Lasting Love

Hello, and welcome to the Salt Church Podcast. Thank you for tuning in to this week's message. Join us as we explore God's Word, providing practical teaching for day-to-day living. The message you are about to hear was recorded live at our Sunday morning worship experience. If you would like to learn more about Salt Church, please visit us at saltchurch.

org. We hope that you are encouraged by today's message. do it with the kids. It's not ever back there. So, but we're starting with today, we're going to pick up from last week, and we know that we understand, we think we understand human love.

And so we've sort of seen as we've gone through this book, we've seen this whole courtship process and the marriage process and the weaving together these couple of lives. And we've also seen last week sort of that disillusionment phase and the first major conflict that they've had. and I want to just pick up from there. As you get into chapter six, we're just going to touch on a little bit of this, but the important thing as we know that conflict happens, we need to know that resolution should also lead to restoration. And so chapter six in there, I'm going to give you guys a little charge to read a little bit of that on your own.

There's only 13 verses in it, so it's a really short piece to read. And so guys, I want you to look through chapter six and look about how he follows up. The whole Song of Songs sort of goes back and forth between the man speaking and the lady speaking. And at times there's some friends that sort of chime in a line here and there, but it's mostly them going back and forth very poetically. So men, when you read through chapter six, you're going to see that he talks about her being beautiful.

He says she's irresistible. She's special. He even says she's celestial. You know he messed up big. And he's really trying to make up for that.

And he's using that kind of language because that's important to help restore the relationship. And ladies, when you read chapter six, you're going to see they make up and they celebrate. The lovers anticipate a whole new season of love and they acknowledge it. And they even announce that they're in this new season of love. So they've moved past just the conflict and they're not just sort of ignoring it or putting it behind them.

They're trying to grow from that and see what's in the next season of love for them. And the one thing we know if we've been in a relationship for any length of time is that that cycle will repeat. We grow in our intimacy through facing the conflicts, working it out, and we celebrate new seasons again and again through a relationship. If that stops, your marriage stopped growing a long time ago. If you're not going through that cycle, it's not like you finally get through it and it's all peaches and roses from that point forward.

It's going to happen again. If you don't think the conflict is happening or if it's not happening, your marriage isn't growing. You probably need to don't try to cause conflict. I'm not saying that. But you want to look at, you know, what's really going on in our relationship?

Are we really investing in it? So you want to make sure you're not just ending relationships, but you're seeking real God-given restoration. And that means more than just the forgiveness and acceptance of forgiveness in the relationship. It means knowing that there's some patience sometimes and there's some silence at a lot of times that prepares the way to that restoration and that reunion. You want to seek to move from sort of ingratitude to appreciation of your wife.

You want to move from pride to humility in relation to them. And that will help you find fresh evidence of your love. That's what you want to see as sort of that fruit and that restoration process. So in the final section of chapter six, what we begin to see is this aging romance of Solomon and the Shulamite woman growing in grace together. And so since Angie and I just celebrate our 30th anniversary and I'm sort of the old guy on the team here, that's why I think they picked me to share this message with you.

And if that's the reason, then it's my honor because this is a great book of the Bible and it's been a great one for Angie and I throughout the years of our marriage to sort of invest in. So the whole book Song of Solomon is 117 verses and those 117 verses, I can't sit for long, um, have been seen as a part of the really deepest sacred writings of the Jewish people along with Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations. Those Old Testament books, those five together are known as the five scrolls or the Megaloth. And what's important about that is this, some of those scrolls go back even before the time this was written, but every Passover, every year for thousands of years, that Megaloth has been read aloud. So the stuff we read about in the Song of Solomon, the stuff about how important love is, that's been an important part to Jewish people.

It's not just the Megaloth, they also call it the Holy of Holies. So when they talk about this love and this romance, it's not just like, oh, there's a nice little fluffy, you know, rom-com chapter of the Bible over here. No, this is the whole, this is a part of the Holy of Holies. They're reading through it at the most sacred time every year. Now, what's also interesting is that the New Testament quotes a lot of parts out of the Old Testament, but the New Testament, there's only a couple of books, Esther, Obadiah, Nahum, and the Song of Songs that never gets quoted.

It was still there, but then there's some important parts to do, but they, they, they, they lived that out all year round. And then they especially celebrated that at Passover. And so I say that to sort of remind us, we always want to remember where the beginning of our love comes from. And there's this idea of love at first sight that saw the cartoon somebody had shared that showed a couple that was greeting a pastor right after the end of the church service. And they said, Tony and I met during this morning's greet your neighbor time.

We'd like you to marry us today. That's love at first sight, but that's probably taking it a little too fast. And we know that love at first sight is just that it's just visual and it has to take time to develop a true and a deep love. And so Angie and I had, have the sort of love at first sight story we've joked about for years. And I know she's going to be a little embarrassed, but she knows we've, we've shared this with a lot of people before.

So, um, the story goes back to this. She was born two days before my brother in the same hospital. Back then you stayed a week or more in the hospital. So I know I would have gone to see my baby brother. He was in the nursery and one of the nearby cribs she had to be there.

So I know that's where it really began, but we have a hard time tracing that back. Um, not robbing the cradle cause I was pretty young too. Um, we know years later we were probably in the same gymnastics class. And then further on, we did meet in a church youth group. We were, we were out Christmas caroling together and sort of met each other.

