preach in the Song of Songs, and we're doing that right now. And in fact, I'm going to stay in the Song of Songs for the next few weeks. We're at a good break point in the Book of Acts for just a few weeks, but I'm going to stay in the Song of Songs for the next few weeks. into Easter. Now next week, Calvin Taylor will be here. Our dear missionary friends, Calvin, I think Gita will be here as well. Is that correct? Yes. As they are laboring in India and Then we'll have a few weeks leading up to Easter and we're going to follow the Song of Songs up to Easter Sunday where we will find in chapter two of the Song of Songs, the bridegroom standing in a garden that is bursting with new life. the shadows are fleeing, love has been awakened from its slumber, and he is calling to his bride, arise, come away with me. And there we will see the Song of Songs capturing so much of the beauty and wonder of the resurrection of Christ. So that's where we're headed as Easter approaches, as we take this short break from the book of Acts. This morning, we're going to continue our admittedly sporadic series in the Song of Songs by looking at verses 7 through 11 of chapter 1. I remember as a kid learning to go off of the high dive at the swimming pool. Maybe some of you remember that experience yourself. And I remember the terror of climbing up the ladder. I don't see high dives anymore like we used to have. Maybe they're still there. I don't know. But I remember the terror of climbing up the ladder. farther and farther from the ground, looking down, being afraid. I remember the shame of climbing back down the ladder because I was too afraid to jump off. And I remember the absolute thrill when I finally had the nerve to jump into the water from the high dive. And you do this as a kid and what you're afraid of, you find out once you do it, there's this explosion of life and joy and laughter and this whole new world is open to me as I delight in jumping from these great heights and soaring through the air and land in the deep end of the pool. And I think our approach to the Song of Songs is, for many of us, a little bit like that experience. And I have made the proposal to us for a long time now that the Song of Songs is one of the most theologically rich books in scripture, and that we're meant to read it as a Christian text with the Lord Jesus Christ at the very center of it. which means for us that to read the Song of Songs is to jump from a great height into the deep end of the theological and Christological ocean of Scripture. So that's kind of what we're doing and because it is so strange, to the way so many people read the Song of Songs today. It can feel a little scary, a little nerve-wracking, a little disorienting. I think the temptation as we read the Song of Songs in this way is going to maybe just be to give up, to climb back down the ladder and flatten out the song so it's not so deep or we're not jumping from such great a height. But I hope that you will continue to dive in with me. and explore the heights that are here and the depths that are here where we are always going to find new surprises, new joys, new wonders, all of it centered on the person of Christ who is our bridegroom and who's presented to us on every page in this book in particularly. So let's look at verses 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 in chapter 1 here. And we begin with the bride speaking to her bridegroom in verse 7. Hear God's holy and inspired word. Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock? Where you make it lie down at noon? For why should I be like one who veils herself beside the flocks of your companions? And then now the bridegroom speaks. If you do not know a most beautiful among women, follow in the tracks of the flock and pasture your young goats beside the shepherd's tents. I compare you, my love, to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots. Your cheeks are lovely with ornaments, your neck with strings of jewels. And then we have a chorus that stands aside and comments on and encourages this love between bride and bridegroom, and they say, we will make for you ornaments of gold studded with silver. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever. The first question that the Heidelberg Catechism asks, so many of you will know this, is what is my only comfort in life and in death? And then the answer it gives is my only comfort, I'll need to look at this, in life and in death, is that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. What's your comfort? I'm not my own. I belong in body and soul to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. Now, as we're looking at the song this morning, I want you to see that you belong both in body and in soul to your faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, that He loves you. I want you to see that He loves you. I want you to see that He loves all of you, body and soul. And I want you to see that you're called to love Him. both in body and in soul. And I wanna begin with the soul, which we find spoken of first in verse seven. The bride is speaking to her bridegroom and she addresses him as you whom my soul loves. We're at the beginning of this dialogue here between the bride and the groom. The bride is looking for her bridegroom. He's not around. She's wondering where he is. He's a shepherd. He appears to be out shepherding, tending to his flocks in the field somewhere. And she's out looking for him. Where is he? Where does he pasture his flocks, she's asking. maybe something a little bit like a whimsical game of hide and seek between two lovers. And in this moment, he is hiding and she is seeking and she's running around. Where is he? Where is he? There's something here, I think, in her search for her bridegroom and longing for him that's akin to the words we find at the end of the book of Revelation where Jesus, the bridegroom, says, surely I am coming soon. And John replies, come Lord Jesus. There's this longing for him to show himself to us, to find