If Christ is so valuable that the hope of his immediate and eternal fellowship after death frees us from the self-serving fear of dying and enables us to lay down our lives for the good of others, such love magnifies the glory of Christ like nothing else in the world, according to John Piper in his book Risk is Right: Better to Lose Your Life Than to Waste It. This short book is actually a chapter extracted from the book Don’t Waste Your Life, written by the author some ten years ago.
Risk involves action that exposes yourself to the possibility of loss of injury, and if our aim in life is to make much of Jesus Christ and his kingdom, then we need to be taking risks for his sake. The book goes on to describe stories of risk in the Old Testament, including stories of Joab, Esther and Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol. The book also describes the risks that Paul took, as described in the New Testament. However, the author warns against taking risks for the wrong reasons, such as seeking to exalt ourselves rather than Jesus.
It is hard to disagree with the author’s biblical analysis of what it means to risk all for the sake of the gospel. However, the reality is that even the most committed followers of Jesus are far from perfect risk-takers. As Paul describes in Romans 7, we have mixed motives, and we often do what we don’t want to do. For most of us, life consists of short bursts of courage and fruitful activity interspersed by long periods of cowardice and inertia. When we do take risks, we tell ourselves that we are doing so in order to “make much of Jesus Christ and his kingdom”, but we usually secretly want to win a bit of praise from people as well.