And then just shortly after that, we were at this Catholic mass at the old cathedral right underneath the arch. And we sort of were at that thing. And then the whole group went up in the top of the arch and I knew right there that something was different about this relationship. And I was just, I really didn't have any idea what God had in store or what was all going on there. But I knew, and I know Angie knew that something was special there, but it took about five years later before we were married.

And then the rest is history. So a couple of things we want to look at and sort of chapter six here, guys, what you want to be thinking about in this part is to actively praise and pursue. That's a, that's a never ending process. That's something we think about when we're doing the courtship, but we see Solomon setting an example here that that doesn't stop after the courtship and after the marriage. That's something that continues on here.

Now, Albert Einstein, this is not somebody you would normally think of here, but we'll say he had a wonderful way of words when he was one woman. Um, so he went from equals MC squared. And then the gal, he was eventually going to marry Maleva Marek. This, this was one of the lines he wrote to her. If only you were with me, we understand so well, each other's souls and also drinking coffee and eating sausages, et cetera.

So sort of went a little downhill after the beginning, but we improve on the honeymoon. Now that was, that was what was meaningful to them. You know, for, if I said to Angie, we're going to drink coffee and eat sausages. She'd be like, I don't even like coffee. So it wouldn't work at all.

But for them that worked, but we, we do improve on the honeymoon when we actively praise our wives and we see in chapter six, that this man, Solomon has become more intimate, more sensual and developed his appreciation, his adoration of his spouse. So you want to make it a priority to regularly say something nice about your spouse, both, both publicly and privately. You want to be genuine. you want to be genuine. You want to be genuine.

Specific and personal. But then you also want to pursue or you want to expect that there's going to be some delight and you want to express a desire for her love. And that means that guys, you're going to have to be sort of creative here. And I know that's, that's tough, but God made you exactly to do that. So you don't want to wimp out on that.

That's where you have to sort of dig deep and say, you know, what did God give me to be creative in this process? I need to deepen in that process. But ladies, there's something for you here, too. There's a personal invitation. That you can make to sort of initiate this process.

And then there's also a public declaration of your affection. So you want to be able to publicly declare it. And we'll see a little more as this develops with their relationship as we go through here. But in modern terms, even if that's just posting like a silly cat meme or Star Wars meme or something like that on your spouse's Facebook page, that's publicly expressing the desire, publicly expressing your affection. So as we get into chapter seven, we see the woman makes a personal invitation for love.

She makes it specific and spontaneous and she makes it sensual. She makes that a known thing to her spouse. And she also declares her affection publicly and she shows loyalty and strengthening of those bonds, a dependency on one another. And so she's not ashamed in that. And so at the end of chapter six, we're going to sort of move into looking a little closer to the text in seven and eight here.

At the end of chapter six, Solomon surprises her, comes in with the royal chariot, whisks her way on, you know, for like another honeymoon out in the countryside. And they leave Jerusalem and they're publicly declaring their love for one another and everybody's sort of cheering them on. So that's sort of the scene that's set here. And so what we want to sort of take out of that last little piece here is what we need to do together. Accept the passionate expression privately.

So tenderness is all about timing. So to be passionate, it has to be personal, but to be truly passionate, your love has to be a few more things. And aside from being just kept private in its expression, and I'll give a little more about that here in a moment. We want to be looking at what it really takes to create lasting love. And that's the main thing we want to look at in these last little pieces of the Song of Solomon is what does it take to create lasting love?

And as I keep going through that, every time I read lasting love, if you're thinking about they're just married and he's sort of treating her as men as her princess, the phrase that keeps going through my head is true love. And so if you know Princess Bride, I was going to play the video clip, but it gets a little longer. So I had a wedding I did for some people once, and they wanted me to dress in this outfit and actually do these lines. So I know the lines a little bit. We didn't actually do it because the mother-in-law sort of stepped in.

But he says, marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today. Marriage, that blessed arrangement, that dweem within a dweem. Then wuv, twu wuv, will follow you forever. So twezza, you're, no, it goes on.

He gets cut off a little bit. So just know every time we talk about lasting love, I'm hearing twu wuv in my head. But so Angie and I, if I look back at some of our family history, you know, there's some divorces, there's some different things and different relationships there. But there's also some very long marriage that set an example for us to never really even consider the idea of divorce. My dad died a few years ago, and they were just a little bit shy of them reaching their 50th wedding anniversary.

And Angie's, or actually my mom's parents reached their 67th wedding anniversary, and both sets of the great-grandparents on that side were around 40 years before one spouse or another passed away. On Angie's side, her parents were married right at 50 years before her father also passed away a few years ago. And both sets of grandparents there have been married over 50 years as well. In fact, her sister tracked it back to her great-great-grandparents. They got married in Terminia and Merse, Palermo, Sicily in 1878.

And then I also looked up earlier, I was wondering, well, what's the longest? Because they were married a long time. There's a Karam and Qatari Chand of England. And just a couple of years ago, one of them passed away. But they were actually married on the 11th of December, 1925.

And when the one passed away, they had been married 90 years, 291 days. And every one of those days meant something. So we want to look at what they're talking about here in the Song of Solomon. He wraps up at the end of 6 saying, My dove, my perfect one, is unique. She's her mother's only daughter.

