Don't Waste Your Life

I'm reading John Piper's book, Don't Waste Your Life between classes today. So far, I'm only on Chapter 2, and starting to really enjoy it. Here are some of my favorite passages from this section.

"Enjoying God supremely is one way to glorify Him. Enjoying God makes Him look supremely valuable" (p 28).

"Delighting God is not a mere preference or option in life, it is our joyful duty and should be the single passion of our lives" (30).

"God created me to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all spheres of life. . . 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" (31).

"We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life" (32).

I think I have often separated happiness from God's will. It's like they're mutually exclusive in some way. I often act and plan as if there are two possibilities, I can be happy, or I can follow God. From what Piper is saying here is that they are really one in the same. How could I be truly happy though going against God's will? He created me. In Psalm 139, David writes "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb . . . All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." God knows, better than I, what will make me happy. He knows what my future holds and how to best get me to where I need to be. He created my interests and talents, my neural pathways that make up my thoughts. He put me in a specific family in a specific point in time and knows every aspect of my development and growth. Not only that, but he deeply cares for me and wants to have a relationship with me. And He wants me to know him and enjoy him. Isaiah calls him King of Kings, Lord of Lords. Jesus says that he came to bring life, and bring it abundantly. Jesus uses the illustration that just as a father wouldn't give his child a stone if the child asked for bread or a snake if the child asked for a fish. How much more will your heavenly father give to you if you ask? God, who possesses all power and all created things in heaven and earth, who is a God of love and mercy, wants to lavish himself on us. What an amazing idea! What else could make happy? Who/what else could possibly be worth magnifying more than God?