Being a Fool for God
Song of Solomon 2:8-13 (New International Version)
8 Listen! My lover!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag.
2 Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
10 My lover spoke and said to me,
"Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, and come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me."
This is the world of God for the people of God and the entire world. Thanks be to God hallelujah, amen.
Let us pray.
I’m going to make a confession. When I first read this passage of scripture, I used it in a love letter that I wrote to my high school sweet heart. I thought that this was a passage of scripture that talked about the love between a man and a woman. I thought that it would make me seem mature and sophisticated.
I bet you’re wondering, how I would know to look in the Bible to find something to write in a love letter. Well, when I was eight years old, I always made it a habit to read the Bible everyday. I didn’t just read a verse or two. I was reading chapters. And on Sundays I would go through an entire Book. So by the time I was 13, I read the Bible from front to cover several times. That’s a great feat for a child. But I wasn’t reading the Bible for understanding. I was reading the Bible for entertainment purposes.
I had a yearning to read everything that I could get my hands on because I love to read. When my mother wouldn’t buy books for me at the grocery stores or Wal-Mart, then I was forced to either re-read my old books or read the Bible.
Because I read my Bible so much, I would get frustrated every Sunday when I went to Sunday school. I would ask my parents why I need to go to Sunday school. They told me that’s where I learn about God. And I would tell them that I think I know more about God than the teacher because the stuff we learn in Sunday school is stuff everybody should know already. I want to talk about the stuff that we never read about in Sunday. (Give some examples of this).
All this stuff that I read made me build up walls when it came to God. I didn’t come to church to worship God out of love but fear of being wiped out like he did the Ammonites or the Canaanites. I didn’t long to have a more personal relationship with God until I was called into ministry.
But God is waiting
When I was doing my research for my sermon this week, I realized that the Songs of Solomon are romantic but it is symbolism. Symbolism can be defined as the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character.
In this passage of text, God is comparing the love that he has for the church to the love that a man has for a woman. I hate to say it, but if God loves us with that sort of passion, then what would seem so out of the ordinary for him to try to woo us into wanting to be in a more intimate relationship with him.
Have you felt the nudging and stirring of the Lord to pray more than usual lately? Have you heard the voice of the Holy Spirit calling you into a deeper relationship with Him?
It seems that the Lord calls me to prayer at some of the most inconvenient times (my perception of the matter). However, I am quickly learning that His call to intimacy is what I need more than anything else on the face of this earth. I don’t know if ya’ll remember, but I gave a sermon on being naked before God. Baring your soul before God sets us up for the ability to establish an intimate relationship with God. Think about it we have to start somewhere. But my thing is, let’s not stop
why does the church reject that which they so desperately need?
Luke chapter 10 gives us the account of Jesus paying a visit to Mary and Martha. Mary chose to sit at the feet of Jesus and receive the words of life proceeding forth from His mouth, while Martha proceeded to prepare a meal. Martha’s focus was on the natural, while Mary’s focus was on that which was spiritual. Jesus told Martha that the spiritual aspect of living was most needful. The natural things of life can sometimes distract us from receiving what we so desperately need from the Lord. We need Jesus! We need to hear what He has to say! We need the words of life that He has to impart to us. We are and will be a people who desperately need a Holy Ghost deposit in our lives.
In John chapter 17, we read some of the last words that Jesus spoke to His disciples before His betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane. In this particular chapter, the Lord mentions how He gave His disciples the words that the Father gave to Him.
John 17:8 – “For I have given to them the words which You have given Me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came forth from You; and they have believed that You sent Me.”
Jesus had made a tremendous deposit into the lives of His disciples. One of His main objectives was to reproduce Himself in these twelve men. He imparted to them everything that He had to give. He held nothing back. He poured Himself into them because He knew that one day He would leave them and they would then be required to carry on the work of God’s kingdom.
Leaders should not burn themselves out by doing all the work all of the time. There are others within the body of Christ who need to be doing their part. Leaders should be training others to do what they are now doing. Five-fold ministers should be equipping the saints to do the work of the ministry. They should be reproducing themselves in those who are under their leadership so that someone will be able to continue the work when they pass on to glory. We must learn how to pass the baton on to the next generation of leaders that God is raising up in this day and hour.
That’s what I’m doing with my daughter. I’ve pour myself into her. I have deposited myself into her, and now I’m starting to see the interest of that deposit. She has seen be a leader in the church and for the church at the local church level, the district level, and the conference level over these past seven years, and now she has accepted her role as a minister. I didn’t make her go to Philander to become a certified youth lay speaker. She did that on her own and now she wants to cultivate that and form her own leadership and ministries to help bring other young people to Christ. She’s yearning to have a deep relationship with God because that’s what she sees her mother doing.
I am the first person to say that children are a direct reflection of the attitudes and beliefs of parents. If you are foster the urgency of having an intimate relationship with God, then your child will be the same way.
Remember the old saying that parents say to children… “Do as I say and not as I do…” Well we all know the consequences to that. Or when parents say to children… “Be better than me.” No… my things is to the parents… you be better because children need to see you make the effort. It will mean so much more.
So let’s take another look at our text for today…Song of Solomon 2:8-9 – The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Behold, he stands behind our wall; He is looking through the windows, gazing through the lattice.
