“Rightly do they love you.” This is the last sentence in Song of Solomon 1:4, and surely is one of the most obvious, yet profoundly powerful statements a human being can make. To discover how right it is for us to love Him is to discover, at some level how much we are loved by Him. That word “rightly” is a Hebrew word that means equity, or easy, or what’s fair. It carries the same idea of Romans 12:1, that says, in light of God’s mercy (His unconditional, sacrificial love), to surrender all of our life to Jesus is our “reasonable service of worship.” We’re not just called to love Him; we are called to love Him with all of our heart. To love someone with all of your heart can’t be done just out of duty; it has to be the result of a response to something so great and so massive that you can’t help but let your heart go, without holding anything back. Earlier in verse 3 we were told that His name means “to empty.” He fully emptied himself at the cross because of his great love for us. The Cross is the great revelation of what God’s love for us is really like. The response to that at the end of verse 3 is, “Therefore the maidens love you.”The surrendered life can’t be the result of manipulation, or condemnation from others, especially spiritual leaders. A surrendered life that will last, and will forever go deeper, has to be the result of a revelation of God’s mercy, grace, and love for us. Sustained lovesickness is the result of a sustained discovery of, and encounter with the amazing love of God. True love is always won by a hero who has conquered a heart with heroics, not through coercion and threats of rejection. Love sickness is the offspring of love sickness. That which is epic giving birth to something epic, that elevates life from the mundane, and meaningless to THE GREAT STORY, and THE GREAT BATTLE of our times. The HOLY ROMANCE of The LION KING.
