White, Randy: He Is Altogether Lovely-Song 5

Amen. Let's pray. Father, we do thank you so much that, uh, you have indeed proven yourself faithful. And Lord, each day that we are on this earth and each week and each month that passes, we just reflect on all your kindness and goodness and faithfulness and grace to us, and we bless your name for that. We pray that we will be those of your children who will trust you increasingly more each day. And, uh, thank you for this song, Lord, and just thank you now for this word as well that were is, yeah, from your scripture, and we very words of God, and we just pray that you will speak to our hearts today. Uh, we'll leave here, um, more in love with you than even when we arrived. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, as Dean was speaking, it's hard to believe that summer's winding down, isn't it? Where did it go? Our summer has, uh, been a good one. Um, Hawaii, you can't really beat that. And then my eldest daughter moved out, uh, which is a good thing, and for the right reasons, because she got a job as a nurse at Children's Hospital. So after all the two years of study and us being really quiet in the house while she studied, she's moved away two miles, and she's got a job as a nurse, so if any of you hopefully don't ever have to have your kids at Children's, you'll, uh, she'll take good care of your children if she she's on the third floor. So, and I said, you know, we've been without a contract at the police department since April thirtieth, and I was saying to my wife the other day, you know, it's kind of like we've already gotten a raise because, uh, now she can pay us back for the car payment, and she's going to take the car insurance and tax and registration and cell phone bill and all of that stuff. So I said to my wife, boy, we, we've got a raise already. So... How can you tell when a couple is in love with each other? Sometimes it's a bit of a scary thing that when you go to a restaurant, you might watch a couple that aren't saying anything to each other, and then you may say, well, they're the ones that have been married a long time, as opposed to another couple that just are chirping back and forth, and hopefully that's not the case. But one clue, certainly, of how you can tell if a couple's in love with each other is by the way they speak to each other, and for that matter, what they say about each other to someone else. It's very much a clear indication. God's been putting it on my heart for probably about six months now that I wanted to speak, uh, the next time or at some point when I came here, about what it is, uh, that we love about the Lord Jesus Christ. And until actually about two weeks ago, the passage of scripture just really hadn't come to me yet. I was thinking of this verse in First Peter that talks about, though we have not seen him, we love him, but I was just waiting on God to reveal the word. What is it about him that we love? And I think I found certainly the answer by going to the Song of Solomon. I'd like you to turn to the Song of Solomon. I've noticed that nobody has spoke on this book in quite a while, so we're not going to have that problem this week. Song of Solomon, chapter five, uh Just going to look at six verse. This would be a wonderful, uh, eight chapters at some point to read, if not later today, sometime during the week. Song of Solomon is pretty much right there in the middle, starting with verse ten. My beloved is dazzling and ruddy, outstanding among ten thousand. His head is like gold, pure gold. His locks are like clusters of dates and black as a raven. His eyes are like doves beside streams of water, bathed in milk and reposed in their setting. His cheeks are like a bed of balsam, banks of sweet scented herbs. His lips are lilies dripping with liquid myrrh. His hands are rods of gold set with beryl. His abdomen is carved ivory inlaid with sapphires. His legs are pillars of alabaster set on pedestals of pure gold. His appearance is like Lebanon, choice as the cedars. His mouth is full of sweetness, and he is wholly desirable. Another translation in the New American Standard reads it this way, or I'm sorry, the NIV, uh, in verse sixteen, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem. Message this morning, like, because I love that phrase from the NIV is, he is altogether lovely. And I would have read from that text, but the print is too small, so I had to read to my print that's larger in the New American Standard. But he is altogether lovely. This is a wonderful book in God's word. In the Hebrew, the title Song of Songs is a Hebrew idiom meaning the most exequate song. This is one of the best, if you like, of the one thousand and five that Solomon wrote. And the difficulty, though, in reading this book is it may be difficult to understand. And the challenge for commentators and Bible scholars with the Song of Solomon has been, how do I interpret this book? And someone has said, here the imagination of readers throughout the ages has had a field day. Some have avoided it, while others have reveled in its reading. They've enjoyed and have just feasted on this book. Actually, there's probably, we won't go into it because I would go down somewhere that I would just be way over in time, but there's probably about four interpretations of the book. One interpretation that I like that seems to make sense is that Solomon wrote this book, or if you like, this song in his youth. Proverbs in his prime, and Ecclesiastes after he had grown weary of the world. Before Solomon had unfortunately gone down the avenue of having many wives and many concubines, he wrote this at a very early age and understood the value of pure love, of matrimony. It is a, I understand it to be a literal