I have a friend who was once a performer. He is a passionate man, but also, from time to time, profoundly honest. I went to see him perform and he made this confession. He said, “My wife told me that all I ever talk about are the things I’m against. ‘Why don’t you,’ she asked me, ‘ever tell your audience what you are for?’” Though he may have forgotten that line, I never will.
When we are just reaching adulthood, many of us find it rather easy to be mad. None perhaps more so than we who, ironically, embrace the doctrines of grace. “Young, restless and Reformed” as a descriptor was soft-pedaling the reality. “Young, angry and Reformed” is more like it. There are, of course, plenty of things for us to be angry about. The dogs of sin have paved paradise and put up a barking lot. Jesus is about the business of bringing all things under submission. Until He has finished there will always be death, disease, and destruction. What there should not be from us, the redeemed, is despair.
Which means, in turn, that we ought to be the most cheerful of people, the most upbeat. That’s hard for me, as my spirit animal is a marshwiggle. But the objective reality is that I have much to be thankful for, which means in turn I have a lot to be for.
My book, Growing Up (with) RC recounts various conversations I had along the way with my father. In one chapter I tell the story of when my father, noting my budding folly of skepticism, warned me, “Son, the cheapest way to develop a reputation as an intellectual is to adopt the pose of the cynic.” The temptation is still there. To be always on the attack, to spend our time and energy on the things we are against is to look to sophisticated to be taken in, to protect oneself from the vulnerability that comes from being moved. It keeps me behind the judge’s bench, clutching what I think is a gavel, but which is just a baby rattle.
It is true enough that we live in a world, and in a church, that is reluctant to call sin sin, that won’t give the context of the bad news by which the good news becomes sweet. That said, our message is good news. It is good news for us, the redeemed children of God. It is likewise good news for those yet outside the kingdom, the not yet redeemed of God. No, it’s not good news for the reprobate. We don’t however, know who they are. Shouldn’t we, once not a people, but now a people, once strangers to the promises but now joint heirs, be giddy heralds of the message of Jesus Christ? Yes, let us warn those outside to consider the cost. But how shall they believe that if they taste they will see that He is good, if our own faces are perpetually sour?
If we believed the good news we would dance like no one’s watching. And because they are watching, they just might join us.