Don't Waste Your Life

Spencer revisits Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper, a book he first read during the 2007–2008 financial crisis that went on to shape the founding of neverthirst. He shares three principles from the book that still drive the ministry today: be mastered by one great thing, risk is right, and live to prove that Christ is more precious than life. Along the way, he gets personal about the tension between wanting a life that counts and wanting comfort, and he closes by praying for the Tugali people of Sudan, an unreached group of 130,000 near the Nuba Mountains.

Resources Mentioned:

• Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper
• The One Thing by Gary Keller
• Tallyho the Fox by Herb Hodges
• Joshua Project (joshuaproject.net)

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Connect with Spencer and the neverthirst team: neverthirstwater.org

Host: Spencer Sutton

To Learn More About neverthirst: neverthirstwater.org

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Production House: Flint Stone Media

Copyright of neverthirst 2025.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Alright, everybody, welcome back to another episode of For the Kingdom, a Never Thirst podcast. I am your host, Mr. Sutton, and it's great to be here with you today. So I want to kick off by going back in time because I recently picked up a book that I first read, I believe in probably 2007, and then again in 2018. I read it with some friends, and then I just picked it up uh again to read it. And so this has been on my mind, this this book has, and I want to talk to you a little bit about it because I think there's some great uh really I'm I'm thinking about three main ideas from the book that I want to highlight and uh talk about today on the podcast, and then we will end our uh time together uh praying for an unreached people group. Going back in time, I remember and I'm and I'm taking you back to 2007, 2008, and I was uh in real estate. I was uh I had a company here in town, and we were buying and selling houses. This is before Neverthirst came into an existence. And of course, in 2007, 2008, we had the great financial meltdown, the crisis, and and that bled into the real estate market. As a matter of fact, a lot of it was brought on by the real estate market, and I found myself really wondering like, what is what am I gonna do next? Like, what's what's after this? And I had been uh meeting with some friends, we'd been praying uh for God to do something in our lives. We were actually meeting every, I think, I want to say every Tuesday morning. We were praying, just seeking God's will. And this book was recommended by some people, and I remember just thinking, well, yeah, I'll I'll give it a read. I mean, what a great title. And the book is called Don't Waste Your Life, and it's a book by John Piper. It and I think it was I think he wrote it after he gave a talk at a passion conference, uh a Louis Giglio passion conference in the 80s, some type of conference, because the book is actually dedicated to Louis Giglio and his passion for students. And I remember somebody had suggested this book, so I picked it up, read it, and it was it was so uh impactful for me that when we started Neverthirst, we actually we actually built a short little curriculum around the book so that when we went into the field and we took teams into the field, every night we would have a devotion, and the devotion was uh uh around this uh concept of don't waste your life. And so I'm gonna talk about three main points that I want to pull out that that I've been thinking about a lot lately. This this really, you know, when we first started taking mission trips back in our uh at our church, and I actually was leading some mission trips, and I was at at this point when I was kind of in between, like, what God, what do you want me to do? I was kind of lead, I was winding down a real estate business and and kind of coming to God with an open hand and saying, Lord, what do you want me to do? At this time, Brooke Hills, who which is our church here in Birmingham, Alabama, approached me and said, Hey, we'd like for you to come on part-time and help out with missions. We're taking a lot of teams on mission trips, and I was like, great. One of the things that we did on these mission trips was we would reteach different sermons from a pastor named Herb Hodges. He was in Memphis. Herb Hodges, fantastic. He wrote a book called Tallyho the Fox. He he was just such a great disciple maker. And so we would reteach these lessons. So I had this idea after reading uh Don't Waste Your Life that we would turn this into some devotions. And this is what we did when we started taking teams in the early days of Everthurst. What we would do is we would take teams on the field because we were trying to expose people to the work and say, hey, here is what it looks like to live without access to clean water. And so some of these early trips were in 2008 and 2009 and early days of 2010. So what I want to do is pull out these three points, share them with you, and then let's pray. So, point number one, or or kind of principle number one coming out of the book that really stuck out to me is this idea that we as believers should be mastered by one great thing. There should be one great overarching mission in our life, and we should be mastered by it. There's a lot of talk in the business world. You know, I came from the business world, uh, there, and there's a great book out there. It's called The One Thing by Gary Keller. And I believe Gary Keller is actually a Christian, and because he talks about his faith in the book, but it's primarily a business book. And his whole point is hey, every day when you start your day, you should have one thing that you're focused on. One, it's like the highest return activity in your business to get done that day, and then