She's the pure child of the one who bore her. The maiden saw her and called her blessed. And then it goes back to the man speaking here at the beginning of chapter 7. He says, How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince's daughter! Your graceful legs are like jewels, the work of an artist's hands.

Your navel is like a round bowl that always has mixed wine in it. Your waist is like a mound of wheat that's surrounded by lilies. Okay, so we want to break that down a bit. Now we know he's sort of head over heels in love for her, but he sort of starts this description from heels going up to head. So he's starting with her feet.

And feet are, you know, sort of a sensitive topic sometimes. So he's starting with that, but he's talking about her feet. And he sort of moves on up her legs and is describing things here. And as you look around the room, if you look around even right now, you know that women are sort of exquisite in the way they dress. And men are best sort of hygienic.

So women, you know, the season and the style. And, oh, we're not doing this anymore. It's a rainy day, so I'm going to do this. And they've got all that figured out. And, guys, if we've got it buttoned up and tied, we're here.

That's usually about it. And guys can sort of make fun of each other. If you're walking in church and somebody looks over and says, you know, hey, you're a fat-bellied, bald-headed dude or something like that, you can say that to another guy and it's just like, yeah, hi, and you high-five and you're fine. But if you start talking like that to a lady, you're going to risk your life. But what we know in this, the reason I'm sort of making a little fun here is that the years are rarely kind to any of us.

And God made women able to bring life into the world with their bodies and everything else. It's an amazing process. But things do change. Things change over the years. And that is a good thing.

It's okay. The woman that's here in this part of the story is not the same woman that we saw earlier. It's the same woman. But her body's changed. But he's still looking and appreciating who she is and where she is at this stage.

And he's going to continue to do that. Your wife wants to know, has she crucified her worth for an unappreciative man? Did a lot of years of counseling with couples. And I know if you don't affirm and appreciate what you have, then she will find a way to affirm and appreciate that elsewhere. And it all sort of goes downhill from there.

So we see him sort of moving up. And he describes her waist as a mound of wheat, as in binding sheaves. Now, wheat is sort of an autumn crop. And he also describes in that same verse her describing her navel as a goblet of wine, never lacking in wine. That's sort of a spring crop.

So what he's saying here is God's blessing in every season is the early rains and the late rains. And we saw plenty of some of the early rains coming in today. But that cut grain, when they would cut it up, he's trying to picture that image because you think of these blowing wheat fields. But they would bring it up a hand. And they would grab as much as they could.

And they would sort of bind that together. So you can sort of see that profile. And we know, okay, that sort of describes he's thinking about the shape of the lady that he loves. And so what he's really saying here is these are descriptions of bounties that come from the field that provide sustenance for them. So he's saying, you are God's gift to me.

In Proverbs it says, houses and lands are from fathers, but a good wife is a gift from God. And so as we dive a little more into this text, the first thing we want to sort of be listening for as we go through all these verses today is that lasting love is... Love is permanent. And if that seems a little redundant, that's okay. Lasting love is permanent.

That's the thing we need to look for. Now it describes, there's three different words that are used that are sort of known as the enduring flames of love. The three flames of love are these. Raya, and this isn't in the text in Solomon, this is from elsewhere, but these words get used to describe love and they get translated as one word in our language. But Raya, that word means a friendship.

Kind of love. It means a companion or someone to hang out with, but it can also mean something deeper. It can mean soulmate, that your will is bent toward them. And that's something you do want in your relationship. We also have what's known as ahava.

Ahava is a commitment love. It means the will. You'd rather be here with them in the moment than anywhere else in the universe. You're going to hear later some phrases like strong as death and a river cannot quench it. That's the decision to join their lives together.

And that's what really makes things last. That's that ahava, that commitment. Commitment love. And then the last one is dode. Okay.

It looks like D-O-D, but dode refers to sexual love. And literally, if you try to translate that, it means carouse or rock or fondle. And so when he's saying your love is more beautiful than wine, the word is actually your dode is more beautiful than wine, which sounds really weird when you say it that way. But the word dode is, it got the same root where the Greek word eros comes from. And that we know that word is erotic.

So that's what that word dode means is basically erotic love. And we're wired for all three of those things in a healthy marriage. And so when all three of those flames are burning together, that's when you have sort of that big flame that's burning bright in your marriage. So as we go into chapter seven, a little more here, I'm going to share some of these verses out of the message version. So if you're following along and the words sound a little different, I'm just doing that because it's got a little extra punch of poetry in it.

He says here in verse seven, as it continues, your breasts are like fawns, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is a carved ivory, like a tower curved and slender. And so we see here, he's finally gotten past sort of the goat analogies and some of the things we've joked about in some of the previous weeks. So those were very valid and they were beautiful. If you look at them in the right cultural context, but he sort of moved past this and maybe they didn't keep working for so long.

He sort of, you don't hear any more of the goat kind of examples here. But the other thing, he mentioned the tower of ivory here and archeologically, they don't have any example ever of there being an actual tower of ivory. So he's describing something here that would be precious and rare and beautiful. That's how he's describing her neck. He says, your eyes are wells of light, deep with mystery, quintessentially feminine.

Your profile turns all heads, commanding attention. The feelings I get when I see the high mountain ranges, stirrings of desire, longings for the heights. Now, in the other translations, he mentioned specifically Mount Carmel here when he's talking about these high mountain ranges. And that's not just a magnificent place to see, but it's also a symbol of some great faith. So when he's saying Mount Carmel, he's picking out a very specific place.

