Having a Personal and Affectionate, Private and Spiritual Love Relationship with Christ

As believers in Christ and lovers of the Lord, we are drawn to pursue Christ for satisfaction, and we are developing a personal, affectionate, private, and spiritual relationship with the Lord.

Amen, Lord Jesus, we love You! This week we come to the topic of, Song of Songs – the Progressive Experience of an Individual Believer’s Loving Fellowship with Christ for the Preparation of the Bride of Christ.

We will focus mainly on the Song of Songs, where we see six main sections or stages of the lover of Christ pursuing after Christ and experiencing Christ in love.

Song of Songs is a love story between Solomon and his lover, the Shulammite; this book is in contrast with Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes begins with vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Life in the world without God is vanity of vanities, futility of futilities, and chasing after the wind.

A life lived apart from Christ is simply vanity. This book, Ecclesiastes, speaks of an unsettled life, but Song of Songs speaks of the rest after being unsettled.

Ecclesiastes tells us that man cannot be satisfied with knowledge, while the Song of Songs tells us that man can be satisfied with love.

Song of Songs shows us in type how our loving pursuit of Christ is, how we love Him and run after Him.

Ecclesiastes tells us that everything other than Christ is vanity of vanities, while Song of Songs describes a life full of meaning and purpose.

What we see in Song of Song is a divine romance, a life of loving our dear Lord Jesus with Him as our very love.

The entire Bible speaks of one thing: God’s economy; the content of God’s economy is the divine romance, the mutual romance between God and His chosen people.

This is the subject of the entire Bible and the secret of the entire universe.

The secret of the universe and the subject of the entire Bible is the divine romance between God and His chosen people.

We are in a divine and mystical romance today with the Lord, and we can never graduate from loving the Lord.

We simply need to love the Lord and enjoy Him. We need to let Him draw us to Himself and love Him with the first love, the best love.

May the Lord make us crazy lovers of the Lord. May we enjoy and experience Him daily until we love Him with the first love.

There is no other way so prevailing, so sweet, so rich, and so full of enjoyment except loving the Lord with the first love.

Every day we need to tell the Lord that we love Him. Every morning, the first thing we tell Him is that we love Him.

Amen, we want to be the crazy lovers of Jesus, those who love the Lord with the first love and give Him the first place.

As Lovers of Christ, we are Drawn by Him to Pursue Christ for Satisfaction

The subject of Song of Songs, a poem, is the history of love in an excellent marriage, revealing the progressive experience of an individual believer’s loving fellowship with Christ for the preparation of His bride.

Today the Lord is preparing His bride, and we are here for this; we’re here in the Lord’s recovery for the Lord to gain His bride.

He is gaining His masterpiece, His bride. On the one hand, on the cross He already created the one new man, His masterpiece; on the other hand, He is still creating His masterpiece in time.

We may look at ourselves and we may think we are a mess-terpiece, not a masterpiece; however, the Lord as the greatest Artist and Designer is working to gain us as part of His masterpiece.

A poem is a work of art that expresses the maker’s wisdom and design. God’s masterpiece expresses His infinite wisdom and expresses His divine design.

The church is the masterpiece of God, and we are being drawn by the Lord to Himself to love Him; it is in this loving the Lord that we are produced as His masterpiece.

The more we love the Lord, the more we remain in the organic union with Him and give all our love to Him, and the more He produces His bride.

In the first stage of Song of Songs, the lover of Christ is drawn to pursue Him for satisfaction (1:2 – 2:7).

The Lord wants us as His loving seekers, the lovers of Christ, to have a personal, affectionate, private, and spiritual relationship with Him.

As Christ’s Loving Seekers we need to have a Personal, Affectionate, Private, and Spiritual relationship with Him

The words that describe our relationship with the Lord are personal, affectionate, private, and spiritual; as Christ’s loving seekers, we need to have such a relationship with Him.

May our relationship with the Lord be sevenfold intensified personal, affectionate, private, and spiritual, so that we may be constituents of His overcoming bride to bring the Lord back again!

Song of Songs starts with, Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth, for Your love is better than wine. In 4:10 the Lord says to the seeker, How much better is your love than wine.

On one hand, His love toward us is better than wine, and on the other hand, our love for Him is so much better than wine.

We treasure the Lord’s love, but we cannot comprehend how precious His love is to us. It is a knowledge-surpassing love of Christ, and His love for us is so much greater than our love.

His love is much better than wine, and His love becomes our love.

We need to ask the Lord to draw us; in particular, we need to tell Him, draw me.

