THE CULTIVATION OF LOVE (27)
Scripture: Song of Songs 1:1-17, Song of Songs 2:1-7
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The Cultivation of Love (27)
Series: Wisdom - Suffering, Thinking, Loving, and Living Authentically
Patrick Edwards
Song of Songs 1:1-2:7
Introduction
For nine months we've been studying what the Old Testament calls 'Wisdom.' This journey began in the book of Job where we asked, 'Can we trust God? Are His ways best for us?' Having established that we can and must trust Him, we turned to the Proverbs to explore what His ways really are. The Proverbs touched on a lot of topics, covering a variety of issues, but the book ended, you recall, by tying it all together with a summary description of the valiant woman who emanates wisdom in all she does. We then immediately got a picture of such valiant, wise living in the book of Ruth. As we've watched over the past six weeks, in Ruth and Boaz we see what it looks like to honor and fear God in a lost, fallen world. In other words, while you could say that Ruth and Boaz is a love story, in reality the book focuses more on how each character fears God than on the romance they share. And this is significant for us, one of the lesson being that romance and feelings aren't the foundation of a godly relationship, but personal righteousness is.
The danger we run, however, after reading Ruth in light of Proverbs 31 is to then minimize or disregard entirely the romantic aspect of human love, which is why in the Hebrew Bible the Song of Songs immediately follows Ruth. You see biblical wisdom, what it is that we've been studying since last August, isn't just concerned with what some might call high, lofty academic theology. Wisdom, you remember, is simply the skill of living. As God has designed and created all things, the Bible teaches that we must therefore approach every aspect of life in the way He sets for us, which includes romance, which only makes sense because you'd have to be utterly clueless to deny the fact that likely the most prominent aspect of human existence centers on love. As Paul McCartney sang, ''You ...
Series: Wisdom - Suffering, Thinking, Loving, and Living Authentically
Patrick Edwards
Song of Songs 1:1-2:7
Introduction
For nine months we've been studying what the Old Testament calls 'Wisdom.' This journey began in the book of Job where we asked, 'Can we trust God? Are His ways best for us?' Having established that we can and must trust Him, we turned to the Proverbs to explore what His ways really are. The Proverbs touched on a lot of topics, covering a variety of issues, but the book ended, you recall, by tying it all together with a summary description of the valiant woman who emanates wisdom in all she does. We then immediately got a picture of such valiant, wise living in the book of Ruth. As we've watched over the past six weeks, in Ruth and Boaz we see what it looks like to honor and fear God in a lost, fallen world. In other words, while you could say that Ruth and Boaz is a love story, in reality the book focuses more on how each character fears God than on the romance they share. And this is significant for us, one of the lesson being that romance and feelings aren't the foundation of a godly relationship, but personal righteousness is.
The danger we run, however, after reading Ruth in light of Proverbs 31 is to then minimize or disregard entirely the romantic aspect of human love, which is why in the Hebrew Bible the Song of Songs immediately follows Ruth. You see biblical wisdom, what it is that we've been studying since last August, isn't just concerned with what some might call high, lofty academic theology. Wisdom, you remember, is simply the skill of living. As God has designed and created all things, the Bible teaches that we must therefore approach every aspect of life in the way He sets for us, which includes romance, which only makes sense because you'd have to be utterly clueless to deny the fact that likely the most prominent aspect of human existence centers on love. As Paul McCartney sang, ''You ...
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