Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2461
“We will be glad and rejoice in You, we will remember Your love more than wine.” Song of Solomon 1:4.
IT is a very blessed habit of saints who have grown in Grace to enter into actual conversation with the Well-Beloved. Our text is not so much speaking of Him as speaking to Him—“We will be glad and rejoice in You, we will remember Your love more than wine.” Of course, in prayer and in praise, we speak to God, but I suggest that we should seek to have much more of intense and familiar conversations with the Lord Jesus Christ than the most of us at present enjoy. I find it good, sometimes in prayer, to say nothing, but to sit or kneel quite still and to look up to my Lord in adoring silence—and then sometimes to talk to Him, not asking anything of Him, but just speaking familiarly with Jesus, realizing Him to be present, and waiting to hear Him speak until some precious Word of His from Scripture comes into my soul as with living accents newly-spoken by those dear lips which are as lilies dropping sweet-smelling myrrh! The French have a word which they use concerning that conversation which is common among those who love one another, or are on terms of intimate friendship. They call it, “tutoyage,” for they say, “you” and, “your,” to one another, instead of the more formal language used towards strangers. I like that form of expression that is used in our text and delight to meet with souls that are brought into so rapt a state of fellowship with Christ that they can speak to Him in this familiar fashion, “We will be glad and rejoice in You, we will remember Your love more than wine.”
If you, dear Friends, have not lately conversed with Jesus, do so now in the quietude of your own spirit. Think that His shadow is over you—do not let it be mere imagination, but let it be what is far better than that—a true realizing faith—for if He is present where two or three are met together in His name, rest assured that He is not absent where this great assembly of His people has come together to commemorate His passion and His death! You are here, blessed Mas-ter—we are sure that You are and we worship You and speak with You as really as if we could see You with that vesture on, woven from the top throughout—as truly as if we saw You, now, lifting that beloved pierced hand and laying it upon us! And we say to You from the bottom of our hearts, “We will rejoice and be glad in You, we will remember Your love more than wine.” This text is not so much for me to explain, dear Friends, as for you to enjoy! Forget all about the preacher, but take the text and part it among yourselves—extract as much as you can of its spiritual nourishment and feed upon it!
I. As you do so, you will notice, first, that we have, here, A DOUBLE RESOLVE— “We will be glad and rejoice in You, we will remember Your love more than wine.”
I may say of that resolve that it is, first, a necessary resolve, for it is not according to human nature to rejoice in Christ. It is not according to the tendency of our poor fallen state to remember His love. There must be an act of the will with regard to this resolve—let us will it now—“We will be glad and rejoice in You, we will remember Your love more than wine.” There are so many things that try to come in between our souls and our Savior, so many sorrows that would prevent our rejoicing in Him, that we must be resolved to be glad in Him whatever our sorrows may be. Down with you, sorrows! Down with you! We have said unto the Lord that we will be glad and rejoice in Him and we mean to prove our words to be true! Then there are so many troublous thoughts that come flying in to mar our full fellowship with our Lord. However tightly windows may be closed and doors may be shut, these thoughts will find an entrance and we get to remembering the sick child at home, or some care that has afflicted us during the week. Oh, but, Lord, we will not remember these things, now! We say to You from our hearts, “We will—we will—we will remember Your love!” Away with you, care, sorrow, grief—away with you! Come to me, O Holy Spirit, and help me, now, to have a happy time, to be glad and rejoice in my Lord—and to have a holy time—to remember His love and to remember nothing else!
You must will it most intensely, dear Friends, or it will not come to pass. It is not sufficient to merely walk into a place of worship and put ourselves into the posture of devotion—and then to imagine that, doing whatever is proper to the place and the hour—we shall have fellowship with Jesus. Oh, no, Beloved! Oh, no! We must worship Him in spirit and in truth, not in fiction and in sham—not mechanically, as though we could have true fellowship with Him without earnest and intense desire. No, there must be these two utterances of our holy resolve, “We will be glad and rejoice in You, we will remember Your love more than wine.”