Escaping the Fog of Triviality
00:00:00.000 | The doctrine of God's providence is the theme of Pastor John's new book by that title,
00:00:08.760 | Providence.
00:00:09.760 | The glorious truth that God governs over everything in this universe has always been true, but
00:00:13.720 | for us to see and savor God's providence, we must learn this glorious truth for ourselves
00:00:20.480 | from what God has revealed to us in his word.
00:00:23.240 | And when we see it and embrace it as true and glorious, this doctrine makes a very definite
00:00:28.640 | impact in our lives.
00:00:30.400 | So on Wednesdays on the podcast, Pastor John is celebrating those real-life impacts that
00:00:34.840 | this doctrine makes on our lives.
00:00:37.080 | There's a total of 10 implications he wants to address.
00:00:40.480 | Last time in episode 1580, we looked at how God's design for all things in providence
00:00:45.000 | brings meaning to all of life.
00:00:47.320 | In God's design of all things, no part of life is made meaningless.
00:00:53.700 | That was implication number three.
00:00:56.320 | Here now with implication number four is Pastor John.
00:01:01.120 | The fourth effect, real-life effect of seeing and savoring, grasping and cherishing the
00:01:10.840 | reality of God's all-pervading, all-embracing providence is that it goes a long way to protecting
00:01:19.160 | us from the trivializing effects of contemporary culture and from the widespread habit of trifling
00:01:29.960 | with great things, even divine things.
00:01:34.320 | Tony, I don't know how many people who are listening right now will resonate like I do
00:01:41.720 | with this precious effect of feeling the weight and the wonder of the providence of God.
00:01:48.920 | One of the reasons this is so significant for me is that I have felt over the years
00:01:56.780 | that the greatest threat to my soul is not committing adultery against my wife or embezzling
00:02:06.120 | money from some ministry or even a sudden throwing away of my faith and becoming an
00:02:14.640 | advocate for atheism or being overtaken by some terrible fit of rage and killing somebody.
00:02:23.680 | None of those things has seemed to me to be nearly as threatening to my soul as the creeping
00:02:35.240 | effect of pettiness.
00:02:40.160 | The loss of all capacity to feel greatness and beauty and magnificence and depth and
00:02:51.240 | wonder and awe and reverence and weightiness.
00:02:58.400 | My fear has not been that I will make shipwreck of my life through some dramatic, egregious
00:03:05.320 | sin, but through the steady drip from the faucet of silliness.
00:03:14.280 | And lest I be misunderstood, this is not some appeal for high-level intellectual, educated
00:03:23.960 | perceptions of philosophical complexity, blah, blah, blah.
00:03:29.600 | No, I'm talking about capacities that the simplest, most uneducated person in the world
00:03:38.720 | can feel if they are in touch with the greatest realities in the universe, which come not
00:03:46.920 | primarily through education, but through the awakening of heart capacities to soar with
00:03:55.520 | beauties and the mysteries of creation and redemption and with the revelation of God's
00:04:01.760 | nature and God's ways in Scripture.
00:04:06.320 | This capacity of heart is not given primarily through education.
00:04:13.320 | It's given through the miracle of the Holy Spirit opening the eyes of the heart to be
00:04:18.240 | stunned by what is stunning and shocked by what is shocking and stand in awe of what
00:04:24.640 | is awesome and be amazed at what is amazing and feel the crushing weight of what is crushing
00:04:31.080 | and see the glory of what is glorious and have affections that are somehow, in some
00:04:37.080 | measure, proportionate to the nature of the reality that God reveals to us in the world
00:04:44.320 | and in his Word.
00:04:46.840 | I'm not on a quest for some kind of philosophical height.
00:04:52.680 | I don't dread being unphilosophical.
00:04:55.120 | I dread from my heart being shrunk down in heart to the level where my heart's capacities
00:05:06.320 | for happiness consist only in silly TV jingles and empty-headed slapstick.
00:05:11.840 | That's what I fear.
00:05:15.480 | And in my life, and this is why I'm commending it, in my life it is seeing and savoring the
00:05:26.080 | all-pervasive providence of God that has protected me from the shrinking of my soul.
00:05:35.480 | One of the curses of our culture, and it has permeated the church and most Christian communication,
00:05:43.400 | is banality, triviality, silliness, superficiality, and an eerie addiction to flippancy and levity.
00:05:58.400 | And this is accompanied by what to me seems a baffling allergy to seriousness, dignity,
00:06:07.640 | articulate precision, brokenhearted joy in public speech, carelessness in speech, and
00:06:17.160 | casualness in demeanor turn up in places and times where you would least expect them, where
00:06:24.760 | you hope for clarity and earnestness and gravity.
