Part 1: It’s Good | Part 2: On Purpose | Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor

There’s another factor to consider in choosing our fun.

It’s actually a principle that applies in a much broader context, involving more than just the entertainment we choose.

It applies to all of life.

Sometimes people have trouble controlling themselves. They get obsessed with a particular thing, and eventually it dominates them.

As I say, it may involve any number of things besides entertainment. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes it’s study. Sometimes—to someone with “a one-track mind,” it’s literally anything—whatever they happen to be doing at the moment.

Study? Seriously?

Yep.

When I was in seminary, a friend of mine told me that his roommate told him to shut up, because he was busy reading a theology book.

Now, that’s putting the cart before the horse. I wonder if he was reading the section on loving your neighbor.

See what I did there? Neigh-bor? Get it?

What was I writing about?

Oh, yes.

Obsession.

What’s wrong with being really interested in something?

Nothing at all.

The issue isn’t interest: it’s control. Slavery.

Believers have just one Master. He is the master we were designed to serve, and when we try to serve a different one, all kinds of things go haywire. When you put a 15-amp fuse in a 50-amp circuit, you’re going to end up in the dark.

Now, it’s bad enough when the wrong master we choose is our career, or popular acclaim, or wealth.

But it’s even worse, I think, when it’s something so trivial as what we do for fun.

There are obvious examples: drugs, including alcohol, make horrendous masters. Sex, a delightful gift from God, can literally destroy the one who serves it.

But so can a TV show. So can scrolling mindlessly and obsessively and endlessly through a social media feed. So can spending money you don’t have to buy one more rifle or golf club or motorcycle or dress or coin set or gemstone.

How much will be enough?

Just one more. Always just one more.

And the money involved is not the primary issue. Maybe you have plenty of money to spend on such things. But you have no more time than the poorest person in the world—just 24 hours per day, and time is a zero-sum game: time you spend on entertainment is time you’re taking away from something else. Family. Productivity. Sleep. Fellowship. Study of the Word.

I think I’ve made it clear already in this series that you ought to have leisure time. You ought to have fun. But fun is a servant, not a master. You weren’t designed to whittle away your time watching every last episode, or achieving every last level, or playing all 9 million games of Freecell.

So far, just two brief allusions to Scripture in this post.

Let’s get serious.

The Scripture speaks to this idea in both Testaments.

• The wisest man who ever lived said, “He who loves pleasure will become a poor man” (Pr 21.17). This reminds me of the wag’s comment that a government-run lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.
• One of the charges that God levels at Babylon is that she is “a lover of pleasures” (Is 47.8).
• In his parable of the soils, Jesus described one unproductive soil as “choked by the riches and cares and pleasures of life” (Lk 8.14).
• Paul tells Timothy that in the last days, people will be “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2Ti 3.4).

I’d suggest that we approach our fun times with the steely assertion of Paul himself, who said, “All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything” (1Co 6.12).

I’d suggest that if some form of entertainment dominates you, then you’re not having as much fun as you could be having.

Have as much fun as you can.

Next time: some questions to ask as you’re making up your mind.

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

Part 5: Question Everything

Part 1: It’s Good

We’ve established that fun—which I’ve defined as comprising pleasure and rest—is good, in that God engages in such activities and commends them for his people. But Scripture also indicates that humans have a remarkable propensity for turning good things into bad things, and we can all think of ways that people have entertained themselves that are clearly unacceptable.

So it’s worth trying to derive some simple principles, based in Scripture, to help us evaluate the ways we choose our pleasures and our ways to relax.

Really? Do we have to be that obsessive about how we choose to have fun?

Well, I wouldn’t call it obsessive—that word implies that there’s something mentally unhealthy about it. I’d prefer to call it being thoughtful, in the sense of thinking carefully about how we steward our lives, our bodies, and our time.

The Scripture famously says,

Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1Co 10.31).

That says, among other things, that

• We ought to have a purpose for everything in our lives; nothing is purposeless, mindless, or “just entertainment”;
• That purpose is outside, or beyond, ourselves; we have other things to consider besides just what we want to do.

So yes, we ought to give thought to how we have fun. I don’t apologize for saying that.

Now, to implement this kind of thinking, we need to begin by defining a key term: what does it means to “do all to the glory of God”? What brings him glory?

I would suggest that honoring him should involve caring about his goals, his purposes. And he tells us what his goal for us as his people is:

Them who are the called according to his purpose, … he did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son (Ro 8.28-29).

Without getting distracted by the arguments about predestination, we can safely conclude that God’s purpose or goal for us is that we be like his Son. Our lives should be a process of becoming increasingly like Jesus.

