Well, what's the point of my life? That was the question we asked and answered on Monday. And we talked about our joy in God and God's glory being united together in one unifying vision of existence. Now, today we feel the question about joy from a listener named Shannon, who writes to say this.

Hello, Pastor John. I attended the most recent cross conference. There you said something that struck me. You said that your hope for us students is for there to be young people who are "joyfully serious." Can you explain this more? And what does this look like, particularly in everyday life?

What does it look like to be joyfully serious? Well, now, how shall I come at this? It touches on so many things. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should write a book on this, I should I should write a book called Joyful Seriousness or Serious Joy or something to try to capture the paradox of what I mean by this.

What I'm trying to get at when I say joyful seriousness is a life that has been made serious because of the unspeakably awesome realities of God and sin and heaven and hell and the cross of Christ and the necessity of faith and the essential reality of holiness. If we are to obtain heaven, in other words, the great realities of life are enormously serious and weighty and glorious and beautiful and awesome and deep and high, they are of such a nature that to treat them in a glib or superficial or trifling or trivial way is an utter contradiction.

And within and under and flowing out of the weight and the wonder of these great realities, there is what the Bible calls joy, unspeakable and full of glory, which is as different from the slapstick and silliness and cleverness of so much Christian so-called banter and worship as lightning is from the lightning bug.

Charles Spurgeon gets at it like this. He said, some of us must conquer some of us, especially our tendency to levity. A great distinction exists between holy cheerfulness, which is a virtue, and that general levity, which is a vice. There is a levity which has not enough heart to laugh, but trifles with everything.

It is a flippant, hollow, unreal thing. A hearty laugh is no more levity than a hearty cry. My concern is that at least three things conspire today to threaten the joy and seriousness of this generation. One is our native sinfulness as human beings, which tends to make light things heavy and heavy things light because it is by nature deception and blind.

And we're always turning things upside down and getting them backwards. So that's the first thing. My own sinful nature inclines me to make light of weighty things and to make weighty, superficial things. The other is the comfort of the Western world. Most people in the West know very little about the basic hardships of life, which make life really serious for most people.

Life where you have to walk miles to get fresh water. You have to chop wood to have heat in the wintertime. You have to cook your food if you're going to eat over a fire that you collect wood for. There's no modern medical care, no food unless you grow it yourself.

No indoor plumbing, no refrigeration, no police protection. No clothing unless you make it. No mention of TV or smartphones or iPads or computers or radios and no access to books by and large. This is the way most of the centuries of the world, new things, new life. And it's the way millions and millions of people live today.

My wife and I are watching a documentary, actually a fictionalized documentary called The Emigrants of the Swedish Emigrants in the 1850s, about a five hour thing. And what overwhelms me is just how incredibly hard life was in winter Sweden or winter Minnesota, where they immigrated to when everything had to be provided for themselves out of the ground or out of the out of the frozen lake or out of the cow that may or may not continue to give some milk if you had one for the children during the winter.

Life was just hard. But we today, we take all these things for granted and therefore we are complainers out of the womb for the slightest little thing. And what we consider hardship is a computer whose Internet speed drops below 25 megabits a second. This this makes for a very superficial kind of people who have little relationship to the threats of life and especially the ones that were just common in other generations.

And then you add to that. And this is my third thing, the the ever present entertainment industry on your phone or your iPad or your TV or your computer or the movie theater, which everybody takes for granted. Everybody talks about incessantly and most of the talking is is is clever.

It's repartee, it's banter. And all of this together produces a kind of life that results in a superficial, trivial, clever, Christian banter shaped for the Twitter sphere and crafted for spreading on Facebook. But I don't think we can do real evangelism on the basis of this kind of ubiquitous levity.

It's almost impossible to shift from a posture of levity to a posture that takes hell seriously and sheds tears over someone's lostness. It's almost impossible to walk into a worship service and suddenly switch off a whole lifestyle of silliness and try to become a reverent person before an all holy God, when everything else in life has been training us to be glib and trite and superficial.

And worse, many worship services have simply adapted to the superficiality of the media culture and tried to turn Christianity into something that fits this with a ever funnier approach to the great things of God, which doesn't work. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't fit. Or another way to come at it is to say that I have a burden that we have lost our grip on what it means to be human, the glory of being human.

It's it's not just that evangelism is made difficult and worship is made almost impossible and God is made almost inconceivable in his true greatness. But the glory of being human is made thinner and thinner as we become cute and clever about things that don't really matter. While the depth and the wonder of being created in God's image and living for his glory and being transformed into his image someday, all that just fades away.

So what I'm lamenting when I plead for joyful seriousness is that it seems to me the pendulum has swung so far in one direction that we are far more adept at humor than tears. The Apostle Paul spoke of sinners in Philippians 3, 18 like this, of whom I tell you weeping that they are enemies of the cross, whose end is destruction and whose mind is set on earthly things.

Without that weeping, there will never be, I think, the revival that we need today in America. No lasting spiritual renewal without that kind of seriousness. What would happen to a congregation if a pastor with all earnestness and gravity and love and joy would begin his Easter sermon with all those guests present, not with a joke or a cute story, but with the words of John Donne to his congregation on Easter Sunday morning when he said, "What sea could furnish my eyes with tears enough to pour out if I should think that of all this congregation which looks me in the face now, I should not meet one at the resurrection at the right hand of God?" Well, that's a flavor of what I meant by saying joyful seriousness.

There's so much more, but that's probably enough for now. So good. That's a great and perceptive question, Shannon. Thank you for sending it in, and thank you for the response, Pastor John. That's really, really insightful. Well, at our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn, you can explore all 1,250 plus of our episodes.

You can scan a list for our most popular ones, read full transcripts, and even send us a question of your own like this excellent one from Shannon. Do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, one of the ministries God has given to Desiring God is in a really focused way, is caring for parents of disabled children.

When the news initially hits, often very suddenly, how should this sudden news be processed? Pastor John will delicately lead us through the stages that parents often face when they're faced with a disabled child. Don't miss this episode. It's sobering. It's humbling. It is pastoral. Don't miss it. I'm your host Tony Reinke.

We'll see you back here on Friday with longtime author and Pastor John Piper.