DWYL - Book Summary

My Search for a Single Passion to Live By

1. Will you feel you’ve wasted your life at the end of it?
2. Will you make a difference?
3. Only one life, ‘Twill soon be past; Only what’s done for Christ will last.
4. Lost years – Most of us have some
5. Where do you find meaning in life? How do you know what you know?
6. God will work in your life according to His grace.

Breakthrough – the Beauty of Christ, My joy

1. Christ is an objective reality
2. God is not dead and man is not dead
3. The essence of glorifying . . . God consists, therefore, in the creature’s rejoicing in God’s manifestations of his beauty, which is the joy and happiness we speak of. So we see it comes to this at last: that the end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature; for if God created the world that he may be glorified in the creature, he created it that they might rejoice in his glory: for we have shown that they are the same. – J. Edwards
4. Would we stand at the Grand Canyon and contemplate our greatness.
5. Love people = point them to the All-Satisfying God
6. 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 the deepest comfort in every pain. – J. Piper

Boasting Only in the Cross, The Blazing Center of the Glory of God

1. 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 the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing. – J. Piper
2. Christ Crucified = The Blazing Center of the Glory of God
3. What do you boast in?
4. If I deserve nothing but condemnation because of my sin, but instead get life and breath in this age, and everlasting joy in the age to come, because Christ died for me, then everything good—and everything bad that God turns for good—must be the reward of his suffering (not my merit). J. Piper
5. Galatians 2:19-20 “I have been crucified with Christ [so I am dead]. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh [so, yes, I am alive, but it isn’t the same “I” as the “I” who died] I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Magnifying Christ Through Pain and Death

1. We boast best in the Cross when we bear it
2. Paul said, “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:20-21).
3. Life and death to glorify God – If we learn to die well, we will live well
4. The Christian life is many deaths
5. How we handle loss shows who our treasure is
6. Don’t waste your life by running from costly things
7. What a tragic waste when people turn away from the Calvary road of love and suffering. All the riches of the glory of God in Christ are on that road. All the sweetest fellowship with Jesus is there. All the treasures of assurance. All the ecstasies of joy. All the clearest sightings of eternity. All the noblest camaraderie. All the humblest affections. All the most tender acts of forgiving kindness. All the deepest discoveries of God’s Word. All the most earnest prayers. They are all on the Calvary road where Jesus walks with his people. Take up your cross and follow Jesus. On this road, and this road alone, life is Christ and death is gain. Life on every other road is wasted.

Risk is Right – Better to Lose Your Life Than to Waste It

1. What is God’s view of risk?
2. Risk is part of our lives as finite creatures
3. The myth of safety can cause us to make poor decisions
4. Queen Esther – had the right attitude (Purim)
5. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego - O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up. (Daniel 3:16-18)
6. Do we hold onto something that we can’t keep rather than spending ourselves on something that we can’t lose?
7. In some parts of the world it is a simpler question because of the danger of being a Christian.
8. Risk must be taken for Godly reasons and not for risks sake

The Goal of Life – Gladly Making Others Glad in God

1. This is the basis of evangelism
2. Forgiveness is good because it gives us God
3. Our being forgiving is a response to a forgiving God
4. Our being giving is a response to a giving God
5. We must be glad in God to make others glad in God
6. When I speak of gladness in God, therefore, I mean a gladness that has roots in God’s eternal decree, was purchased by the blood of Christ, springs up in the newborn heart because of God’s Spirit, awakens in repentance and faith, constitutes the essence of sanctification and Christlikeness, and gives rise to a life of love and a passion for redeeming the world after the image of God. Gladness in God is a massive reality planned and purchased and produced by God in the lives of his elect for the glory of his name. – J. Piper

Living to Prove He is More Precious Than Life

1. If Christ is an all-satisfying treasure and promises to provide all our needs, even through famine and nakedness, then to live as though we had all the same values as the world would betray him.
2. Christ should be our obvious hope and draw others by His glory.
3. The credibility of Christ hangs on how we use our money (Mark 10:21; Luke 6:20, 24; Luke 14:33; Luke 18:25; Luke 12:15; Matthew 6:33; Luke 12:33; Luke 19:8-9; Matthew 13:44; Luke 21:2-3; Luke 12:20-21; Luke 9:58-59)
4. Use money to show that God, not possessions, is our treasure
5. Our “wartime lifestyle” should show our focus is on the goal
6. Wasting life means losing our lives by trying to save them
7. Our peace and deep satisfaction should be in God
8. Cut away those things that waste our life.
9. What has weight in your life? What do you hold dear?
10. 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 from 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”? – J. Piper

Making Much of Christ from 8 to 5

1. Our war is not geographical. The front is where you are.
2. Your secular position can be strategic
3. You will probably be called to stay in your job “with God”
4. Breath out continual thanks to God for all things
5. Work is not a curse; futility is.
6. God is glorified when we participate with God in our work.
7. We can make much of God in our secular job through the fellowship that we enjoy with him throughout the day in all our work
8. We make much of Christ in our secular work by the joyful, trusting, God-exalting design of our creativity and industry.
9. We make much of Christ in our secular work when it confirms and enhances the portrait of Christ’s glory that people hear in the spoken Gospel.
10. We make much of Christ in our secular work by earning enough money to keep us from depending on others, while focusing on the helpfulness of our work rather than financial rewards.
11. We make much of Christ in our secular work by earning money with the desire to use our money to make others glad in God.
12. We make much of Christ in our secular work by treating the web of relationships it creates as a gift of God to be loved by sharing the Gospel and by practical deeds of help.

The Majesty of Christ in Missions and Mercy – A Plea to the Generation

1. Adoniram Judson – 1st overseas missionary from America (1812); captured by the Hounds of Heaven.
2. Follow the action on the mission field
3. Rejoice in what God is doing in the lives of those he has called to foreign missions.
4. Our actions at home give credibility to our efforts on the mission field.
5. Missions are not finished
6. Are you doing what God has called you to do?