Pastor John Dan in Salem, Oregon writes in to ask, "Why you hate fun so much?" Hello Pastor John, I have heard you disapprove of the concept of "fun" as applied to the things of God before in sermons. I would like for you to explain more what you have against this word, particularly in light of your acceptance of the often maligned word "happy" when applied to the things of God.

Why reject "fun," which can connote enjoyment and pleasure, while accepting "happy," which is to many Christians a worldly substitute for God's joy? I'm feeling confused by your lexical choices, and I know how highly you value the clarity of language. What would you say to Dan? My lament is only secondarily concerned with words, and is primarily concerned with a spirit of levity or lightness.

And I'm distinguishing levity from a robust, large-hearted sense of humor. My lament is with a spirit of flippancy, jokiness, silliness, playfulness—a spirit that is manifestly uncomfortable with serious joy, and only comfortable with chipper, upbeat, jolly feelings of joy. Language, particular words like "fun" or "happy," is not the main issue for me.

It is something much deeper than that that I'm concerned about. It really doesn't matter to me what words a pastor uses if he walks out on the stage after the first two worship songs that have been engaging a heart with the living Christ and says, "Howdy church, y'all having fun?" It wouldn't help matters to me if he changed his language.

"Howdy church, y'all happy this morning?" The issue's not whether the word "happy" is okay or the word "fun" is okay. The problem here is not the vocabulary. The problem is the heart. It's the inability to distinguish emotionally between the happiness of the glories of Christ that we were just singing about and the happiness of a barn-hee-haw dance.

And the point is not that barn dance is bad. Good grief, it's not bad. There's a place for the barn dance and the hee-haw. That's totally not the issue. The point is that there's a difference. There's more than one kind of good times. Our people desperately need good models of serious joy, not somber joy, but serious joy.

I fear there's so many people who don't have a clue what I'm talking about. All they can do is put this into the categories of glum. I hope they're listening more carefully. They need to see, our people need to see in their pastor the kind of earnestness about life and worship and ministry that is gloriously happy in the child of God, happy that I'm his child, happy to be called into his service, and gloriously able to show that and express that without borrowing from the same demeanor and the same vocabulary of a carnival or a talk show.

So when I hear a pastor say about his ministry, "It's great fun. We're having a blast planting this church. We're just having a blast," I want to say, "Aren't you spending most of your time dealing with God, the tragic consequences of the fall, the local and global realities of suffering and ministry, hell, heaven, the slaughter of Jesus on the cross, the resurrection, the bondage of the will that you're powerless to do anything about in the people you love, the power of Satan, the preciousness of the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of sins, the call to suffer, the hope of glory, the sweetness of Christian camaraderie, the privilege of ministry, the miracle of new birth, gifts of the Spirit?

How in the world does the word "fun" or the phrase "having a blast" fit emotionally with those realities? Why don't those words "fun" and "blast" stick in your craw? I think the answer is this. We are all, myself included, infected with the vocabulary of entertainment, the vocabulary of amusement, infected.

This is where we're at home. We're at home with entertainment. This is our default vocabulary resource. This is our native air. The vocabulary of earnestness and gravity and depth and weightiness and substance, these are foreign. They're foreign. They make us feel awkward. They're not natural to us, and that's my lament.

That's my lament. It's not about words. We've borrowed the language of entertainment to describe sacred, weighty, serious, holy joys, and the best thing we can say to being an ambassador of the King of Kings is it's a blast. I regard that as tragic, and not just a vocabulary tragedy, but a spirit tragedy, a life tragedy, a huge loss in the Church and in life.

Someone might object, and I can just imagine you're trying to build up a wall again between the sacred and the secular, and we've worked hard, really hard, to tear down that wall by the way we talk and the way we dress, and you're trying to build that wall up again between the sacred and the secular.

Now, my response to that is why should the flattening out go all in one direction, from the spirit of sacred to the spirit of secular, from seriousness to silliness? Why not the other way? We know why, because emotionally we are at home in the language of the secular. We're at home in the language of entertainment.

We're not at home in the language of sacred and holy things. We have torn—no, we haven't. We haven't torn down the wall between sacred and secular. We've sold the store to the secular. So my longing is for a heart in me and others that feels the words and expresses ourselves and feels the demeanor that corresponds to the weightiness and glory and sacredness of the subject matter being referred to and the activity being described.

I long for a gladness and gravity, an intermingling of gladness and gravity that are woven together in the life and preaching of a pastor or anybody in such a way that sober careless people and sweeten the burdens of the saints. I want careless people to be wakened by the sobriety of joy, and I want burdened saints who come in on Sunday morning to have their burdens sweetened and lightened.

And I don't think the word fun and blast is a vocabulary that does either of those things. If anyone thinks that I want ministers to become boring or somber or gloomy or melancholy, let me close like this. Unbroken seriousness of a melodramatic or somber kind will inevitably communicate a sickness of soul to the great mass of people, and rightly so.

This is partly because life as God created is not like that. There are, for example, little babies in mother's arms or lying on the couch in the world who are not the least impressed with John Piper's passion or zeal or earnest looks. They are cooing and smiling and calling for their daddies to get down on the floor and play with them.

And the daddy who cannot do this with abandon and joy and fun and having a blast doing it will not understand the true seriousness of sin because he's not capable of enjoying what God has preserved from its ravages, the ravages of sin. He's really sick. He's a man unfit to lead others to health.

He's in the end earnest about being earnest. He's not earnest about being joyful. The real battle in life is to be as happy in God as we can be, and that takes a very special kind of earnestness since God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy. So my lament is not a lament about the word "fun." It's a lament about the loss of the capacity to feel and express the fun of cotton candy and roller coasters at the fair with our kids and the tear-stained joy of soul-saving ministry in the service of a crucified, triumphant king.

There is a difference, brothers. There is a difference, and it would be a good thing to use words that help people feel the difference. That is sobering and worth a lot of self-reflection, Pastor John. This is why I appreciate your earnestness with the ministry and with language and with serious joy.

Thank you. And thank you for the question, Dan. If you have a question, send it to us. Go to our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn and click on the button to send us a brief email with your question. And there you can also take a look at the most popular episodes all time and browse our most recent episodes or search through our entire collection of 900 episodes to date.

Well, the world is full of glory. There's glory in every direction, but not every glory is saving glory. And to explain, John Piper will compare all other world religions and talk about how they compare to the living God of the universe. That's tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinhke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.

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