This message explores the Song of Solomon to deal with the holy intimacy of love and its importance of being properly seen in the family, and perpetuated to the children.
Excerpts from the message:
“In the Middle East, the love stories are centered (and in the Orient)—it`s a biblical culture—the Middle East and Orient the marriages are planned by parents, and the boy and the girl fall in love later. I would like to see some of our own marriages fall in love later. Western romance built upon the word romance, it`s a Western word. We fall in love first and then get a divorce. That`s Western. In the old country, you married sometimes without sight because she was veiled, and your parents planned it, and tried to match an appropriate girl for the boy. I don`t think we would tolerate that now, but if that was done in faith, I believed it really worked. Only for the boy and girl to find romance later, and really come to love each other last, not at first, but last—love at last. What a wonderful way for couples to end up—love at last, not just at first.”
“I do not believe any of those are in the book of the Song of Solomon—none of those views of courtship. We have a very good example of courtship, intimate courtship, and I`m going to call it—not the duenna, the chaperone, the escort system—but I`m going to call it family love-making. Love-making in the presence of the family. The scene starts out in chapter five. Her beloved is absent, and she is deeply moved he`s absent. She is longing for him to come. She tells the daughters of Jerusalem, and they appear to be in a house, ‘Where is my beloved.’ All of her love-sickness and all of her hungering for his courtship is uttered right out to the people....But this dear Shulamite girl, deeply in love with her Solomon, just blurts it out, ‘I wish you would help me find my beloved.’ And when they inquire what is thy beloved among another beloved, they`re talking right in the family, right in the house there. She begins to describe him. They probably didn`t have cameras then, and there was nobody there to give a painting of it, so she just verbally portrayed him....And so the Shulamite says, ‘Well, my beloved is gone down into his garden. I wish he were here. Last time I saw him he was in his garden. And while she is talking to the daughters of Jerusalem, he appears in the room—probably on the backside of the Shulamite while she is facing the daughters of Jerusalem—says, ‘Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah.’...Right there love-making started....He is not at all reluctant to speak these words in the presence of the daughters of Jerusalem to his Shulamite....Who in the world could do that today?”
“I remember when I took my dear wife-to-be home to meet my parents. That was big. That was big, big. I remember how I helped her up the steps, you know. Six-inch rule was perfectly proper to break it. I didn`t want her to fall down the steps. That`s what I had on my mind. Perfectly proper in the presence of the family. I remember sitting on a sofa with her. I remember. I remember.”
“O that God would give our children a view of holy intimacies, and it be a photograph of the heart—‘That`s the way I`m going too, Papa. That`s the way I`m going to do it, Mama.’ My father and my mother impressed me on a number of occasions in the home of their love. I will never forget it.”
“If you`ve had a life where a father and mother so bragged on you, you`re suffering from pride by now. But it`s very important that somebody come along and love a daughter and the parents see it in her because somebody else said it. Somebody else said it. Somebody else said it, ‘He`s a handsome man.’ When somebody else said it, it helps....I remember when I started courting my wife (I don`t think I ever explained this to her), but I wanted to become acquainted with her girlfriends. Or, the girls that I saw at the college that she was with. I wanted to meet them, and I wanted to find out what they thought of her. I wanted to know if they had anything to say. Now, I didn`t come up to them and say, ‘I`m Tally. I`m courting this girl. Tell me about her.’ That wasn`t the way I went. You won`t get anything that way.”
“I`m sorry to say some families have almost ruined their children, and it will be nothing but a miracle that will make a head out of the son and a loving, submissive wife out of the daughter. I don`t mean a weak wife....Too many children are being raised as daughters never to be a wife. They will never be one. And too many sons have been raised by women who will never be men.”