00:06:30.000 | My impression is that at the root of this culture of inarticulate, casual trifling is
00:06:39.120 | a loss of a sense of the weight of the greatness and awfulness—isn't that an interesting
00:06:48.240 | word?—awful, and a-w-e dash full, awfulness of God.
00:06:56.000 | The loss of a sense of the awfulness of God.
00:07:01.420 | Everything is light and funny because God is lightweight.
00:07:06.080 | The boats of our communication bounce around with a chipper bearing on the waves of cultural
00:07:12.520 | trifling, because the heavy ballast of the great, sovereign, holy God of all-pervading
00:07:21.360 | providence has been offloaded at the docks, the docks of man-centered theology and endless
00:07:29.200 | screen time.
00:07:33.000 | This is a tragedy, and not only because it is the fruit of trivializing God, but because
00:07:41.520 | it hinders us from seeing him and experiencing him as he really is in the majesty of his
00:07:50.040 | all-embracing providence.
00:07:53.600 | My guess is that some who listen to me right now will have no categories for hearing what
00:08:04.080 | I'm saying except as hearing it as a summons to grim, dour, somberness, and boredom.
00:08:16.200 | That's what Piper's advocating right now.
00:08:18.200 | That's what it sounds like, because we live in a culture that can scarcely imagine something
00:08:25.160 | like glad gravity, joyful sorrow, humor, and yes, I am defending humor.
00:08:37.400 | Humor has been so identified with silliness and levity and slapstick of verbal antics
00:08:47.080 | that the robust, reality-rooted, natural explosiveness of humor is for many inconceivable.
00:08:58.040 | Charles Spurgeon was a very funny man, great preacher from the last, I guess, two centuries
00:09:05.000 | ago in the 1800s.
00:09:07.880 | But he was not a man of levity.
00:09:11.520 | He did not trifle with sacred things or think that worship was a place for casual clowning.
00:09:19.640 | He was not allergic to seriousness or dignity.
00:09:23.120 | Three years after his death, Robertson Nicole expressed my concerns and used Spurgeon as
00:09:31.780 | a counter example.
00:09:33.700 | He said this, "Evangelism of the humorous type may attract multitudes, but it lays the
00:09:40.420 | soul in ashes and destroys the very germs of religion."
00:09:45.960 | Mr. Spurgeon is often thought by those who do not know his sermons to have been a humorous
00:09:52.520 | preacher.
00:09:53.840 | As a matter of fact, there was no preacher whose tone was more uniformly earnest, reverent,
00:10:03.120 | and solemn.
00:10:05.360 | Of course, every mature and healthy person knows that unbroken seriousness of a melodramatic
00:10:15.480 | or somber kind will inevitably communicate a sickness of soul.
00:10:23.640 | But that's not our danger here in the first half of the 21st century.
00:10:29.280 | Our danger is drowning in an ocean of banality and silliness, emptiness, the losing of our
00:10:41.680 | capacities for feeling anything like the depth and height of what we ought to feel in the
00:10:51.800 | presence of God.
00:10:54.720 | That's our danger.
00:10:56.600 | And my point here is that seeing and savoring the all-embracing, all-pervasive providence
00:11:04.880 | of God has a wonderful effect—certainly has in my life—a wonderful effect in helping
00:11:14.040 | us recover and preserve and grow in those capacities.
00:11:21.140 | It protects us from the trivializing effects of contemporary culture and from the widespread
00:11:29.920 | habit of trifling with everything, even the great things of God.
00:11:35.200 | I thank God for that season in my life when he wakened me and shocked me and frightened
00:11:43.680 | me and comforted me and rescued me from the shrinking and the deadening effects of losing
00:11:52.760 | the greatness and beauty and joy of God in a fog of trifles.
00:11:58.920 | Powerful.
00:11:59.920 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:12:01.760 | That was implication number four of God's providence and how it will make a real impact
00:12:05.840 | on our lives in cutting through the fog of trivialities that surround us in our culture.
00:12:11.040 | We're looking at 10 of these implications on Wednesdays.
00:12:13.760 | Thank you for joining us for it.
00:12:15.280 | Thanks for listening.
00:12:16.280 | Thank you for your engagement.
00:12:17.960 | You can find out more about this podcast.
00:12:19.680 | You can submit a question, browse our episodes, or subscribe to the podcast.
00:12:23.560 | Do all of that at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:12:29.480 | While we close out the podcast week with a technical question over whether our happiness
00:12:33.440 | is moral or non-moral—it's an important conversation—we'll explain the question
00:12:38.200 | and why it's important when we return on Friday.
00:12:40.960 | I'm Tony Reinke.
00:12:41.960 | We'll see you then.
00:12:42.960 | Thanks for listening.
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