John Piper’s Most Bizarre Moment in Preaching

00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, ten years ago to the month was recorded what I think to be the weirdest video

00:00:09.640 | of you preaching.

00:00:11.520 | You were speaking in front of thousands of Christian counselors in Nashville at the National

00:00:15.240 | Gathering of the American Association of Christian Counselors.

00:00:18.720 | Some reports claim that there were as many as 8,000 people in attendance.

00:00:22.320 | It was big.

00:00:23.320 | And there you delivered a message titled, "Beholding Glory and Becoming Whole, Seeing

00:00:28.760 | and Savoring God as the Heart of Mental Health."

00:00:33.240 | From the start of the message, you poured out your heart, you shared your personal struggles,

00:00:36.680 | but what makes the video so weird is that for several minutes, the counselors responded

00:00:41.720 | to your serious confessions with laughter.

00:00:45.760 | Here's a brief clip of what I'm talking about.

00:00:48.920 | So I thought I would spare you the analysis and just go ahead and tell you up front that

00:00:54.680 | I'm a sinner.

00:00:55.680 | And I'm a man who, to be more specific, must crucify the love of praise every day.

00:01:11.280 | A man who is prone to freeze up emotionally when he's tired and then feels instinctively

00:01:22.000 | justified in blaming it on somebody else.

00:01:26.120 | A man who loves to praise God in the Great Assembly and feels a constraint on my spirit

00:01:35.880 | in my own living room.

00:01:37.080 | All right, now it's about to get really weird.

00:01:39.000 | Check this out.

00:01:40.000 | A man who never feels sure of his motives, including the ones I feel right now about

00:01:47.120 | why I'm doing this.

00:01:52.520 | And you're a very strange audience, because I totally did not expect laughter.

00:02:01.440 | And I'm continually perplexed.

00:02:04.480 | I guess I'd better just get used to it.

00:02:06.720 | This is a serious talk, in case you're wondering.

00:02:10.200 | But this is strange.

00:02:17.280 | So you can just kind of get it out of your system.

00:02:21.640 | I have so many questions.

00:02:23.040 | A lot of people have a lot of questions.

00:02:25.200 | A decade later, Caleb writes in to ask, "Pastor John, am I right in saying that I hear the

00:02:29.600 | crowd laughing at you as you poured your heart out to them and became very vulnerable?

00:02:34.360 | Seem like they totally miss the fact that you are really being serious with them.

00:02:38.240 | What in the world happened?"

00:02:39.880 | John asks, "It seems like there was a lot of confusion.

00:02:42.600 | I was just curious on what the reasoning for the response might have been."

00:02:47.280 | Adam asks, "Pastor John, your message was encouraging for me in many ways, and I was

00:02:50.240 | particularly encouraged and moved by the humility you showed at the beginning of the message

00:02:53.720 | when you discussed your struggles with self-focus in your ministry and in your marriage.

00:03:00.240 | That said, I was disturbed by their audible laughter.

00:03:03.240 | Judging by your remarks and composure during all of this, I also noticed that you were

00:03:06.720 | concerned and disturbed as well.

00:03:08.720 | What do you remember from the event, and what are your thoughts as you look back now a decade

00:03:13.320 | later?"

00:03:14.320 | Well, you know, this was a long time ago.

00:03:18.320 | Yeah, it was, yeah.

00:03:21.480 | And I don't live with any ongoing bad feelings or resentment or bitterness to those who were

00:03:32.080 | in attendance there.

00:03:33.520 | I hadn't thought about it for years, I think, until I was in Nashville last week in the

00:03:42.160 | very hotel where it happened.

00:03:45.640 | And I said to people, "I've never been here."

00:03:47.480 | And then I looked around and said, "Oh, I have been here.

00:03:50.480 | This is where that happened."

00:03:52.560 | So that's where I just stayed three days ago at the Gaylord Hotel in Nashville.

00:03:59.760 | Well that's where it happened.

00:04:01.560 | And the farther I have gotten away from it, the less reliable my reconstruction of the

00:04:09.640 | moment is likely to be.

00:04:11.680 | So I don't want to make any condemning judgments on their behavior in laughing while I was

00:04:20.160 | trying to confess my sins.

00:04:21.960 | But I do have some thoughts about those kinds of events and situations.

00:04:29.680 | But first, let me help our listeners who don't know anything about what we're talking about

00:04:35.120 | have a sense of it.

00:04:37.740 | So this was a gathering of several thousand Christian counselors under the theme "Grace

00:04:44.200 | and Truth," which I think is a wonderful theme.

00:04:47.720 | And my thought was that I would begin my talk by listing my most besetting sins that they

00:04:59.000 | could get some sense of whether this speaker was in touch with his own reality.

00:05:05.200 | I'm kind of self-conscious speaking in front of counselors like, "Whoa, these folks are

00:05:09.240 | good at reading people, so I don't want to be fake in any way."

00:05:13.480 | And so I didn't want to begin in any presumptuous, self-assured, cocky way.

00:05:22.560 | So I gave nine points.