everything else can come after that. And his whole point was do that one thing early in the morning. You're you're you're at your best in the morning, you have a lot of strong willpower in the morning, you're probably more creative, focused in the morning. So focus on that one thing. This is the most important thing you need to get done today. So this book talks about one thing in your entire life. One thing in your entire life. And so John Piper goes into this just saying, hey, there is one thing every believer should be mastered by. And so I'm going to read you just a short excerpt from this book. He says, you don't have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. And really, this the book is the whole premise of the book is God's given you one life. Let's not waste it, let's use it for his glory. And so he goes on and says, 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. If you want your life to count, if you want the ripple effect of the pebbles of you drop to become waves that reach the ends of the earth and roll into eternity, you don't need to have a high IQ. You don't have to have good looks or riches or come from a fine family or a fine school. Instead, you have to know a few great, majestic, unchanging, obvious, simple, glorious things, or one great, all embracing thing and be set on fire by them. And this is the whole idea. This is what the gospel has like Christ has come and saved us and redeemed us for the purpose of us making much of him in this life. And the point is we want to be mastered by this one great thing. And this one great thing is living a life that brings God glory. And in the book, he saw it says what that when we do this, when we live a life that brings God the most glory, we also have the most satisfaction in this life. He goes on to say, you may not be sure that you want your life to make a difference for the sake of something great. You you just want people to like you. If people would just like being around you, you'd be satisfied. Or if you could just have a good job with a good wife or a husband and a couple of good kids and a nice car and long weekends and a few good friends, a fun retirement, and a quick and easy death, and no hell. If you could have all of that even without God, you would be satisfied. That is a tragedy in the making, a wasted life. What he's doing is he's setting up the whole premise of listen, our our lives are meant for something greater. And this is what we should be captured by. Like our whole imagination, our life should be focused on one great thing. All right, moving on to the second big idea in the book, and this is one that really stuck with us as we were forming Neverthirst, because we don't work in the easiest places. And this second idea is risk is right. And I remember reading this chapter and reading all about this, and and the the idea coming to us, it's like, what if not taking a risk was the least loving thing you could do? In other words, like what when we take risk for the glory of God, it's a loving, it's a good thing. Now, these risks may be small things, or we what we may consider small things. This could be sharing your faith. Right? You could have a friend and you've been wondering, like, how do I share my faith with my friend? How do I, how do I bring up gospel conversation? We've got this, maybe this work relationship or this family relationship, and would it be awkward or whatever? But risking your friendship or risking your reputation is a good thing. It's a loving thing. That's why he says risk is right. And so we can even we can even look at different parts of scripture and see how not everything was known to people who were following God. God's people didn't always know what was going to happen, but they were willing to risk like their lives even to for the sake of following God, for the sake of making uh of bringing him glory. And so here's a few examples. We have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3. What were they told to do? They were they were told to bow down and worship this statue that Nebuchadnezzar had had built. And so they answered him. This is Daniel 3, 16, says they answered him and said to the king, 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 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. So they went into the fiery furnace, not knowing what the outcome was going to be. But they did it for the glory of God. They would not share God's glory with a golden idol. What about Esther 416? We read this when the Jews were at risk of extinction, and there there was this time like Mordecai was saying, Hey, you you need to you need to go in and and tell the king what's gonna happen, and and and that the that your life is at risk. And and she knew that if she went in and the king was not pleased, or maybe he was in a bad mood, he could have her killed right there. He hadn't called her into his presence. And this is what she said. Verse 16 Go gather all the Jews to be found in Susa and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish. So so these are instances in scripture where Esther, Shadrach, Meshach, and Nebega were risking their lives. We also know in Daniel we also see him praying, like he had always done. In in in the ri like his life was at risk because he could be thrown into the lion's den. We know what happened there. This is what Piper says here. He's he has a little parts called exploding the myth of safety. We cannot avoid risk even if we want to. Ignorance and uncertainty about tomorrow is our native air. All of our plans for tomorrow's activity can be shattered by a thousand unknowns, whether we stay at home under the covers or ride the freeways. One of my aims is to explode the myth of safety and to somehow deliver you from the enchantment of security because it's a mirage. It doesn't exist. Every direction you turn, there are unknowns and things beyond your control. Now I experienced