love and identity
Rooted deep in us is the need to ‘be ourselves’ –as God sees us. Yet for so many Christians, it’s an ongoing struggle
We are all different and have different struggles, but some struggles are common to all humanity. Ever since God sent Adam and Eve out of the garden, our souls have longed for Eden.
The Shulamite woman
Our hearts still grieve for what we lost when Adam sinned. Yet even before we felt our loss, God provided the answer. How is it, then, that even the most mature and seasoned Christian can miss it? It is 37 years since I fully gave my life to the Lord and received the Holy Spirit. I have earnestly sought the Lord and determined to serve Him throughout those years. However, strangely it has only been in recent months (aged 51) that people have started to tell me that I look different and that I have changed. It is wonderful that I have changed, but why has it taken so long? What was it that I just wasn’t ‘getting’ in all my long years as a Christian?
I have always loved the Song of Songs. For me it hasn’t been an erotic book about physical love. Rather I have spent many hours, dwelling upon the relationship of the girl with her shepherd king. I discovered myself in the girl. She longed for the love of the king. She knew that only the king’s love could satisfy her soul, far more than any wine. She had been into his chambers. She’d had access to the king; she had met with God. But she wanted more – she needed more – of his love. She, like me, needed to be re-united with God in the Garden of Eden. She needed to have a close, intimate, continually abiding relationship with her King that would take away her insecurity and ‘people pleasing’ and all the other things that ailed her.
My problem was deep insecurity. I used to ‘wear a mask’ a lot of the time with people with whom I didn’t feel secure. I would aim to be what I thought they wanted me to be. So I put on the mask of being the good girl, wanting to please people, doing all I could so as to not be rejected. I was afraid that if I was really me I wouldn’t be good enough. I wouldn’t be loved. You probably don’t put up a mask like I used to, but maybe you have your own strategies to make people – and even God – love you more? The girl in the Song of Songs said, “Do not look upon me, because I am dark, because the sun has tanned me. My mother’s sons were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards but my own vineyard I have not kept.” (Song of Songs 1:6)
The Shulamite woman had been working out in the scorching sun, doing the heavy labour of trimming the vines, carrying away trimmed branches for burning, thinning out the grape clusters, and training the selected branches along the stakes. This was back breaking toil. She would have been criticised if she did it wrong, and pressured and pushed so that the vines would produce good fruit for her brothers. Their profits depended on the efficiency of her labour. So she worked hard to please her brothers, yet all along, there was an ‘internal’ vineyard which she was failing to tend. Her ‘internal’ vineyard would be one known only to her lover the King, yet on-lookers would recognise that she had found something special.
Tending my vineyard
I have done many things ‘for the wrong reasons’. I think of all the things I used to do to please people – and sometimes to please myself. I think of how even in ‘Christian work’ I often felt I was striving to please my bosses. I was sensitive to their criticisms and was always trying to do better. But so long as I made them my focus, my relationship with God was not being properly tended. I longed for deepening relationship, but I didn’t know how to nurture it. Well-meaning Christians were not always much help. They seemed to end up rubbing salt into my wounds with their correction, advice and observations. In Song of Songsthe girl had this problem. “I sought him, but he gave me no answer. The watchmen who went about the city found me. They struck me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took my veil away from me.” Song of Songs 5:6, 7
The Lord deals with us in different ways. In my case the Lord took away my ‘serving’to ‘please’and took me into a desert place where nothing much seemed to be happening. My focus changed from what I was ‘accomplishing’ to what I was ‘becoming’. The culmination came when I spent almost a whole night lying awake in my bed repenting of my sins. I repented of all my self-serving, self-protective strategies and cried out to God to change me. The following day, in weeping and tears, I expressed to a Christian friend that I felt like God had brought me to a dead end and I needed Him to change me and to do something new with my life. She prayed with me. Very soon after that the Lord brought a gifted Christian lady to me to pray with me through my ‘issues’. At last I was changing! At last we were tending my vineyard and spiritually cutting out the fruitless branches of my life. Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15:1, 2)
Abiding in the vine
Jesus said, “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.” (John 15:4) In the Song of Songs the Shulamite woman came into a deeply intimate relationship with Solomon the King. The name Solomon comes from the same Hebrew root letters as the word Shalom meaning ‘peace’. Over the following days the Lord showed me that my breakthrough in relationship with Him would come by maintaining my ‘peace’. In so doing I would more easily stay connected to Jesus. This is not peace in a dodgy, worldly way, but true Biblical peace. Peace with God and Man comes through forgiving others and receiving forgiveness.
The Lord is teaching me to keep asking Him to reveal to me my heart, and show me if there is anyone I have blocked out of my heart through unforgiveness.
Then He is showing me how to continually forgive from my heart and release all situations to Him from my heart. He is teaching me to release all my anxieties into Him, to trust Him with all my heart and surrender to His will. It is surely a lesson for all of us. Are you on this path, abiding in the vine?
The Holy of Holies
I believe that one of the things that the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle (and later in the Jerusalem Temple) represents is, in fact, our heart. It is hidden behind a veil yet Jesus, our High Priest, can enter in. There is no worldly light in the Holy of Holies. It is completely dark and hidden from the eyes of all but Jesus. What happens within might be discerned from the outside, but it can’t be seen by others. Inside the Holy of Holies is the Ark of the Covenant, with the Mercy Seat. Inside the Ark are the tablets of the Law. God’s laws have been written on our hearts. We treasure His living Word in our spirit. There is Aaron’s blossoming rod, which represents life. The resurrection life that raised Jesus from the dead abides in our hearts. There is the pot of manna which is the bread of life, the pure heavenly life of Jesus in our hearts.
Abide in His love
The outer problems of our lives can all be solved by meeting with our heavenly king in the most inner place. Every day, we need to take time to shut the door on the outside world and draw near to Him. We need to come to him simply, before we bring any intercessions. We need to quiet all the activity of the vineyard and come to the vine himself, Jesus. When we close our eyes into the quietness and meet with him in our hearts we find him. He was there all along. Like the Shulamite, we didn’t need to go running all over the place looking for him.
He has been waiting for us, there in our hearts. It is in that place that we can find his love which satisfies more than wine. It is in the secret inner chamber of our spirit, in that deep place in our innermost parts from which flow the rivers of living water. You don’t need anyone to pray for you, good though that may be. You don’t need special music or to go on a pilgrimage to search for him.He is waiting for you there in your heart. Jesus said, “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will becometo him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:14)
The Shulamite woman of the Song of Songs learned to tend her vineyard. She tended it by learning how to meet with her bridegroom King. It was a struggle at first, but she learned how to meet with him and know him intimately. She found the love of God through the cross which restores what was lost in Eden. His love alone makes us secure and brings us into our true identity. I am still pressing on in this journey to wholeness. But I am definitely changing. I hope you are too.