I’ve Wasted It!!

This Thursday Morning, as I sip on my coffee and enjoy a quiet, beautiful morning, I am reminded of how merciful and loving God has been to me. I don’t deserve it. I have failed Him so many times. I have chose worldly things over Him. I have gone a week without even saying a prayer or opening my Bible. I feel like sometimes I make God too small. I don’t truly realize how GREAT and powerful He is. I honestly do NOT deserve the blessings, mercy, kindness and protection He gives so generously to me. I am beyond thankful. I know that without Him I would be so hopelessly lost. I would be so deep into the ways of this world. It would be horrific. I am so glad God chose me. I am so thankful I am His child. I am so in debt to Him. He has been so gracious.

I am reading a book by John Piper called Don’t Waste You Life. Wow. The first page gave me chill bumps. He talks about how his father would tell stories of glorious conversions and horrific refusals to believe. One story really stuck out to me: “The story of a man converted in old age. 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. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face—and what an impact it made on me to hear my father say this through his own tears—“I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” This was the story that gripped me more than all the stories of young people who died in car wrecks before they were converted—the story of an old man weeping that he had wasted his life. In those early years God awakened in me a fear and a passion not to waste my life. The thought of coming to my old age and saying through tears, “I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” was a fearful and horrible thought to me. “ONLY ONE LIFE, ’TWILL SOON BE PAST”

Wow. I don’t want to come to the end of my life and say, through tears, “I’ve wasted it” I don’t want to live this one life that I have selfishly and worldly. I want to give every part of me to God. I want to live completely for Him. I know I am only 24 but I still feel like I have wasted those 24 years. I want to end the wasted years now. I want to give the next 24 years to Jesus Christ and make his name known. It’s not about me anymore. It’s about Him.  Another paragraph of the book stood out to me as well, it reads “It was becoming clearer and clearer that if I wanted to come to the end of my life and not say, “I’ve wasted it!” then I would need to press all the way in, and all the way up, to the ultimate purpose of God and join him in it. If my life was to have a single, all-satisfying, unifying passion, it would have to be God’s passion.”

It’s time for me to press all the way in, and all the way up, to the ultimate purpose!! I’m tired of living luke warm through this life. I’m tired of giving God only parts of me. I want to surrender to Him completely. One more quote from Mr. Piper’s book,”God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. Enjoying and displaying are both crucial. If we try to display the excellence of God without joy in it, we will display a shell of hypocrisy and create scorn or legalism. But if we claim to enjoy his excellence and do not display it for others to see and admire, we deceive ourselves, because the mark of God-enthralled joy is to overflow and expand by extending itself into the hearts of others. The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.”

God give me strength to live a life that glorifies Your name and helps further Your kingdom.