The Lord was telling me this morning that we have to get our eyes off our feet in our walk with Him, and we need to lift up our gaze into His eyes, trusting His leadership. It’s like a dance. You can’t watch your steps if you’re going to dance with Jesus.
While watching the Shulammite’s union dance with Christ, the daughters of Jerusalem, as the Shulammite passes by, cry out, “Come back, come back, O Shulammite; come back, come back that we may gaze at you!”
In response, Solomon (Jesus) addresses the daughters of Jerusalem, “Why should you gaze at the Shulammite, as that the dance the two companies?” He is saying to them, ‘You should not be gazing on someone else dancing. You should be dancing too.’
In poetic language, our relationship with Jesus is described in Song of Solomon 6:13 as a dance between heaven and earth. Of course, that is an amazing description of those whose feet are on earth and yet seated in the heavenly places in Christ. Our relationship with Jesus is like a dance. In Christ, we are one with Him face to face, engaged in an extraordinarily fascinating and delightful dance. To other believers (the daughters of Jerusalem) who are watching this dance played out in a Shulammite’s (a hidden one who is walking out their union with Christ) life, nothing is more heart-provoking and inviting. Don’t you love to be around someone whose hiddenness in Christ is being manifest?
In the very next verse of Song of Solomon – 7:1 – Jesus speaks to the Shulammite and says to her, “How beautiful are your feet (literally “footsteps” in the Hebrew) in sandals, O prince’s daughter.”
When you dance in sandals, your feet sometimes get a little bit dirty, but Jesus says the footsteps of our dance with Him are beautiful. He just loves the fact that we have given ourselves to the dance, even if we were wearing sandals. When you’re dancing with your beloved Jesus, you can’t keep looking at your feet, or you will fall all over yourself. You have to lift your gaze into the eyes of the one you are dancing with and trust His lead. If all you do is spend your time staring at your spiritual feet because you’re afraid that every step won’t be perfect enough, then you will never enjoy the dance. Your beloved who holds you with his nail-scarred hands invites you to get lost in His presence, and in the process, with your eyes fixed on Him, you will discover that the steps become even more extravagant without you having even to try. Dancing by faith isn’t a risk; it’s a trust in the lover of your soul.