Does John Piper Hate “Fun”?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | Pastor John Dan in Salem, Oregon writes in to ask, "Why you hate fun so much?"
00:00:11.000 | Hello Pastor John, I have heard you disapprove of the concept of "fun" as applied to the
00:00:16.000 | things of God before in sermons. I would like for you to explain more what you have against
00:00:21.000 | this word, particularly in light of your acceptance of the often maligned word "happy" when
00:00:27.000 | applied to the things of God. Why reject "fun," which can connote enjoyment and pleasure, while
00:00:32.000 | accepting "happy," which is to many Christians a worldly substitute for God's joy? I'm feeling
00:00:38.000 | confused by your lexical choices, and I know how highly you value the clarity of language.
00:00:43.000 | What would you say to Dan?
00:00:46.000 | My lament is only secondarily concerned with words, and is primarily concerned with a spirit
00:00:59.000 | of levity or lightness. And I'm distinguishing levity from a robust, large-hearted sense
00:01:08.000 | of humor. My lament is with a spirit of flippancy, jokiness, silliness, playfulness—a spirit
00:01:17.000 | that is manifestly uncomfortable with serious joy, and only comfortable with chipper, upbeat,
00:01:28.000 | jolly feelings of joy. Language, particular words like "fun" or "happy," is not the
00:01:36.000 | main issue for me. It is something much deeper than that that I'm concerned about. It really
00:01:43.000 | doesn't matter to me what words a pastor uses if he walks out on the stage after the
00:01:50.000 | first two worship songs that have been engaging a heart with the living Christ and says, "Howdy
00:01:57.000 | church, y'all having fun?" It wouldn't help matters to me if he changed his language.
00:02:05.000 | "Howdy church, y'all happy this morning?" The issue's not whether the word "happy"
00:02:10.000 | is okay or the word "fun" is okay. The problem here is not the vocabulary. The problem
00:02:17.000 | is the heart. It's the inability to distinguish emotionally between the happiness of the glories
00:02:25.000 | of Christ that we were just singing about and the happiness of a barn-hee-haw dance.
00:02:33.000 | And the point is not that barn dance is bad. Good grief, it's not bad. There's a place
00:02:39.000 | for the barn dance and the hee-haw. That's totally not the issue. The point is that there's
00:02:46.000 | a difference. There's more than one kind of good times. Our people desperately need
00:02:56.000 | good models of serious joy, not somber joy, but serious joy. I fear there's so many people
00:03:05.000 | who don't have a clue what I'm talking about. All they can do is put this into the categories
00:03:09.000 | of glum. I hope they're listening more carefully. They need to see, our people need to see in
00:03:18.000 | their pastor the kind of earnestness about life and worship and ministry that is gloriously
00:03:25.000 | happy in the child of God, happy that I'm his child, happy to be called into his service,
00:03:33.000 | and gloriously able to show that and express that without borrowing from the same demeanor
00:03:41.000 | and the same vocabulary of a carnival or a talk show. So when I hear a pastor say about
00:03:50.000 | his ministry, "It's great fun. We're having a blast planting this church. We're just having
00:03:56.000 | a blast," I want to say, "Aren't you spending most of your time dealing with God, the tragic
00:04:05.000 | consequences of the fall, the local and global realities of suffering and ministry, hell,
00:04:13.000 | heaven, the slaughter of Jesus on the cross, the resurrection, the bondage of the will
00:04:21.000 | that you're powerless to do anything about in the people you love, the power of Satan,
00:04:27.000 | the preciousness of the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of sins, the call to suffer, the hope of glory,
00:04:33.000 | the sweetness of Christian camaraderie, the privilege of ministry, the miracle of new
00:04:39.000 | birth, gifts of the Spirit? How in the world does the word "fun" or the phrase "having
00:04:48.000 | a blast" fit emotionally with those realities? Why don't those words "fun" and "blast" stick
00:04:59.000 | in your craw? I think the answer is this. We are all, myself included, infected with
00:05:07.000 | the vocabulary of entertainment, the vocabulary of amusement, infected. This is where we're
00:05:18.000 | at home. We're at home with entertainment. This is our default vocabulary resource. This
00:05:25.000 | is our native air. The vocabulary of earnestness and gravity and depth and weightiness and
00:05:34.000 | substance, these are foreign. They're foreign. They make us feel awkward. They're not natural
00:05:40.000 | to us, and that's my lament. That's my lament. It's not about words. We've borrowed the language
00:05:48.000 | of entertainment to describe sacred, weighty, serious, holy joys, and the best thing we
