All That Really Matters

I know that my blogging was really weak last month, and I'm not intending to make any promises for this year, as I know it will be busy enough.

This week, I started reading John Piper's book Don't Waste Your Life. I believe that I'm in a very fitting time in my life to read this book and a few passages have particularly caught my attention. Not only is it a new year, but a time in my life where I have many trials ahead of me, where I trust God will show Himself strong and I will learn to love Him more.

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. If you want your life to count, if you want the ripple effect of the pebbles you drop to become waves that reach the ends of the earth and roll on 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--and one great all-embracing thing--and be set on fire by them.
--John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life (emphasis in passage mine)

In the end, all that will really matter, is do we know God and does He know us. This is what it will all come down to: Do you know Jesus and does He know you? That second part is as important as the first. No Ph.D, no houses, land, or other accumulated possessions will matter. I like how Jim Cowan says it in his song When It's All Been Said and Done:

When it's all been said and done
There is just one thing that matters
Did I do my best to live for truth
Did I live my life for You
When it's all been said and done
All my treasures will mean nothing
Only what I've done for love's Reward
Will stand the test of time

This year, I long to live for Christ and Him alone, because knowing Him is all that matters. No matter what I accomplish here on earth, unless I know Him and live to love and glorify Him, I have nothing but wasted my life.

John 17:3
And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

Knowing God is eternal life!

And thus a cross-centered, cross-exalting, cross-saturated life is a God-glorifying life--the only God-glorifying life. All others are wasted.
--John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

May we remember these words this coming year.