Chapter 1: My Search for a Single Passion to Live By

The ethical question "whether something is permissible" faded in relation to the question, "what is the main thing, the essential thing?" The thought of building a life around minimal morality or minimal significance - a life defined by the question by the question, "What is permissible?" - felt almost disgusting to me. I didn't want a minimal life. I didn't want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it. (14)

Chapter 2: Breakthrough - the Beauty of Christ, My Joy

What was life about? What was it for? Why do I exist? Why am I here? To be happy? To glorify God? Unspoken for years, there was in me the feeling that these two were at odds. Either you glorify God or you pursue happiness. One seemed absolutely right; the other seemed absolutely inevitable. And that is why I was confused and frustrated for so long. (31)

God created me - and you - to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion - namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. Enjoying and displaying are both crucial. 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. The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples. (31)

So here is the question to test whether you have been sucked into this world's distortion of love: Would you feel more loved by God if he made much of you, or if he liberated you from the bondage of self-regard, at great cost to himself, so that you enjoy making much of him forever? (36)

Christ must be explicit in all our God-talk. It will not do, in this day of pluralism, to talk about the glory of God in vague ways. God without Christ is no God. And a no-God cannot save or satisfy the soul. Following a no-God - whatever his name or whatever his religion - will be a wasted life. God-in-Christ is the only true God and the only path to joy. Everything I have said so far must now be related to Christ. The old kitchen plaque comes back: "Only what's done for Christ will last." (38)

Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and deepest comfort in every pain. (40)

Chapter 3: Boasting Only in the Cross of Christ, The Blazing Center of the Glory of God

God's aim is not that we merely admire his gifts, but, even more, his glory. (58)

Chapter 4: Magnifying Christ Through Pain and Death

If we only trust Christ to give us gifts and not himself as the all-satisfying gift, then we do not trust him in a way that honors him as our treasure. We simply honor the gifts. They are what we really want, not him. A biblical faith in Jesus must mean that we trust him to give us what we need most - namely himself. That means that faith itself must include at its essence a treasuring of Christ above all things. (70)

Chapter 5: Risk Is Right - Better to Lose Your Life Than to Waste It

The tragic hypocrisy is that the enchantment of security lets us take risks every day for ourselves but paralyzes us from taking risks for others on the Calvary road of love. (81)

This is very different from heroism and self-reliance. When we risk losing face or money or life because we believe God will always help us and use our loss, in the end, to make us more glad in his glory, then it's not we who get the praise because of our courage; it's God who gets the praise because of his care. In this way risk reflects God's value, not our valor. (90)

Without Christ, we are all legalists or lechers at heart - wanting to do our own thing, or wanting to do God's thing in our way to prove our own ability. (91)

How much food and clothing are necessary? Necessary for what? we must ask. Necessary to be comfortable? No, Jesus did not promise comfort. Necessary to avoid shame? No, Jesus called us to bear shame for his name with joy. Necessary to stay alive? No, he did not promise to spare us death - of any kind. Persecution and plague consume the saints. Christians die on the scaffold, and Christians die of disease. That's why Paul wrote, "We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:23).

What Jesus meant was that our Father in heaven would never let us be tested beyond what we are able (1 Corinthians 10:13). If there is one scrap of bread that you need, as God's child, in order to keep your faith in the dungeon of starvation, you will have it. God does not promise enough food for comfort or life - he promises enough so that you can trust him and do his will. (94)

The bottom-line comfort and assurance in all our risk-taking for Christ is that nothing will ever separate us from the love of Christ. (95)

Chapter 6: The Goal of Life - Gladly Making Others Glad in God

Forgiveness is essentially God's way of removing the great obstacle to our fellowship with him. By canceling our sin and paying for it with the death of his own Son, God opens the way for us to see him and know him and enjoy him forever. Seeing and savoring him is the goal of forgiveness. (100)

Joy in God overflows in glad-hearted mercy to people, because joy in the merciful God cannot spurn being merciful. You cannot despise becoming what you enjoy about God. (101)

Chapter 7: Living to Prove He is More Precious Than Life

Why don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life. (109)

Oh, how many lives are wasted by people who believe that the Christian life means simply avoiding badness and providing for the family. So there is no adultery, no stealing, no killing, no killing, no embezzlement, no fraud - just lots of hard work during the day, and lots of TV and PG-13 videos in the evening (during quality family time), and lots of fun stuff on the weekend - woven around church (mostly). This is life for millions of people. Wasted life. We were created for more, far more. (119)

Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out of the periphery of our secularized life. (121)

O Lord, Don't Let Me Waste My Life!

