Friday 19 August

Song of Songs 5:1-8:14

Call me old-fashioned if you like but if a lady came to me and said they wished their lover was their brother then I think I might just struggle to smile and nod approvingly.  If she then said she wished this so that she could publicly kiss her lover without anyone despising her well, I think I might begin to doubt her sanity.  But, rather than a yearning for incest, I think this section rather tries to express one person’s desire to continually be close to the one whom they love.  People have said that Song of Songs is allegory for our relationship with God or his relationship with us.  I don’t know if it is exactly that.  But I do think it exposes and celebrates the rampant emotional cravings that lie in the core of us humans.  It revels in God’s creation and soars in poetic delight over the expression of intimacy between spouses.  But it also points beyond the married relationship.  It wallows in the beauty of life; it affirms the non-mechanical, it espouses the ‘softer’ side of things.  It shows us that God doesn’t want us to be gruff and focussed bible-bashers, stepping over person after person in a relentless quest for converts.  He wants us to seek his will - and to do this in our passionate enjoyment of one another, in dwelling on what is good and radiant and joyous and in spreading this zest for life with the world.  Beauty deserves to be shared - it leads us to bid others to ‘come’.

1 Corinthians 12:27-13:13

Don’t let the distant sound of wedding bells fool you - this is about so much more than marriage.  It is one of the most inspiring and most challenging mandates for every church, every house group, ever prayer triplet and every household.  It is full of poetic beauty and yet it is more down to earth than a French toilet at a motorway service station.  Every single descriptor of love is a relational word - it rams us into the blokes who are sitting next to us. It chains us to the moody-looking woman behind us.  Yes, people have more than us and are worse than us and annoying to us and doing wrong to us.  And yes there is evil and there is need for protection and need for perseverance.  But don’t let this drive you apart.  Don’t let this make you insular and just going for your own thing.  Choose to love.  Choose to commit and give and forgive.  Choose to do what you can to overcome these problems.  Choose to spend yourself on building others up.  Ask God for gifts that will most help other people.  Don’t make excuses for yourself, saying that your thing is to really know the bible or that your thing is really knowing how to prophecy and that other people can do the people stuff.  That’s to misunderstand eternity, that’s to focus on the temporary rather than eternal.  Just choose to build up other people, and then pray like crazy for the Spirit to equip you to do it.

Psalm 100:1-5

His faithfulness continues.