Tonight, Chris Brooks talked about wasting your life . . . in a good way. The idea is that you give up pursuing what society and the media and culture tell you are worthy pursuits, and you spend your time, your talents, and your treasures to reach out to the least of these that the world calls nobodies.

You waste your life (according to the world) if you live selflessly and sacrificially and deliberately choose not to keep up with the proverbial Joneses.

You waste your life if you serve and give to those who will most likely never have the means to pay back what you’ve done for them.

You waste your life if you give up a promising career to go halfway around the world to serve the poverty-stricken in a third world country.

You royally wasted your time and your life (according to everything the world tells you) every time you lift your voice and your hands in worship to celebrate a baby born in a barn and laid in a feeding trough and who favored the outcasts and the marginalized but who is now the Risen King who lives forevermore.

If that’s a waste of time, let me be the first to waste my life for the God who didn’t spare any of His own life for me but lavishly wasted it on me in the person of Jesus Christ.

Here’s the book Chris mentioned in his sermon: