Three Threats to the Joy of This Generation

00:00:00.000 | Well, what's the point of my life?

00:00:06.240 | That was the question we asked and answered on Monday.

00:00:09.520 | And we talked about our joy in God and God's glory being united together

00:00:13.800 | in one unifying vision of existence.

00:00:16.860 | Now, today we feel the question about joy from a listener named

00:00:19.800 | Shannon, who writes to say this.

00:00:22.100 | Hello, Pastor John.

00:00:23.160 | I attended the most recent cross conference.

00:00:25.740 | There you said something that struck me.

00:00:27.680 | You said that your hope for us students is for there to be young people

00:00:32.520 | who are "joyfully serious."

00:00:35.800 | Can you explain this more?

00:00:38.640 | And what does this look like, particularly in everyday life?

00:00:42.580 | What does it look like to be joyfully serious?

00:00:45.840 | Well, now, how shall I come at this?

00:00:48.200 | It touches on so many things.

00:00:52.720 | In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should write a book on

00:00:56.240 | this, I should I should write a book called Joyful Seriousness or Serious

00:01:01.240 | Joy or something to try to capture the paradox of what I mean by this.

00:01:07.200 | What I'm trying to get at when I say joyful seriousness is a life that has

00:01:16.320 | been made serious because of the unspeakably awesome realities of God

00:01:23.160 | and sin and heaven and hell and the cross of Christ and the necessity of faith

00:01:30.120 | and the essential reality of holiness.

00:01:33.240 | If we are to obtain heaven, in other words, the great realities of life are

00:01:39.080 | enormously serious and weighty and glorious and beautiful and awesome and

00:01:45.120 | deep and high, they are of such a nature that to treat them in a glib or

00:01:51.840 | superficial or trifling or trivial way is an utter contradiction.

00:01:58.080 | And within and under and flowing out of the weight and the wonder of these great

00:02:05.160 | realities, there is what the Bible calls joy, unspeakable and full of glory,

00:02:11.920 | which is as different from the slapstick and silliness and cleverness of so much

00:02:20.200 | Christian so-called banter and worship as lightning is from the lightning bug.

00:02:26.920 | Charles Spurgeon gets at it like this.

00:02:30.720 | He said, some of us must conquer some of us, especially our tendency to levity.

00:02:39.560 | A great distinction exists between holy cheerfulness, which is a virtue, and that

00:02:48.120 | general levity, which is a vice.

00:02:51.640 | There is a levity which has not enough heart to laugh, but trifles with

00:02:59.040 | everything.

00:02:59.800 | It is a flippant, hollow, unreal thing.

00:03:04.680 | A hearty laugh is no more levity than a hearty cry.

00:03:12.000 | My concern is that at least three things conspire today to threaten the joy and

00:03:22.040 | seriousness of this generation.

00:03:24.160 | One is our native sinfulness as human beings, which tends to make light things

00:03:32.760 | heavy and heavy things light because it is by nature deception and blind.

00:03:38.520 | And we're always turning things upside down and getting them backwards.

00:03:43.120 | So that's the first thing.

00:03:43.960 | My own sinful nature inclines me to make light of weighty things and to make

00:03:51.480 | weighty, superficial things.

00:03:53.920 | The other is the comfort of the Western world.

00:03:59.160 | Most people in the West know very little about the basic hardships of life, which

00:04:07.640 | make life really serious for most people.

00:04:10.600 | Life where you have to walk miles to get fresh water.

00:04:14.800 | You have to chop wood to have heat in the wintertime.

00:04:18.600 | You have to cook your food if you're going to eat over a fire that you collect

00:04:24.960 | wood for.

00:04:25.760 | There's no modern medical care, no food unless you grow it yourself.

00:04:31.200 | No indoor plumbing, no refrigeration, no police protection.

00:04:38.080 | No clothing unless you make it.

00:04:39.680 | No mention of TV or smartphones or iPads or computers or radios and no access to

00:04:47.800 | books by and large.

00:04:48.800 | This is the way most of the centuries of the world, new things, new life.

00:04:54.440 | And it's the way millions and millions of people live today.

00:04:58.440 | My wife and I are watching a documentary, actually a fictionalized documentary

00:05:03.920 | called The Emigrants of the Swedish Emigrants in the 1850s, about a five hour

00:05:08.440 | thing.

00:05:09.040 | And what overwhelms me is just how incredibly hard life was in winter Sweden

00:05:17.960 | or winter Minnesota, where they immigrated to when everything had to be provided

00:05:23.800 | for themselves out of the ground or out of the out of the frozen lake or out of

00:05:30.760 | the cow that may or may not continue to give some milk if you had one for the

00:05:35.240 | children during the winter.

00:05:36.360 | Life was just hard.

00:05:38.120 | But we today, we take all these things for granted and therefore we are

00:05:43.520 | complainers out of the womb for the slightest little thing.

00:05:48.680 | And what we consider hardship is a computer whose Internet speed drops below

00:05:53.600 | 25 megabits a second.