I am deeply moved by the courage and carnage of Iwo Jima. As I read the pages of this history, everything in me cries out, "O Lord, don't let me waste my life!" Let me come to the end - whether soon or late - and be able to say to a family, a church, a city , and the unreached peoples of the earth, For your tomorrow, I gave my today. Not just for your tomorrow on earth, but for the countless tomorrows of your ever-increasing gladness in God." the closer I look at the individual soldiers in the World War II history, the more I felt a passion that my life would count and that I would be able to die well.

As rainy morning wore into afternoon and the fighting bogged down, the Marines continued to take casualties. Often it was the corpsmen [medics] themselves who died as they tried to preserve life. William Hoopes of Chattanooga was crouching besides a medic named Kelly, who put his head above a protective ridge and placed binoculars to his eyes - just for an instant - to spot a sniper who was peppering the area. In that instant the sniper shot him through the Adam's apple. Hoopes, a pharmacist's mate himself, struggled frantically to save his friend. "I took my forceps and reached into his neck to grasp the artery and pinch it off," Hoopes recalled. "His blood was spurting. He had no speech but his eyes were on me. He knew I was trying to save his life. I tried everything in the world. I couldn't do it. I tried. The blood was so slippery. I couldn't get the artery. I was trying so hard. And all the while he just looked at me. He looked directly into my face. The last thing he did as the blood spurts became less and less was to pat me on the arm as if to say, 'That's all right.' Then he died."

In this heart-breaking moment I want to be Hoopes and I want to be Kelly. I want to be able to say to suffering and perishing people, "I tried everything in the world…I was trying so hard." And I want to be able to say to those around me when I die, "It's all right. To live is Christ, and to die is gain."

When the Trifling Fog Clears

At these moments, when the trifling fog of life clears and I see what I am really on earth to do, I groan over the petty pursuits that waste so many lives - and so much of mine. Just think of the magnitude of sports - a whole section of the daily newspaper. But there is no section on God. Think of the endless resources for making your home and garden more comfortable and impressive. Think of how many tens of thousands of dollars you can spend to buy more car than you need. Think of the time and energy and conversation that go into entertainment and leisure and what we call "fun stuff". And add to that now the computer that artificially recreates the very games that are already so distant from reality; it is like a multi-layered dreamworld of insignificance expanding into nothingness.

Consumed with Clothes

Or think about clothes. What a tragedy to see so many young people obsessed with what they wear and how they look. Even Christian youth seem powerless to ask greater questions than "What's wrong with it?" Like: Will these clothes help me magnify Christ? Will they point people to him as the manifest treasure of my life? Will they highlight my personhood created in the image of God to serve, or will they highlight my sexuality? Or my laziness? Trust me, I'm not hung up on clothes. There are some pretty radical, Christ-exalting reasons to dress down. My plea is that you be more like a dolphin and less like a jelly-fish in the sea of fashion - and of contra-fashion (which is just as tyrannizing)…..

Where Are the Young Radicals for Christ?

When I stand, as it were, on the shores of Iwo Jima and let myself reenact those hours of courage and sacrifice, and remember that they were young, I cannot make peace with the petty preoccupations of most American life. One of them was really young. I read his story and wanted to speak to every youth group in America and say, do you want to see what cool is? Do you want to see something a thousand times more impressive than a triple double? Well, listen up about Jacklyn Lucas.

He'd fast talked his way into the Marines at fourteen, fooling the recruits with his muscled physique. Assigned to drive a truck in Hawaii, he had grown frustrated; he wanted to fight. He stowed away on a transport out of Honolulu, surviving on food passed along to him by sympathetic leathernecks on board. He landed on D-Day [at Iwo Jima] without a rifle. He grabbed one lying on the beach and fought his way inland. Now, on D+1, Jack and three comrades were crawling through a trench when eight Japanese sprang in front of them. Jack shot one of them through the head. Then his rifle jammed. As he struggled with it a grenade landed at his feet. He yelled a warning to the others and rammed the grenade into soft ash. Immediately, another rolled in. Jack Lucas, seventeen, fell on both grenades. "Luke, you're gonna die," he remembered thinking…

Aboard the hospital ship Smaaritan the doctors could scarcely believe it. "Maybe he was too damned young and too damned tough to die," one said. He endured twenty-one reconstructive operations and became the nation's youngest Medal of Honor winner - and the only high school freshman to receive it.