That's where Elijah has sort of his contest with the prophets of Baal up on that mountaintop. So that's a very holy place. It's not just a beautiful place. He says, remind me of you and I'm spoiled for anyone else. So what he's saying here is nobody but you, babe, nobody but you.

He says, your beauty within and without is absolute, dear lover, close companion. You are tall and supple like the palm tree. Now, when he says tall and supple, there's an important thing here because we don't usually think about getting taller as we age. But he's pulling in a specific example here because the palm tree is one tree that gets more fruit as it gets older. So if you're getting older up there in the years, you know, we've still got a lot of good years ahead of us.

But as you get older and up there in the years, your usefulness and your fruitfulness should not necessarily be diminishing. That's something that we should be bearing more fruit. Those things should cause that. And God designed it that way. He says, and your breasts are like sweet clusters of dates.

I say, I'm going to climb that palm tree. I'm going to caress its fruit. Okay. That's where you're glad that there's not pictures in this part. The Bible is he's getting very specific here.

In fact, the word for desire there is to shoot. It means to consume when it comes up in other places. The Bible. So he's just like. He's he's in full to shoot mode.

He says, oh, yes, your breasts, your breasts will be clusters of sweet fruit to me. And marriage is nourished by fruit. The fruit of these things. God intended sex to be a wonderfully fulfilling part of marriage. And we've seen that through all these chapters.

It's meant to be protected inside the marital relationship and ministering to one another's needs. He then says, your breath clean and cool like fresh mint. Now, he's talking about some intimate kissing going on here. And if you look over in the book of Job, he talks about your breath is offense. My breath is offensive to my wife is what Job says.

Very different phrasing going on over in that book than over here. And I know after a cup of coffee, Angie will be reminding me to like pull out a breath man and pop something in there because I would rather be Solomon than Job in this example. And he sort of wraps up his little piece there by saying, your tongue and your lips are like the best wine. Now, wine usually gets equated with joy whenever it comes up in Scripture. OK, when they talk about Jesus turning the water into wine at the wedding, it brings great joy every time it comes up.

And that was a broad cultural thing. So in a nearby civilization, there's a Babylonian love point. I think she might have a picture of it up there for us. This was written. They date to somewhere around the 18th century B.

C. And this is the phrase that they translated off of that, that love poem there. It says, my beloved knows my heart. My beloved is sweet as honey. She is fragrant as to the nose as wine, the fruit of my feelings.

So we see that, you know, some of these examples and these things, these phrases he's using about love were sort of common culture. They weren't unique to that culture, but they were very common at that time. And what's different is that on this Babylonian love poem, it never gets in anything where it talks about the sanctity of that relationship. It doesn't ever get anywhere outside of the dode part of the love in its descriptions. It never talks about the commitment.

It never talks about some of the other pieces. It just talks about that erotic part of it. And so when Solomon is ending this up here and saying your tongue and your lips mean more than kisses, it's her words. It's more than just the kisses. It's that he feels safe in her.

He trusts her words. And women, this is important because your words, especially in public, outside the home, even more than in private, can cut pretty deeply. So if you're single, there was an example a couple of years ago, we're off at a conference. It was a ministry kind of conference, and there's a couple of young guys. And we couldn't find this one guy.

We're asking around, and I said, you know, where's Mike? And the young guy says, well, he's out looking for a P31 model. And I'm like, no, he's like, yeah, the scuttlebutt is looking for a P31. I had no idea what they were talking about for a minute. And all I can picture in my head, I don't know why we're at a church conference, and he's, I'm thinking like P31 Mustang.

Like a little model I built when I was a kid. I can't think of any other example. What he's talking about is Proverbs 31. He's figuring he's at a church conference. If he can meet a single young woman that fits Proverbs 31, it says, the heart of her husband trusts in her.

She will never hurt him. That's what he was looking for. He was trying to find the right gal to hook up with. Not to hook up with. That's the wrong one to say.

He's trying to find a P31 model. Ladies, I want to ask, you want to ask yourself, are you a P31 model? You might, at times, have to take your husband's hand and ask for his forgiveness if you've said some things outside the home about him or online about him. They might have gotten back to him, and if they haven't, when they do, they will hurt him. And I know this is something, personally, I appreciate this so much about Angie, because as I look back, she has never intentionally gossiped or trash-talked me or anything like that to others.

And even when something's rarely been, you know, maybe come out the wrong way or been said unintentionally that could have been hurtful, she's asked for forgiveness. And that's another reason I love her, and I know that's a powerful reason behind what helped the relationship last between Solomon and the Shulam. And so that reminds us the devil will do anything within his power to come between God and our Christian marriages. Jesus stands defiantly between us and Lucifer, because if we could only see what God sees when he looks at each one of us, if I could see what he sees when he looks at me, I would experience immense unimaginable joy and glory. But we buy into the devil's lies.

We believe that God is an angry God, and he's looking for this opportunity to just sort of pounce on us. But nothing could be further from the truth. The devil is filled with jealousy when he sees us have a great relationship with God. And especially when he sees that great relationship reflected in our marriage, in our relationship with our spouse. And he's going to try to do anything he can to undermine that.

