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Podcast: Remembering the “Seashells” Sermon 23 Years Later (John Piper)

August 21, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

A Sermon That Impacted a Generation

In today’s episode, John Piper shares what he was thinking as he walked onto the stage on May 20th, 2000 to deliver a message to over 30,000 young people, the impact that sermon had on his ministry in the years that followed, and why he’s still gripped by a story his dad told him when he was a little boy.

Don't Waste Your Life

Don't Waste Your Life

John Piper

In this bestselling book, John Piper makes a passionate plea to the next generation of Christians to not waste their lives, but to live for Jesus with all their hearts.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:41 - Inspired by Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards

Matt Tully
John, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

John Piper
Right. It seems like yesterday, but it’s been a while.

Matt Tully
It does. On May 20th, 2000, you delivered a sermon—a sermon that would, I think it’s fair to say, change the lives of many people. Many would testify to the impact that that message had on them, both those who were there standing in the rain and listening to you preach, but also those who encountered the sermon, whether the audio or in written form, in the years to come after that. And so today we’re going to explore a little bit of the backstory of that sermon and the impact that that had on not only the lives of many other people but even your own life and ministry. But I wonder if, before we get to that, you could share a little bit about the story of Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards and how their story impacted the sermon that you preached that day.

John Piper
It was providential that those two women died—and I’ll mention how in a minute—just weeks before this message, and thus provided the backdrop for an illustration I was going to use about wasting your life. Laura Edwards was a medical doctor in her early eighties (or maybe just pushing eighty), and Ruby Eliason was single all her life and a nurse. They had worked for decades off and on with the Baptist General Conference in West Africa, and in Cameroon in particular. Laura was a widow, and weeks before I spoke there in Tennessee, they were ministering together in Cameroon to the poorest of the poor who didn’t have access to good medical care. They were driving along a road that I had driven on myself back in 1985 when I was visiting missionaries there. I remembered how bumpy and dangerous it was. Their brakes failed and they flew off a cliff and both of them died instantly. So that was the event, and it had made the news and I was moved. I knew Laura personally. I didn’t know Ruby personally. The way it turned up in the message was that I asked the young people—all these folks that were spread out on the field there in Shelby Farms—was that a tragedy? I said no, it was not a tragedy. What could you ask for 160 years of biblical faithfulness devoted to the poorest of the poor in the name of Jesus, and you get to die without dementia. I mean, this is not tragedy. This is a full, glorious, God-honoring life, and then heaven! So, no, that was not a tragedy. And then, of course, you know what I did next because it was the one thing everybody remembers. You may want to ask about this, but I’ll stop there. You just ask about them.

Matt Tully
We’ll get to the next step because it is the thing that people so often talk about and remember and comment on. But before we get there, paint a picture of that day. Who were you preaching to? What was the context, for those who have never seen that sermon and don’t know this story? And what were you feeling as you walked up behind that pulpit?

John Piper
It wasn’t much of a pulpit, but it was in Tennessee—a huge, open, rolling hills field called Shelby Farms. It was an event called One Day, and it was sponsored by Passion—Louie Giglio’s dream. I’ve heard there was anything from 30,000 to 40,000 18- to 25-year-olds sitting out there on the grass. So it’s the biggest group I’d ever talked to at that time. You mentioned rain earlier. It had stopped raining when I stood up to speak, but it had been threatening most of the day and some had to speak to people standing in the rain, but I was spared that trial. You said, What are you thinking as you get up there? Well, the spiritual side of me was saying, Oh God, please help me do this. This is a challenge. Students are milling all over the place—like 100 people walking around and 30,000 people sitting on the grass. Will anybody pay attention? The wind was blowing, and so I was afraid my notes were going to blow away. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the video, but I never moved my left hand from off my notes. Now, John Piper not moving his left hand from off his notes—

Matt Tully
That’s crazy.

John Piper
It’s almost inconceivable. It was quite the miracle because I did it, although it was a gift from God because the other speakers dealt with a failed lavalier, and they had to hold a mic in one hand. And what if I had had to hold a mic in one hand and my notes with the other hand? That would’ve been impossible. So I was very fortunate that they had a boom mic for me. And so I did my APTAT that I walk through as I approach any challenging moment in my life. A: I admit, Lord, I can’t do anything without you. P: I pray for your help. T: I trust your promise. A: I act. T: I thank you when I’m done. I walked through APTAT and I went to the pulpit and opened my mouth and God gave me words. We were talking about this this morning over at Desiring God and the ripple effects that maybe we’ll talk about a little here, but what we marveled at is that as I look back, and I wrote this in my journal the next day, I wrote to a friend and said, I don’t know what God’s going to do with that, because I felt very distracted. Which is a lesson for all speakers, all lovers of the gospel who open their mouths and always feel inadequate—That didn’t go well. And the situation is never right for a full-blown, perfect presentation of the gospel. And it’s just a lesson to do it anyway. If you got a chance to say anything, say it, because, clearly, God is not dependent on our feeling like, Oh, this has got to be a situation of perfects. It wasn’t perfect at all, and I watched with marvel at what he did in the years to follow.

