BAM! Kicking it up a notch!
Being sick of Love!
Merry Monday by Parris Bailey
“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love” SOS 2:5
The Song of Solomon is a progression of our love from one degree to another till we reach the highest degree of spiritual enjoyment possible in this world. The Holy Spirit can so fill our heart with his influences as to make us “lovesick”, so much that we that cannot get enough of His presence. Being a Christian is not just saying a prayer but it starts there. It’s time to kick it up a notch. His love takes our breath away and can be intoxicating. If you haven’t felt these stirrings then this is the message is for you. “The cry of the Shulamite is that she be made capable of bearing the deep agitation of her physical life, which is the consequence, not of her love sickness but her love happiness.”(Keil & Delitzsch)Love is personified as a power and has its own laws and is not to be achieved artificially. Through the earthly love one must view the heavenly, and through the symbolic we understand the spiritual. (Interpreters Bible)It is the task of those who ” love knowledge” to reach this understanding. The Bible is full of symbols and the Song of Solomon has an ocean full of them, but we find Christ fulfills all of them. Augustine said, “do not desert the higher love and bend down toward the lower. Be upright in heart, so that you may have praise, make correct use of things that are below you, and you will rightly enjoy the higher good.” We are forever comforted with “his apples” which is His presence and His word. His love wounds us, quickens us, revives us and causes our whole lives to burn for him! This state of affection wants so to see Jesus in his glory. Rutherford said “there will be a sickness of love at the delay of what I hope for, most of all, when the sun of my blessedness is the thing hoped for, and still deferred.They that never felt their hearts sick with the desire of heaven, and the blessedness of that state, cannot conceive of it a tree beforehand.”
John in Revelations was so overcome that “fell at his feet as dead” and Daniel remarked “straightway there was no strength in him”. Dan.10:8-19. Paul prays that we might be “strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man” Eph 3:16. O Lord enlarge our capacity to receive more from you! David exclaimed ” O God, thou art my God: I have earnestly contemplated thee, my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee”. Ps. 63:, It is hard to describe such intimacy such secret longings of the soul. I pray He load us down with His fruits while seated under His shadow, so much that we become lovesick! BAM! “For Your arrows pierce me deeply, And Your hand presses me down.” (Psalm 38:2 NKJV)
“Lord withdraw thy hand for a little, for my heart is too weak to receive so great joy!” St. Ephrem