Song of Solomon 2:10 – My beloved spoke, and said to me; “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.”
The Lord is pictured as one skipping upon the hills and leaping upon the mountains. He’s definitely not having a bad day. He’s full of joy and gladness as He is looking forward to spending some intimate time with His bride. However, when He arrives at the place where she lives, He is stopped dead in His tracks by a wall with small windows in it. The wall completely surrounds His beloved. He desperately begins to call for His beloved through the small windows in the wall. “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away with me.”
How many times has the Lord called us to Himself only to find that we have put up walls to keep Him out? So many of us are afraid of intimate relationships because we don’t want to be hurt. We’ve been there, done that. We are afraid to give ourselves completely to the Lord because of past hurts, past wounds, past relationships that have ended in disastrous ways.
The Lord wants us to find healing and deliverance in Him so that we can be made whole. He wants to tear down those walls that keep us separated from Him. He longs to be intimate with us so that He can reproduce Himself in us.
This call from the Lord to His bride was a call to intimacy. He wanted her to come away with Him. He wanted to romance her and cause her to skip on the hills with Him. He wanted her to leap upon the mountains with Him and receive the joy and the love that was in His heart for her.
Song of Solomon 5:5-6 – I arose to open for my beloved and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, on the handles of the lock. I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had turned away and was gone.
She had waited too long to respond to the call from her beloved. She decided to respond when it was convenient for her. As a result of her lack of sensitivity, she missed her time of visitation. She missed her appointment with the One who loved her unconditionally.
How many times have we missed our appointments with God? How many times has He tugged on our hearts to spend some quality time with Him, yet we brushed Him off and continued to do our own thing. How many times has He called us to come away with Him to skip on the hills and leap upon the mountains?
Think about how many times have we missed the opportunity to get closer to God? Probably far too many to count. But we miss out because we don’t want to feel foolish. We have the misconceived notion that the relationship that we have with God is going to end up in disappointment because of the disasters that we have had with people.
But my thing is… I would rather be a fool for God than wise man. All this education that I’m getting doesn’t mean anything if I can’t continue to maintain my intimate relationship with God.
But I know for a fact that we don’t do that because we run the risk of looking ridiculous to other people. In this day and age, to say that you love Jesus runs the risk of you being labeled by people. And let’s face it… we don’t like to be label because that’s means that we are locked into stereotypes and scrutinizes that we are ready to face. I can’t just see it now. We go out and tell people how much we love Jesus and the next thing we know they’re say, “Aw man! There’s goes another one of those Jesus freaks!”
But if the Lord could endure the being mocked at the cross, then we should be able to endure it when people call us a few names.
But guess what! Most of the time we can’t because we’re punks! We care what people think, and we have to get out of the habit of that. I get scrutinized ever day, but I shake it off because you walk a mile in my shoes then you realize why I love the Lord so much because he delivered me from the snares of the enemy! And he delivered me from myself!
Just imagine… how it would be if we were to just find Miss Cora laying in her yard as we’re passing on our way to go to church. Our first inclination is to stop and make sure she’s alright. She’s just laying there. And we get over to where she’s lying in the grass we notice she has her eyes closed. Now my first instinct would be to see if she was still breathing because that just wouldn’t seem normal for Miss Cora to just be lying out in the grass like that.
So I might ask her if she’s alright. She opens her eyes and says she is… And of course anyone of us would ask her why she’s laying the grass. And her answer is “Oh, I’m just out here having a little talk with Jesus.” Now we all know that we’d be thinking to ourselves that Miss Cora must be touched with the case of the “Old timer’s disease” or something. We would think that she’s off her rocker, but that’s not the case.
We have to come to a point to where nothing keeps us from establishing true intimacy with God even at the sake of looking foolish to others.
We have to learn to be a fool for God!
It amazes me how so many Christians find such pleasure in spending a good portion of their time complaining, bickering, backbiting, gossiping and speaking negative words over those whom they don’t like within the body of Christ. Don’t we yet understand how much God hates this kind of carnality? Wouldn’t it be much better for us to spend that time in an intimate relationship with the Lord, receiving that which is needed to live a victorious Christian life for Him? I believe the church would have less internal problems today if we would learn to respond to the call to intimacy. The Spirit of God longs for His bride to be transformed into His image. He longs for His bride to be delivered from division and strife. He longs for us to become so close to Him, that we become one in the Spirit.
Are we putting God first in our lives? Are we really sold out to Him or are we just playing church, going through the motions of Christianity? Do we really want to be changed into His image? Do we really want to live for Jesus and make the world different? If so, let’s respond to the call. Let’s get right with God and make Him our first priority. When we get our relationship right with God, everything else will fall into place.
So turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, I’m a fool for God, but if you’re not you need to be.”
Are you a fool for God? Well I am. I’m up here standing before you now talking about how God wants to woo you into a deeper more passionate relationship with him. God wants to draw you nearer to him. He wants to deposit his spirit into us, but are we going to keep the walls up at the risk of looking foolish to others?
When Minister Tommy comes up and gives the invitational, examine your hearts and search your souls and ask yourselves are there any walls inside you that’s keeping God from having an intimate relationship with each of us. I have them still. But little by little I allow for the Lord to tear them down. Are you willing to do the same?
(Do if you’re happy and you know it)
