The following message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. Song of Songs chapter 2 beginning in verse 1. This is indeed the word of the Lord, so please give it your full attention as it's read to you. I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among the young women. As an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow. His fruit was sweet to my taste. Well, this is indeed the word of the Lord. Amen. You may be seated. I invite you to pray with me. Our great God and Father, we look to you. We pray that you would feed hungry souls today. We long to see our Savior, and so we pray that by faith we might glimpse him today. We pray that you would use your word to, as we heard this morning, transform our very minds. that you would change the way that we think, that you would change the way that we feel and love, therefore change the way that we live. So Father, please draw our hearts up to higher views of the Savior. We pray that we'd behold him and that our hearts would rise and run after him. We ask this in his name, amen. If you were to kind of survey a little bit of church history and kind of look at who is preached to the Song of Songs or who would be most notable for their sermon series to the Song of Songs, a few names would come to the surface, but maybe more than all the others would be the name Robert Murray McShane. And I want to read to you what a little portion of McShane's sermon on this text. He said, some people, are afraid of anything like joy in religion. They have none themselves and they do not love seeing it in others. Their religion is something like the stars. Very high, very clear, but very cold. When they see tears of anxiety or tears of joy, they cry out enthusiasm, enthusiasm. Well then, to the law and to the testimony. I sat down under his shadow with great delight. Is this enthusiasm? O Lord, evermore give us this enthusiasm. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing. If it be really in sitting under the shadow of Christ, let there be no bounds to your joy. Oh, if God would but open our eyes and give us simple, childlike faith, to look to Jesus, to sit under his shadow, then would songs of joy arise from all our dwellings. Rejoice in the Lord always, and I will say it again, rejoice. What seems like McShane, was touching on something in his day that we would find also in our own. And that is that there can be, I don't know how subtle it is, but we'll be generous, a subtle temptation or a subtle drifting towards what we might call an austere disposition or posture in the Christian life. We think that the more I grow in Christ, the more it looks like I'm eating a very, very sour apple. The more in love with Him, the less I smile. The more I know Him, I laugh almost never and even then accidentally. And you could at times, looking at such a Christian life, say, You know, they talk of joy, but I just don't see it. They talk of delight, but delight must look really different in their life. There's this idea where maturity means less joy, less fun, more scowling, and that's how you know you've really, you've got it dialed in when it comes to religion. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Psalms don't say at my right hand are scowls forevermore. At my right hand are joys forevermore. Pleasures without boundaries. That's the thing that we as Christians say that's what relationship with Christ is like. Fuller joy, more pleasure. We shouldn't even be ashamed to say so. There is a difference, and this is where we get from preaching quickly into meddling, between knowing Christ and delighting in Christ. Do you understand the difference? Someone can say I know a lot about Christ. I can tell you where he was born. I can tell you the theology of the virgin birth. I can talk to you about how he grew in stature and wisdom and somehow that all worked with him being God and man and what happened at the cross. I can explain all that. You could know all that and yet not delight in him one bit. The Christian life is not a bunch of fat-headed knowers. The Christian life are those who know their God and then because they know their God, delight deeply in their God. And so that's that very simple, that's the main thing I want us to get our hearts wrapped around this afternoon is that Christ is preeminently worthy of delighting in. and not just worthy of it, but he invites you as a sinner plucked from the very fires of his wrath, you're invited by him to delight in him. It's not like you are found delighting in him. He's like, ah, I never gave you permission, but you did it anyway, and so I'll just roll with it. Like, no. It's Him who calls us. Come, taste, see my goodness. And as Christians who have faith working and at work in the heart, we say, yes, Lord, I want to, but I need even help to do that. I need even help to do that. And so we wanna consider this idea of delighting in the Lord Jesus Christ, not simply just knowing about him, but knowing him and then in knowing him, delighting in him. And we wanna look at that under four headings this afternoon. And the first is this, there is no one like the Lord Jesus Christ. There's no one like him. It's not like, this is a terrible analogy, so we'll go with it anyway. Have you ever bought a vehicle and you thought to yourself, no one else really drives this vehicle, you buy it, and the next day, what do you see everywhere? That same dumb vehicle, everyone's driving it, unless you're around here and you drive Fords, in which case