Piper also explores the practical effects of "fear and trembling" on parenting and evangelism. It's an excellent sermon.
Those who have seen and savored the holiness of God and justice and wrath and grace of God, can never again trivialize worship. It is so sad when someone hears a message like this and then comes up and says, “Don’t you think we can have fun in worship?” What is sad about that response is that their heart is so small that the only alternative they can think of to fear is fun. I don’t like to the word “fun” for what we do in worship—or in ministry for that matter. It is a sad commentary on the superficial condition of our times that one of the most common things said about good experience in ministry and worship is that “we are having fun.”
The point is not that Christians can’t be light-hearted. You are probably sick if you can’t be light hearted. The point is, there is time and season for everything under the sun. And something should happen in corporate worship, before the face of the infinitely holy God, that calls forth a different vocabulary than what you experience at the amusement park.
We are Christian Hedonists. We pursue joy with all our might, because we believe that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. And Christian Hedonists can smell the flames of hell. Christian Hedonists tremble still at the ledge from which we were snatched. Christian Hedonists see those who are toppling toward wrath as people who are just like us, only not yet snatched by grace alone from the ledge. Christian Hedonists feel a potential for joy—infinitely serious joy—in the God of holiness and wrath and grace that is so great it would break our heart if God did not give us a divine ability to bear the weight of our happiness without being crushed by it.
Oh, the difference in worship when the wrath of God is known and felt! Gone is jesting and silliness and slapstick and pettiness and trifling and joking and clowning and levity. Listen to Charles Spurgeon:
“We 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 flippant, hollow, unreal. A hearty laugh is no more levity than a hearty cry.” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 212)
Over and over again, we on the staff at Desiring God and Bethlehem remind ourselves of 2 Corinthians 6:10 as the watch word of Christian Hedonism: “sorrowful yet always rejoicing (lupoumenoi aei de chairontes).” “Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.” That’s what happens in corporate worship when you believe and feel the wrath of God.
<>Piper also explores the practical effects of "fear and trembling" on parenting and evangelism. It's an excellent sermon.
