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Your Love, O Lord, Is Better Than Life
Your steadfast love, O Lord, is better than life. You have told us this in many ways. With these very words You have said it through the mouth of Your servant David: “Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise You.” You have said it in the words of Your apostle Paul, when he cried out in prison, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” O Lord, how much better You are than life! Does Your apostle Paul not use strong language! Not just “better,” but “far better.” You are so much better than life that Your apostle says death is gain. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain.” To lose everything this world can offer and be left with You alone is gain.
Why, O Lord, is Your love better than life? Surely David gives us the answer in the way he speaks. He does not say, “Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise Your love.” What does he say? He says that he will praise You, not Your love. “Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise You.”
How many, Lord, have made Your love a witness to their worth! Is then their joy a resting in Your worth or in their own? So many decades have gone by in which the constant message from the world, and even from some ministers, is this: that love means making much of man. And so when men, with this assurance, ponder what Your love might mean, they say the same: God’s love means making much of man. For proof they ask: Don’t you feel loved when someone calls attention to your worth?
I answer: Once I did. When life was better than the Lord, and not the other way around. There was a time love felt like this-when I could not conceive of any joy greater than the honor of my name. When I was so absorbed in me that it was inconceivable for joy to rise by my admiring rather than my being admired. Oh, yes, I’ve known what it is like to call the praise of men an act of love and justify this craving with the readiness to give the same. How satisfying it does seem-this love among ourselves of mutual admiration!
How many ways You said and showed, “I made you for My glory. I made you for My praise. I made you for My honor and My name.” And, lest we miss the point, You added: “In My presence there is fullness of joy; at My right hand are pleasures forevermore. Delight Yourself in me! Be glad in Me and leap for joy; I am your sure and great Reward! Come taste, and even now rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
How then shall Christ not be my only boast! What do I have that does not come from Him? What gift of life or breath? What promise ever made did not receive its Yes in Him? What one sweet thing-or hard thing You will soon make sweet-did I receive except that it was purchased by His blood? Not one thing I deserve, but hell. Yet everything is mine in Him, and by His sacrifice alone. O God, forbid that I should ever boast save in the cross of Christ, my Lord.
O Father, grant Your church to love Your glory more than gold-to cease her love affair with comfort and security. Grant that we seek the kingdom first and let the other things come as You will. Grant that we move toward need and not toward ease. Grant that the firm finality of our security in Christ free us to risk our homes and health and money on the earth. Help us to see that if we try to guard our wealth, instead of using it to show it’s not our god, then we will waste our lives, however we succeed.
Let every wavering heart remember this: You promised, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So may we say with death-defying confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”
-John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life