We have a personal, one-on-one relationship with Him, and our relationship is private, spiritual, personal, and affectionate.

God’s Love in His Salvation Reaches us in a Personal way: We have a Personal Relationship with the Lord

Song of Songs 1:4 says, Draw me; this is very personal. The Lord said in Hosea 11:4, I drew them with cords of a man, / With bands of love.”

God loves us with His divine love not on the level of divinity but on the level of humanity.

The cords of a man through which God draws us include Christ’s incarnation, human living, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.

By all these steps which Christ took in His humanity, God’s love in His salvation reaches us in a personal way (Rom. 5:8; 1 John 4:9-10).

No one can enjoy or contact the Lord for us; we need to do it ourselves.

No one can be saved on our behalf, and no one can contact the Lord in our stead – we need to do it ourselves.

We need to personally enter into our private room, shut our door, and pray to our Father who is in secret.

And our Father, who sees in secret, will reward us with Himself.

For example, when we take a walk, we can simply have some time with the Lord. We can build our root system with the Lord, a system of fine-hair roots that no one can see.

This is our hidden, deep experience with the Lord, the experience of being personal and intimate with the Lord.

When we take root downward, we will bear fruit upward.

May we come to the Lord and take time to just look at Him, spend time with Him, and look into the index of His eyes.

May we live our whole life in the index of the Lord’s eyes, carrying out our life and work in the presence of Christ, the present presence of Christ.

When we look at the Lord’s face, when we behold His face personally, we see what is in His heart, and His heart becomes our heart.

It is like the relationship between the husband and the wife; it is so personal that they know what the other feels and thinks simply by looking into his/her face.

Our relationship with Christ needs to be personal and affectionate.

Day by day we need to develop our warm, intimate, close affection between us and our God.

All religions, including Christianity, portray God merely as someone great, almighty, sovereign, majestic, and even unapproachable; no one dares to touch God.

Saying that God is almighty and majestic is not wrong, but it is inadequate; in our relationship with God, He is personal to us. He is so personal to us that He Himself became a man.

When He came to Peter, He didn’t come as the glorious, almighty, majestic God, but as one of his countrymen.

May we intimately and personally tell the Lord,

Lord Jesus, draw me, we will run after You! Draw us more today. Infuse us with Your love. We want to spend time with You in a personal and affectionate way. Have a way to infuse us with what is in Your heart. Thank You, dear Lord, for coming to us on the level of a man, in Your humanity, to draw us. We love You, Lord Jesus, for we see Your incarnation, human living, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension! Thank You for reaching us in Your love in Your salvation in a personal way. We come to You as we are and we want to spend time with You. We want to develop our personal relationship with You, enjoying You in a personal, intimate, affectionate, and spiritual way. Keep us behold You face to face. Keep us living in the index of Your eyes, in Your presence, drawing all our life from You!

Loving Christ in a Personal and Affectionate way to Pursue and Enjoy Him as our Satisfaction

Song of Songs 1:2 says, Let Him kiss me; this is very affectionate.

You can kiss only one person at a time; when we ask the Lord to kiss us, this is very personal and affectionate.

You do not kiss a person that you do not care for or a person you’re not affectionate with.

After believing in Christ to receive Him as the divine life (John 1:4, 12), we need to love Christ in a personal and affectionate way so that we may pursue Him and enjoy Him as our satisfaction.

Psa. 2:12 commands us to “kiss the Son”; to kiss Christ as the Son of God is to personally and intimately enjoy Christ.

Especially in the morning, before we start out the day, we need to kiss the Lord; we need to open to Him and tell Him that we love Him.

We need to ask the Lord to kiss us, and we need to simply kiss Him.

Every morning after rising up we need to say, Lord Jesus, I love You!

We are not mere poor sinners praying to a merciful God – we are contacting a Savior who is personal and affectionate to us, and we are personal and affectionate to Him.

In order for us to pursue and enjoy Christ as our satisfaction, we need to love Christ in a personal and affectionate way.

We need to turn our hearts to Him and tell Him that we love Him from our whole heart; we love Him because He loved us first, and we love Him with the first love.

May this be our custom, our habit, every morning; may we not miss the Son but kiss the Son every morning and ask the Lord to kiss us again and again.

We need to practice telling the Lord in a personal and affectionate way daily,

Lord Jesus, I turn my heart to You. I love You. You are my Beloved. You are the most wonderful One. I love You with all of my heart. Kiss me with the kisses of Your mouth. Amen, Lord, how I love You! Your love is better than wine. I love You with the first love, the best love. Dear Lord Jesus, I just want to kiss You. I want to have a personal and affectionate relationship with You. I pursue You, Lord, to enjoy You as my satisfaction. Kiss me, Lord Jesus! Kiss me with the kisses of Your mouth! Draw me, we will run after You!

