Who is this coming up from the desert, leaning on her beloved?
Song of Solomon 8:5
This past Monday was a holiday at my workplace. My wife and I enjoy spending time out in nature, and we have a number of parks not far from our home. So, I asked her which one she would like to visit that day. Her answer was, “I don’t care, as long as I am with you!”
This reply made me think, not because it was unusual for her to respond in that way but because it captures something of our relationship with Jesus. In the last post I quoted Brennan Manning regarding faith, about it growing to the point that we want God, and we want to want nothing else. To be with Him is our objective rather than where He takes us or whether we become enriched in some way.
In the resurrection, Jesus gave Peter a preview of the future: “‘…when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.’ (This he [Jesus] said to show by what kind of death he [Peter] was to glorify God.)” (John 21:18-19). Peter would not want to go there, but he would accompany Jesus for the sake of glorifying God. This willingness to place God’s interests above our own is a sure sign that a death has taken place, and new life has come.
Lately I have been spending some time re-reading Watchman Nee’s wonderful book, The Normal Christian Life. He takes as the starting point our crucifixion with Christ, as the apostle Paul describes in Galatians 2:20. God the Father has placed us, as baptized believers, in His Son. Eventually we awaken to the fact that when Jesus died on the cross our old sinful nature died with him. And when he arose from the dead we were given a new life in him. As Paul put it in Romans 6:3-4, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” The nature of this new life is inclined to love him and seek him, to long to be near him—because now we share in his own nature, and this is how Jesus himself relates to the Father. This is not something that God regards as extraordinary for followers of Christ; it is, to Him, a normal Christian life. The Father placed each of us in Christ, and Christ in each of us, so that Jesus “became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).
I am astonished to find myself coming up from the wilderness, leaning on Jesus. Astonished because I always thought that this experience of walking with him and leaning on him was reserved for the far-advanced, super-spiritual giants of the faith. Instead, our Lord intends for all believers to know Him in this way. The young woman in the poems of the Song of Solomon was not extraordinary in herself, but she was extraordinary in the eyes of her Beloved. As we learn His love we grow in trust. Trust leads us to greater openness, dependence and intimacy. As we walk in intimacy with the Son, our Beloved brings us up from the desert of individualism and into the family life of the Father.
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