him. And that longing is all through the song from the bridegroom, from the bride to the bridegroom. And we see that here, we feel it. here so with the bride right away we we call out where are you whom my soul loves whom our souls love and you know This is poetry here. The part of the wonder of poetry is that it brings us to inhabit it on a deeply personal level. So we read this and we're there with her longing for the bridegroom. We're invited into this reality in which the simple matter is we are ever longing for Jesus. To see him, to know him, to feel his presence, to be near him, to hear his voice, There's a sense in which we could read this as her longing even to be one of His very sheep. In verse 7, there are clear reverberations and connections to Psalm 23 as the shepherd makes his sheep to lie down in the pastures, and we would connect that to lying down beside still waters in Psalm 23. where he, the psalm will say, restores my soul. And there again is that idea of our souls, our very souls engaged in this love that exists between Jesus and his bride. And she here in longing for him, she's longing for her soul to be restored. And it can only be restored when he is with her, because she loves him with her very soul. you sense this thrill of desire for him. with the deepest and most intimate part of who she is, she loves him. You are the one, she's saying, whom my soul longs for. Her soul belongs to him, and so that's what she calls him, you whom my soul loves. And this is a phrase that occurs five times in the book of Song of Songs, here, and then four times at the beginning of chapter three, in 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4. It's always the bride speaking of her love for the bridegroom, a love that affects her very soul. Now as you read the Song of Songs, one of the questions we want to be asking anytime we're reading the Bible, but especially in a book like this that is so rich with biblical imagery throughout that connects to so many other places in Scripture, we want to ask how would a Scripture-saturated believer read and understand the words of this song. Remember, we're reading this as a Christian text, and that's why we see Christ and his church as bride and bridegroom here. But we're also reading it as a text that connects to so many other places in Scripture. And if we're saturated in Scripture, what are we gonna see as we read these words, as she says to her bridegroom, you're the one who my soul loves. We've already seen a connection to Psalm 23, as he is the shepherd. I think the most significant connection with her soul love for her bridegroom comes in Deuteronomy 6. You're gonna know these words from Deuteronomy 6, starting in verse four, it says this. It says, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And then it says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And then it goes on and tells us something of what we're to do with this love. And it says, these words that I command you today shall be on your heart, you shall teach them diligently to your children, shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. They're gonna be stuck right in front of your eyes all the time. This command to love God with your very soul, And it says, you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. This passage is called the Shema. The Shema is a Hebrew word. It's a command to hear. And the idea of the Shema extends beyond merely hearing these truths, but allowing these truths to sink into all of who we are, into our very souls. The Shema holds a place of central importance among all of the commandments given to Israel because it defines the very essence of our relationship with God. It says, the Lord is one, we have only one God, and we are to love Him with everything in our being so that our very soul belongs to Him. The Shema, if you really think about it, is a picture of extraordinary excess in loving God. Not only do we love Him with our heart and our soul and our strength, everything of what we are, We're to bear this love to God on our hearts. We're to teach this love to our children and we're to talk about this love to God when we sit in the house and when we're walking, when we're lying down, when we arise in the morning. It's a love that is to consume us and define us. control all of our waking moments and shape the entirety of our lives so that when someone looks at us, they will see the love of God written across your very soul. They'll say that that person belongs to Jesus. You can see God's love written on them. Their soul belongs to Jesus. And so here in Song of Songs, when the bride speaks of he whom her soul loves, she's calling us into this really radical and excessive love of Deuteronomy 6 that marks one off as entirely belonging to God. It's just written all over you. I had a friend in college who, he toured Europe and he hiked around. And you know, you tour Europe, you backpack, you stay in wherever you can find a place as you're moving along. And one night they arrived at a house. a hostel and they stayed there. The next morning they left. And then when they left, they looked back at the house and the word bedbugs was written right across the front of the house in giant letters and saying, look, this is what this house is all about. It's all about this. It's written all over it. Now, I don't think they ended up with bedbugs, but that kind of forces the question. What is written all over you when people look at you, when they see you? Are others able to see that in your soul you love Jesus? and you belong to Him because you've written your love for Him across every single thing you do, across every part of your life, across everything that you are. Charles Spurgeon calls this soul love in verse seven, a vehemence of affection. Vehemence means passion or vigor. And the bride here exhibits that vigor in every page of the song. In fact, she begins it in verse two, at the very beginning of the song, when she says, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. Now, those