historical piece of writing on human love between a country maid and a shepherd youth, being Solomon. And it is true, no doubt about it, that there are many lessons for two thousand and seven on marriage that can be applied, and it's a fantastic book for that. No better book to go to than the Word of God on learning about marriage. But for today, and this is the awesome thing about God's word, is that there's just, you can just dive in deep, and you can go deeper, and you can go deeper. But for today, what I want to do is concentrate on three applications, and that's the key here, not interpretation, but applications that we can take from this book that relate into our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. We can take three applications and take from the woman's love that she had for her husband and apply that to you and I, the church, and how we're to love Christ and the bridegroom. Because let's face it, it is inevitable, sometimes sadly true, but inevitable, that what happens in many relationships is that with the passing of time and the growth of familiarity with one another, when you're in that kind of a relationship, a marriage relationship, or even, dare I say, in our relationship with Jesus Christ, sometimes what happens is it can lose some of its sparkle, and some of the passion that we had becomes, if you like, mechanical. Scripture says that in the last days that the love of many will grow cold. And so I'm very conscious of the fact that when I became a Christian, what I was doing was is I was not changing religions. I was entering into a personal relationship with the living God who loves me. And so God wants a relationship with his people. And when you think of all the things that make for a good and outstanding relationship with another human being, those same same things apply even in a greater sense, in our relationship with Christ. And if you know it's true, and you've been awake the last couple of years in life, you know that the stresses of this world don't encourage intimacy. And all the things that are happening, we, we have this struggle to make sure that we're continuing in our intimacy with God, and that we're not falling into this kind of subtle and yet sure thing of where our relationship with God is becoming mechanical, and it's lost its luster. Now, the interesting thing is, and we know this, is that whenever we have a sense that God seems far away, or there's some kind of a distance that's crept in in our relationship with God, we know this for certain, that God has never moved away from us. If that's ever happened, it's because in some way, shape, or form, we're moving back. Something else is distracting us or is coming to that relationship and, and is in a sense destroying and ruining that intimacy that we can have with him. And so I believe by looking at an a- as an application of how this woman felt toward her beloved, we can rediscover, and we can remember just how great and how wonderful the Lord Jesus Christ is in all his fullness. One of the things I noticed right away, just in a a reading, maybe this is one of the first times you've read the Song of Solomon, uh, any verses on it, but when you just take a quick glance at verses ten to sixteen, you may have to say, I don't understand some of those phrases. They're not words that we use today so much in two thousand and seven here in the West. But one thing you can kind of sense is that, number one, she loved everything about him. His complexion, his head, his hairs, his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, his lips, his arms, his body, his hands, and his legs. And she expressed that. Couples this morning, do we say not only I love you to one another as or to friends, family members, but do we ever go a second level deeper and express what it is that we love about the person? It's hard enough. It shouldn't be, but it's hard enough to say, I love you. I have a brother right now in the Lord who I've kind of become, he's become a new friend, um, over about the last six months. Ex-Marine. This guy in the trenches. Almost every time we talk, he tells me he loves me. I'm not really too used to somebody doing that with the frequency he does, and I usually come back and say something like, so do I. I haven't quite gotten it to where I say, and I love you too, Patrick, but sometimes I do. But it's interesting to me because this isn't some wimp, if you like. This is a, a stud, you know, in the Marines. He works out every day, and he's very expressive to not only me, but to others of his love, and that's a great thing. We need to grow in learning how to be expressive in our love, and we're going to turn that to how it applies to the Lord Jesus Christ. The only thing is, is we probably don't want to say, men, what Solomon said in chapter six, verse five, because this was a Middle East expression, and it was a compliment to say, your hair is like a flock of goats. I'm not sure if you say that today, you may have to explain exactly what that meant and the beauty of that phrase when Solomon wrote it. But the question is, and the application of it is, when you look at chapter five verse nine, m these friends say, what kind of beloved is your beloved? O most beautiful among women, what kind of beloved is your beloved that thus you adjure us? If you and I are faced with this question is, is what is it about the beauty of Christ that we adore and that we love? What answer would you give? I trust this morning that we love him because he first loved us. But to get more specific, like how she was toward her lover, what would you say? And the awesome thing about God's word is, is that verses ten to sixteen, maybe for some here this morning, have been a passage of scripture that