Matt Tully
A quick question about that APTAT acronym that you mentioned. Is that something that you’ve come up with over the years, or did you get that from somebody else? It’s such a simple yet profound and I would imagine encouraging and reassuring thing to be thinking about whenever you get up to do something difficult.

John Piper
Yes, I did come up with it. The closest I’ve seen of other people saying the same thing almost the same way was in the book by J. I. Packer called Keep in Step with the Spirit. What APTAT is trying to do is answer the question, How do you walk by the Spirit? Walk by the Spirit, be led by the Spirit, bear the fruits of the Spirit, live by the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit. We’re supposed to be a people carried by the Holy Spirit so that when we’re acting, it’s not us acting. It’s God acting—Galatians 2:20. Well, how in the world do you do that? And APTAT is my answer to how you walk by the Spirit. In his chapter on Walking by the Spirit, he’s got steps. He doesn’t number them and he doesn’t put an acrostic on it, but it’s virtually the same.

Matt Tully
I guess that’s the difference between a Baptist and an Anglican.

John Piper
Although, John Stott was a great numberer of points. And he was of the same Anglican ilk.

09:57 - “It’s a Frightening Thing to Call a Generation to Die”

Matt Tully
That’s right. In the opening prayer to that message, and I would encourage anyone listening to go and watch that message or listen to that whole message, but in the opening prayer that you say before you even start preaching, you acknowledge that “It’s a frightening thing to call a generation to die.” And I think that really set the tone for the message as a whole, and I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit. What did you mean when you said that it was a frightening thing to call a generation to die?

John Piper
I had two things in mind, I think, at least I do right now. And as I listened, I think I heard them both. It’s hard to reconstruct exactly everything you were thinking. Number one is the Bible through and through portrays a life in God and a life in Christ as a life that begins with death. “Whoever would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” So taking up your cross means dying. “For he who would save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will save it.” Psalm 63: “The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life. Acts 20:24: “I do not count my life of any value or as precious to myself, if only I might finish my course and the ministry of God has given me to bear witness to the gospel of the grace of God.” When Paul held up his life in one hand and his ministry to finishing the course in the other, he just said, My life is of no value except for one thing: doing God’s will and finishing the course. So, that’s the main thing I had in mind. I’m going to call students to be Christian, radically Christian. You’ve been bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body. You’re not your own. The second thing I had in mind was driving off cliffs in Cameroon. Namely, in order to get the Great Commission done, we’ve got to go to hard places, take real risks, and speak the gospel where it might be very costly, including death. So those are the two senses in which I wanted to summon them to die. Be a real Christian and die to yourself and live to Christ. And secondly, be willing to take the risks that might cost you your life.

Matt Tully
Maybe as a an aside, you’re famous for this sermon, for the book that was then sparked from this sermon, and just in general your ministry has been marked by the call to Christian Hedonism—to live passionately for the glory of God, and through that we receive joy but not through the things the world would call us to. Throughout your life or even in your younger years in particular, perhaps, did you ever toy with the idea of something as radical as going overseas and working in a physically risky place like these two women did? Was that something that was ever appealing to you?

John Piper
Yes. What would be most honest to say would be this: for 33 years I preached at one church, and every one of those 33 years we had a fall missions conference. We devoted two weekends to it. I spoke at one of them, guests spoke at another, and my job was to summon people at the end of seven to ten days of mission focus to give their lives to the cause of cross-cultural missions. And I invite them to the front to draw their line in the sand. And I said to the church, and it was true that Noël and I, every one of those years, got on our face before God and said, Are we to respond to this invitation? Are we willing? Is it time? We’re calling all these young people and older people to do these radical, crazy things, and never did I feel—and, of course, I could have been kidding myself here; I’m not infallible—but never did I feel like I would be more useful to God—at least not yet. I’m 77, so there’s still time. Ramon Llull, when he was my age, went to Algeria and got himself killed while preaching the gospel, which was a nice way to go instead of in a nursing home. So, don’t stop praying for me. But in those days, we didn’t feel like we’d be more useful to the cause of the gospel by doing it ourselves rather than mobilizing people to do it. Now, the little teeny representation of my commitment was to live where I live. I’m in the house where I’ve been for 43 years. Most people think this is a crazy place to live. You don’t live in Phillips neighborhood if you’ve got the resources to live elsewhere, which we do. And I look out my window here, and we didn’t have a TV growing up, and people say, How do your boys grow up without a TV? I said, Look, all they have to do is go outside to see the news. You don’t need a TV to see what’s wrong with the world and learn how to minister to the world. You can just go out and look at it here. So, Noël and I raised five kids here and we never really felt in danger, but other people think it is. It’s really not.