this in a in a very real and sobering and sad way. Uh just about a year and a half ago, a little bit less than a year and a half ago, when my uh brother-in-law was directing traffic at a local church here in Birmingham and was struck and killed by uh a driver. And it it was uh this church was holding a prayer meeting early in the morning. It was during a week, it was on a weekday, and he had he had worked at this church in security and and as their one of their like main police officers for the past 17 years. And he was just out there doing what he always did, which was putting cones out, getting ready for people to leave the prayer meeting. They met at six, they were leaving at seven and in the morning, and he was struck and killed. And instantly, all of our lives changed. My sister, this was my sister's husband, her life changed, her children's lives changed, all of our lives changed. And like this is the uncertainty, this is the mirage that Piper's talking about. There, like we assume that we are safe all of the time, and it's just not true. So, why not live our life taking risk for the glory of God? Now we can waste our lives in a in a number of ways by taking dumb risks that don't make a lot of sense, but but God desires us to take risk for his glory. All right, and then number three, I'll I'll finish with this one and then we'll pray for an unreached people group. And there's a chapter, it's chapter seven in here, which will probably one of my favorite chapters. And and the whole point is to live to prove that he is more precious than life. So how do we do this? I believe this is a matter of constant attention because it goes it it goes so against the culture of our day. Like even if I'm being honest, even the culture of the American church in a lot of a lot of cases, a lot of instances, because uh uh uh sometimes the message from the American church is hey, you can have the American dream and just kind of like tape Christ onto it. Like it's it's a it's a Christian spin on the American dream. One of the early stories in this book uh highlights he he he wants to paint a picture of what a wasted life is and what a a life that's not wasted is, and so he paints this picture of these two ladies in their 70s or 80s and their missionaries in Cameroon, which is a country in uh West Africa, and and and they he they died tragically in a car accident. Their brakes failed, their car went over a cliff, and they died. He said, Is that a way was that a wasted life? They were there ministering the gospel, they're sharing the gospel, they're taking care of the poor. And he asked in the book, is that a wasted life? And he says, No, that's not a wasted life. He said, I'll show you what a wasted life is. And and he hey, he had read in a reader's digest for for those of you who are my age, you kind of remember what a reader's digest is. If you're younger, you will not remember that, but it's a it was a book that was really popular. It's kind of a magazine or periodical that was really popular back in the day, but it had a story in there about this couple and they had a really successful career, and they retired at the beach and they spent their days on their yacht and then collecting seashells. And now listen, uh there's nothing wrong, obviously, there's nothing wrong with retirement, there's nothing wrong with having a boat, there's nothing wrong with any of that. But his whole point was to make this big like to show this big distinction between the two lives. And his whole point was like, how would you like to come to the end of your life and you had seashells? Like what the the big aim of your life was to spend it on the beach collecting seashells. And I remember reading this, and if I was really honest with myself, if I was really honest with myself, and and me and a buddy wrestled with this, I kind of want both of these things. I want my life to count for the glory of God, and and I also want the comforts and security and the super easy life that the that that our culture says is the most important thing that you can go after. If I'm being honest, this is what my this is what this is how I wrestle with like in my flesh. I want my life to count for the glory of God, but I also want to be at ease. And this is the challenge. So when we talk about living to prove that Jesus is more precious than life, how do we do this? We have to, we have to pay constant attention. We have to keep coming back to the gospel. We have to keep coming back to God's word. And when I'm here and when I and I'm looking at this and I'm reading it, I was just looking at 1 Peter 4, 1 and 2 with some people last night. I uh have a Bible study on Tuesday nights, and we were looking at this passage and it says this since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourself with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh, no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. And I've come to the conclusion that this is how you and I, if we want our life to count, if we don't want to have a life that is wasted, we have to keep coming back to this mindset. We have to arm ourselves with the same way of thinking that Christ did, which how what did Christ think about? I'll tell you, this is what Christ did over and over and over again. We can read it in John 5, verse 30, and John 6, verse 38. He says this in John 5, I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just because I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me. Again in John 6, 38, for I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. So this is the same way of thinking. Peter's pointing to the way of the Jesus thought all the time. This is the way Jesus thought. Not my will, but your will be done. God, not my will, but your will be done. So will that mean taking a risk for the glory of God? Yes, probably. But God, I I I all I really want to do is your will. Your will. And this