some have found incredible, incredible joy in meditating on this passage because there are the striking, uh, similes of the Lord Jesus Christ in his moral glories. For example, verse ten, if we were to take this as application, and we're to say, now how do we apply this in application to Jesus Christ? My beloved is dazzling and ruddy. Dazzling means white. And when you think of the Lord Jesus Christ, I think of the verses of scripture that in him there is no sin. Scripture says that he who knew no sin became sin for us. Lord Jesus is absolutely pure. Is that something that you love about him today? And I'm not going to cover all of these because there's just not enough time. Verse eleven, his head is like pure gold. When you think of gold and what that means in the scriptures, gold symbolizes deity and sovereignty. And the head is the only place for crowns. And yet the amazing thing is, is he once wore a crown of thorns. But Revelation nineteen twelve says there's coming a day when on his head are many crowns, these crowns of gold. Verse twelve, what she said about her lover, his eyes are like doves. Eyes like doves. When you think of Jesus Christ and when he was walking on the face of this earth, all I can think of is this, is that his eyes must have been very, very expressive. And they were obviously clearly, clearly observant. I don't know how many times in the Gospels you read Jesus saw. Jesus was seeing things that other people didn't see. Other things were going on. They missed it, but he saw it. The interesting thing about doves is, I understand that doves delight in seeing their reflection in the water. They, they enjoy doing that. God has made them that way. And if the Lord Jesus Christ, in that sense, is, is like a dove in that sense of gentleness and expressiveness, then the Lord Jesus delights that when he's looking into the water, that there's, or we're looking into the water, there's a reflection of him, that we're seeing him because we're in Christ, and that's what our position is. What are the things you think about when you think about his eyes? I think of his tender appeal. I think of his loving compassion. I think of the way that he expressed his gracious encouragement to the disciples when they had blown it, and how he corrected them gently. I think at times, of course, in the New Testament where it shows that there was strong disapproval, and there was a righteous anger. What was going on with those eyes? Scripture tells us in Revelation chapter one, two, and nineteen that as the capacity as a judge, it says that his eyes are like a flame of fire in the context and capacity as judge. And yet, in the Gospels, little children were attracted to him. And they approached him without any hesitancy. And you and I know that when we look at somebody, one thing where we do gauge is we, we look at their eyes, and eyes can say a lot. Sometime I'll, somebody will say, don't give me that look. I've heard that. I don't like that look. And other times, that look can be just one that's completely one that you just warm to and embrace. And the Lord Jesus Christ had eyes like that. Interesting thing about his eyes is that he only had eyes for you and I. And then, of course, the flip question on that back to us is, do we have only eyes for him? Verse thirteen. When I think of the, the cheeks, they were the ones that were exposed to spitting. Think of the cheeks of the Lord that had tears that were rolling down his face in sympathy, or in actually in unspeakable grief at when he was betrayed. It's an interesting verse in Hebrews. It says, in the days of his flesh, he offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears. You know, tears, when I hear loud crying, I'm thinking of just tears that are flowing down our Savior's face. Verse thirteen also talks about his lips are lilies dripping with liquid myrrh. What is it you love about the Lord Jesus Christ? I think about his lips in the sense of what gracious words fell from those lips. How he welcomed people when he spoke, how he pardoned, how he encouraged, how he loved, and how he comforted. You think of all those, all of the wonderful words of life that came out of Jesus Christ. Scripture says in Peter, there was no deceit found in him. He didn't think it, and he never uttered it. Isn't that just something that you absolutely love about the Lord? Think about our lips. Sometimes we get up in the morning, and you know what, the first l- words out of our mouth are good ones. And then there's other times we wake up in the morning and we've started and we've said something, and immediately we're thinking, boy, I got to confess already, you know, I only got up half an hour ago, and I've already said something that I shouldn't have said. Something that I said that got took, uh, taken up wrongly, picked up wrong, wasn't said graciously, might have been the truth, but wasn't said in love. The Lord was gracious in his words all the time. And of course, they come to the conclusion in John seven forty six that they said no man ever spoke like this man. No one. No one. I mean, you can take everybody who is on the planet today, everybody who has been, everybody that's gonna be until there's a new heaven and a new earth or whatever, and there'll be no one who'll ever speak like the Lord Jesus. Absolutely, um, I love that about the Lord because I'm so conscious of my tongue and how it can get me into trouble. And I, there's times I just need to be absolutely silent rather than speaking. I love also Isaiah fifty that kind of summarizes verse thirteen about the cheeks and about the lips of the Lord. Isaiah fifty, verses four to six, reference of the Lord. The Lord God has given me the tongue of disciples that I may know how to sustain the weary one with the word. He awakens me morning by morning. He awakens my ear to listen as a disciple. