piper and James give listeners a sense of intimacy and propriety, treating the material as the precious information it is." --AudioFile

From AudioFile
John Piper encourages Christians to eschew seeking worldly joy and instead to live lives dedicated to Christ. Piper is writing at his most humble and transparent, and Lloyd James brings home his message like a trusted friend, the words soothing, encouraging, and inspiring. Fully capturing the tone of the piece, James reads it the way it should be heard, never rushing or forcing a point. Together Piper and James give listeners a sense of intimacy and propriety, treating the material as the precious information it is. S.M.M. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

John Piper's work makes you examine you life and priorities
John Piper is one of my favorite Christian authors. He possesses the rare ability to combine serious theological discourse with practical advice. Throughout his works, one always senses the zeal and passion he feels for honoring and obeying God's Word and, in this, Don't Waste Your Life is no exception. Though not as weighty as some of his other works, Don't Waste Your Life is a call to Christians to stop wasting their lives on shallow entertainment and pursuing worldly possessions that our culture so often offers as viable alternatives to the eternal promises of the gospel.

Piper opens the book with a story his father, an evangelist, told him when he was younger. Piper's father was preaching at a crusade when an old, hardened man approached him at the end of the service. Piper's father and the old man talked and prayed together, a conversation which led the old man to accept Christ as his Lord and Savior. As Piper's dad sat there the old man sobbed, "I've wasted it! I've wasted it!" Piper relates how deeply this story affected him while he was growing up. He did not want to reach the end of his life knowing he had wasted it.

In the first two chapters of the book Piper gives his testimony, sharing how God used his formative college years in the turbulent sixties to shape and mold him. He tells how reading Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis helped him to answer the prevalent philosophy of the time - existentialism, or the belief that there is no objective reality, just subjective, personal truths. Piper states:

"Lewis gave me an intense sense of the `realness' of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate...He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror."

Piper was pursuing a career in medicine when he was struck by a bad case of mononucleosis. Bedridden for weeks, each morning Piper listened to a series of sermons delivered on his college's radio station from revival services being held on campus. Piper writes, "Never had I heard exposition of the Scriptures like this. Suddenly all the glorious objectivity of Reality centered for me on the Word of God. I lay there feeling as if I had awakened from a dream, and knew, now that I was awake, what I was to do." Later that night when his girlfriend (now his wife) visited him, he asked her what she thought of him leaving medical school to go to seminary. She affirmed that she would follow him wherever God led him, and Piper states from that moment on he has always known his calling was to be a minister of the Word of God.

The rest of the book is full of life-applicable advice about how to avoid wasting our lives by pursuing the eternal riches of the gospel; not the fool's gold the world offers. In one chapter, Piper encourages Christians to take risks for Christ, but is careful to explain "not because God promises success to all our ventures in his cause." Rather, he explains "It is not the impulse of heroism, or the lust for adventure, or the courage of self-reliance, or the need to earn God's favor. It is simple trust in Christ - that in Him God will do everything necessary so that we can enjoy making much of him forever. Every good poised to bless us, and every evil arrayed against us will, in the end, help us boast only in the cross, magnify Christ, and glorify our Creator. Faith in these promises frees us to risk and to find in our own experience that it is better to lose our life than to waste it."

In other chapters Piper laments the great amount of time spent on shallow and worthless entertainment. He credits television as being the "greatest life-waster." He says, "A mind fed daily on TV diminishes. Your mind was made to know and love God. Its facility for this great calling is ruined by excessive TV."

I love how Piper goes after the trivial nature of our culture. He really challenges Christians to think how we spend our time and money. He writes:

"When the trifling fog of life clears and I see what I am really on earth to do, I groan over the petty pursuits that waste so many lives - and so much of mine. Just think of the magnitude of sports - a whole section of the daily newspaper. But there is no section on God. Think of the endless resources for making your home and garden more comfortable and impressive. Think of how many tens of thousands of dollars you can spend o buy more car than you need. Think of the time and energy and conversation that go into entertainment and leisure and what we call "fun stuff." And add to that now the computer that artificially recreates the very games that are already so distant from reality; it is like a multi-layered dreamworld of insignificance expanding into nothingness."

Another chapter in the book was dedicated to how Christians can magnify Christ through their normal, 8 to 5 jobs. It is this kind of practical advice that so many Christians can apply to their life that makes Don't Waste Your Life so valuable to the Christian layperson.

This excerpt really captures the heart of the book:

"Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader's Digest, which tells about a couple who `took early 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.' At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn't. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life--your one and only precious, God-given life--and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: `Look, Lord. See my shells.' That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don't buy it. Don't waste your life."

Rare is the book that is applicable to so many people, across all walks of life. Yet I am convinced that the counsel given in this book can apply to almost all Christians struggling to find meaning in their life. Even as Christians, it is so easy for us to lose sight of what's important in their lives. And that's why Piper's Don't Waste Your Life fills a gaping need in Christian works - accessible advice on how to make sure your life counts and is not wasted pursuing worthless junk masquerading as treasure.

Great Book
This book really made me think. It is a great book to think about how you are living your life for Christ.

Top Read
John Piper delivers again: insightful, biblical, timely. An excellent read for every Christian, but especially those of us caught up in our culture's unnecessary hustle and bustle. I'll continue to recommend him as one of the top contemporary Christian writers, analogous to CS Lewis and Watchman Nee.