As I read that, I thought of all the things that high school kids think is cool. I sat on the porch where I was reading and thought, O God, who will get in their face and give them something to live for? They waste their days in a trance of insignificance, trying to look cool or talk cool or walk cool. They don't have a clue what cool is…

Of course, we do not use the word cool to describe true greatness. It is a small word. That's the point. It's cheap. And it's what millions of young people live for. Who confronts them with urgency and tears? Who pleads with them by the collar, so to speak, and loves them enough to show them a life so radical and so real and so costly and Christ-saturated that they feel the emptiness and triviality of their CD collection and their pointless conversations about passing celebrities? Who will waken what lies latent in their souls, untapped - a longing not to waste their lives?

My Heart's Plea

Oh, that young and old would turn off the television, take a long walk, and dream about feats of courage for a cause ten thousand times more important than American democracy - as precious as that is. If we would dream and if we would pray, would not God answer? Would he withhold form us a life of joyful love and mercy and sacrifice that magnifies Christ and makes people glad in God? I plead with you, as I pray for myself, set your face like flint to join Jesus on the Calvary road. "Let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13:13-14). When they see our sacrificial love - radiant with joy - will they not say, "Christ is great"? (124-129)

Chapter 8: Making Much of Christ from 8 to 5

The war is not primarily spatial or physical - though its successes and failures have physical effects. Therefore, the secular vocations of Christians are a war zone. There are spiritual adversaries to be defeated (that is, evil spirits and sins, not people); and there is beautiful moral high ground to be gained for the glory of God. You don't waste your life by where you work, but how and why.
(132)

The Bible makes it plain that God's will is for his people to be scattered like salt and light among the whole range of secular vocations. Enclaves of Christians living only with Christians and working only with Christians would not accomplish God's whole purpose in the world. That does not mean Christina orders or ministries or mission outposts are wrong. It means they are exceptional. The vast majority of Christians are meant to live in the world and work among unbelievers. (134)

The essence of work was not sustenance of life. God gave himself as the sustainer. Man was free, not from work, but in work, to be creative without the anxiety of providing food and clothing. (145)

You can steal to have. Or you can work to have. Or you can work to have to give. When the third option comes from joy in God's goodness, it makes him look great in the world. (151)

Chapter 9: The Majesty of Christ in Missions and Mercy - A Plea to This Generation

Missions exists because worship doesn't. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever. Worship, therefore, is the fuel and the goal of missions. (162)

Showing practical mercy to the poor displays the beauty of Christ at home and makes the exportation of the Christian faith credible. We are hypocrites to pretend enthusiasm for overseas missions while neglecting the miseries at home. There was something wrong with the priest and the Levite in the story of the good Samaritan, who had their distant religious aims but were not moved by suffering close at hand where they would have to get their own hands dirty. Ministries of mercy close at hand validate the authenticity of our distant concerns. (165)

In 1916, Protestants were giving 2.9% of their incomes to their churches. In 1933, the depth of the Great Depression, it was 3.2%….By 2000, when Americans were over 450% richer, after taxes and inflation, than in the Great Depression, Protestants were giving 2.6% of their incomes to their churches…Now add to that the really shocking fact that of the money given to the church, less than 6% goes to foreign missions, and of that amount, about 1% goes to fund breakthroughs to unreached peoples. This is not to say we should pull back on any front. The point is, there is plenty for all the breakthroughs if we live to show that Christ is our Treasure. (172)

I pray that this divine call will rise in your heart with joy and not guilt. (174)

Chapter 10: My Prayer - Let None Say in the End, "I've Wasted It"

So many decades have gone by in which the constant message from the world, and even from some ministers, is this: that love means making much of man. And so when men, with this assurance, ponder what your love might mean, they say the same: God's love means making much of man. For proof they ask: Don't you feel loved when someone calls attention to your worth?

I answer: Once I did. When life was better than the Lord, and not the other way around. There was a time love felt like this - when I could not conceive of any joy greater than the honor of my name. (184)

O Father, grant your church to love your glory more than gold - to cease her love affair with comfort and security. Grant that we seek the kingdom first and let the other things come as you will. Grant that we move toward need and not toward ease. Grant that the firm finality of our security in Christ free us to risk our homes and health and money on the earth. Help us to see that if we try to guard our wealth, instead of using it to show it's not our god, then we will waste our lives, however we succeed. (188)

Let every wavering heart remember this: You promised "I will never leave you nor forsake you." So may we say with death-defying confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?" (189)