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not disobedient, nor did I turn back. I gave my back to those who strike me, and my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard. I did not cover my face from humiliation and spitting. Verse thirteen, in a way, is a summary, or Isaiah fifty verses four to six summarize a application of the Lord Jesus in this Song of Songs. Then you think of verse fourteen. This woman was referring to Solomon's hands, and she said his hands are rods of gold. When you think about the hands of the Lord Jesus, what do you think of? I think of hands that were busy doing works of, of kindness, acts of, uh, compassion, good works, never doing anything wrong with his hands, where he would have to say to himself, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Never had to be said about him. He's never doing anything wrong. Hands that were outstretched to heal and to bless, to provide and support one another. That's what he did. And then you think even before his public ministry, we know that he was a carpenter. And over the last few weeks, with, uh, one daughter moving out and another one taking her room as fast as they she could get it. We've been to some place called IKEA, and we've been building IKEA furniture. You know, it's that stuff that unfortunately is causing a lot of furniture stores to go out of business because everybody's going there with their kids that are graduating and just want cheaper furniture and building. And we've been building furniture the last week. But I guarantee you that the furniture I'm building and the furniture from IKEA is nothing like the carpenter's furniture that he built with those hands and the work he did. And the craftsmanship of Jesus Christ as a carpenter, I believe, was nothing but outstanding. It was A plus. It was A plus work. How could it not be as a carpenter with those hands? And then verse fifteen, what it is that she loved, and I hope this is just getting your appetite wet as to the things that you love about the Lord. You can go to so many other passages of scripture, but to begin thinking and expressing this back to him. In one, it says in verse fifteen about his legs, and when I think about the legs, I think about the fact that these legs and these feet of our Savior, while he was here on earth, were always, always, always pleasing the Father. Never, never, you know, traveling down some road he shouldn't have gone, or never veering off in some direction he shouldn't have gone, never acting independent of the Father, but always doing the Father's will as he was walking. Just in this wonderful peace, not in a sense of hurriedness and frazzled and stressed, but just in a calmness, going as the Father directed, very much in sync and in tune. Think about how he didn't have to go to meet the woman at the well in John chapter four, but he did. He went out of his way. Other people avoided that journey, being a Jew, and he went, and he was tired. I'm sure maybe his legs were tired, and he asked for a drink of water. One of the things that impresses me about this story and about this woman is that she was able to be so specific about the things that she loved, indicated this, that she knew him. She knew him. She could not, she could not come up with this if she did not observe this by spending time and knowing him. And the challenge for you and I is, is when we think about him being altogether lovely, is how much time are we spending getting to know him so that these words can come out of our mouth about our Savior, and somebody says, what is it, like these women said, what is it about your beloved? What kind of beloved is your beloved? That just like this, you know, just like that, it's rolling off our tongue, that we can say what our beloved's like. Well, he's this, and he's this, and he's done this, and he's this. Or might we be, uh, you know, uh, he's my savior. Okay, there's more. There's so much more about his beauty. So much more about his person. It's not meant to be a guilt trip, it's meant to be an encouragement to say, when you think of the loveliness of this person, when you think the loveliness of our Lord God, it ought to be an incentive to want to spend time with somebody like this is a treat. It's a privilege that we're in the company of being able to say that he calls us friends, that we're in this intimate relationship with as a bride of Christ, and him being the bridegroom, that we can have this kind of relationship for those who know him, that we can have this kind of intimacy. It makes you wonder, why do we settle? Why do we settle for something so much less significant than spending time with God? How does the computer, how does the internet, how does television, how does all the other things, when they're taken to an excess, have any comparison to spending time with God? This is a question I've been asking myself. It doesn't make any sense. What do those things have to offer in the same way of excessive amount of time and of wasting of time and putting our and fixing our mind on these things, rather than where we can be in the very presence of God and learning from him. Secondly, time's flying. She loved talking about him. You see that, don't you? We see that in chapter five, verse eight and nine. and she said, I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, as to what you will tell him, for I am lovesick. Lovesick. And then she says this wonderful thing in verse three of chapter six: I am my beloved's, and my beloved's mine. And of course, we probably think of Emmanuel's land, those of you who know the hymn. Probably taken, obviously, from that verse. She loved