Exuberance!
I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness….
Again you will take up your tambourines,
And go forth to the dances of the merrymakers.
In my preaching I stress doctrine. One reason is that the apostle Paul stressed doctrine. It was his mission strategy. When he had finished his church-planting labor in Ephesus, he said, “I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:26, RSV). So on Sundays I preach doctrine.
Today is Monday The sun is shining. The sky is deep-sea blue. The temperature is in the seventies. The wind is gentle. The air is crystal clear and clean. The tulips are halfway up. At times like this you want to leap for joy, not study doctrine.
Me too.
I am not interested in a religion that offers anything less than fullness of joy and pleasures for evermore (Psalm 16:11). I don’t just mean deep, weighty delights that come in moments of heart-heaving discoveries of God’s faithfulness in tragedy I do mean that! There is too much cancer and killing in the world not to mean that—until the curse is finally lifted—but not just that.
I also mean what baby cows do: “You shall go forth leaping like calves from the stall” (Malachi 4:2, RSV). I love the April sunshine and the warmth on my skin and the breeze in my face. I love the yelping of my little ones as they come home from school, testing their high notes. I love the fast-fading, uninhibited affection of preadolescents. I love the exuberance of some of the young people in my church unleashed in drama for Jesus’ sake.
Exuberance!
That’s a rare word, isn’t it? We grow out of it about eleven, I think. We try to find it again in a hundred artificial ways, but it’s gone. We’ve grown up. We know too much now.
Or could it be that we know too little? Could it be that we have grown up halfway? Out of the naive exuberance of childhood into the cloud-covered realism of half-adulthood.
Reenter doctrine. The whole counsel of God. What is it?
It’s the new foundation of exuberance when the naivete of childhood won’t work anymore, but it’s different. The old foundation could not handle reality, but the new foundation sees everything—cancer, nuclear weapons, environmental crises, terrorism, abortion, burned-out cities, broken marriages, bummed-out kids, depression—it sees and feels everything. Nevertheless, it does not break or sink—not in the hospital and not in jail.
This is the whole counsel of God. If you intend to dance in the April sun, just remember, either you do it with your eyes closed or you do it on the great granite tableland of the whole counsel of God, also known as doctrine.
“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man!
Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold_________” (Luke 6:22-23).
Yes, the blank is filled with “your reward is great in heaven,” but how you come to hope in this reward, how this reward was purchased for you by Christ, what the nature of faith is that lays hold on this reward, what the content of the reward is, and how you maintain daily confidence in the surety of the reward—that is all doctrine. Without it, we will not leap for long. And surely not in jail.
A Godward Life.
