Pastor John, ten years ago to the month was recorded what I think to be the weirdest video of you preaching. You were speaking in front of thousands of Christian counselors in Nashville at the National Gathering of the American Association of Christian Counselors. Some reports claim that there were as many as 8,000 people in attendance.

It was big. And there you delivered a message titled, "Beholding Glory and Becoming Whole, Seeing and Savoring God as the Heart of Mental Health." From the start of the message, you poured out your heart, you shared your personal struggles, but what makes the video so weird is that for several minutes, the counselors responded to your serious confessions with laughter.

Here's a brief clip of what I'm talking about. So I thought I would spare you the analysis and just go ahead and tell you up front that I'm a sinner. And I'm a man who, to be more specific, must crucify the love of praise every day. A man who is prone to freeze up emotionally when he's tired and then feels instinctively justified in blaming it on somebody else.

A man who loves to praise God in the Great Assembly and feels a constraint on my spirit in my own living room. All right, now it's about to get really weird. Check this out. A man who never feels sure of his motives, including the ones I feel right now about why I'm doing this.

And you're a very strange audience, because I totally did not expect laughter. And I'm continually perplexed. I guess I'd better just get used to it. This is a serious talk, in case you're wondering. But this is strange. So you can just kind of get it out of your system.

I have so many questions. A lot of people have a lot of questions. A decade later, Caleb writes in to ask, "Pastor John, am I right in saying that I hear the crowd laughing at you as you poured your heart out to them and became very vulnerable? Seem like they totally miss the fact that you are really being serious with them.

What in the world happened?" John asks, "It seems like there was a lot of confusion. I was just curious on what the reasoning for the response might have been." Adam asks, "Pastor John, your message was encouraging for me in many ways, and I was particularly encouraged and moved by the humility you showed at the beginning of the message when you discussed your struggles with self-focus in your ministry and in your marriage.

That said, I was disturbed by their audible laughter. Judging by your remarks and composure during all of this, I also noticed that you were concerned and disturbed as well. What do you remember from the event, and what are your thoughts as you look back now a decade later?" Well, you know, this was a long time ago.

Yeah, it was, yeah. And I don't live with any ongoing bad feelings or resentment or bitterness to those who were in attendance there. I hadn't thought about it for years, I think, until I was in Nashville last week in the very hotel where it happened. And I said to people, "I've never been here." And then I looked around and said, "Oh, I have been here.

This is where that happened." So that's where I just stayed three days ago at the Gaylord Hotel in Nashville. Well that's where it happened. And the farther I have gotten away from it, the less reliable my reconstruction of the moment is likely to be. So I don't want to make any condemning judgments on their behavior in laughing while I was trying to confess my sins.

But I do have some thoughts about those kinds of events and situations. But first, let me help our listeners who don't know anything about what we're talking about have a sense of it. So this was a gathering of several thousand Christian counselors under the theme "Grace and Truth," which I think is a wonderful theme.

And my thought was that I would begin my talk by listing my most besetting sins that they could get some sense of whether this speaker was in touch with his own reality. I'm kind of self-conscious speaking in front of counselors like, "Whoa, these folks are good at reading people, so I don't want to be fake in any way." And so I didn't want to begin in any presumptuous, self-assured, cocky way.

So I gave nine points. And here they are. I'll just give you bullet points. I am a man who must crucify the love of praise every day. I'm a man who struggles with the same adolescent fear at age 63—that was 10 years ago—that he had at age 15, the fear of looking foolish.

I'm a man who is prone to feel self-pity and pout when he doesn't get love the way he wants. I am one who is almost never sure he has used his time in the best way and therefore struggles with guilt. I am one who is short on compassion and long on critical analysis.

My wife lets me know that. I am one who can freeze up emotionally when he's tired and feel instinctively that it's someone else's fault. I'm one who loves to praise God in the Great Assembly and feels a constraint, nevertheless, on my own spirit in my living room with my family.

Why is that? I am one who has loved his wife for 40 years imperfectly and spent with her over three of those years with a Christian counselor, trying to become better images of Christ and the church. And I, lastly, am one who never feels sure that his motives are pure, including right now in this moment, for why he's telling you all of this.

That was how I began the talk, and those are all sincere, and there may be some more or less growth in those over the last 10 years, but I know what I'm talking about there. Now, what was disorienting to me was that there was laughter from the audience at points in this litany of my failures, a good bit of it.

It took me totally off guard, and I wasn't sure what to make of it, and I still don't know what to make of it, but wise friends have—and you email me one of these—wise friends have cautioned me that there may be reasons for it that I don't see. In fact, I am sure that's true.

But here's what I want to say that's semi-related. Desiring God, with me as a prominent voice for desiring God, exists to promote the vision that we call Christian hedonism, which means that we believe human beings not only may pursue their fullest and deepest and highest and widest and most intense joy, happiness, pleasure, but that we must pursue it in God through Christ if we're going to glorify God the way we should.

