“America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.” ― John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

You may have heard of the American Dream, the idea that the perfect life consists of one spouse, two kids, a house with a garage, and a yearly vacation. The American Dream is not the Christian ideal. The Bible does not speak of life being fulfilled in having a home, 401k, or even having a family. John Piper in his book, Don't Waste Your Life, told students about two different couples. The first couple is the one who went to spread the gospel and soon after died in a car accident. The next couple is the one who spent their life savings to buy a yacht so that they could sail around the Caribbean collecting sea shells until an old age. He asks his audience about which story was more tragic. While one set of lives were shorter, the other lives were wasted. John Piper concluded that the story of the couple who sailed around the Carribean, was the more tragic story.

Whether it is parent or child reading this, how will you spend your life? Will you spend it pursuing God or pursuing things? Our culture today defines itself by the stuff it has. Will you be like the world in pursuing that nice car, dream job, or whatever possession it is? Will you define yourself by what you have? Or will you live to make Christ known? You cannot successfully have both. Jesus says you cannot have two masters. You cannot serve God and money. I started my own business, I pursued wealth and wanted to be my own boss in every way. And I wasted all of that time. Wealth is a dangerous god that sneaks into everything it can.

This idea of “I need that” consumerism isn’t just outside of the church. How many times have we heard or said something about how you or they liked that church service because of the coffee bar, smoke machine, or other toys the church has? Are those things bad, no. It is bad when we let those define the service. Do we leave church talking about the conviction of the message and if God was pleased with our worship, or are we talking about how it all served us and made us feel comfortable? The overt comforts that have entered our churches are not just centered on the physical, but have entered the theological too. We have crafted a whole gospel that is an American edition. We have created a prosperity gospel that is all about God giving us more stuff. We will talk more about it later. Let's not make our life or our theology about things, but instead, let’s make it about someone.

In this same book we previously mentioned, John Piper, writes of one the stories that impacted him most as a child.

“The church had prayed for this man for decades. He was hard and resistant. But this time, for some reason, he showed up when my father was preaching. At the end of the service, during a hymn, to everyone’s amazement he came and took my father’s hand. They sat down together on the front pew of the church as the people were dismissed. God opened his heart to the Gospel of Christ, and he was saved from his sins and given eternal life. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face—and what an impact it made on me to hear my father say this through his own tears—“I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!¹⁶”

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.” ― John Steinbeck