2022-5丨General Subject：Loving the Lord and Loving One Another for the Organic Building Up of the Church as the Body of Christ

General Subject：Loving the Lord and Loving One Another for the Organic Building Up of the Church as the Body of Christ

Message Two Song of Songs—the Progressive Experience of an Individual Believer's Loving Fellowship with Christ for the Preparation of the Bride of Christ

I. The subject of Song of Songs, a poem, is the history of love in an excellent marriage, revealing the progressive experience of an individual believer's loving fellowship with Christ for the preparation of His bride in six major stages:

A. In the first stage of Song of Songs, the lover of Christ is drawn to pursue Him for satisfaction (1:2—2:7); the Lord wants His seeker to have a personal, affectionate, private, and spiritual relationship with Him:

S.S. 1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! / For your love is better than wine.

S.S. 1:3 Your anointing oils have a pleasant fragrance; / Your name is like ointment poured forth; / Therefore the virgins love you.

S.S. 1:4 Draw me; we will run after you—The king has brought me into his chambers—/ We will be glad and rejoice in you; / We will extol your love more than wine. / Rightly do they love you.

S.S. 1:5 I am black but lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem, / Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.

S.S. 1:6 Do not look at me, because I am black, / Because the sun has scorched me. / My mother's sons were angry with me; / They made me keeper of the vineyards, / But my own vineyard I have not kept.

S.S. 1:7 Tell me, you whom my soul loves, Where do you pasture your flock? / Where do you make it lie down at noon? / For why should I be like one who is veiled / Beside the flocks of your companions?

S.S. 1:8 If you yourself do not know, / You fairest among women, / Go forth on the footsteps of the flock, / And pasture your young goats / By the shepherds' tents.

S.S. 1:9 I compare you, my love, / To a mare among Pharaoh's chariots.

S.S. 1:10 Your cheeks are lovely with plaits of ornaments, / Your neck with strings of jewels.

S.S. 1:11 We will make you plaits of gold / With studs of silver.

S.S. 1:12 While the king was at his table, / My spikenard gave forth its fragrance.

S.S. 1:13 My beloved is to me a bundle of myrrh / That lies at night between my breasts.

S.S. 1:14 My beloved is to me a cluster of henna flowers / In the vineyards of En-gedi.

S.S. 1:15 Oh, you are beautiful, my love! / Oh, you are beautiful! Your eyes are like doves.

S.S. 1:16 Oh, you are beautiful, my beloved; indeed, pleasant! Indeed, our couch is green.

S.S. 1:17 The beams of our house are cedars; / Our rafters are cypresses.

S.S. 2:1 I am a rose of Sharon, / A lily of the valleys.

S.S. 2:2 As a lily among thorns, / So is my love among the daughters.

S.S. 2:3 As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, / So is my beloved among the sons: In his shade I delighted and sat down, / And his fruit was sweet to my taste.

S.S. 2:4 He brought me into the banqueting house, / And his banner over me was love.

S.S. 2:5 Sustain me with raisin cakes, / Refresh me with apples, / For I am sick with love.

S.S. 2:6 His left hand is under my head, / And his right hand embraces me.

S.S. 2:7 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, / By the gazelles or by the hinds of the fields, / Not to rouse up or awaken my love / Until she pleases.

1. Draw me is personal (1:4); the Lord said, “I drew them with cords of a man, / With bands of love” (Hosea 11:4a); this indicates that God loves us with His divine love not on the level of divinity but on the level of humanity; the cords of a man through which God draws us include Christ's incarnation, human living, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension; it is by all these steps of Christ in His humanity that God's love in His salvation reaches us in a personal way (Rom. 5:8; 1 John 4:9-10).

S.S. 1:4 Draw me; we will run after you—The king has brought me into his chambers—/ We will be glad and rejoice in you; / We will extol your love more than wine. / Rightly do they love you.

Hosea 11:4 I drew them with cords of a man, / With bands of love; And I was to them like those / Who lift off the yoke on their jaws; / And I gently caused them to eat.

Rom. 5:8 But God commends His own love to us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

1 John 4:9 In this the love of God was manifested among us, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might have life and live through Him.

1 John 4:10 Herein is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son as a propitiation for our sins.

2. Kiss me (S. S. 1:2) is affectionate; after believing in Christ to receive Him as the divine life (John 1:4,12), we need to love Christ in a personal and affectionate way that we may pursue Him and enjoy Him as our satisfaction; Psalm 2:12 commands us to “kiss the Son”; kissing Christ is the enjoyment of Christ.