you feel like a fish out of water, but that's a different matter altogether, especially when yours breaks down. It's not like Christ is like that. You find one of them, you find 800 of them. There's no one like him. There's no one in all the earth like this one. And so as we approach this text in the Song of Songs, looking at verse three, we wanna consider the, well, we've mentioned that there's more than one way of seeing the Song of Songs, right? And some would take it as a love poem exulting the glories and the beauties of human marriage. And I've not been shy with, well, the fact that I don't think that that's what the song is trying to do, but in this text, almost more than maybe any other text, the disparity between the two interpretations could not be further from one another. So those of you who look at it as a marriage manual or an exaltation of human marriage would look at this and on the very, very conservative side would say, we find in verse three, Scriptural evidence is that a wife should compliment their husband. No husband was brave enough to say amen, so we're just gonna move on. Is that a true thing? The wives might be thinking, well, give me something worthy of compliment, and I'll compliment it. That aside, we'll set that aside. Is it true that either spouse should compliment and love and dote on the other one? Well, absolutely, absolutely. I just am not convinced that this is, well, the primary reason why Solomon wrote this. I don't think Solomon was like, you know what, she doesn't say, you know what, I'm gonna write this down. Like, no, I don't think that's what's going on. The more extreme side of things, I won't even venture to mention the things that they would draw from texts like this and others. On the conservative side, Phil Riken would be one of the illustrations of those who would take it as Christian marriage. And the main point of the chapter that he wrote on this verse, his thesis is chemistry is crucial to romance. And I'm like, yeah? I'm not arguing. Then he goes on to quote Billy Joel. I'm not sure who he or she is, but that person said, tell her about it. Tell her everything you feel. That's dangerous advice. Give her every reason to accept that you are for real. I'm going to say this is not what Solomon had in mind. But if it is Christ in this church, well, wouldn't that be just a drastically different message altogether? If this is Christ in his church as I think it is, this is one of the ways in which the church thinks about him or feels about him or approaches him. These are our words, verse three. This is our message, this is our heart. When tuned rightly to what God is doing in our life, this is the way that Christians ought to think and to feel. I love Pearton Thomas Boston says of this verse, he says, that this song is literally, although in a continued allegory, meant of Christ and his church, and that it is not at all meant of Solomon and Pharaoh's daughters. You can see Boston pulling no punches. whatsoever on the way that he approaches the Song of Songs. He says, this is plain, unabashed Christ and his church. And I think passages like this make it abundantly clear that that's exactly what's going on. So as verse three opens up before us, these are her words to him, and they should have felt familiar. If you would just drop your eyes back one verse to verse two, you'll notice a theme or a pattern. As a lily among brambles, so something beautiful among, well, things that aren't so beautiful, so is my love among the young women. Now, she, in responding to his declaration of love, Christ speaking to the church, The church responds to him. Grace begun by the bridegroom now taking root in the heart of the bride. Now that root bearing fruit in the way that she speaks of him, she says of him, An apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. She's shaped and molded by the way that he's spoken to her and how he's worked in her life and now she mirrors it right back beautifully to him. right out of the gate, as she says, as an apple tree. I will say that that is a very free-flowing translation of what she actually says. The word she uses, it's not like we can take our view of an apple and apple trees here and be like, they had that back then. Like, no, no, they didn't. Apples don't do so great in Israel. So the word she uses, it just means like a round fruit. which is not all that specific. But it does tell us it's a fruit tree, and that's about all that it tells us, now that it has two functions. But I don't want you to think like, were they red delicious, or were they Granny Smith's? Because that's gonna change how I view it. Like, no, it's a generic word for fruit tree kind of a thing. And one commentator by the name of McLean says that, or the particular tree that's mentioned here, it's not our apple tree, which is not prominent in Palestine and in any case isn't that great at providing shade. It may be a reference to the citron tree, a tree of rich foliage which is always producing fruit. So it could encompass lots of different things from oranges to pomegranates. If it's oranges, I can jive with that. Pomegranates are the worst. And don't come up to me afterwards and tell me, like, no, you don't appreciate them. It's a bunch of little nasty seeds. It's all that it is. And yet, you guys throw it in everything. So, the point is, he's a fruit tree, and that fruit tree has two effects in the life of his bride. Number one, he provides shade. Number two, he provides fruit. And the bigger