Don't Waste Your Life Series

Piper gives the illustration of a couple featured in Reader’s Digest who took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast and moved to Florida. He was 59 and she was 51. The story was about how they enjoy their leisure retirement cruising the Gulf in their 30-foot boat, playing softball and collecting shells. Doesn’t that sound nice?

But Piper wrote: “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!”

Life philosophy: “For me, to live is to live it up, and to die is the end.”

The person who wastes his (or her) life lives only to please “me.” This is natural because the default setting for humanity is to be a self-centered, self-pleasing person. We put the “Big I” at the center of our own little universe and everything revolves around our “ego.” When we’re babies we cry when we’re hungry, even if it’s in the middle of the night because “the Big I” is hungry and “the Big I” doesn’t care if mom and dad are trying to sleep, “The Big I” says, “Feed me and feed me NOW!” Of course, a baby can’t help himself, because it’s the way we’re wired. But the problem arises when we grow older and we still keep “the Big I” at the center of the universe. We continue to need to feed the “Big I” so we spend our lives working hard to get more money to buy more toys so we can have more fun. You’ve probably seen the t-shirt that says, “The one who dies with the most toys wins!” Jesus is saying if you live that way, you don’t win—you lose. You end up like that television show, you are the biggest loser!

Mass media has shaped our lives more than we’ll ever realize. If you’re old enough you can remember the old Schlitz Beer commercial popular in the1960s. A manly voice came on and said, “You only go around once in life, so you’ve got to grab for all the gusto you can.” I can remember watching that as a child thinking, “Hey, he’s right. I’d better start grabbing for some gusto because this is my only chance!” Of course, I had no clue what “gusto” was, but I sure liked the sound of it—and so did a lot of other people. People are still grabbing for gusto, even though they aren’t sure what it is and wouldn’t even recognize it when they find it. They are living for themselves because they are swallowed the lie that this life is all there is. Jesus said that if you live that way, you are wasting your life.