is what Piper says at the um in this section that I wanted to share with you. He says this. He says, I need to hear this message again and again. Because he he starts, and let me give you a little bit of background, he starts talking about we have to be reminded of this in the way it's it's having a mentality that is more like a wartime mentality than a peacetime mentality. And he he he brings us back to World War II when in the United States, when we were in World War II, people sacrificed, people did without. People rationed, people like they sacrificed for a greater cause, and that was to win the war. Like scrap metal. Metal was at a at an all-time, like it we needed it for material for the war. And so people did without and they they sacrificed so that we could win the war. He said it's way different than peacetime, because in peacetime we start thinking, well, what's best for me? And we start looking more inward. And this is why he says he needed to hear this message again and again, because he says, I drift into a peacetime mindset. As clearly as rain falls down and flames go up. I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in, I start to love what others love, I start to call Earth home. Before you know it, I'm calling luxuries needs and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached. People groups drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mindset that looks first to what man can do and not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness, and I thank God for those who have forced me again and again towards a more wartime mindset. This is truly, truly, truly, this is the heartbeat of uh this organization of Never Thirst. We we started this organization because we didn't want to waste our lives. And then by God's grace, He has brought so many partners, friends, supporters. It's just been amazing to see how God has sustained this ministry through people like you. If you're listening to this and you've been a supporter, I just praise God for you because you want your life to count. You want your life to make a difference. And and it is. And this is why we have decided to work in some of the most difficult parts of the world. Parts where the gospel is not known, parts of where where it's riskier to go to these countries. As a matter of fact, we're in the process of removing the actual countries that we work in from our website because it's not necessarily great to have those on the website. We we've had some difficulties and we we want to protect our partners, we want to protect church partners on the ground. And these places are unreached for a reason they're not easy to get to, and they're resistant to the gospel. But the risk is right, it's worth it. And so on that note, I want us to pray for a people group. This is a people group in Sudan, and you can find uh you can find some like great people groups to pray for. Uh Joshua Project.net is where I get these. And this is the Tagali people in Sudan. Now there's Sudan, which is I used to call it North Sudan, but it's just called Sudan, and then there's South Sudan. So these people are in Sudan. They're a little bit south of Khartoum. This is where they live. There's about 130,000 of them. That's 0.1% Christian. The largest religion is Islam. And they live near a region kind of called the Nuba Mountains. And so it's this place where it's it North Sudan is very dry. You have the Sahara Desert, and then you go, you dip into, as you get into South Sudan, you dip into Sub-Sahara Africa, with where there's a lot of lush leaves. These kind of people are near the border of that, what we would call the Nuba Mountains. But their lives are they're agricultural, uh, they raise crops, they raise cattle, uh, and they don't know the good news about Jesus Christ. And so what we want to do is we want to and not only that, they live lives of um uh I mean there's there's violence all around them. Like there's there's wars, there's civil wars, there's war with South Sudan, there's all kinds of things that happen where their lives are in jeopardy. And so what we want to do is we want to pray that the Lord would provide physically for them, but also pray for their spiritual needs and just pray for workers who are filled with the Spirit of God to go and plant their lives there and share the gospel and live lives worthy of the gospel so that this people group, the Tagali, would come to faith in Christ. So let's pray. Lord, just so thankful for the gospel, so thankful for people who came and shared the gospel with us. We're so thankful that we have access to the gospel everywhere we look, God. We have Bibles, we have churches, we have pastors, we have friends and family members who are followers of you, God. And this is an incredible grace from you. But Lord, we want to direct our thoughts, we want to direct our prayers for the Tagali people in Sudan, God, who don't have anyone in their communities that we know of who are followers of you. And so, God, we pray. We pray for people who are nearby, indigenous people in the air. We pray that they would come to know you, that people would come and plant their lives among the Tagali and share the gospel and show them what it looks like to love Christ and to worship you alone, God. So, Jesus Christ, I pray that you would make yourself known to these people. I pray that you would use others who are even maybe even now considering, is it worth it? Is the risk worth it? God, I pray that you would show them that the risk is right, that you would point them to Esther in the book of Daniel, so that they would see that yes, it is worth it. And so, God, we just pray that you would be magnified and glorified in these people through your son Jesus Christ. We pray all of these things in the precious name of Christ. Amen. All right, everybody, that is it for this episode of For the Kingdom, and we'll be back in two weeks with a new episode.