00:05:57.000 | can say to being an ambassador of the King of Kings is it's a blast. I regard that as
00:06:06.000 | tragic, and not just a vocabulary tragedy, but a spirit tragedy, a life tragedy, a huge
00:06:14.000 | loss in the Church and in life. Someone might object, and I can just imagine you're trying
00:06:22.000 | to build up a wall again between the sacred and the secular, and we've worked hard, really
00:06:29.000 | hard, to tear down that wall by the way we talk and the way we dress, and you're trying
00:06:35.000 | to build that wall up again between the sacred and the secular. Now, my response to that
00:06:40.000 | is why should the flattening out go all in one direction, from the spirit of sacred to
00:06:48.000 | the spirit of secular, from seriousness to silliness? Why not the other way? We know
00:06:54.000 | why, because emotionally we are at home in the language of the secular. We're at home
00:07:00.000 | in the language of entertainment. We're not at home in the language of sacred and holy
00:07:08.000 | things. We have torn—no, we haven't. We haven't torn down the wall between sacred
00:07:17.000 | and secular. We've sold the store to the secular. So my longing is for a heart in me
00:07:24.000 | and others that feels the words and expresses ourselves and feels the demeanor that corresponds
00:07:33.000 | to the weightiness and glory and sacredness of the subject matter being referred to and
00:07:42.000 | the activity being described. I long for a gladness and gravity, an intermingling of
00:07:51.000 | gladness and gravity that are woven together in the life and preaching of a pastor or anybody
00:07:59.000 | in such a way that sober careless people and sweeten the burdens of the saints. I want
00:08:07.000 | careless people to be wakened by the sobriety of joy, and I want burdened saints who come
00:08:15.000 | in on Sunday morning to have their burdens sweetened and lightened. And I don't think
00:08:20.000 | the word fun and blast is a vocabulary that does either of those things. If anyone thinks
00:08:28.000 | that I want ministers to become boring or somber or gloomy or melancholy, let me close
00:08:35.000 | like this. Unbroken seriousness of a melodramatic or somber kind will inevitably communicate
00:08:44.000 | a sickness of soul to the great mass of people, and rightly so. This is partly because life
00:08:52.000 | as God created is not like that. There are, for example, little babies in mother's arms
00:09:00.000 | or lying on the couch in the world who are not the least impressed with John Piper's
00:09:08.000 | passion or zeal or earnest looks. They are cooing and smiling and calling for their daddies
00:09:17.000 | to get down on the floor and play with them. And the daddy who cannot do this with abandon
00:09:25.000 | and joy and fun and having a blast doing it will not understand the true seriousness of
00:09:36.000 | sin because he's not capable of enjoying what God has preserved from its ravages, the ravages
00:09:43.000 | of sin. He's really sick. He's a man unfit to lead others to health. He's in the end
00:09:52.000 | earnest about being earnest. He's not earnest about being joyful. The real battle in life
00:09:58.000 | is to be as happy in God as we can be, and that takes a very special kind of earnestness
00:10:05.000 | since God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy. So my lament is not a lament
00:10:14.000 | about the word "fun." It's a lament about the loss of the capacity to feel and express
00:10:22.000 | the fun of cotton candy and roller coasters at the fair with our kids and the tear-stained
00:10:30.000 | joy of soul-saving ministry in the service of a crucified, triumphant king. There is
00:10:37.000 | a difference, brothers. There is a difference, and it would be a good thing to use words
00:10:44.000 | that help people feel the difference.
00:10:47.000 | That is sobering and worth a lot of self-reflection, Pastor John. This is why I appreciate your
00:10:52.000 | earnestness with the ministry and with language and with serious joy. Thank you. And thank
00:10:58.000 | you for the question, Dan. If you have a question, send it to us. Go to our online home at
00:11:02.000 | desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn and click on the button to send us a brief email with your
00:11:07.000 | question. And there you can also take a look at the most popular episodes all time and
00:11:12.000 | browse our most recent episodes or search through our entire collection of 900 episodes
00:11:18.000 | to date. Well, the world is full of glory. There's glory in every direction, but not
00:11:24.000 | every glory is saving glory. And to explain, John Piper will compare all other world religions
00:11:30.000 | and talk about how they compare to the living God of the universe. That's tomorrow. I'm
00:11:36.000 | your host, Tony Reinhke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:11:39.000 | [End]
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