point, even beyond that, if you take your comparison, an apple tree among forest-type trees, It's simply this, there's no other one like him in all the world. That there's no other Savior like this one. There are those who might propound to be such a thing, there are those who might say that there's something, but no one actually is like the Lord Jesus Christ. Among all the young men, this one is unique. Secondly, we want to consider that Christ is the rest of his people. He invites them to find refuge in his shadow. If you look at verse 3 in the second half, she calls him again, my beloved. Again, iterating over and over again. It's not just that the church should be happy with saying this one time. The church should be ceaselessly saying again and again to her Savior, the one that I love. Now we say that for two reasons. One of them is we say it to Him because we do love Him. The second is there a use where when we refer to Christ as our beloved, is there a way that we could do that where I'm reminding my heart of what is true? and what it needs to be reminded of. Isn't our heart so prone to, as one of the hymns we sing says, to wander after other loves? Isn't there a way in which the church, and we do it one to another when we're singing on a Lord's Day. We're actually reminding one another of what is true and what should be true and what we want to be true in our hearts. She does that here by, taking on the title or calling him my beloved and says that using the tree analogy that she with great delight we'll get to the delight part into the sweet part here in just a few points but she says with great delight I sat down under his shadow. So she's still using what we'll call the tree motif, for lack of a better term. She's not saying he is, well, glorious and casts a big shadow. Like, no, she's taking that tree analogy into the second half of the verse. And if you were to just step back a little bit from the text and say, okay, she says that she finds refuge is what's being depicted here, under a shadow. And then ask yourself, you know, I wonder if anywhere else in the Bible, people find refuge in a shadow. Well, you would find it all over the Psalms, and you would only ever find, I mean, unless my search is flawed in some degree, they only ever find refuge in God's shadow. There's actually no other, so there's times where it's the shadow of death, and that's a different thing entirely, or the shadow of the day, or the shadow of the, but when it talks about a person casting a shadow, and others then finding refuge in that shadow, it's only ever used of God, and a few times in the prophets, he says you sought refuge in the shadow of that country, and you couldn't find it. This idea of taking refuge under the shadow of someone, it's only ever rightly used of the believer finding refuge in God. And so I'm actually gonna say that Song of Songs doesn't break away from that and now introduce something new. It goes along with all the poetic ways in which we viewed this. Let me just read a few of them for you. Psalm 17, verse eight. Keep me as the, we actually sang this. Keep me as the apple of your eye. Hide me in the shadow of your wings. Psalm 36 verse seven. How precious is your steadfast love, O God, that children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wing. Psalm 91 verse one. He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. That's the only kind of language, when we use shadow and refuge language, it's only ever of the believer in the shadow of God. And the same thing's happening here. She says, I find refuge in your shadow. I find safety in your shadow. Christ is, for his people, their shelter. their shade, their shadow. And if you just work out some of the details of the imagery that's being used, the idea is hiding away from the hot, blazing, scorching Middle Eastern sun and finding both protection as well as rest. Those two going together simultaneously. And if you were to ask, well, has the song introduced This idea of the scorching effects of the sun anywhere previously. Well, you'd have to say yes. You'd back up just to chapter one and verse five. You would find the first reference to it. She says she's very dark because of the sun. But if you look at verse six in particular, I think it's relevant, number one, because it's in the song that we're looking at, but number two, it's, well, being said of the one who's finding shelter, she says, don't gaze at me because I'm dark, because the sun has looked upon me. When we exposit that text a few months ago, I suppose, we talked about how the church is a people who, yes, they've been saved, and yes, they've been forgiven, but we still live life out in a fallen world. And it's not just that there's problems out there, though there are, but who's the biggest problem that we've got? Don't say anyone else's name other than your own. I guess that could have been dangerous. You. The sin in this wretched thing. And here the husband provides shade and shelter and rest for his bride. You know, when the Puritans looked at that, they just said, well, take a step back and what is it that the bride is being sheltered from? The tree is Christ, and I think that it is, and the bride is the church, and I think that it is. Well, what is she finding protection from? What is she finding safety from? What is he a refuge to her regarding? And you could come up quickly with several lists. You could say, well, just the trials and the temptations of life. Is not Christ a shelter to you in