15:40 - Seashells

Matt Tully
You titled that sermon that you delivered about 23 years ago A Boasting Only in the Cross, but that sermon has another title, probably a more well-known title that people use more often to refer to that sermon. I wonder if you can tell us what that other title is, and then I have some more questions.

John Piper
Well, the illustration that is remembered is the seashells illustration, so I suppose it would be the seashells. If you said Piper’s seashell sermon, the people who know the sermon would know what you’re talking about. So that’s the negative counterpart to the Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards death. I had run across this article in Reader's Digest, and I laughed because those students didn’t read Reader's Digest. That’s an old person’s magazine. It told the story of a young couple that is in their early 50s who took early retirement, moved to Punta Gorda, Florida, bought a 30-foot trawler, played kitten ball, and collected shells. And when I read that I thought, Okay. That’s what I want to talk about at Shelby Farms. I want these students not to live their lives toward that end. And I held up that and said, Now that’s a tragedy. That’s a tragedy. Imagine yourself taking the last thirty years of your life—from 52 to 82—dying and meeting Jesus and saying, ’Here’s my shell collection.’ That everybody remembered. Nobody remembers what text I was preaching on.

Matt Tully
I think it makes sense because it’s such a powerful illustration. You call out in a serious way—you literally say it’s a waste of a life—exactly what our culture would hold up as the good life, of the American dream. This is what most of our working lives are meant to result in. And you pointed at that. But I want to ask the broader question: What do you make of the attention that has been, even if you understand it to some extent, what do you make of the way that people have so focused in on that one illustration? Do you appreciate that? Has it impacted how you understand your preaching and the impact of sermons on us?

John Piper
Well, that’s an interesting way to pose the question. A couple of things come to mind. Let me mention the one about preaching and then what I think of people making so much of that illustration. I think it’s tragic in preaching when pastors hear this story say, Oh! It’s stories that count. It’s stories that count. So they just leave exposition and the wrestling with biblical texts aside and tell as many stories as they can because Look, Piper! That’s what they remember! I think that’s a tragic misunderstanding of what went on there, because I think God anointed that day because it was mainly an effort to help students understand Galatians 6:14—“I don’t boast in anything except the cross of the Lord Jesus, by which the world was crucified to me and me to the world.” Now, the fact that people don’t remember that’s what I was preaching on doesn’t mean it didn’t have a massive empowering effect for everything surrounding the exposition. So that’s my response to preaching: don’t draw the wrong conclusion from the fact that they remembered a story, as though remembering the story didn’t mean the exposition had an effect. It did. Josh Buice would not say I don’t think today that God saved him that day because of that story. God saved him that day because God showed up in the word of God. So that’s the first thing. The other thing with regard to what I think of that point being remembered and that story being remembered, I’m happy that it is. I think that story has done much good. I think capturing the wasted life, with presenting Jesus with your hobby of seashells, is very powerful, and I’m glad it was remembered and I think it is to this day serving the cause of Christ to warn people that you get one life. You get one pass at this vapor’s breath. You’re going to collect seashells and present them to the judge of the universe, or you’re going to do something that magnifies his worth over the worth of your leisure.

Matt Tully
Some have taken that anecdote and they’ve been a little bit critical of what you were saying there. They’ve taken it as implying that you don’t think there’s any place in the Christian life for leisure or for rest or for relaxation, for fun hobbies. The Piper mindset, when it comes to the Christian life, is go, go, go, go! Spend every second of your life working as hard as you can for the Lord, and then die. That’s the only way to live a meaningful, valuable Christian life. Is that a fair criticism of what you’re saying? Are there ways in which you would say this point that you were trying to make has been misunderstood at times?