So we see the groom's happiness here is all focused on his bride. The bride has his full attention. How beautiful and how pleasing you are, my love. How happy you make me. And so we want to try to grasp that love and reconnect with what it means to have that love beyond comprehension.

So the woman picks up the next part of the verse here and she says, Yes, and yours are too. My love's kisses flow from his lips to mine. And so she picks up from his verse, sort of like in a concert, a violin and a cello, just picking up one note from the next, just very fluidly. He says, tongue and lips are like the best wine. And she picks up and basically says, and it goes down smooth.

I am my lovers. I am all he wants. I'm all the world to him. She responds and deeply and strengthens that bond between them like no other woman can. She wants to spend time with him.

And so we hear a phrase like a good wife is the crown of a husband. And that phrase goes way, way back. And we need to understand the crown is not his clothes, his watch, his car. Those are things that might be proud of if you got something cool. And even back to them, you know, his palace, that was not his crown.

OK, her head, her countenance was seen as her nobility. So it's her head, not a rock and body or anything else that makes her crown, that makes that that nobility for her. And that's when he said when we hear a good wife is the husband's crown. That it's her countenance that we're really looking at there. So Song of Solomon, she continues, says, come, my beloved, let us go to the countryside and spend the night in villages.

Talking about sort of the villages where she grew up. Let's go to the early vineyards and see if the vines have budded, if blossoms have opened, if pomegranates are in bloom. And there I will give you my love. She talks about love apples will drench us with fragrance. Fertility surrounds and suffuses us fresh fruits and preserved fruits.

Now, what fruits is she talking about here? We've heard grapes, figs, dates. She's talking about her sexuality. She's saying this is this is what I have here. And she says, I've kept and saved them for you, my love.

So she's expressing the sanctity of marriage. These are these are kept and saved for that time. And when you hear the term love apples here, the the other word that gets translated as what it really is referring to is something called a mandrake. OK, so she talks about old fruit and new fruit. So other than if you remember, mandrakes come up in a couple of Shakespearean kind of stories that you might have read also back in the Old Testament story between Leah and Rachel.

They were sort of fighting over who was going to give mandrakes to Jacob because they were seen as something that increased potency or fertility. And they want they both want to have kids. So they were sort of fighting over who was going to give him the mandrakes. And that seems sort of weird. The the mandrake without going too far with this, it resembles a certain body part of man.

The roots of the the plant do. And so that's why they were had that sort of rumor there. So she's talking about here. She says every delicacy new and old. And so we want to think about we have ways of touching one another that we know it's them and only them.

It's distinctly and uniquely your spouse. So if Angie or I sneak up behind each other and, you know, put her hands over their eyes, we don't even have to guess. We know who it is. You know, there's a certain way you hold your hands, go arm and arm the certain way that you hug. And you know who it is.

That's old fruits. It's comfortable and familiar. That's the preserved part. I read somewhere that if a couple doesn't hug seven times a day, your blood count actually lowers in hemoglobin. Now, I'm not 100% sure if that's true.

I read it in one place. I don't know if it's been validated, but it's good enough to be able to turn to your spouse and just at any moment say hemoglobin attack. And, you know, I need some hemoglobin and just get a hug. Those are good things. Those are familiar.

Those are comfortable. And those are distinct ways we love each other. But you don't want to discard that old and familiar. She's also bringing new. She says, I've got the old fruits preserved, but I've also got new fruits here.

And the magic of long term romance is having a bit of both. So the woman in the Song of Songs is imaginative, creative. She's becoming a better lover from week to week and from year to year. So we might think we've mastered passion in the modern age, but this is like 3000 years ago. They were mastering this stuff.

And again, this goes back to this being part of the Holy Holy. So mastering biblical passion is just as meaningful and worthwhile a challenge today as mastering righteousness or investing time in prayer. That's something God's expecting of us. He's expecting us to master the idea of biblical passion. And so the next thing I want to look at is here that is that lasting love is persevering.

And this is where we sort of hear that that phrase that I mentioned earlier. Many waters cannot quench love. Rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned. So the story of them began in the spring and it sort of spring again.

So the romance is staying alive. And I don't want to let the relationship with my wife become mundane or typical or classic or even worse, just sort of dead or junk. I want us to be the nice white headed lady and that bald guy headed off down in another sunset, walking down the beach hand in hand, still dating many years from now. The book that we're talking about here, if you look through it, we've talked about a lot of things, but it never talks about two specific things. It never mentions the guy's job and it never mentions the couple's kids.

And so two of the most dangerous things you can build your marriage on are career and kids. Okay. We can sort of think about how the career can be destructed in marriage, but kids are something expected here. There's, there's some hints of this, but they never talk about kids directly in this book. There's an expectation of that, but you don't want to build a marriage on just the kids because at some point, Angie and I had this a couple of years ago, the kids are both off to college.

And if that's all you've put into it, then you're going to be sitting there looking across the table one another going, wait a minute, who, who are we? Why are we together? What's, what's going on here? So if you need to, you know, tonight, hang up the phone, call a babysitter, go out for the night. In fact, I don't even know what you're waiting for.

If you're texting a babysitter right now, setting something up, that's totally fine. Um, so if we get into the last part in chapter eight here, I'm going to sort of move back to the NIV version. She says, if only you were to me like a brother who was nursed at my mother's breast. Then if I found you outside, I would kiss you and no one would despise me. Now, when you first read that, you're like, sounds sort of Kentucky hillbilly something.

