These are passionate people who gives you victory. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will renew you in his love. He will exalt over you with loud singing. This is describing God. And it's part of the reason that our own emotional experience, our own approach to negative emotion is impoverished comparatively — is because we don't think of God this way.
A great illustration of this, a great way to talk about this, is C.S. Lewis, who was mentioned earlier in the service. He has the Narnia books — you know, we all love the Narnia books. But Brooks, the former New York Times columnist, said that as a Jewish cultural atheist growing up, when he was coming to faith in Christ, they were sending him Mere Christianity, they were sending him the Narnia books, and he was reading them. And he read Narnia and he thought Aslan didn't resonate with him — which sounds like anathema to us. How could Aslan not resonate with anybody? Aslan's amazing. But for him, Aslan was — he said he was too English. And at the last service I said "British," and a wonderful Irish gentleman came up to me afterward and said, "No. The Irish are passionate. The English are the ones you're talking about." Stand corrected.
So the English version of Aslan — of God — is not... you know, he's regal, he's refined, he's contained. He's not stoic, but he's not oozing emotional experience, right? And Brooks said, for him as a culturally Jewish atheist, this did not resonate, because he said, "When I read the Gospels as a Jew, I see a Jewish Jesus." And Jewish Jesus is out there doing emotive Jewish Jesus things. He's angry in public. He's weeping in public. He's expressive. And he's okay expressing negative emotion in public.
And so this is very different than perhaps many of us and the way that we approach, particularly, our grief. And so we want to be aware and corrected by the—