John Piper
No, it’s not fair. But I don’t care very much that it’s not fair, because, frankly, I would rather be misunderstood by encouraging too much devotion to the Lord than encouraging too much play. I know I’m misunderstood. I know I’m conceived that way, and I’m okay with that. Frankly, I think if you put away all your preconceptions, that you would say Jesus talked that way as well. Not a lot of play in Jesus’s life, right? No jokes in Jesus’s life. Not a lot of leisure. Some, but not a lot. So I’m okay with that. Now, the reason I say it’s not fair is because I play. Right after this interview is over, they give me what’s called comp time. I work full time for Desiring God, and those guys run my life, and they make sure there’s these things called comp time. Well, comp time is because I worked last night until nine o’clock offsite. So, from six to nine was work, and it’s not supposed to be, so they give me the comp time. Well, when you and I hang up here, I’m going to go sit downstairs in my chair with my wife and read whatever I feel like reading. Or I might go outside and pull up some dandelions, because I hate dandelions. So it’s just not true. It’s not true. And those who are close to me know it’s not true. However, when I go public and preach, like right now, that’s where I’m leaning. And the reason is because the whole world plays. The world lives to play. They’re telling all of our young people, Work your tail off for 40 years and then play for 20 years. I think that’s wicked. So I’m going to say that. And if people want to twist that and say, Oh, there’s no place for leisure. You can’t go fishing because Piper said you shouldn’t go fishing, and you can’t golf because Piper says you shouldn’t golf. Well, that’s just plain not true. And if they cared about the truth they wouldn’t say that. If they want to say, Piper emphasizes much more being ready to die for Jesus than being ready to play for Jesus, they’re absolutely right. I think that’s the emphasis the world needs to hear because the world is going 120 miles an hour in the other direction.

Matt Tully
That’s a really helpful nuance. You’re kind of responding to the dominant ethos surrounding us in our culture, but that doesn’t mean you don’t think there is a place for rest in the Christian life, for leisure in the Christian life. But that maybe isn’t the main thing that we need to hear most of the time as Christians.

John Piper
Just one other thing. Don’t get me going on work and leisure because I did an Ask Pastor John recently on will we work in the age to come, because it’s an eternal rest, right? And I said if it’s an eternal rest in the sense of lying in bed, that’s a bad future. Believe me. And everybody thinks it is. Nobody wants to lie in a bed or in an easy chair for a million ages of years. We will work. What will be removed is futility of work, pain of work, emptiness of work, meaninglessness of work. All that goes away, and all that’s left is creativity and delight and joy and productivity. We’re made to work. We’re made to make, to create, do things. The only thing the fall did was mess that up with futility and emptiness and meaninglessness. So I have no problem emphasizing live flat out to make much of Jesus in every way you can.

Matt Tully
Your colleague and friend, David Mathis, worked with you for many, many years at Desiring God and you’ve been at the same church together over the years. He said that sermon “may be the single most significant event in terms of exposing a wider audience to John Piper.” I wonder if you could summarize for us how that sermon on that day changed or impacted your ministry in the years that followed?

John Piper
I don’t recall a causal connection between that message and any ministry changes in me. Now, David knows more than I do and he sees things better than I do and his memory is way better than my memory. But here’s what I do remember, and I went back in my journal last night to confirm it. I wrote in my journal within two days of that event, mainly, my fear and the danger of the pride and the notoriety and the celebrity that could come from speaking to 30,000 people. That’s what I felt mainly. I mean, there was a lot of thankfulness that God just got me through it, and there was hope that there would be ripple effects for the sake of the nations. But mainly, emotionally, I was trembling. And I’m thankful for that. I think to write books and to speak to large crowds is very dangerous spiritually. You can have an inflated notion of your significance. You can start to put your eggs of contentment in the basket of fame. And those are more mortal dangers. Jesus had no patience whatsoever with people who loved the praise of man. And so that was huge. I felt that, and I confirmed it in my journal last night, that coming off of the privilege that I felt it was. And it lasted for 20 years. Louie gave me the gift of speaking to passion for 20 years. Imagine it. I got to speak to that kind of crowd every New Year’s for 20 years. Well, that’s huge. If I were to say putting Piper’s name before a generations who would maybe buy my books, it wasn’t just one day; it was Louie’s giving me the privilege of speaking at Passion for so many years. And so year by year I come away from those events trembling with, Lord, don’t let me be a squanderer of this gift. Don’t let me turn the gift into a means of ruin through pride. So that was one. Here’s one other thing I remember the effect of that day had on me. I was 57, and for the first time, I don’t remember feeling this before, standing in front of 30,000 18- to 25-year-olds, I felt like I’m their father. I’m old enough to be their father. Way old enough. And I had not felt that in front of any big group before. And I said that to them I think. And that entered into my life as a whole new self-consciousness. John Piper is now a father in the evangelical world. You don’t come to that point easily because you feel like I’m just young. I’m still young, right? I’m just a young upstart pastor trying to do his job and got a privilege to write a book. I’m just one of the guys. And suddenly, you’re looking out on 30,000 people and saying, I’m old enough to be the father of every one of these people out here. So my mindset, I would say, grew up a little bit, matured, felt a greater weight of responsibility. Because I think older evangelical leaders should feel that way. I think we should feel fatherly toward the generation coming. Those are some of the things that I remember flowing out of that day.