So I have friends in Kentucky. I don't want to insult them, but there's that thing. It's like, wait, what's going on here? And we want to sort of put a little context on this. If you ever visit Israel and you do this, someone's going to pop you upside the head.

You do, you don't do that. So, um, and that's a general culture thing. Like if you go into like the Muslim court in Jerusalem, I mean, you can't be wearing shorts. You can't bare shoulders. I mean, they'll pop you for a lot of things, but everywhere.

If you show any public display of affection between you and your spouse, it's not good. Now you can see two guys, whether they're brothers or not, they're going to hug each other. They'll kiss each other. There's a couple things you've been doing before that. Hello, Neil and 사�ki the driver is going to become the only way of wahrscheinlich.

What did you do today? They'll walk hand-in-hand down the street. Grown men. That's totally fine. Same thing for women, but if you and your spouse sort of lean in or hug each other or walk arm-in-arm down the street, you're gonna get popped on the side of the head.

So, what she wants here is some, all she's really saying here is, you know, if we were brother and sister, I could display my affection with anybody around. I wouldn't have to hold back at those times. And she just wants some of that freedom to be able to display affection to her husband Solomon. I know in today's day and age, we still haven't gotten over sort of the whole PDA's thing here, but that's a good thing. We want to remember that the passion, that part of it, we do want to keep that private.

She has a little bit here where she mentions the daughters of Jerusalem again, and she charges them not to arouse or wake in love until it so desires. And her friends respond saying, who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning on her beloved? Now, we just talked about that sort of PDA thing. They see them in the distance. They're coming back from this trip.

They're still in sort of the private, they're in the wilderness, but they can see in the distance, like, okay, she's leaning on her, she's talking. They know that that affection is there. They know that it happens. They, you know, by the time they get back into town, they'll probably have a little comfortable distance there. All right.

So, she continues and says, under the apple tree, I roused you. Now, there's a couple different trees in the Bible that seem to sort of go along with different things. Anytime in the Bible they talk about a fig tree and somebody rests under a fig tree or sets by a fig tree, there's always this meditation and sort of thoughtfulness that's going on. If they're talking about an olive tree, the olive tree almost always represents Israel and sort of God's promises. So, that's the olive tree.

But here we're hearing an apple tree. And every time an apple tree comes up, it usually represents love. And like even in Adam and Eve, we don't know what the fruit was that they weren't supposed to eat, but we know we sort of represent that as an apple. That's traditional because an apple represents love. And that's sort of how we think back into that story.

But she says, she's under the apple tree. She says, there your mother conceived you. There she who was in labor gave you birth. Now, if you're married, you know that love is a labor. And this book might not be about bearing children.

But you know that love, that she's taking him back to this specific tree where he was conceived. Now, if we're thinking about this for a second, Solomon, who was his mom and dad? We're talking about David and Bathsheba, right? And we're not going to get into that story. That's a whole different racy story in the Bible.

And there's a few more stories out there, too. So if you're not reading in your Bible, I don't know what's holding you back. There's a lot more stuff like this in there. She takes him back to that same apple tree representing love. And even though sex isn't just about procreation, this is the one part where there is an implication.

You know, they're going to have children as well. She's taking them back to that spot for a very specific reason. So if you're in high school, you're in college, you're single, you know, your marriage, when that comes about and everything, it's going to be perfect. Right? You're wrong.

So marriages are hard work and they are painful. They're not just hard work. They are painful. We're going to hit times with the other person when they reach points that they're honestly unlovable. They will.

They will. And you will, too. It's going to happen. There's a pain of longing and separation. You know, maybe just they're out of town for a few days, but there's also that long deployment in times like that, where there's that pain of longing and separation.

There's a pain of insecurity when they're working late again or they're not answering your texts. And there's the pain of disappointment when we're just mortals. We're sort of booger heads at times. And we let the other person down despite our best intentions or our worst. The pain is equated sort of here to the labor of childbirth and the pains of raising a child.

And so despite that risk and that pain, that part's inevitable. But we also know that it's a blessing, that it's worth it. It's work and it's a labor, but it's worth it. And so she continues on to this thing here where we sort of hear this permanence coming back up. And this is one of the more quoted and I see people with, you know, this written in places.

It says, place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. In the book of Haggai, it also talks about making you like a seal, a promise, a kotham. And a seal was used to denote ownership. OK, so a seal would have been made a semi-precious stone. It would have been engraved with a unique design or some kind of inscription.

And it would have been used as a stamp to impress like a clay pot or a roll, something like that to show that that was a property. It belonged to the seal's owner. And when they would do that, it would signify that. So she's saying, you know, place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. This was a very valuable possession.

If you had a seal, that didn't get out of your hands. That was something you treasured. You had to protect. So the owner took careful precaution to not lose it. It would keep it close at all times.

So one kind of seal was sort of worn around the heart or on the neck, like a necklace. And the other kind would have been worn on the arm. So she's sort of saying, either way you're carrying this thing, if it's on your arm or it's here, and that's why she sort of has placed me like a seal on your heart. If it's hanging around his neck, that's right where it's hanging. That seal is right there.