those times? Or seasons where you're afraid? Or seasons where you're just riddled with anxiety or discouragement? Can you not run to the shadow of Christ and find rest there and find protection there? You know, absolutely. But the Puritans said, you know what? If we just took one big step back and said, what more than anything else does the church find refuge from in Christ? And any time it speaks of hiding her, or Him covering, even there I'm tipping my hand at the thing that we're referring to. What is Christ covering for? They would say it would have to be the scorching sun of God's wrath. The church runs to Christ. and finds shelter so that she escapes the very wrath of God. Let me just read two selections from the Puritans. John Owen says, when the heat of wrath is ready to scorch the soul, Christ, interposing, bears it all. Under the shadow of his wings we sit, putting our trust in him and that with great delight. Where Thomas Boston said, Christ became a shadow for poor sinners. He received all the scorching beams of wrath on himself so that he might keep them from his people. Come under Christ's shadow, you who fear the Lord's wrath. Here is a shadow for ease to you. Come, tempted souls whom Satan is plying with fiery darts. If you sit down under Christ's shadow by faith, it will be a defense to you. Come, you whose corruptions are rampant. Christ's shadow will cool the distempered heat of your soul. Come, all of you, whatever your case, What a beautiful way of picturing the way that Christ is the shelter of his people. There's no one else that we can run to to escape the wrath of God other than Christ. You can't hide in the shadow of your own sense of works or righteousness You can't run to the shadow of what mom and dad believed. You can't run to the shadow of, well, I was conservative and did pretty well with my life, all things considered. You can't run to the shadow of this thing or that thing. There's only one shadow from which you can escape the wrath of God, and that's the shadow of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he is willing and able to welcome all who would flee to him to find refuge there. And so the song, while from the bride's perspective is extolling the excellencies and the uniqueness of the Savior saying he's able to save from wrath, it's also because it's in God's word a beckoning call to all who are outside of the shadow of Christ to flee to the shadow of Christ. So if you are here this afternoon and you do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, you are still under the scorching light of God's wrath. There's actually nothing and no one between you and a full punishment that is, it's full as well as eternal. And those two track side by side, a full and eternal punishment for your sins. And one day, if you don't find refuge in Christ, you will experience that wrath of God with no one in between. with no one to shade you, with no one to cover you, with no, we could say it this way, there will be no place to hide. Why would you risk your soul? Why would you spurn such a refuge as Christ? Why would you live any longer under the sun of God's wrath when you can find shelter under the sun of his grace? Why would you do that? He invites you, even by hearing this text today, to run to his sun and find shelter from the wrath that we rightly deserve. Christians, we should seek no other refuge. That's the bride's position, right? To those outside of Christ, a welcome and invitation to come find rest in Him. To those already there, if you're a Christian, you're saying, I know what it is to find shelter and rest in the shadow of Christ. Rejoice and revel in such a Savior as that. Say with the bride, among the young men, No one like him. And it would then cause that bride to be so, or that church, to be so satisfied in him that the petitions of other false shadows or refuges would crash like waves on a rock. They would be nothing to you. Why? My shadow of Christ lacks nothing. What do I need that he has not provided? He has not partially shaded me from God's wrath, he has fully shaded me from God's wrath, and so as a bride fully convinced and then experiencing the sufficiency of her heavenly husband, she'd need look no further. Why would she ever abandon such a one as him? Why would she ever toy with gods that aren't gods? with refuges that cannot save. Why would she go to steal from a Jeremiah's language? Why would she go out in the sun and dig and scratch out cisterns knowing full well they can't hold water? when she has the fountain of living water right there with her. Oh, church, we should rejoice that Christ is really what the word mercy seed is, that covering, that protection from the wrath of God. Thirdly, we wanna consider Christ as the one who nourishes his people. It doesn't just save them from the wrath that is coming, but he actually is a nourishment of his people. Notice at the end of verse three, she said, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. Those are the two important elements of the tree that the bride sings about. She says this fruit tree does two things. It gives abundant protection as we just looked at, but it also gives abundant fruit. If you can read, The end of verse three, and I know that, well, I harp on this a lot, and if you talk to Charlie, he'll harp on it a lot, and this is just like we're, let's say, a record that's skipping or a CD, but both of those would be archaic ways of talking about it. We talk about this a lot. If you could read the end of