30:00 - *Don’t Waste Your Life*

Matt Tully
Let’s skip ahead a few years. In 2003 you published a book with Crossway inspired, at least in part, by that sermon called Don’t Waste Your Life. I wonder if you could walk us through briefly, how did that come about? Was that your idea? Was that Crossway’s idea? Was that a joint project that originated on both sides?

John Piper
That particular question I don’t know the answer to who had the idea first. I wish I did. I’m just deeply, deeply thankful for the partnership I have with Crossway. Whoever initiates an idea, it generally grows up from a seed to a flower, and that’s a wonderful thing. If I put that question aside of who sowed the seed, here are the pieces that flowed into the book. One, Louie Giglio’s 26:8 generation came from Isaiah 26:8. That verse says, “Your name and your renown are the desire of our souls.” And Louis came to me in 1997, having read my book on missions, and he said, I don’t know anybody else besides you saying that the fame of God is reflected in your desire for God. Capturing those two things—a big, majestic God is famous and Jesus is famous, and we show that worth and value by desiring him. I want you to come say that at passion. And let me say it for 20 years. So that was huge. I dedicated the book to him. That’s why I mention him here because that was a privilege that I still to this day shake my head at. Secondly, my dad’s illustration never let me go. From when I was a little boy, I heard my dad in sermons say, as an evangelist trying to win people to Christ, over and over again he used this illustration. He was preaching, an old man in his 70s or 80s walks to the front. People have been praying for him for years. He confesses Christ. He gets saved. He puts his face in his hands on the front pew as my dad is dealing with him. And he just says over and over, I wasted it. I wasted it. I wasted it. Meaning, he’s old and he just got saved and he’s got nothing to give anymore, presumably. I remember as a little boy thinking, I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want that to happen to me. Our listeners can’t see this but you can see it. This is the plaque that hung on my kitchen in my home from age 6 to 18. It says “Only one life will soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” When a boy sees this plaque every day for 12 years, it’s going to have an impact. So, that was a piece. The message from my home was, You got one life, Johnny. You got one life. If you do what Christ says, it’ll count. If you go your own way, it won’t count. And so that fed in through the sermon to the book. And then as I began to ponder what a book like that would look like, I remember my college days when existentialism was just so red hot. Jean-Paul Sartre and the theater of the absurd. And everybody was cool with existentialism. And as I’ve lived I’ve seen it go from existentialism to postmodernism to expressive individualism. And as I look back over 60 years, I see it’s all the same thing. It’s all the same thing. Either there’s an objective reality outside of you that defines who you are—God and his word—or you make it up. You just make it up and decide what your essence is. That’s where transgenderism come from. That’s where homosexual so-called marriage comes from. That’s where all this expressive individualism comes from because there’s no objective reality. And I thought, That’s a good way to waste your life. Waiting for Godot was one of the dramas of the absurd two men sitting in a garbage can. And the whole drama is them talking to each other, waiting for Godot, which is for God, and he never comes. It ends. I mean, it’s totally absurd. And that’s the picture of the generation of the existentialist. They were waiting and waiting and waiting, but there is no external reality. You better just make it up as you go along. And I wanted to write a book that said, No, absolutely not! That’s not what unwasted life comes from. So there are a whole bunch of streams flowing toward the book. Whoever sowed the decisive seed, Crossway or me, I’m thankful that Crossway was willing to do it in 2003.

Matt Tully
It’s such a powerful message, and as you said, a counter-cultural message today maybe more so than it even was when it was first published. But it’s remarkable to note the way the book was received. It was published in the beginning of 2003, and by the end of that year—less than 12 months later—the book had sold over a hundred thousand copies, which is an amazing number for such a short amount of time. And then the book kept selling year after year after year to where we are today, where the book has now sold over a million copies around the world. Were you surprised by the response? Were you anticipating anything like that for this book?