S.S. 1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! / For your love is better than wine.

John 1:4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.

John 1:12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the authority to become children of God, to those who believe into His name,

Psa. 2:12 Kiss the Son / Lest He be angry and you perish from the way; / For His anger may suddenly be kindled. / Blessed are all those who take refuge in Him.

3. In her pursuing of Christ the seeker is brought by Him into her regenerated spirit as the Holiest of all (his chambers—S. S. 1:4) to have fellowship with Him; His chambers indicate a private relationship with the Lord.

S.S. 1:4 Draw me; we will run after you—The king has brought me into his chambers—/ We will be glad and rejoice in you; / We will extol your love more than wine. / Rightly do they love you.

4. Furthermore, because Christ visits us in our regenerated spirit as His inner chambers, our relationship with Him must be spiritual; He visits us in our spirit privately, coming to us in a spiritual way, not in a physical way.

5. All the spiritual principles are contained in this first stage of the seeker's overcoming life in Song of Songs; the lessons that follow are not new, but they are old lessons repeated in a deeper way; regeneration brings the gene of God into us, and all the experiences of our whole Christian life are in this gene—1 John 3:9.

1 John 3:9 Everyone who has been begotten of God does not practice sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been begotten of God.

Morning Nourishment

S. S. 1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.

4 Draw me; we will run after you—the king has brought me into his chambers...

After you have received Christ as your life, you must have a very personal seeking after Christ. No one can represent you or do anything for you in this matter...Every believer’s relationship with Christ must be personal and affectionate.

In these days I feel very much that there is a warm, intimate, close affection between me and my God. The seeker said, “Draw me.” She did not say, “Draw us.” Draw me is personal ... All the religions, including Christianity,...portray God merely as great, almighty, sovereign, majestic, and even unapproachable; no one can or even dares to touch God. To say that God is majestic is not wrong, but that is only one attribute of the Divine Being...When He wanted to build up His relationship with man, He took the personal, affectionate way. He took the way of becoming a man... He did not come to Peter as the majestic, untouchable God. Instead, He came to Peter as his countryman. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 3, “Crystallization-study of Song of Songs,” pp. 257-258)

The apostle John could recline on the Lord’s bosom (John 13:23). How personal and affectionate that was! The very God, the very Lord whom we seek, sets up a feast and invites us to feast with Him (Rev. 3:20).

Every morning after rising up I go to my desk, and the first thing I say is, “Lord Jesus, I love You.” I am not just a poor man praying to a merciful God, but I am contacting a Savior who is personal and affectionate to me, as I am personal and affectionate to Him. We all need to take heed to what the seeker says: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” Right away her tone changes: “Your love is better than wine.” This is a personal, intimate prayer. “Draw me; we will run after you.”

To pursue Christ for satisfaction is the first “crystal” in Song of Songs. The second crystal is the King bringing His seeker into His inner chambers... In a figure of speech the king’s inner chambers signify our regenerated spirit as Christ’s inner chambers. God created man so that man may become Him by His being received by man so that He can enter into and stay in man. For this reason God created us with a spirit. According to the New Testament teaching, our regenerated spirit is not only for us to have a means to receive Him but also for us to contain Him. Second Timothy 4:22 says, “The Lord be with your spirit.”...Ephesians 2:22 shows that our spirit is a habitation, a dwelling place, to God. The real inner chambers to God are our spirit.

Christ, as the last Adam, became a life-giving Spirit. Christ as the life-giving Spirit dwells in our human spirit, and these two spirits are mingled together to be one spirit (1 Cor. 6:17). Christianity preaches the physical Jesus, but we preach the pneumatic Christ, the Christ who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17)...He visits us in our spirit privately, and He comes to us in a spiritual way, not a physical way.

Christ the King brings His seekers into His chambers, that is, into their regenerated spirit, His dwelling place... According to our experience, our spirit is the Holy of Holies—the dwelling place, the inner chambers, of the Triune God. The king drew her and she followed, but she did not know where to go [S. S. 1:4]. The King knows where to go. We must go to our spirit. The inner chambers of Christ are His lovers’ regenerated spirits mingled with and indwelt by Him as the life-dispensing Spirit (Rom. 8:16; 2 Tim. 4:22; Rom. 8:11) and are the practical Holy of Holies in Christ’s lovers for their participation in and enjoyment of the pneumatic Christ as the consummated Triune God (Heb. 4:16). (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 3, “Crystallization-study of Song of Songs,” pp. 258, 260, 263-265)

Further Reading: CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 3, “Crystallization-study of Song of Songs,” chs. 1-12