does your life matter?

Series: Conversations with Jesus
John 7:1-13
19th oct 2008
“Does Your Life Matter?”
John Piper, in his book Don’t Waste Your Life, tells of a time he came across an old
poem he had written in high school
- Next to it was drawn an old man in a rocking chair, and then these words
- “Long I sought for the earth’s hidden meaning
Long as a youth was my search in vain
Now as I approach my last years waning
My search I must begin again”
He wrote it, in his youth, as a description of the worst thing imaginable
- To come to the end of life and realize that everything you have given yourself to
was false
- To come to your last years and realize you have wasted them
- Devoted yourself to that which amounts to nothing more than a grain of sand in
the Sahara, a cup of water in the Pacific
- And must search again!
- To put it in other words, waited for all of life for your ship to come in and realize
you were standing at the wrong dock
- Every now and then, one can hear God whisper the same words: “Don’t waste
your life!”
- Only one life to offer
- Life is not a dress rehearsal
- “Do not run like a man running aimlessly” - Paul (I Corinthians 9)
- “Press on to lay hold of why God laid hold of you” (Philippians 3)
- “Redeem the time, the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5)
- It’s what I hear in the conversation in John 7
- Like every conversation that John records, it is set within a context
(verses 1-2)
- Jesus remains, where He has been rejected
- Steers clear of where others want to take His life
- Maybe His siblings began to think He needed direction
- So they speak to Him
- It’s hard to know what this relationship must have been like
- What happens when you live with a brother who has never done
anything wrong
- Never got home late and lied about it
- Never lost an argument
- Always brought home the correct change from the store
- Always kept his room neat, never talked back to mom and dad
- Living with Him, you never heard the words “Give it back to
her; Don’t talk to your brother that way; You will sit here until you
finish what is on your plate.”
- Always-outstanding parents evenings
- Never impulsive, selfish, lazy
- Family devotions: “Dad, that’s really not what that text is saying.”
- There was nothing but consistency, while for His brothers, their only
consistency was their inconsistency
- It had to work on them, they weren’t perfect they never could be, they had no time for him.
- And so it seemed natural to say what lots of brothers say to brothers:
“You ought to leave.” (Verses 3-4)
- They had their reasons, as is stated in the text
1) GO! Get your disciples back (verse 3b)
- Give them a fresh view of your works
- Use the holiday in Jerusalem to re-establish your reputation, get your street cred back
- Reverse your fortunes, retrieve your popularity, and reclaim your fed up followers
2) DEPART! Make a name (verse 4)
- If you hope to gain popularity, it’s important to not be so cryptic. Time to go public.
- Get out of Dalkeith. You gotta go to London if you hope to be noticed
- Galilee is nowhere; get to Jerusalem that is where you will get the fame!
- No one who seeks to be public, literally “seeks to be bold,” stays behind the scenes
- In other words, “Don’t be a wimp, BROTHER!”
- Time to get hold of yourself, sort yourself out
- And John tells us why (verse 5) they say these things
- They did not believe, well maybe a little, not a lot! But they were rejecting Him
- And so, maybe their motives were even darker
3) GO! And get out of our lives
- For Jesus had become too uncomfortable to live with
- Was viewed, in fact, as a mental case (Mark 3:21)
- What would Jesus say? How does He respond to their words?
- My first guess would be something like this…
- IT’S NOT YOUR PLACE
- To tell Me what my life should do
- A point Jesus made to another family member, his mother Mary, in His conversation with her (John 2)
- Jesus will not be dictated by anyone’s expectations, or timetable
-He does not need the advice and coaching of others
- He will not play the crowd to satisfy His brothers. If He goes to Jerusalem, it will be on His own terms, for His own purposes, in His own time
- And when He chooses to reveal Himself, it will not be in spectacular miracles, but in the disgrace and shame of the Cross
- But Jesus, instead, focused on something else
- It was a different kind of rebuke (verses 6-8)
- LIVE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
- Don’t waste your life
- Don’t let your years be inconsequential
- And here’s how
1) LIVE A LIFE THAT IS DELIBERATE
- Make your time matter
- When Jesus said, the right time, the suitable time, the kairos (God-appointed moment) HAD NOT ARRIVED he was declaring that He lived according to an intentional, purposeful plan
- A time frame determined by the will of the Father
- A theme running through John
- “No one laid a hand on Him. His hour was not yet.” (John 7:30)
- “His time had not yet come.” (John 8:20)
- “For this reason I came to this hour.” (John 12:27)
- All of which demanded careful steps—TIMING, careful timing, God’s timing
- In contrast, time for His brothers had no purpose
- For them, time was theirs to own
- The time was always there, always possible
- “Your time is always here because your lives have no reference to a divine plan.”
- “Your timetables are not regulated by any sense of God’s will.”
- They are determined merely by your own will, small as that is
- And so, your actions means nothing
- It has no consequence to anything until you realize you were made by
God, for God, to live for God
- Until then, “any time will do.” AND ALL OF LIFE WILL BE WASTED

- The second way to avoid wasting your time is to
2) LIVE A LIFE THAT CHANGES THE WORLD
A) For Jesus it meant entering this fallen world to shape its culture
- Expose the evil the kingdom of this world
- Draw it out of its shadows and into the light
- So that it can be named, rejected, and banished
- Sometimes, He directly confronted it, as when He disrupted temple protocols, went into the temple and called the religious leaders hypocrites to their faces, wolves disguised as sheep
- Told the religious leaders that little children understand more than they do
- Healed on the Sabbath to expose their heartless religion
- “In all of this, Jesus represented a counterforce, a countermovement, a counter-kingdom that will confront all corrupt human regimes, exposing them, naming them, and showing them for what they really are.”
- And because of this, He was a magnet for opposition
B) In contrast, for His brothers, who chose a path of unbelief, they consequently believed in nothing, did not take a stand on anything
- Accommodated rather than lived to shape the world
- And so the world did not hate them
- Could not hate them, for the world does not hate its own
- Jesus in effect said, “Do whatever you wish, your decisions have no significance.”
- They make no difference - they CHANGE
NOTHING!
- But if you want to follow Me, you will make a difference

- So what is He saying to us? Don’t waste your life.
1) BE DELIBERATE
- Treat time as part of God’s intentional plan
- Treat the moments as fulfilling God’s purpose
- That defines all of our parameters: when we go, when we stay
- If we’re committed to the important, we’ll avoid the trivial (which always takes up our time
- If we seize it, see the moments presented by God; it will not come under the influence of others
- Will not change that which is immediate, visible, popular, but what is vital
- You will build the kingdom
2) CHANGE YOUR WORLD
- Engage in our mission to reach the lost
- Be prophetic
- Protest the pollution of this world (I don’t just mean physically, spiritually as well)
- Be the light that exposes the darkness
- Such that your life will be neither marginal, nondescript, inconsequential, wasted
- And if we are hated for it, well so what? we will have joined great company
- As Jesus would later say, “If they hated Me, they will hate you.”
DON’T WASTE YOUR LIFE