John Piper
Well, frankly, I didn’t know any of those numbers until the day before yesterday. When I read your email I thought, Really? Are you kidding me? To this day, and I said this to the guys this morning when I was talking about what we’re going to be doing this afternoon, I said, You know, I don’t know how any of my books are doing. I’ve got a second coming book with you guys and I’ve got a providence book with you guys and I’ve got What Is Saving Faith? I have no idea how those books are selling. None. I really do have the sense that you cast your bread upon the water, and you move on. My whole mindset is I’ve written the book, now I’ve got another one to write. So you guys can have it right. Do with it what you want, but I’ve written it. That’s my job, right? I write books. You sell books. I’m off to do a new thing. So I’m just not given to trying to follow up the past success or failure. And there are failures!

Matt Tully
So, given you haven’t historically paid attention, when you hear those stats now—100,000 copies within the first year and a million now after two decades—does that surprise you? What’s your response to that?

John Piper
It does surprise me. That’s a lot of books. What moves me is not numbers, because for all I know those numbers largely represent parents desperately trying to get their kids to read something significant, and they never read it. So I don’t know what those numbers mean. What moves me is stories. I want to hear of a life encountering God in this book and being turned upside down and moving in a direction that magnifies the worth of Jesus. That’s the unwasted book. A book that causes people to make much of the worth of Jesus is not a wasted book. A book that sells a lot of copies, I don’t know, maybe that’s valuable and maybe it’s not. There are a lot of bad books that sell a lot of copies. So I really want to know what’s it doing to people? How is it advancing the cause of Christ? And that’s where I have gotten much encouragement. Getting ready for this little interview here, I went searching for stories. I do not mind doing that. I want to hear stories of the mighty hand of God in the life of people through Piper books. I love that. A little parentheses here: if I go to speak somewhere and they ask me, Do you want to talk to people afterwards or would you rather just disappear into the green room? And if I’m not too tired I say, I’ll talk for 20 or 30 minutes. And the reason I say yes, even though I hate having to take pictures and they get signatures, is because I hear enough stories and I see enough tears to say, Okay, this is worth it. This is what I want to hear. This is what I’m living for is tears of transformation told with honesty and earnestness. That’s worth it.

39:21 - Stories of Transformation

Matt Tully
Tell us one of those stories. What’s a story of something that you’ve heard from somebody who’s testifying to the impact that that book had on them?

John Piper
Okay, I’ll give you two, and one was surprising because I didn’t even know the whole story. Our listeners can’t see it, but here’s a picture. This is my favorite picture of Don’t Waste Your Life. This is Bill Housley—maybe he’ll hear this—in the Guam River of Papua New Guinea, March of 2003. He’s in a canoe, going into Papua New Guinea, and he’s sitting in the front of the canoe reading Don’t Waste Your Life.

Matt Tully
Wow. So March would’ve been pretty soon after the book released.

John Piper
Right after it. I didn’t even know it was published that early, so he must have gotten it right off the press. What he’s trying to say with this is, I am in Papua New Guinea, in large measure, because of Piper’s radical call to missions. And he illustrates it just by putting the book up there in front. Now, when I told this story this morning to the guys at DG (Desiring God), Scott went online, typed in Bill Housley , and he said, He’s still there!

Matt Tully
Wow.

John Piper
He’s still there! You could go talk to him and see a life of faithfulness and see about the tribe that they brought the gospel to. So it’s that kind of story. Here’s the other one, and I got this last night from looking at my journal. He’s a policeman. He’s in his forties. He’s been a policeman for nine years. I’ll read you what he wrote to me: “I see 40 years of waste in sin and self-love. God has finally led me out of the desert of my life. God has been speaking to me for about three years now about going into missions. Your book has played a part in fanning little embers into flames. My wife and I have applied for training with New Tribes Mission. We’re going to dump the house and the retirement and start trusting God to take care of us. We are very excited. Thanks for your faithfulness.” Now here’s the deal: I assumed every one of those 33 years, when I was preaching and missions week rolled around, I assumed God, for months ahead of time, had been taking people’s trees—their lives—in his hand and shaking them. Shaking back and forth so that their roots are loosened. Not everybody. He wants some people to stay right where they are. I mean, he wants most people to stay right where they are, live for Jesus in your job, but there’s 20, 30, or 40 people in this church that God’s been shaking their roots. And what I’m supposed to do, when I stand up in my pulpit on that last Sunday of missions week, is pluck that tree right out of the ground. And that’s what books and sermons do. God is doing the work of loosening people. So, later in that email he referred to the section in chapter 9 called The Meaning of Your Discontent. And here’s what I wrote: “Many of you are simply not satisfied with what you’re doing. As Jay Campbell White said, ‘The output of your lives is not satisfying your deepest spiritual needs.’ We must be careful here because every job has its discouragements. You don’t just leave a job because of seasons of darkness. We must not interpret that. But if the discontent in your life is deep, recurrent, and lasting, and if the discontent grows in Bible-saturated soil, God may be calling you to a new work.” He said that was the paragraph that did it for him. I read it now because I think some of our listeners are exactly at that point. They’re listening to this and they feel exactly that way. I’m 40 years old, I’m 50 years old, and I’m not satisfied with the spiritual output of my life. I don’t want to do this for the next 30 years. What more might be God calling me to do? And I think it’s books, it’s conversations, and it’s sermons that say, Come on! Dream a dream! that cause people to pluck up their lives and plant them in a new ministry.