And so figuratively speaking, it did rest on the heart. Now, she's saying here she wants to be intimate with her lover as the seal worn by him in your heart. She wanted a prime place in her emotions, in his emotions. She wanted to be on his arm. She's saying, you possess me.

We're together. You don't possess your old girlfriends. You don't possess your old love letters. You don't have the embrace of another woman in a friendly way. But you don't have these other things.

We possess one another. And your strength, your best is given to her. Your time is not indiscriminate. It's not just like, hey, I was at wherever. Your time isn't indiscriminate.

It belongs to one another. And she's precious. She's possessive of you and you're possessive of her. And if we keep talking, it starts to feel like something different. And that's where we can go too far in that direction.

This is not talking about a smothering kind of love. We're talking about a committed, caring, trusting relationship. We're talking about developing the relationship. That's the possessiveness they're talking about there. They value that thing.

It's not they're trying to smother it and hide it and protect it. They're wanting that to be something that blossoms. And so selfish love is the love that hoards. It keeps others away. It tries, you know, to just sort of smother and protect there.

What we're talking about here is trying to develop and encourage our spouse. So we want to help them grow. You want to be right there and cheering them on, doing the best they can. If she wants to learn bungee jumping, is that coming up, Angie? No, probably not.

But if she wants to learn bungee jumping, you are right there. Now, that also means that the bungee jump instructor doesn't get a long, soulful hug at the end. You know, it's a high five and yeah, we made it. So she then continues here. She says, for love is as strong as death.

It's jealousy unyielding as the grave. Now, our God is a jealous God. And that's a model for us. It's not an unhealthy jelly, but it is unhealthy jealousy. Did I say jelly?

It's not unhealthy jelly either, but no, it's not unhealthy jealousy, but it is serious as death and hell itself. So if I was officiating a wedding and I looked down and said, okay, for better or worse or richer, poor, as long as you both still live. And the bride responded like hell, it would be biblical. It wouldn't probably interrupt the thing a little bit, but that's how serious it is. He's saying like death and hell itself.

That's how serious this commitment is. That's what the Shulamite woman is saying to him here. And she says, it burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame. So love is permanent. And I want to just take a moment here and say, if you are in the midst of a broken marriage or you're divorced and that's going on, I am sorry.

And I know this is going to be hard to hear, but these things are true. So love. You are in the midst of this. You are. It's permanent.

Those things do leave a mark when we go through that kind of trauma. But God doesn't change. And so if that marriage is beyond hope or it's gone already, then we still love you. I know God still loves you. But when you turn and face another person to make those vows again, the rules still apply.

It applies to each one of us each and every day. So we might be changeable, immutable, but God is not. He's the model for our love. So love endures all things. Love never fails.

She says here, many waters cannot quench love. Rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one's house for love would be utterly scorned. And so the thing that pops into my head here when I'm reading through that is sort of a Paul McCartney lyric. Say you don't need no diamond rings and I'll be satisfied.

Tell me what kind of things that money just can't buy. I don't care too much for money. Money can't be satisfied. Okay, you know the song. Might have heard it.

But the love here is modeled on the love of the Father and that love doesn't change. It's unmerited and unbreakable. So you might remember a verse that you've probably heard at pretty much every wedding you've ever been to. And these three abide faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.

Right. And do you know why they say the greatest of these is love? I mean, faith and hope are really important too. But in heaven, we only have love. Love is never done away with.

We don't need faith. He's there. And we don't need hope because it's present. We're in heaven with him. But it's God's love.

He never changes. So the friends respond here and says and say some things here. And this if you're single or thinking about marriage and you're sort of in that stage, this is the best text in the entire Bible to sort of think about when am I ready to be married? Okay. And they're talking about love being protective here.

So that's the next point on our outline. I want you to think about a driver pulling several tons of equipment behind him in a car or Chris pulling the trailer to church. It requires more braking power and a longer stopping time. So we have to learn to keep plenty of space between us and sinful acts the same way that the braking is. We have to brake soon enough to stop before it's too late.

So how do we know when it's time to put on the brakes? When you're so busy that there's no time to be alone with God. You put on the brakes when you're too busy to spend at least one relaxed evening a week with your spouse and your family. When you feel you deserve more attention than you're getting at home. Or you need to put the brakes on when you wouldn't want your spouse to see what you're looking at or reading.

When the romance in your marriage is fading. You put on the brakes when you enjoy fantasizing about an inappropriate relationship. Or when some woman or guy tells you how wonderful you are and gives you signals that they're available. You put on the brakes when you start feeling sorry for yourself. And you put on the brakes when you think that God isn't looking or listening.

And so they say to her, we have a little sister and her breasts are not yet grown. For what shall we do for our sister on the day she has spoken for? They say, if she is a wall, we will build towers of silver on her. Now a wall is being very little here. They're saying she knows how to say no.

She has integrity. She's sort of learned to put the brakes on here. They say if she's a door, we will enclose her with panels of cedar. The doors are implying that she's open to some immoral choices and she needs to be protected. So they're talking about building up around her.

The family and friends are wanting to protect her. So if you're single and are going through some premarital stuff, one of the questions I'm going to ask you that's probably a more embarrassing question, and I don't marry anybody without sort of getting an honest response to this, is are you sleeping together? That has to change first. Because you're not ready to get married if you don't know how to put the brakes on at times. And that's tough.

