Don't Waste Your Life (Part 3) - John Piper

Don't Waste Your Life (Part 1) - John Piper
Don't Waste Your Life (Part 2) - John Piper
Don't Waste Your Life (Part 3) - John Piper

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Don't Waste Your Life

Day 3 of 3

 

Guest:                            John Piper

 

From the Series:         Boasting in the Cross 

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Bob:                On days other than Good Friday is the cross central to your thinking?  Is it central to your life?  Here's Dr. John Piper with thoughts about the cross.

 

John:              The word "cross" might mean something you're crucified on, or it might mean a piece of jewelry, or it might mean the last name of somebody you know, but in redemptive historical terms Jesus Christ the Son of God came into the world, He lived a perfect life, He laid Himself out voluntarily to be slaughtered on a cross.  He breathed his last breath in obedience to the Father so that He was a perfectly righteous substitute.  Then He raised Himself from the dead, He was taken up, sits at the right hand of God, intercedes for us.  When I say "the cross," I mean that great redemptive work from incarnation to the installation at God's right hand.  Yeah, that's really crucial to see.

 

Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Friday, July 28th.  Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Today we'll look at the implications of the cross, why it still matters for your life 2,000 years later.

 

                        And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Friday edition.  You know, Dennis, I don't know that I will ever forget something that I heard our guest today say.  I remember where I was.  I was driving along on a highway on my way to Mount Ida, Arkansas.  I was tooling along listening to John Piper on tape, and he was saying that the world is not going to look at Christians in times of prosperity and say "I want to be a Christian," because you know what?  When Christians are blessed, they say "Praise the Lord," and when pagans are blessed, all we say is, "Boy, wasn't that lucky?"  He said, "No, the world is going to sit up and take notice when we go through adversity, and we still have a confidence in God; when we go through trials, and when we live the kind of radical life, then the world will say, 'Where does that come from?'"  And I thought, "He's right.  I am too comfortable, I am too content."  In fact, I should say here at the very beginning there needs to be a surgeon general warning on today's program.

 

Dennis:          Mm-hm, I'll tell you that.

 

Bob:                This program will create conviction in your soul and could bring you to a point of personal repentance yourself.

 

Dennis:          It could bring you to the conclusion that you are dangerously close, too close, to the world.

 

Bob:                Yeah, and it might bring you to the point where you need to get more dangerously involved in the Gospel.  And so let me introduce the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church and the person who has brought me under conviction many times, John Piper, who is back with us for a third day.  Welcome back to FamilyLife Today.

 

John:              Thanks, I'm real glad to be here.

 

Bob:                And this book, "Don't Waste Your Life," you felt so strongly about this book you went to the publisher and said, "I want to give 50,000 copies of this book away."

 

John:              Yeah, we created a website just to give it away called "Don't Waste Your Life."  You can go there now, but we don't give them away anymore, because people took them, and we got a special deal because we just wanted to jumpstart the impact of the book and give as many away as we could, so we raised the money and people took them.

 

Bob:                Gave away 50,000?  Do you have any idea – any of the stories of folks who wrote to get a copy of this book?

 

John:              Not yet.

 

Dennis:          John, at the end of the broadcast yesterday, we challenged the listener to consider writing a title deed and transferring ownership over to Jesus Christ to become a disciple, a learner, a follower, a pursuer of God and His agenda for their lives.  And this is really at the core of what "Don't Waste Your Life" is all about.  In fact, you quote 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, as really one of the seminal passages in the New Testament calling people to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Christ.

 

John:              Yeah, the link that I heard, what you ended the program that way, was between signing your life off so that it belongs now to another and the glory of God, which is the ultimate value of the universe and the value that we live to display, and the link is made there in that verse in 1 Corinthians 6 because Paul says you are not your own, you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your bodies, which are God's.  So he made the link between being owned by God and glorifying God.  And so I think you're absolutely right – every person should be challenged to sign the title of their lives over to another who will not then say, "Ah, now I have a slave."  He will say, "No longer do I call you slaves.  I call you friends.  And now, come on, let's live together to magnify my glory in the world, thus says the Lord."

 

                        So that was the link I heard, and I thought it was crucial because the cross is right at the center of this book, and that's what I thought it might be helpful to think about a little bit – in what way is the cross center, because this book grew out of the one-day event in Memphis, Tennessee, in the year 2000, I think it was, where I delivered a message called "Boasting Only in the Cross," and told the illustration of the shells and so on that we talked about a couple of days ago.  That message was taken from Galatians 6:14, which says, "God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world was crucified to me and I to the world," and I raised the question, "Really?  How can you only boast in the cross, only glory, only enjoy the cross?  ...