Matt Tully
That makes me think of the quote that you’ve often referenced before, that it’s your conviction that it’s not books that change people, it’s not even sermons that change people, but it’s paragraphs and sentences. It’s even words that God uses as part of his providential plan. Sometimes the smallest thing can just change the whole trajectory of our lives.

John Piper
That’s what I feel about Bible reading. That’s what I feel about reading books. I don’t know of anybody but geniuses who, coming away from reading four chapters of the Bible in the morning, have those four chapters present to their mind during the day. There are probably some kinds of brains that can do that. They have the whole four chapters right there in front of them. For me, a sentence. I have to have one sentence. If I don’t have a sentence, it’s a blur. That’s just the way my brain works. I think I’m pretty average in that regard, that you come away from reading four chapters, it’s all a blur unless you’ve latched onto one sentence. So my sentence today is your sufficiency is from God. I just took that out of 2 Corinthians. Your sufficiency is from God. Period. I can remember that all day. And that feeds my soul. And as we get ready to talk here, I wonder, Am I going to remember what to say? How will this go? I’d say, *Look, it’s not ultimately you, Piper. Your sufficiency is from God. That’s the way I live my life.

45:13 - What If I’ve Wasted My Life?

Matt Tully
Some last couple questions. You mentioned that story of the policeman who wrote to you and said that he had wasted 40 years of his life. It made me think a little bit of someone who might be listening right now, people who have maybe encountered your book even over the years, who have been that old, if not older, and wonder, Man, have I wasted my life? Am I that man in that story that your father told you about who had his head in his hands? I’m feeling so discouraged, feeling so hopeless that I have wasted so much of my life. There’s so little left to give. Am I too late? What would you say to that person? You, living a full life of ministry and now nearing the end of your ministry, how do you respond to that?

John Piper
It is a great and glorious thing that the gospel is good news for every penitent person and every totally disabled person and every person that has made an absolute mess of their lives. So the first thing I would do if I were sitting beside that old man is I would not try to minimize his pain. And I wouldn’t try to gloss over the fact he blew it. He totally blew it for 75 years. I wouldn’t in any way try to poo poo, Oh, it wasn’t so bad or whatever. He wasted it, and I would just sit with him in quiet and let him weep over that. And then I would say maybe two or three things. One, if you let regret paralyze you for the next five years, you will add insult to injury and you will dishonor the Lord. He came and died in order that you might not be paralyzed by regret. That’d be one of the first things I’d say. I think the second thing I’d say is, and you have to be very careful with this because on the one hand it could sound discouraging and on the other it could sound very encouraging, I would say I am so glad that the story of the thief on the cross is in the Bible because the thief who died on the cross beside Jesus wasted his entire life except for maybe one hour. One hour he gets on the cross, while gasping his last breath, to live for Jesus. And he does a couple of good works there. He bears witness to Jesus, he calls out in humility—he has a couple of good works to his regenerate one hour life. But what a waste. What a waste. And yet Jesus doesn’t scold him. He says, Today you’ll be with me in paradise. We get to do eternity together, fella. And then really the verse that is just over the top wonderful is Matthew 10, where Jesus sends out the 72, they come back to him, and they’re just ecstatic that they cast out demons and they healed the sick and they preached the kingdom. And Jesus affirms that by saying, I saw Satan fall like lightning in your ministry. Satan was being defeated as you guys opened your mouth and preached the gospel and cast out demons and healed the sick. Amen! And then he said, But do not rejoice in this. Rejoice that your names are written in heaven. That’s mind boggling that he would say to this old man, for example, Look, even if you hadn’t wasted your life and you had devoted 70 years to casting out demons and preaching the gospel, you know what Jesus would say to you right now? It’s a hundred times more important that you’re saved. You’re saved, man! To be saved is more important than to have done all those things. Now, I think a lot of pastors, a lot of evangelists, a lot of social workers get so enamored by the usefulness and the thrill of ministry that they stop being amazed that they’re saved, their sins are forgiven. They’ve got eternal life in front of them forever. So I would try to reorient that man’s mind, eventually, off of the pain of regret and onto the hope of I get paradise with Jesus forever. My name is written in the book.