It's a very tough thing to change. And I've had some people go through that. It's not an easy thing. But if you're single, how do you think other people view you? As a door or as a wall?

Can you lean on some friends to help hold you accountable in that? And so she responds saying, I'm a wall. My breasts are like towers. Thus I have become in his eyes like one bringing contentment, like one bringing peace. And when she says peace here, the word is shalom, which is if we could read this in the Hebrew, it's sort of a pun she's saying here.

And I like puns because the word shalom is actually sounds the same as his name, Solomon. So when she says that, she's really saying in his eyes, I found Solomon. So she's saying peace, but she's saying his name at the same time. And so it talks about him having a vineyard and she talks about her own vineyard is hers to give. And what we're seeing here is that she's saying you have to develop your character, your heart before you just give it away.

And so think about who protected her fruit. We've been talking about this fruit all the way through. Who protected the fruit for the Shulamite woman and for the friend that they're talking about? Her brother, her parents, those are the people who protected it. So you want to appreciate your parents, everything they've done to help set limits, set curfews, set rules, all those things you didn't appreciate.

Those were things that were done to protect. Appreciate what your family does and looking out for you. And when you start to get serious about someone, they're still there to protect you. So you don't want to ignore that. They're still part of your life.

As much as we cleave, they're there and they're still looking out for you and they're protecting you. They're protecting your fruit, your life, your happiness. So you might want to help a friend and say, you know, stay away from that fruit. That's for her husband. Stay away from his virtue.

That's for his wife. That's what we need to be saying and building one another up. And so the last point here says lasting love is peaceful. Solomon says, you who dwell in the garden with friends and attendants, let me hear your voice. And so she has a lovely voice and he's asking at the very end for her to sing to him.

And so the song ends with her singing a song of invitation to love. She says, come away, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or like a young stag on the spice laden mountains. It's a beautiful ending to that. And so the last thought we want to have here as we wrap up the series is that love is a choice that we make every day. Love is priceless.

Colossians 3.14 says, and over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Love is a choice we make every day. But we also know that being loved is what gives us the capacity to love. Love is powerful in that way.

We only have that capacity to love because we are loved. And that's true, not just in our relationship, but that's true with our father as well. First John 4.19 says, we love because he first loved us. I had some other tips I was going to sort of share.

I'm going to post those online. There's just some 10 sort of good ideas to do. You can check out the Salt Community page later and get some of those. But I want to look at the very end here about the Song of Solomon. And there's a whole different way to look at this text than the way we've been reading it.

And it's valid also. The way we've been looking at it is the way it's written, the way it's intended, is poetic. It's about that love. But it also all reflects the love between God the Father and us. And so you can read back through it more than once, not just about your relationship, but also looking at your relationship with God the Father.

So the Song of Solomon foreshadows Christ, the bridegroom's relationship with the bride, the church. Ephesians says, so husbands also ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does also for the church. You hear Solomon there saying, you know, you are more valuable to me than anything else. And Christ is saying the same thing about the church.

That's right. We should be saying to him and declaring our love and putting him first in our life and our affections. It's a picture of Christ's first coming. We see Solomon going up to Jerusalem to prepare a place. He's preparing that marital home for her and then he's promising to return and take her back there as a wife.

That's a perfect picture for, you know, Christ is here. He's going back. He's preparing that place for us, that home for us. So Jesus ascended into heavenly Jerusalem. He's preparing that place for us and he's going to come again a second time and take us home to live and to reign forever with him in that palace in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Our bridegroom is going to appear in a return with a great procession. He's going to take his bride to his home and this time he's going to appear to us as the king of glory. And in that moment we will be married. Our resurrection will be the physical consummation of that relationship. We will be filled with his glory and we will be that glorious bride.

In revelation it says, let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to him for the marriage of the lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready. It was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean. That's us. That's the church. That's what we need to clothe ourselves in.

For the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. So we want to think here, if things aren't going right horizontally, maybe it's because we haven't gotten things right vertically yet. We need to spend time with each other and we need to spend time with God to get it right. Quit playing religion and let the Lord Jesus Christ be Lord of your life in this area and in all areas of your life. So we want to thank God here today for not just caring for us in our sanctification and our pursuit of righteousness.

Thank him that he sent our, his son to die and be our advocate, but also thank him that he cares what takes place behind closed doors. He cares about what takes place in those private times. He is very concerned about every aspect of how I emotionally and spiritually and physically love my wife. He's very concerned about how my wife loves and exalts and encourages me. Not a hair on our head falls without him knowing.

And we love, Lord, being part of your little flock, following your son as a savior. And this goes so far beyond our relationship now or even in the future. We have to believe in Christ's love and drink deeply of it. John says, he brought me to this banqueting house and his banner over me was love. So Jesus wants to pour out this wine of love on you.

He wants you to drink of his love. And God says to these lovers, eat friends and drink. Yes, drink abundantly. Oh, beloved, we want to receive that father's love today for we have no reason to wait. We want to ask him to draw closer, closer to us as we begin to be filled with him.

I want to ask Christ today to be part of our life, making us closer to his image for your life, making sure that that life will be worth pursuing every day and that that will make your marriage more lasting and worth pursuing. Make sure that it's a blessing far more of worth than the work and the pain that goes into it. Worth everything it takes to make it last. We want to have a marriage that lasts by honoring God first.