Delight yourself in the Lord, Psalm 37, 4, is a biblical command, not a suggestion, because God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him, which means I think Christians, Christian hedonists in particular, should outrejoice the world. The treasure of our God and Christ and our salvation and our hope is so spectacularly great and so utterly sure that we should be the most hope-filled, joy-filled people in the world.

But here's the irony, the beautiful irony, the culturally disorienting irony, the irony that was, I think, at the root of the mystifying miscommunication in that conference, and the irony is this, in 50 years, I have never told a joke in a sermon, at least that I can remember. Nobody at Desiring God aspires to be a comedian.

The reason this is felt as an irony, in spite of what I just said about we should be the happiest people in the world, the reason it's felt as an irony is that in American culture, inside and outside the church, and that's the sad part, inside, categories by and large do not exist for the Pauline, the phrase of the Apostle Paul, "sorrowful yet always rejoicing," or for the motto of Bethlehem College and Seminary, "an education in serious joy," or a happy pastor who never tells jokes in his sermons.

They don't have any categories for that. That makes no sense to the world. If you're a happy pastor, you're going to tell jokes. If you're a happy pastor, you're not going to talk about serious joy, but happy joy, and so on. You're not going to have this sad strain running through your life.

The world doesn't compute with that very easily. Now I can't prove this, but I'm going to make a guess here, and the Lord knows. My guess is that John Piper laughs as much as any pastor he knows. And I don't mean nervous laughter that covers up awkward feeling moments.

I mean laughter that just busts out, because there are so many surprising foibles in the world, so many hilarious, unexpected juxtapositions in the world that you're being confronted with humor at almost every turn. But there's a world of difference between natural, spontaneous, uncalculated eruptions of humor on the one hand, and planned, calculated clowning on the other hand.

And by clowning, I mean at conferences, on podcasts, in sermons, trying to sound funny, which usually means demeanors and practices and words that create a silly, slapstick, jokey, jesting, clever, trifling, young teen summer camp, rah-rah atmosphere, because that's the only alternative to boredom and sadness and sullenness and moroseness and glumness that American culture knows.

That's just the way the entertainment-saturated culture of America is. And I don't fit that culture. I don't intend to fit it. I don't like it. I think it grows out of a worldview with a very, very small and negligible God, if any, and I think it is rampant and damaging in the American church.

And I suspect that I walked into a set of expectations at that conference, given the way it had been flowing and given just the American culture of Nashville and the world, I walked into a set of expectations at that conference that were so different from my own that I didn't help people make the transition as well as I might have.

So are you saying that that room that we recorded in, Ask Pastor John Live, recently, was that the same room? I don't know. I don't know, because the place is, as the kids say, ginormous. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are 2,881 rooms in the Gaylord Hotel. It's the biggest hotel in America, if you don't count hotels with casinos, and there are six mammoth garden sections, and who knows underneath how many of those places of that whole 10,000 people.

So I don't know the answer to that. I just know that when I walked through one of those garden areas over a bridge with a little goldfish underneath it, I said, "I've been here before." Oh, interesting. And then I remembered, "Oh, that's where this was." Ten years. Yeah, almost ten years to the month that that would have happened, and then we recorded Ask Pastor John Live in the same building.

That's incredible. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around that. Thank you, Pastor John. Well, I'm a total believer in the providence of God. I just think whether people laugh at you or don't laugh at you, God is at work, and He does His work, and the best thing we can do is not second-guess ourselves.

In fact, whether something wonderful happens while I'm preaching or something distressing happens while I'm preaching, I'm a very poor judge about what God is doing. I really am. I have to try to go to bed and say, "Don't think about this very much because you're going to get depressed or discouraged or proud," and just let it go.

You did your best. Be on to the next thing. Let God bear the fruit He wants to bear. Amen. And now a bunch of you want to go watch the full intro to that message. I'm sure it's weird. Brace yourself. "Beholding Glory and Becoming Whole, Seeing and Savoring God as the Heart of Mental Health." That's the title.

You can find the video at DesiringGod.org. Thank you, Pastor John. Well, Pastor John and I have been busy in the recording studio with a whole slate of new episodes for you this fall. A lot of great questions have come in from you, and the easiest way to get new episodes is to subscribe to the podcast on your phone or your tablet through your favorite podcast app.

I use the app called Overcast. I know some of you use Downcast. And Apple Podcasts is by far now the most popular app among our listeners. Whatever app you choose, there you can get the latest episodes delivered immediately to you as we release them. Download a podcast app that best works for you and your device, and in that app search for "Ask Pastor John" and click on "Subscribe." You can also subscribe to DG's YouTube channel and get all the episodes there as well.

And of course, our entire archive of past episodes is online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. On that site you can find all 1,400 episodes we've released to date and even ask a question of your own. I'm your host Tony Ranke. We'll see you Monday for another new episode with Pastor John. Thanks for listening.