Back in 2009 John Piper delivered a message to the American Association of Christian Counselors and it proved to be one of the strangest interactions between speaker and audience I have ever seen.

Piper, as you can see from the video, decided to be as clear as possible on his own sinful patterns in life. He thought it appropriate given the nature of his audience. I find his confession to be humbling and God-honoring. The audience found it hilarious. Piper eventually becomes flummoxed with their reaction and points out how “strange” an audience they were.

But were they really strange?

Greg Gilbert, in an excellent commentary, calls it “one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard,” and sees an “incredibly important and massively undervalued lesson” for preachers:

Do you see, at root, what had happened at that conference? Over the course of a couple of days, those conferees had been trained to expect humor from the speakers and therefore to react to the speakers with laughter–all the way to the point that they were incapable of seeing that John Piper was being serious in his confession of sin to them. You can quibble with whether the first couple of Piper’s statements were (unintentionally, it seems) kind of funny. I happen to think they were. By the time he gets to about the 3-minute mark, though, there’s nothing funny left, and he’s moved into very serious stuff. Yet the atmosphere of humor and levity at that conference was so thick–the training so complete–that the people were incapable of seeing it. So they laughed at Piper’s confession of his sin.

Apparently the conditioning of that audience to think everything is funny took no more than a couple of days.

How deep do you think that conditioning would be for a church who sat under a funny-man pastor every Sunday for fifteen years?

A preacher’s content and tone will condition how his church hears God’s word. Pastor, what kind of auditory conditioning will your church have after hearing you preach for a decade?

Let us not be masters at training our churches to laugh at anything. Rather, let us labor to train them to hear with “serious joy in a Sovereign Savior.”

– HT: Justin Taylor