Waste Your Life!

Mountain climbing could be one of the strangest “sports” (or more accurate “obsessions”) I’ve ever heard of. Equipped with nothing more than what you can carry on your back, you scale an insurmountable wall of treacherous heights for solely the enjoyment of reaching the top (and eventually having to find a way back down!).
I see a familiar analogy when I look at our graduating seniors, you students who are closing a chapter of your childhood and are moving now into adulthood. Here you are, standing on the precipice of life’s unknowns, pondering the panorama of choices, paths, and worldviews. What will the next step be? Confident of the uncertainties, you move forward with either sheer faith or blind adrenaline! Bloody knuckles and all, you seize whatever you see is strong enough to hold you, and you keep moving, never looking down.

In your ascent, I want to leave you with a few final words. It has been an honor and a privilege to teach and equip, to love and lead, to pray for and nurture the young flock of students who are now taking the torch and running the next lap, moving on to college and “real life”. What would be my final exhortation?

Pastor Carl has encouraged and exhorted us as a fellowship to read, study, internalize the book by John Piper called, “Don’t Waste Your Life”. I agree with the entire message of the book and give it my full endorsement. But I want to play with the title for just a moment. God has challenged me recently on the idea of ‘wasting my life’, and what that really means.

When we think of someone who has wasted their lives, often drug addicts, convicts, uninvolved parents or bitter divorcees may come to our minds. The word, “waste”, according to Webster, means: “to spend or use carelessly; to allow to be used inefficiently or become dissipated; to be consumed”. We would never intentionally want our lives to be ‘wasted’ by drugs, or work, or money, or sin, or self. God gently posed the question I’m posing to you today:
Would you be willing to waste your life for God?

That’s right—to be spent or used, exhausted and expended by the Lord for His purposes, no matter where or what it may entail. Are you willing? This goes against all that we hold dear as humans, as Americans, even as Christians. The antonym for “waste” is “conserve”. We should become successful, educated, wealthy, wise, and prominent in order to have a life that isn’t wasted, right? What did Jesus say about our lives? He said frankly: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).

Often we ask God to come alongside our plans, our motives, our ideas, and put His stamp of anointing or blessing on them. We pray and tell God what we’ll be doing and then expect Him to join in and hop on board.

Would I be willing to waste my life, to abandon my dreams, my desires, my agendas, my strategies and the design for my life, to the One who lost His life to save me? Jesus’s life had one goal, one plan, one intention. It was to please the Father, to do His will. Jesus never deviated, disobeyed, or disregarded His Father’s will. Even when the path led to death, and Jesus wrestled in the garden with the implications, He still submitted and entrusted Himself to the One who was faithful to lead Him through.

By historian standards, Jesus’s life was absolutely wasted for God. He never owned property, was never a political leader, didn’t set up a worldwide healing or preaching ministry, and always seemed to turn away the crowds that wanted to crown Him king. He invested in people that Hollywood and Washington would never consider and wasn’t worried about their social or economic status. Jesus didn’t sell a book or a DVD, didn’t start a fashion line, and still hasn’t launched a website! He didn’t even promote Himself, but only His Father. In the end, His life was ended unfairly and unjustly. According to this world, Jesus’s life was wasted. But we know the rest of the story!

For the Christian graduate, often we hear the phrase, “You need to fit Christ into your life after high school”. Whether spoken or implied, that idea is often how we go throughout our Christian lives. We form compartments into our lives, and we have our life at school, our life at work, our life at home, our life with these friends, our life with those friends. And we fit Christ into these areas, squeezing Him in so He fits nicely and is compatible with what we are doing.

Instead of fitting Christ into our lives, I would challenge you to fit your life into Christ. The Bible says to “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). Instead of asking God to come alongside OUR plans and bless them, we should stop and ask what His will is for our lives. We should join in what HE is doing and then follow with reckless abandon. Instead of making plans and goals and praying for His blessing, we should wait upon the Lord, see the direction He is leading, and then make every effort to reach and attain the end of that path as He takes us step by step by faith.

As you venture into the next chapter of life, I would leave you with just a simple verse, a simple truth that applies not only to mountain climbing and graduating, but for all areas of our Christian endeavor:
I will ask nothing more of you except that you hold tightly to what you have until I come. (Revelation 2:24-25, NLT)
-Pilgrim