verse three, or I guess all of verse three, and not be thinking about a particular garden, You need to read with new eyes. You need to read with eyes that would say the Bible is one whole story, front to finish. And everything in between that, there's just these wonderful themes and motifs that flow through all of it. And so if I could come to a text and read of a fruit tree that nourishes the inhabitants of a garden, and I'm not thinking, well at least backward to where we started in the Garden of Eden, and then probably a bit, I'd say more importantly, but that's maybe debatable, and then just as importantly, about the garden that's ahead of God's people. Oh, I've been robbed. I've settled for such a low view of the text. I've read with such bored eyes that are too familiar with these things that they've lost some of that excitement in seeing the themes woven throughout scripture. The bride says of him, essentially, my Eden, my paradise. How can you not get thrilled when you see things like that? She describes him as one who gives abundant fruit to his people as well as shade, and that he gives plentiful nourishment. I mean, there's obviously, there'd be nowhere in the New Testament, right, where Christ in speaking to his people, say to them, I don't know, something like, my flesh is true food and my blood true drink, right? Like in, well, John 6 as well as other places. Christ over and over and over again presents himself as being an overflowing fountain for his people. And the bride experiencing that, not just knowing it cognitively, knowing it experientially, says of him, he has fruit and it's sweet to the taste. That sounds a whole lot like the temptation with which the serpent deceived Eve. Didn't she look upon the fruit and say it was good to the eyes and pleasing for the taste, offering her something other than what God had provided, and yet that being the empty promise of temptation, Christ is the full, right, rich enjoyment offered to his people. He's the one who calls them to come to him and find all that they need. So you might step back and say, well, I know that this is picturesque language, right? We understand Christ isn't a fruit tree. We understand that it's a metaphor that's pointing to bigger things. So what is the fruit that Christ's people receive from him? What do you receive from Christ that is nourishing and refreshing and sustaining to your very soul? You might say, well, how much time do you have? Does not Christ, maybe this was the first fruit you pulled from the branches, offered you peace with God for the first time in your life? And was it not sweet to your taste? Maybe the second fruit that you reached in the branches and pulled forth and tasted was adoption into his family. That you're now a son and you're now a daughter. Not in the game of make believe and not in the way where it's like, eh, we're close to that family, I call him aunt or uncle, you know, however it works out. Like, no, no, no, you really are brought into the family of God by the Lord Jesus Christ. Maybe another, maybe a fruit a little higher up and you've not all the way laid hold of it yet, but one day in eternity you will. You're made heirs of glory. You've received, and this is one that you will have received now, you've received the very Holy Spirit himself. You've received peace in your conscience. Do you remember what that was first like? Maybe if you're saved really, really young, you don't remember the first time, but if you're saved later in life, maybe you can recall the first time the waves of your conscience were still. It's a fruit that Christ gives. It's not just a first time kind of a thing. You can still daily find in prayer and repentance a stilled conscience. Isn't a stilled conscience a beautiful thing? Really is beautiful. You find not just those things in Christ, but you find access to God. You could go on and on. You could start going around the room, not that we would do so in this format or with the time that we have left, but you could go person by person and say, what fruit of Christ have you received? And each one could bear testimony to that. Notice, she doesn't say, and I behold from a distance, look, there's fruit on that tree. I bet it's good. She experientially takes in Christ. This is not like those who would read, this is what bothers me so much about YouTube reviews. People watch a YouTube review, there's lots of things that bother me about YouTube reviews, but this is one of them. And they think after watching one of those, they know something about the thing that they, you don't know squat. I don't care if you saw it on YouTube or a review, you don't know anything yet. And for you to go forth and then say, well, I watched a video, I know all this stuff. You don't know anything. I don't wanna hear from somebody who says, well, I watched a video about it. I wanna know from the person who tasted and saw. Now that person knows in a very different way. One has what we could call like cognitive or cerebral understanding of maybe a few little things. The other person knows what it tastes like. Knows the texture and the smell. And they could speak to you on a level that the first one can't even dream about. we would be really, really, well, just coming and falling way short if we left this section of verse three behind without mentioning, well, at least one other thing. Was there a particular tree in the garden that way? and in the garden that awaits us that way, that would stand out of real importance? Well, you'd