are words that Spurgeon, when he's talking about this, he'll say, if these words make you uncomfortable in reference to Christ, you don't know how radical Christ's love is and how radical our love should be for Christ, is what Spurgeon would say. And what's clear is this bride is infatuated with him. Infatuated with him, down to her very soul so that there's no decorum here. There's no, you know, decency and an order that we as Presbyterians like to celebrate. Let him kiss me, let him kiss me. And in the New Testament, what the bride embodies here is really fulfilled, particularly in that woman who comes to Jesus when he's dining at the Pharisee's house and she starts to kiss his feet. Remember that woman? There's no room in her world for any restraint whatsoever when it comes to the reality that her soul belongs to Christ and that she loves Christ with all of her soul. And so she does not stop kissing his feet. The Pharisees don't know what to do with her. The Pharisees are offended and they reject Jesus because he did not reject her. We can't have that. He doesn't even know who she is. And with the implication being she's not someone of good character and they reject Jesus because he does not reject her. He just let her keep kissing his feet. And as the meal winds on, I mean, this is extraordinary. As the meal winds on, Jesus eventually says to the Pharisees in Luke 7 45, you gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. The New Testament woman who will not stop kissing Jesus' feet is the fulfillment of this Old Testament woman, this bride, who says that her very soul, everything that she is, loves Jesus, belongs to Jesus. She's a living picture of that reality. And dear friends, your souls belong to Jesus. They do, they do. He loves you. Your souls belong to Jesus in such a way that every single contour of your life should speak of this radical reality that he is the one whom our souls love. What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul to my faithful savior, Jesus. Our souls belong to him. Verse seven there, and our bodies belong to him also. This becomes clear in verses eight, nine, and 10, as the bridegroom now speaks to his bride. This is him speaking and speaking to her for the first time in the Song of Songs. And his attention is, it's on her body, not as a depersonalized object for his pleasure, but as an essential part of who she is. His bride has a soul and a body, both, and both are essential to her personhood. So he praises her beauty in verse eight. In his eyes, she is the most beautiful among women. In verse nine, he compares her physical appearance to a horse, okay? So, you know, maybe that was appropriate back then, maybe you don't wanna do that today, but he compares her to a horse, particularly, not just any horse, but a mare among Pharaoh's chariots. And now this right away connects us to how God set his love on Israel as he drew them out of that bondage in Egypt under Pharaoh. He set his love on them. He saw them as beautiful and he called them out of that slavery to be his own. And then verse 10, he praises her cheeks and her neck, which are bejeweled and beautiful. praises her cheeks and her neck. He'll go on in the song to praise her eyes, her hair, her teeth, her lips, her mouth, her breasts, her tongue, her feet, her thighs, her navel, her belly, her nose, her head, even the scent of her breath. In the song, she is to him a garden with the choicest of fruits and a fountain in whom he delights. Now all of this to say you cannot escape the embodied physicality that is ever present here in the Song of Songs. And here his focus is on her neck and her cheeks. Her soul and her body belong to him. And in this way, the song becomes, in many ways, a mirror of what we read in Ephesians 5, as Paul talks about human marriage. Paul says, in the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it. That's what we're reading Christ doing here for his bride, nourishing her and cherishing her. And that's why Paul says, just as Christ does the church. And then Paul says, because we are members of his body. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church. Isn't this interesting what Paul is doing? Paul looks at how a husband nourishes and cares for the physical body of his wife, the physical existence of his wife, and he sees right away Jesus in that reality, in that marital reality. Paul uses the word mystery. He says it's profound that in God's divine ordering of creation, A man cherishes his wife physically, the flesh is in view, her body is in view. And Paul says this kind of human physical love reveals and expounds Christ's love, Christ's cherishing for his bride who is the church. So the church in scripture is frequently defined, not just in spiritual terms, sometimes often is in spiritual terms. We are the temple of God. Those are spiritual terms, the place where God's spirit dwells his people. But often the church is described in its physicality, in fleshly, bodily terms, especially as it is called so frequently, the body of Christ. And when the church is called the body of Christ, this brings a special emphasis on the bodily, physical reality of who we are as God's people. God loves all of us, every part of us belongs to him, our souls and our bodies. Christ who came in the flesh as our bridegroom nourishes and cherishes us as he is here in verses eight, nine, and 10. He cherishes our flesh because we are members of his body. And it would be an absurdity to reduce the love of Christ to merely a spiritual realm that maybe touches on our souls, but has nothing to communicate to our bodies. That's a temptation, I think, at times, to think of our existence and our existence as Christians merely in spiritual terms. I love, as you know, the old-time gospel music. We should have an old-time gospel music hour here sometime and come and play. In fact, I've signed up for, I saw that the youth group is doing a talent show, so I've signed up for it, and we might do some old-time gospel music, I don't know. I'm