00:05:55.640 | This this makes for a very superficial kind of people who have little

00:06:01.960 | relationship to the threats of life and especially the ones that were just

00:06:06.360 | common in other generations.

00:06:08.360 | And then you add to that.

00:06:09.960 | And this is my third thing, the the ever present entertainment industry on your

00:06:16.080 | phone or your iPad or your TV or your computer or the movie theater, which

00:06:21.440 | everybody takes for granted.

00:06:22.800 | Everybody talks about incessantly and most of the talking is is is clever.

00:06:28.640 | It's repartee, it's banter.

00:06:31.240 | And all of this together produces a kind of life that results in a superficial,

00:06:36.880 | trivial, clever, Christian banter shaped for the Twitter sphere and crafted for

00:06:44.400 | spreading on Facebook.

00:06:46.400 | But I don't think we can do real evangelism on the basis of this kind of

00:06:52.720 | ubiquitous levity.

00:06:55.000 | It's almost impossible to shift from a posture of levity to a posture that takes

00:07:02.240 | hell seriously and sheds tears over someone's lostness.

00:07:06.720 | It's almost impossible to walk into a worship service and suddenly switch off a

00:07:13.160 | whole lifestyle of silliness and try to become a reverent person before an all

00:07:20.680 | holy God, when everything else in life has been training us to be glib and trite

00:07:27.880 | and superficial.

00:07:29.280 | And worse, many worship services have simply adapted to the superficiality of

00:07:36.160 | the media culture and tried to turn Christianity into something that fits

00:07:41.080 | this with a ever funnier approach to the great things of God, which doesn't work.

00:07:47.800 | It doesn't make any sense.

00:07:49.040 | It doesn't fit.

00:07:50.320 | Or another way to come at it is to say that I have a burden that we have lost our

00:07:56.600 | grip on what it means to be human, the glory of being human.

00:08:00.880 | It's it's not just that evangelism is made difficult and worship is made almost

00:08:06.080 | impossible and God is made almost inconceivable in his true greatness.

00:08:10.640 | But the glory of being human is made thinner and thinner as we become cute and

00:08:17.320 | clever about things that don't really matter.

00:08:20.320 | While the depth and the wonder of being created in God's image and living for his

00:08:26.080 | glory and being transformed into his image someday, all that just fades away.

00:08:31.240 | So what I'm lamenting when I plead for joyful seriousness is that it seems to me

00:08:39.600 | the pendulum has swung so far in one direction that we are far more adept at

00:08:47.120 | humor than tears.

00:08:49.640 | The Apostle Paul spoke of sinners in Philippians 3, 18 like this, of whom I

00:08:56.400 | tell you weeping that they are enemies of the cross, whose end is destruction and

00:09:03.800 | whose mind is set on earthly things.

00:09:07.920 | Without that weeping, there will never be, I think, the revival that we need today

00:09:14.600 | in America. No lasting spiritual renewal without that kind of seriousness.

00:09:21.240 | What would happen to a congregation if a pastor with all earnestness and gravity

00:09:29.680 | and love and joy would begin his Easter sermon with all those guests present, not

00:09:37.600 | with a joke or a cute story, but with the words of John Donne to his congregation on

00:09:44.160 | Easter Sunday morning when he said, "What sea could furnish my eyes with tears

00:09:51.680 | enough to pour out if I should think that of all this congregation which looks me in

00:09:58.280 | the face now, I should not meet one at the resurrection at the right hand of God?"

00:10:06.680 | Well, that's a flavor of what I meant by saying joyful seriousness.

00:10:14.080 | There's so much more, but that's probably enough for now.

00:10:17.600 | So good. That's a great and perceptive question, Shannon.

00:10:21.840 | Thank you for sending it in, and thank you for the response, Pastor John.

00:10:25.680 | That's really, really insightful.

00:10:27.200 | Well, at our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn, you can explore all

00:10:32.200 | 1,250 plus of our episodes.

00:10:34.440 | You can scan a list for our most popular ones, read full transcripts, and even send

00:10:38.360 | us a question of your own like this excellent one from Shannon.

00:10:41.200 | Do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:10:46.520 | Well, one of the ministries God has given to Desiring God is in a really focused way,

00:10:52.200 | is caring for parents of disabled children.

00:10:55.560 | When the news initially hits, often very suddenly, how should

00:11:01.040 | this sudden news be processed?

00:11:03.040 | Pastor John will delicately lead us through the stages that parents often face when

00:11:08.680 | they're faced with a disabled child.

00:11:10.720 | Don't miss this episode.

00:11:12.720 | It's sobering.

00:11:13.720 | It's humbling.

00:11:15.080 | It is pastoral.

00:11:17.960 | Don't miss it.

00:11:19.360 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.

00:11:20.920 | We'll see you back here on Friday with longtime author and Pastor John Piper.

00:11:24.760 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:11:33.760 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Three Threats to the Joy of This Generation

Chapters