Audio Transcript
We lived through a decade of smartphone abuse and overuse (roughly 2015 to 2024). We talked at length about it on this podcast. I wrote books about it. Most of us have come to terms with when and where we’ve been online too much. We lament the wasted time, knowing we should have been doing more important things. The clock sped up as we lost ourselves in the everlasting scroll of eye-grabbing images and video. But what if time was not the greatest cost? What if something more serious happened to us, a lingering damage still present inside of us now? Today on Ask Pastor John: scrolling the soul shallow.
It’s a question from Noah, a young man in Akron, Ohio. “Pastor John, I have made Titus 2:6–8 my aim as a young man. I know Paul is speaking to a young pastor. I am not a pastor, but I want to be self-controlled. I want to show myself ‘to be a model of good works,’ and I want to display ‘integrity, dignity, and sound speech.’ The main struggle I face is the shallowness of the culture in which we live. On my phone, computer, and TV, I see endless examples of flippancy. That’s really all I see some days. The whole world seems bent on numbing our souls to eternal realities. How can a young man resist all this and stay spiritually alert and cultivate these virtues?”
One of the reasons I love this question is because I have said many times that the worst problem with television (or now let’s just say Instagram or any online media in general) is probably not the pervasive sexualization of all of life — that’s big enough — but rather the pervasive trivialization of all of life. You can scarcely watch TV ads or be online for more than ten seconds without being dump-trucked with banality and silliness. Grown men and women, even famous grown men and women, act like eleven-year-olds whose high point at summer camp was to bob for apples in a toilet filled with Mello Yello — the apex of satisfaction. That’s the quality that we’re being dumped on every day.
This is the world we live in: silliness, humor, fun, joking, casual, flippant, cleverness, whimsical. And all that has made its way tragically into parenting, worship services, preaching, and hosting an event, even a serious one. Many modern people have never tasted serious joy, glad gravity, happy earnestness, or joyful weightiness. They have no category for such a thing. There’s fun and there’s boredom. That’s it. Life is that shallow, that insignificant.
So, Noah asks, “How can I resist all this? How can I march to the beat of a different drummer?”
1. Distinguish between joy and fun.
First, make sure that you are clear that joy and fun are not identical. Today, the word fun has virtually taken over the experience of serious joy.
“Think about the shortness of life and the inevitability of death and the great realities of God.”
Fun is what you have when playing with your kids on the living-room floor, flag football with the guys on Saturday, or a day at Disney World. That’s fun — nothing wrong with it. But now, church planting is fun, worship services are fun, Bible studies are fun. It’s as if you learn the language of trees while walking among twenty-foot Georgia pines, and then you visit three-hundred-foot, two-thousand-year-old redwoods in California and you have no language. They’re just fun trees. They’re not magnificent. They’re not breathtaking. They’re not humbling. They’re just fun trees.
So, Noah, grow your vocabulary of joy and significance and wonder, because more often than we would like to admit, the heart shrinks to the language we have to express it rather than the other way around. If you call enough magnificent things “fun,” before long, that’s all they’ll be. Your heart will have shrunk to your vocabulary.
2. Know you’re not crazy.
Second, listen to the warnings of Scripture to know you’re not crazy. The Bible is very aware of people who are incapable of being happily serious, and all their language is just clever or joking or trifling.
- “Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, ‘I am only joking!’” (Proverbs 26:18–19).
- “[Beware,] there are many who are . . . empty talkers” (Titus 1:10).
- “Avoid the irreverent babble” (1 Timothy 6:20). The Greek word, kenophōnia, means “empty sounds coming out of your mouth.”
- “Doing wrong is like a joke to a fool, but wisdom is pleasure to a man of understanding” (Proverbs 10:23).
- “Let no one deceive you with empty words” (Ephesians 5:6).
- “Certain persons . . . have wandered away into vain discussion” (1 Timothy 1:6). Mataiologia — that is, “futile speech.”
If you long for substance and deep insight into reality and joyful earnestness in conversation, you’re not crazy.
3. Let Scripture define your reality.
Third, think about the shortness of life and the inevitability of death and the great realities of God and the human soul and sin and the cross — oh, the cross, the cross, the bloody, horrible cross! — and faith and holiness and heaven. “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:2–4). Let the word of God define your reality.
4. Read biographies of great lives.
Fourth, read biographies of people who gave their lives to significant things. For example, not long ago, I completed Graham Tomlin’s biography of Blaise Pascal, published in 2025. When I finished, I wrote on the first blank page two frustrations that I had with the book, but then I wrote, “I loved this book for the cast of mind it quickened. Serious, joyful, realistic, deep, heartbreaking, fearful, anti-trivial, inspiring, Bible reality, stirring.” That was my pitiful attempt to capture the effect it was having on my soul. So, here’s a taste as he quotes Pascal.
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy: who unites himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end than him. (139)
And of course — it’s “of course” for those who know me, anyway — nobody outside the Bible has been more helpful to me in making joy and seriousness priorities of my life, happy priorities of my life, than Jonathan Edwards. Sometimes I just go to Edwards to take a bath in the water of another world of God-entranced happiness because I just swim in triviality. I want to take a bath and see if I can wash myself off from this modern world of ours. Here’s one of my favorite quotes that captures what I mean. It’s from Religious Affections. I first read this quote over fifty years ago, and I can still feel the first force of it. He said,
All gracious affections, that are a sweet odor to Christ, and that fill the soul of a Christian with an heavenly sweetness and fragrancy, are brokenhearted affections. A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble brokenhearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires: their hope is an humble hope; and their joy, even when it is “unspeakable, and full of glory,” is a humble, brokenhearted joy and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, more disposed to an universal lowliness of behavior. (339–40)
Tony, and all of our listeners, I don’t know anyone who writes like that. I mean, I’m sure there are, but I don’t know anybody who writes like that or sees like that or feels like that. So, find your biographies and find your great witnesses to serious joy.
5. Find a joyfully serious church.
And finally, I would say, find a church. You’ve got to have a church. God wills for us to be in churches. Find a church that doesn’t do slapstick on Sunday morning: a joyfully serious church and a biblically faithful church. Find a friend or two in it, and read something great together, and then go do some crazy, risky ministry for the glory of Jesus.