00:05:26.080 | And here they are.

00:05:27.080 | I'll just give you bullet points.

00:05:28.080 | I am a man who must crucify the love of praise every day.

00:05:33.760 | I'm a man who struggles with the same adolescent fear at age 63—that was 10 years ago—that

00:05:40.560 | he had at age 15, the fear of looking foolish.

00:05:45.600 | I'm a man who is prone to feel self-pity and pout when he doesn't get love the way he wants.

00:05:53.440 | I am one who is almost never sure he has used his time in the best way and therefore struggles

00:06:00.840 | with guilt.

00:06:03.160 | I am one who is short on compassion and long on critical analysis.

00:06:09.000 | My wife lets me know that.

00:06:11.120 | I am one who can freeze up emotionally when he's tired and feel instinctively that it's

00:06:18.600 | someone else's fault.

00:06:20.040 | I'm one who loves to praise God in the Great Assembly and feels a constraint, nevertheless,

00:06:26.800 | on my own spirit in my living room with my family.

00:06:30.040 | Why is that?

00:06:31.620 | I am one who has loved his wife for 40 years imperfectly and spent with her over three

00:06:39.000 | of those years with a Christian counselor, trying to become better images of Christ and

00:06:45.400 | the church.

00:06:47.000 | And I, lastly, am one who never feels sure that his motives are pure, including right

00:06:54.400 | now in this moment, for why he's telling you all of this.

00:07:00.360 | That was how I began the talk, and those are all sincere, and there may be some more or

00:07:06.800 | less growth in those over the last 10 years, but I know what I'm talking about there.

00:07:11.760 | Now, what was disorienting to me was that there was laughter from the audience at points

00:07:19.080 | in this litany of my failures, a good bit of it.

00:07:24.080 | It took me totally off guard, and I wasn't sure what to make of it, and I still don't

00:07:31.960 | know what to make of it, but wise friends have—and you email me one of these—wise

00:07:39.200 | friends have cautioned me that there may be reasons for it that I don't see.

00:07:44.360 | In fact, I am sure that's true.

00:07:47.960 | But here's what I want to say that's semi-related.

00:07:54.080 | Desiring God, with me as a prominent voice for desiring God, exists to promote the vision

00:08:03.360 | that we call Christian hedonism, which means that we believe human beings not only may

00:08:11.320 | pursue their fullest and deepest and highest and widest and most intense joy, happiness,

00:08:20.240 | pleasure, but that we must pursue it in God through Christ if we're going to glorify

00:08:29.520 | God the way we should.

00:08:31.600 | Delight yourself in the Lord, Psalm 37, 4, is a biblical command, not a suggestion, because

00:08:38.280 | God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him, which means I think Christians,

00:08:46.520 | Christian hedonists in particular, should outrejoice the world.

00:08:52.540 | The treasure of our God and Christ and our salvation and our hope is so spectacularly

00:08:59.220 | great and so utterly sure that we should be the most hope-filled, joy-filled people in

00:09:09.020 | the world.

00:09:10.020 | But here's the irony, the beautiful irony, the culturally disorienting irony, the irony

00:09:19.900 | that was, I think, at the root of the mystifying miscommunication in that conference, and the

00:09:27.360 | irony is this, in 50 years, I have never told a joke in a sermon, at least that I can remember.

00:09:38.940 | Nobody at Desiring God aspires to be a comedian.

00:09:44.260 | The reason this is felt as an irony, in spite of what I just said about we should be the

00:09:49.260 | happiest people in the world, the reason it's felt as an irony is that in American culture,

00:09:58.020 | inside and outside the church, and that's the sad part, inside, categories by and large

00:10:04.260 | do not exist for the Pauline, the phrase of the Apostle Paul, "sorrowful yet always rejoicing,"

00:10:13.980 | or for the motto of Bethlehem College and Seminary, "an education in serious joy," or

00:10:23.340 | a happy pastor who never tells jokes in his sermons.

00:10:26.260 | They don't have any categories for that.

00:10:28.020 | That makes no sense to the world.

00:10:29.740 | If you're a happy pastor, you're going to tell jokes.

00:10:32.260 | If you're a happy pastor, you're not going to talk about serious joy, but happy joy,

00:10:37.060 | and so on.

00:10:38.060 | You're not going to have this sad strain running through your life.

00:10:44.460 | The world doesn't compute with that very easily.

00:10:48.340 | Now I can't prove this, but I'm going to make a guess here, and the Lord knows.

00:10:54.280 | My guess is that John Piper laughs as much as any pastor he knows.

00:11:05.500 | And I don't mean nervous laughter that covers up awkward feeling moments.

00:11:11.100 | I mean laughter that just busts out, because there are so many surprising foibles in the

00:11:19.340 | world, so many hilarious, unexpected juxtapositions in the world that you're being confronted

00:11:26.520 | with humor at almost every turn.

00:11:32.700 | But there's a world of difference between natural, spontaneous, uncalculated eruptions

00:11:42.180 | of humor on the one hand, and planned, calculated clowning on the other hand.