talking about him. Someone has said her mouth spoke out of the abundance of her heart. Or as the psalmist says, her lips were the pen of a ready writer. She was just ready to go, and so she articulated this in chapter five verses ten to sixteen about his appearance and what it was in his physical beauty that she liked. And we take that and we apply it into his moral character and about his very own body and what he was like on earth. There's an old poem, and I don't normally like old poems, but this one grabbed me when it said this: Then my tongue would sincerely express all his love and loveliness, but I lisp and falter forth, broken words, not half its worth. Vexed I try and try again, still my efforts all are vain. Living tongues are dumb at best. We must die to speak of Christ. And another w- way to express that is we, we're conscious of the fact that there's stuff that we can talk about pretty readily. If you like sports, you probably can go down that road and talk about baseball, and for me, weather and, you know, business news and some of the stuff Adal I've enjoyed talking about over a breakfast. But I think that the best kind of conversation that naturally should flow from the heart and then out is is when we, when we are having conversations about our God, when we're talking about w- about what it is that we just love about him, because that's something that we can all enter into, those of us who know him. And another modern, uh, chorus today, slightly obviously different from this older song, said, you are beautiful beyond description, too marvelous for words, too wonderful for comprehension, like nothing ever seen or heard. That is a description of Christ. And so this question is, as we read in chapter five, or verses ten, outstanding among ten thousand. What do we do for this chief among ten thousand. What do we do? She loved talking about her lover. I encourage us, we ought to be talking about ours to others. He ought to be the theme of our conversation. The other day, a couple days ago, had a conversation with a friend of my daughters. Let's just say he's a boy friend at the moment. And in our conversation, uh, we've had about six hours worth now. It's pretty tough if you're gonna ever see one of my daughters, I tell you, but, um, over a Starbucks, and he bought, so I was pretty impressed with that. But, um, this is a friend at the moment, but I said, you know, I'm gonna, I want to talk to you about Jesus, and I'm going to tell you right now, I'm not going to be timid about this. I'm very interested, and I want to know where you are in your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. I said, to be honest, by the, in the power of the Spirit, I said, I stood on street corners in Dublin for ten years in the rain, and I stood with a microphone, and I talked to people about Jesus. Sometimes there was two, sometimes there was twenty, sometimes there was a hundred. I'm timid about it sometimes, but I want to tell you right now, I'm going to talk to you about Jesus. So buckle down, strap your seat belt, because that's where we're going. Isn't that what we, we ought to be doing? Talking to people about not religion, not about ourselves and how good we are, but about the Lord Jesus. We rub shoulders every day with people who don't know this beauty. They don't know. It says in scripture, he was despised and rejected of men, and he still is today. He still is. But the interesting thing is there are others like chapter five verse nine that have that question, and they say to us, in effect, what kind of beloved is your beloved? Aren't they the most awesome questions you ever asked? What, what's this God like? Who is this Jesus that you know? What makes you different? Why have you changed? What's going on? You were once like this, now you seem more like this, and it's for the good. What's happening? Tell me. We've had a study at the place where we fellowship, where we've been going through, um, it's called The Journey. For eight weeks, we just go over the gospel, and we have about fifteen, twenty folks who come. Some said to me they will never come at nine fifteen on a Sunday morning. I said, yes, they will. The seekers will come, and about a dozen or so have. And we've had conversations with some people. One's a lady named Jiwan from South Korea. She's been here for about a year and a half, coming to the study just about every week, asking questions, kind of hard to understand her because of broken English. But on the last week before she left back to South Korea, she said, I want to be baptized. And this has been kind of a desire. And I said, but why do you want to be baptized? And I'll make a long story short, it was a wonderful opportunity to go to the passage in Acts where the eunuch asked Philip, what prevents me from being baptized? And then he says, you know, if you believe, eh, with all your heart in, you know, in in God, in the Lord Jesus, then you can be baptized. And he did, and they stopped the chariot right there, and they got, he got baptized. Obviously, belief comes before baptism. Baptism is, baptism is the outward expression of what has already occurred in our life, and it's a witness to the world and to God and to each other that we say we belong to Jesus Christ. She said, I want to believe. She, with tears rolling down her face after this class was over, it was worth missing church for that, to be able to visit with her in another room with another couple of folks and to see tears streaming down her face, wanting to receive the Lord Jesus Christ. And then three days later, she was baptized before she went back to South Korea. Basically, this has been somebody saying, what kind of beloved is your beloved? And we've been sharing. Our desire is that when