Being Brought into our Regenerated Spirit as the Lord’s Chambers to have a Private Relationship with the Lord

Song of Songs 1:4 mentions that the King brings us into His chambers; this indicates that we have a private relationship with the Lord.

In our pursuit of Christ, we as the Lord’s loving seekers are brought by Him into our regenerated spirit as the Holiest of all, the chambers of Christ, to have fellowship with Him. His chambers indicate a private relationship with the Lord.

What are these chambers of the Lord? The Lord’s chambers are our spirit; our spirit is the chambers of the King of kings.

The king’s inner chambers signify our regenerated spirit as Christ’s inner chambers. The chambers where the Lord dwells, the inner chambers of our being, are our mingled spirit.

God created us with a spirit; our spirit is not only the organ with which we contact God and receive God, but also for us to contain God.

2 Tim. 4:22 says, The Lord be with your spirit; Eph. 2:22 indicates that our spirit is the habitation, the dwelling place of God.

We need to be brought into our regenerated spirit as the Lord’s inner chambers to have a private relationship with the Lord.

The place where Christ dwells today is our mingled spirit.

Christ as the last Adam became a man, and then He became a life-giving Spirit; now through regeneration, He comes to dwell in our human spirit, joining and mingling our human spirit with the divine Spirit to make them one spirit (1 Cor. 6:17).

We do not merely have a Jesus that lived once two thousand years ago; we have a Christ who is the Spirit and who dwells in our spirit.

Christ today is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17); He visits in our spirit privately, and He comes to us in a spiritual way, not in a physical way.

We can testify that, whenever we turn to our spirit and contact the Lord, we touch the Holy of Holies, for the Lord wells in our spirit.

Here, in our mingled spirit, we have a personal and affectionate relationship with the Lord, a private and spiritual relationship with Him.

In the first stage of Song of Songs, the lover of Christ is drawn to pursue Him for satisfaction; the Lord wants His seeker to have a personal, affectionate, private, and spiritual relationship with Him.

All the spiritual principles are contained in this first stage of the seeker’s overcoming life in the Song of Songs.

The lessons that follow this stage are not new – they are old lessons repeated in a deeper way.

Regeneration brings the gene of God into us, and all the experiences of our whole Christian life are in this gene (1 John 3:9).

We have the gene of the processed and consummated Triune God in our spirit; we simply need to love the Lord and develop our personal and affectionate, private and spiritual relationship with the Lord.

Lord Jesus, we come to contact You in spirit, the inner chambers of the King. Thank You for coming as the life-giving Spirit to dwell in our spirit and make our spirit one with You! We want to pursue after You and be brought by You into our regenerated spirit as the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of God. Amen, Lord, we yearn to have more fellowship with You in our spirit. It is here, in our mingled spirit, that we can develop our private and spiritual relationship with You. We love You, dear Lord Jesus, and we turn to our spirit to be where You are, in the inner chambers of our King. We love to spend time with You and be in the sweetest and most intimate contact with You!

References and Hymns on this Topic

• Sources of inspiration: the Word of God, my enjoyment in the ministry, a sharing by brother Ed Marks in the message, and portions from, Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1994-1997, vol. 3, “Crystallization-study of Song of Songs,” pp. 258-263, as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, Loving the Lord and loving one another for the organic building up of the church as the Body of Christ (2022 fall ITERO), week 2, entitled, Song of Songs – the Progressive Experience of an Individual Believer’s Loving Fellowship with Christ for the Preparation of the Bride of Christ.
• Hymns on this topic:
  – I love Thee, Jesus, / And Thy love to me / Draws me, ever to seek Thee / And run after Thee, / Draws me, ever to seek Thee / And run after Thee. / Thou art beloved, / Yea! Altogether lovely, / The One in whom my heart delighteth. (Hymns #1154, stanza 1)
  – Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! / For your love is better than wine. / Your name is like ointment poured forth; / Therefore the virgins love you. / The king brought me, brought me into his chambers— / We’ll be glad and joy in you; / We’ll extol your love much more than wine. / Draw me; we will run after you. (Scripture song)
  – Thy love is much better than wine: / Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! / Thy love is much better than wine, / Thy love is much better than wine. / Draw me, we will run after Thee: / Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! / Draw me, we will run after Thee, / Draw me, we will run after Thee. (Hymns #1084 stanzas 3-4)