say yes, obviously you're asking, so the answer must be yes. What tree would that be? The tree of life, absolutely. And in Christ, is there a flaming cherub bearing a sword against you, barring your way so that you can't go to him? No. No, he welcomes you. What else does the tree of life show us? If it doesn't point to Christ, well I don't know what it points to. Here she says of him, my tree. You could insert in there the tree of life itself. Not just this idea, not this disembodied set of ideas. The person, the man, the Lord Jesus Christ. Revelation 2 verse 7, Christ says to one of the churches, to the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the paradise of God. If that doesn't sound so much like what we're reading in verse 3, I don't know where we're getting off the tracks. Fourthly and lastly, we want to consider Christ our chiefest delight. Christ our chiefest delight. And you notice she said it twice. She said it in two different ways. She extols Him as being unique at the first half of verse two, among all the trees of the forest, among all of the young men. But then she says at the end, with great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. Those are emotive, effectual, experiential kind of words, right? She knows what it is to experience the shade of the tree. She knows what it is to experience the taste of the fruit. She could say, as Robert Marie McShane said, to her, Christ is more precious than all the saviors in the eye to that believer. That there's no one, excuse me, like Him and His superior delights. His superior pleasures will drive or chasten out the lesser ones in her life. Christ is not a cheap Savior. Christ is not a Savior where you're kind of like, you go over to someone's house and there's not a whole lot of food, so your first portion would barely satisfy a small child, but you're trying to be polite. I guess I'm the only one who's thought this through. And you're worried about taking too much. That's not this kind of Savior. This Savior is full. This Savior is a delight to his people. This Savior is, to drive with the metaphor, sweet to the very taste. Thomas Manton says, oh, taste and see. You will find enough in Christ to spoil the relish of all other pleasures. As the sun puts out the fire, the idea is puts out the need for the fire, so does this greater delight make carnal vanities tasteless? We are never so satisfied, I think this is where John Piper stole this, we're never so satisfied as when we're most fruitful, when most powerfully drawn. This, I mean, whether it's Manton or Edwards or Piper, the same theme is run through many throughout church history. When I drink in deeply the delights of Christ, those other things fade. And so when it comes to being transformed in our minds, as we heard this morning, or putting off and putting on, and just basic Christian life and change and sanctification, the problem so often isn't that I love this, whatever this thing is, I love this too much. It's the other side. I love him too little. And the more that I run and drink deeply in Christ, these things pale. These things lose their luster. They lose the allure. When you feasted at Christ's table, you're full and delighted in him. The idea with regards to pursuing for lack of a better term, just the pursuit of holiness in the Christian's life. So often we just say like, no, no, no, no, instead of Christ, more. and more, I need more of him. I need a bigger view of him. I need more delight in him. I need to drink him down more deeply, more fully. That will prove a far more powerful tonic against sin than simply no, don't, no, don't. That only does so much. but being convinced in your inner man, down in your bones, that there's no one who can satisfy like Christ. You will just see these things grow thankfully dim in the light of his glory and of his grace. In closing, Robert Murray McShane says, some people think that they'll be saved because they've got a head knowledge of Christ. They've read Christ in the Bible. They hear of Christ in the house of God, and they think that is what it means to be a Christian. It's not fully true, is it? A Christian is one who delights much in the Savior. A Christian is one who at his invitation, took him up on his offer, taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are all those, how does it end? Take refuge in him. That's what a Christian is. That's what a Christian is. Someone who runs and hides in the Savior and then freely tastes of him and says, there's no one like this. Not in all the world. I wanna spend the rest of not just my life, but the rest of eternity with this one. That's what a Christian is. Let's pray. Our great God and Father, we pray that you would help us to eat and to drink deeply of the Lord Jesus Christ. Father, we pray that you would stir up our hearts to love him more fully, that you would cause our desires for other things to just fall by the wayside when compared to his excellencies. Lord, we confess we've loved him too little. We confess we've sought other shadows to hide in and we've eaten from other trees. Oh God, draw us back to the only shelter, the only one who can nourish his people. May we say with the bride that he and he alone is our beloved, more than all the others. We pray this in his name, amen. We hope that you were edified by this message. For additional sermons as well as information on giving to the ministry of Grace Community Church, please visit us online at gracenevada.com. That's gracenevada.com.