we witness and when we talk to others about Jesus, that they would see him as altogether lovely. And why not? But they maybe don't know. They need to hear. They may not know this passage. They might not know the beauty of Jesus. I've been talking to a young man for the last couple of weeks, again at the same coffee establishment. I'm giving him business. And we were meeting yesterday for a couple hours, and he says, I don't know what it is, Randy, but I'm, something's holding me back from making this commitment. And we went over the gospel last week at another of the same establishment just down the road here off Crow Canyon. We were talking about these things, and he never understood the blood of Jesus and how that can forgive all his sin. And in a sense, he, we presented it this way because he's engaged, and he's going to be married in the future, and I said, you know, it's kind of like this, the father is presiding. And he has turned to the Lord Jesus, and he said, Jesus, do you take this sinner? And will you be their savior? And Christ, of course, always says yes. Then he turns to you and he says, now, are you willing to take Jesus to be your savior? And he's at the point right now where he's not able to say I do to Jesus. He's at that altar, but something's holding him back, and we talked about that. Really, when you think about it, what is the alternative? Who, can you tell me who or what else loves you like the Lord Jesus? Is there anything else? Is there anyone else? And as as we were talking about this, I said, the Bible says you're in slavery in sin, that actually you may not realize it, but if you don't know God, then really your master at this point, in not knowing Christ, is the devil. Jesus said that in John chapter eight. He said to the Pharisees, he said, your father's the devil. I mean, you're the religious folks here, but that's who your master is. And if we say no to Christ, what in the world are we saying yes to? What in the world are we saying yes to? And I said to him, you know, I'm at this very sensitive situation. I am wanting to persuade you. I'm a v- walking a very fine line. I said, I want to persuade you, but I don't want to pressure you, because nobody should come kicking and screaming into heaven. We want to have to and be willing to give him our heart and be able to say, I love you, Lord. Can we say that this morning, that we honestly love the Lord Jesus, and we would be able to say that with no stuttering, with no hesitancy, but we'd be able just to say it, you know, and mean it from the bottom of our heart. Coming to a conclusion on this, our conclusion should be verse sixteen. He is, if you like, wholly desirable. He is altogether lovely. Someone has said, you know, there are many that are lovely, but no one except Jesus is altogether. You may see something that is lovely, if you like, in me, something that is, I s- see that is something that I love about you, but Jesus takes it all. He takes all those traits that we might see in each other of his likeness, and in one, he is altogether lovely. It's met in him. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing can rival him. Think of his name. Think of his work. Think of what it says, the Bible says his occupation is. Think of what he's done. Think of what he's doing today. Someone has said, our Lord is lovely in every office. He's the most admirable priest and king and prophet that ever exercised the office. He is a lovely shepherd of a chosen flock, a lovely friend, a lovely husband, a lovely brother. He is admirable in every position that he occupies for our sakes. And his loveliness appears in every condition, in the manger or in the temple or by the well or by the sea, on the garden or on the cross, in the tomb or in the resurrection, or in his first or in his second coming that is still future. And so the challenge for you and I is, is when we think about him being altogether lovely and the affection and that this woman had for, for hers, is there a rival in our hearts? Is there anyone, is there anything that's coming between us and the Lord? I remember once reading, if so, chase it out. Chase the intruder out. You know, whatever foxes have been allowed to to come in, get rid of those foxes so that your relationship can grow in the Lord Jesus. Let's renew our vows to him. Yes, let's yield again to his charms, and aren't they wonderful charms, and just surrender to his person. Let's pray. Lord, I think of the song, Lord, you're beautiful. Your face is all I seek. We want to tell you again afresh today that you are altogether lovely to us. Every single thing about your character, about your life, about your very person is absolutely beautiful, and it's faultless. We want to bless you for having a work, uh, that you accomplished that is absolutely perfect. Thank you for accomplishing something for us on Calvary's cross that we could never, ever, ever accomplish. I pray, God, for myself and for my friends here, Valley, Santa Monica Valley, that you will, uh, just speak to us, uh, if our heart has been getting hard or our heart's been getting, uh, somewhat cold, I pray that you'll just reveal that to us and that we'll be honest with you and tell you that we want you back. We we want to have you back, Lord, and, um, in the way that you would just desire us, and we know you'll take us back, and we thank you for that. Thank you for those who are, uh, have a heart that's burning for you, and I pray that you'll just keep them encouraged as they continue to press on. Help us, Lord, to, to be, um, actively bold in sharing you with others. Where there's fear and timidity, Lord, I pray that you'll remove that and take it away. Again, just thank you for our time together now. In Jesus' name, amen.