49:58 - Mastered by a Few Great Things

Matt Tully
One final question for you, and it relates to the very first words of that sermon that you preached 23 years ago. I wonder if you can start by reading those words for us.

John Piper
“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world, but you do have to know a few great things that matter, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not people who have mastered many things but who have been mastered by a few great things.”

Matt Tully
So John, as you reflect over your seven decades of life and ministry, what would you say are a few great things—the few great things—that have mastered you?

John Piper
Number one, the sheer reality of God. I have circled back to Exodus 3:14 so many times over the last decades, when Moses asked God, Who shall I say sent me to the people of Israel? God says, Tell them I AM sent you. I am who I am. That sentence, I am who I am, I think is the clearest biblical capture of God absolutely is. Nobody made God. Nobody brought God into being. Nobody shaped God. If there is ultimate reality, it’s God. And that sheer fact that the God who is just there, he is the given of reality, he’s just there, and the universe is like a peanut that he carries in his pocket. But his absolute reality is the number one great reality of life. Just coming to terms with the fact I’m not God. God is God. God is absolute reality. God is outside the world. God decides everything. He decides right and wrong, up and down, black and white, beauty and ugly. He’s absolute. Nobody influences him. He influences and determines everything. That is just staggeringly important. So that’s number one. Second, therefore the universe is created and has a purpose, and the purpose is that everything that happens ought to display the greatness, the beauty, the worth of that God through the enjoyment of his people in him. That was the great discovery of my life. You could say it another way, namely, that the enjoyment of the glory of God, the God who is, is the apex of his glorification. That’s my life. My Christian Hedonism. The enjoyment of God above all things is the glorification of God above all things, and that’s why he made the world. So you get the magnifying of God and the enjoyment of God in one great act of worship. And then the third or fourth thing, depending on how you number these, this God exists in a Trinitarian reality. He has a Son—the Word—and the Son of God became a God-man in order to suffer and die so that undeserving people might have that enjoyment forever and ever. I mean, that’s the center of the gospel, right? Jesus Christ comes into the world, he dies for the sins of his people, he bears their guilt, he carries their punishment, he magnifies God, he rises from the dead, and all who believe in him will have everlasting happiness in his presence forever and ever. That’s worth a hundred years of meditation. And then I would add two more things that have mastered me. The sheer magnitude of eternity. Just how long that is. And the reason that’s so significant in relation to God is because Ephesians 2:7 says, “In the coming ages, he will show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” In other words, it will take infinite coming ages for God to exhaust the riches of his grace in kindness on us. I really think that’s what Ephesians 2:7 means. We must have eternity. Eternity, never ending. This is just mind boggling for a 9-year-old, a 12-year-old lying on the roof of his house looking up into the sky, being scared to death of eternity because it’s going to be boring. And growing up and to realize, no, no, no, it’s not boring! God is of such an infinite nature that his mercies will be new every morning forever. That’s what infinite means. God is inexhaustible in the treasures of the riches of his kindness in grace, and it will take forever and ever and ever for him to show us all there is about himself to make us happy. It will never be boring, ever. And then the last thing is, to bring it back down on Earth, is to say life right now is sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. As long as there’s sin in this world, my joy in God will always be painful. It will always be sorrowful. It will always be sad. They asked me this morning when we were talking over at Desiring God about how I felt about some of the stories that were being told about the ripple effect of Desiring God. And I said, frankly, I mainly think about the pain. There are things in my family I wish were different. I think about my marriage. I wish I were a better husband. I’ve got a whole list of things where I feel regret. I’m not measuring up to my own standards, let alone God’s. I don’t ever expect in this life to get beyond that. And yet when this is over, then it won’t be sorrowful yet always rejoicing; it will be only rejoicing. So those are a few of the really big things that have held me over the years.

Matt Tully
Amen. John, thank you so much for sharing with us about the story of this important message that you preached all those years ago, the book that rose out of that, and the way that vision has shaped your whole ministry and career for decades. We appreciate it.

John Piper
Thank you. Been wonderful to be with you. I love talking about big things.

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