00:11:50.640 | And by clowning, I mean at conferences, on podcasts, in sermons, trying to sound funny,

00:12:00.500 | which usually means demeanors and practices and words that create a silly, slapstick,

00:12:06.860 | jokey, jesting, clever, trifling, young teen summer camp, rah-rah atmosphere, because that's

00:12:16.060 | the only alternative to boredom and sadness and sullenness and moroseness and glumness

00:12:21.620 | that American culture knows.

00:12:25.260 | That's just the way the entertainment-saturated culture of America is.

00:12:30.540 | And I don't fit that culture.

00:12:32.340 | I don't intend to fit it.

00:12:33.780 | I don't like it.

00:12:34.820 | I think it grows out of a worldview with a very, very small and negligible God, if any,

00:12:42.940 | and I think it is rampant and damaging in the American church.

00:12:49.540 | And I suspect that I walked into a set of expectations at that conference, given the

00:12:58.020 | way it had been flowing and given just the American culture of Nashville and the world,

00:13:04.420 | I walked into a set of expectations at that conference that were so different from my

00:13:11.140 | own that I didn't help people make the transition as well as I might have.

00:13:19.820 | So are you saying that that room that we recorded in, Ask Pastor John Live, recently, was that

00:13:25.340 | the same room?

00:13:26.340 | I don't know.

00:13:27.340 | I don't know, because the place is, as the kids say, ginormous.

00:13:31.220 | Yeah, exactly.

00:13:32.220 | I mean, there are 2,881 rooms in the Gaylord Hotel.

00:13:37.020 | It's the biggest hotel in America, if you don't count hotels with casinos, and there

00:13:41.740 | are six mammoth garden sections, and who knows underneath how many of those places of that

00:13:49.060 | whole 10,000 people.

00:13:50.520 | So I don't know the answer to that.

00:13:52.340 | I just know that when I walked through one of those garden areas over a bridge with a

00:13:57.980 | little goldfish underneath it, I said, "I've been here before."

00:14:01.980 | Oh, interesting.

00:14:02.980 | And then I remembered, "Oh, that's where this was."

00:14:05.500 | Ten years.

00:14:06.500 | Yeah, almost ten years to the month that that would have happened, and then we recorded

00:14:11.780 | Ask Pastor John Live in the same building.

00:14:13.860 | That's incredible.

00:14:14.860 | I'm still trying to wrap my brain around that.

00:14:16.300 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:14:17.300 | Well, I'm a total believer in the providence of God.

00:14:20.700 | I just think whether people laugh at you or don't laugh at you, God is at work, and He

00:14:25.820 | does His work, and the best thing we can do is not second-guess ourselves.

00:14:31.180 | In fact, whether something wonderful happens while I'm preaching or something distressing

00:14:36.500 | happens while I'm preaching, I'm a very poor judge about what God is doing.

00:14:41.340 | I really am.

00:14:42.340 | I have to try to go to bed and say, "Don't think about this very much because you're

00:14:46.460 | going to get depressed or discouraged or proud," and just let it go.

00:14:51.320 | You did your best.

00:14:52.660 | Be on to the next thing.

00:14:54.460 | Let God bear the fruit He wants to bear.

00:14:57.140 | Amen.

00:14:58.140 | And now a bunch of you want to go watch the full intro to that message.

00:15:01.740 | I'm sure it's weird.

00:15:02.980 | Brace yourself.

00:15:03.980 | "Beholding Glory and Becoming Whole, Seeing and Savoring God as the Heart of Mental Health."

00:15:08.900 | That's the title.

00:15:09.900 | You can find the video at DesiringGod.org.

00:15:11.900 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:15:14.220 | Well, Pastor John and I have been busy in the recording studio with a whole slate of

00:15:17.860 | new episodes for you this fall.

00:15:19.380 | A lot of great questions have come in from you, and the easiest way to get new episodes

00:15:23.980 | is to subscribe to the podcast on your phone or your tablet through your favorite podcast

00:15:27.980 | app.

00:15:28.980 | I use the app called Overcast.

00:15:31.060 | I know some of you use Downcast.

00:15:33.940 | And Apple Podcasts is by far now the most popular app among our listeners.

00:15:39.180 | Whatever app you choose, there you can get the latest episodes delivered immediately

00:15:42.440 | to you as we release them.

00:15:44.540 | Download a podcast app that best works for you and your device, and in that app search

00:15:48.080 | for "Ask Pastor John" and click on "Subscribe."

00:15:51.300 | You can also subscribe to DG's YouTube channel and get all the episodes there as well.

00:15:56.100 | And of course, our entire archive of past episodes is online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:16:02.900 | On that site you can find all 1,400 episodes we've released to date and even ask a question

00:16:07.400 | of your own.

00:16:08.400 | I'm your host Tony Ranke.

00:16:10.540 | We'll see you Monday for another new episode with Pastor John.

00:16:13.300 | Thanks for listening.

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John Piper’s Most Bizarre Moment in Preaching

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