That’s the Prime Directive.

Everything we do should be purposely chosen for that end.

As a simple illustration, if a sitcom makes me laugh at sin, I can’t think to myself, “Oh, lighten up; it’s just a joke!”

In a life patterned after 1 Corinthians 10.31, nothing is ever “just a joke.”

I’m not suggesting that we should be somber and joyless; but I am arguing that our laughter, which should be abundant, should also be purposeful, should be about things that the Son would enjoy sharing with us.

Recently I had dinner with a group gathered in a midwestern city for a conference of Christian educators. There were 11 of us seated around a large table, and over good food we told stories of teaching and other ministry experiences, and we laughed until our sides hurt. Some of us were closer friends than others, but by the end of the evening we all were united by the simple delight of the experience. No observer would have thought that anyone at the table was a stick in the mud.

What a joy such an experience is. What memories it cements in our minds.

What fun.

Now eating and telling tales and laughing is not the only way to have fun. As beings in the image of God, we are creative, and over the centuries people have come up with all sorts of ways to entertain themselves. And in the future there will be many, many more. Delight in such things is a gift from God.

Let’s think for a few posts about how to experience such delights in ways that move us toward being like the Son.

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor | Part 4: Down with Slavery | Part 5: Question Everything

For a radical change of pace, I’d like to spend a few posts thinking about having fun—and specifically, how to have fun and do it right.

I’ll note that my colleague Dr. Brian Hand has written a brief book on the subject, cleverly titled Upright Downtime, which I highly recommend. This series isn’t a summary of that book, but of course our thoughts will overlap in places.

I think the best place to begin is with morals. I’m happy to start with a firm and resolute statement:

Fun is good.

We know that it’s good, because God both practices it himself and endorses it for us.

I’d suggest that what we call “fun” consists of both pleasure, or enjoyment, and rest, or relaxation. God engages in both.

• God takes pleasure throughout Scripture, in all kinds of things:
  • Uprightness (1Ch 29.17)
  • The prosperity of his servant (Ps 35.27)
  • Those that fear him (Ps 147.11)
  • His Temple (Hag 1.8)
  • Giving his people the kingdom (Lk 12.32)

In just this short list I note that God takes pleasure in not only the service of his servants (uprightness, fear, the Temple) but also in their pleasure (prosperity, the kingdom). More on that in a few sentences.

• God also rests.
  • He rested from creation on Day 7 (Ge 2.2). Now, I know that God didn’t rest because he was tired; the passage simply means that he stopped his creative work, because it was finished. But he did stop. The biblical picture of God is not of one who is working feverishly—even though he is working constantly, most noticeably in his providential work. But he is not stressed, and he is never feeling the pressure of getting it all done.
  • Jesus, incarnate, rested from his exhausting labors by withdrawing into the wilderness (Lk 5.16). Sometimes he does that to pray, as this verse specifies (see also Mt 14.23); sometimes no specific reason is given (Mt 14.13). If you had three years to save the world, would you be taking days off? Jesus did.

Beyond that, God clearly encourages—even commands—us to take pleasure and rest as well.

• He makes Eden’s trees “pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Ge 2.9). Multisensory pleasure! And we know that Adam was encouraged to eat of every tree that was good for food, with the exception of just one (Ge 2.17).
• David notes that “at [God’s] right hand there are pleasures forevermore” (Ps 16.11); and again, “[The children of men] shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; And thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures” (Ps 36.8). This metaphor speaks of an abundance of pleasure, of multiple kinds of pleasure, of swimming in it.
• All through the Song of Solomon, the kings delights in specifically sexual pleasure. Many commentators have tried to lessen the erotic tone of the book by turning it into a metaphor of God’s love for his church; but I don’t see any evidence in the text that it should be read that way. It was God, after all, who designed sex to be pleasurable.

And rest?

• The same Jesus who withdraws into the wilderness for rest takes his disciples with him on at least one occasion (Mk 6.31).
• And then there’s the Sabbath, a central feature of the Law of Moses, where God requires his people to rest every seventh day—on penalty of death (Nu 15.32-36).

Rest is serious business; it’s a basic need for those in the image of God.

But I need to temper the title of this post.

The Scripture is clear that not all fun is good. There is pleasure that is evil, and there is rest that is evil. The God who takes pleasure in many things also reveals that he does not take pleasure in certain other things.

So how do we decide how to have fun?—or more precisely, what kinds of fun to have?

We’ll start on that in the next post.

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

Part 2: On Purpose | Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor | Part 4: Down with Slavery | Part 5: Question Everything