What 'Owns' You

"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, 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 a few great things. 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 for centuries and into eternity..."

These are the words with which John Piper challenged 20000 college students in the summer of 2000 (see here). Piper's earnest plea was that this groups of 20-somethings not waste their life on the cheap temporal pleasures lavished upon them by a society fixated only with the now. Piper wanted their lives to count for so much more.

What owns you? What dominates your affection, what grasps your attention more than any other thing? Maybe it is a multitude of things all wrapped up in this wicked rat race of keeping up with the mind-blowing levels of consumption by our peers in order to maintain 'the image.'

Piper's whole message is borne out of his focus on the words of Paul in Galatians 6:14. Here Paul claims that he will boast only in one thing: THE CROSS OF JESUS CHRIST. For Paul, and so it should be for us, the cross of Jesus Christ was the central element of all reality. For him reality is because the cross was. As Christians we must ask ourselves if we could make the same claim.

We must ascertain whether everything we seek to do, our thoughts, our affections stem from our absolute love for the person and work of Jesus Christ crucified. It will bring about transformation if that is the case.

Simon