not in the youth group, don't tell them that, but I'm playing. And we've got banjo and mandolin and we're, anyway. I love the old time gospel music, but so often, such good songs with often such bad theology. And the theology, I think of the song, I'll Fly Away. I might've mentioned this to you before, I don't even remember, but it's such a good song. Terrible, terrible theology of the body. So it says, when the shadows of this life has gone, I'll fly away. When I'm dead, I'll fly away. Okay, we got that. And it says, like a bird from prison bars has flown, I'll fly away. What it's doing there is viewing the body as a prison where our souls will one day escape it and fly away and then we'll be who we were meant to be. It's an ancient heresy, in fact, called Gnosticism that focuses so much on spirituality that it rejects the goodness of the human body and our physical existence. In its most extreme form, Gnosticism teaches that matter itself is corrupt and the human body is evil. It's a prison that you have to escape. And it teaches Christ only appeared to exist in human flesh, but it was just an appearance of that. The Song of Songs, think about what's happening here in the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs crushes those ideas that our existence is only spiritual, that God's love for us is manifest in only spiritual ways. Because here what we're reading is Jesus the bridegroom, delighting and caring for and praising the very flesh of his bride. And so the Song of Songs emphasis on the human body. Particularly the bridegroom's delight in the body of his beloved reminds us that we cannot separate our physical existence and our physical nature from our spiritual nature and our souls. We are one person, both body and soul together. So the communication of Christ's love to us involves both the physical and the spiritual. The notion of God nurturing his people is on almost every page of scripture. And we find in the garden, God feeding his people physically and spiritually. We find God feeding his people physically and spiritually in the many, many different feasts of Israel. We read that passage in Deuteronomy 14 where God's people as an act of their spiritual worship are to bring their tithes and then God tells them to eat their tithes. So that worship then in Deuteronomy 14 is a spiritual act that engages the body and nourishes both. Make a feast out of it is what he's saying. We read prophetic promises throughout the Old Testament of an eschatological feast with rich meat and well-aged wine. And of course, have the Lord's Supper. It looks forward as a foretaste of the wedding supper of the Lamb, feasts that feed us and nourish us spiritually, but not just spiritually, also in regard to who we are as embodied people in union and communion with Christ who came in the flesh to save us. and all of these biblical portrayals of God feeding his people in all kinds of different ways, and we're gonna see it over and over again in the Song of Songs, is basically the bride and groom, they feast on each other in essence. All of this is a reminder that our bodies matter to God, and we are physical beings, and God interacts with us in physical ways by nurturing and cherishing us, and offering to us the very body of Christ, which is life to us. Some of you are getting older. This is not me, so I'm not preaching. No, this is me. You're getting older, and your body's start to fall apart, and you're weak. For me, it's my eyesight that I've been noticing the last few years. so many other ways that I realize I'm not as strong as I once was, or all kinds of things. Or maybe you're sick, you're old enough that you're sick and there are serious problems, and you might be tempted to ask the question, what is the goodness in this human body? Is there any goodness in this body? It's broken, it's a shell of what it used to be, it's not what it should be. You're old and you're feeling that. Some of you are young and you're feeling that. You're not entirely sure what this body is for. And maybe you don't like the body that you have and you're fearful of how you appear and you're tempted to question the goodness of the human body that God has given to you. And to all of us, the Song of Song says, Both our bodies and our souls belong to Jesus. He loves the whole of who we are. And so, as we're reading through the Song of Songs, sporadically, but we'll be in it the next few weeks anyway, the bridegroom's delight in the body of his beloved, it's not an accidental thing, it's not an incidental thing, it's not a side note in the storyline of Scripture, it is central to the physical, fleshly, bodily reality of who we are. We are loved by God in our flesh by a Christ who came in the flesh, who cherishes us as his flesh, and who nourishes us with his own flesh. What is your only comfort in life and in death? Isn't it this, that you belong to Jesus in body and in soul? He is the one whom our souls love, our souls belong to him. And He is the one who delights even in our bodies, our physical existence. You know that Christ's love is written across your soul? You know that Christ's love is written across your body so that He delights to call you flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone? He loves the whole of who you are and he will cherish you and nourish the whole of who you are. And he's doing that right now as we hear his word and as we come to this meal. So let's pray as we come. Heavenly Father, we rejoice that you have granted us life in Christ and that you have written your love across every aspect of who we are. And we pray that we will find comfort as we come to this meal, that we are not our own, that we belong to you as your bride in both body and in soul. And so bless us as we meet you here in this meal, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. We invite you to stand as we come to the Lord's Supper. We will sing together Psalm 45, a portion of Psalm 45. You'll find it in the bulletin. It is the tune of Crown Him with Many Crowns.