*this is writing #5 in a series of studying the Song of Solomon.this portion comes from time spent meditating in chapter 4,
“Awake, O north wind, And come, O south! Blow upon my garden, That its spices may flow out. Let my beloved come to his garden And eat its pleasant fruits. ”
The scene over the previous chapters leading to this place is a garden, the garden speaking of our hearts, that we protect and guard, now being given over in full surrender to God. The trust involved with giving the Lord our heart fully is weighty and precious, not lightly taken. This is not a decision with a short prayer attached. This is years of progress, pursuit, wrestle and pain that leads to a genuine place of surrender.
Last year the Lord began speaking to me about this word, “surrender”. It was as if a sharp needle poked a raw, open wound. We all use the word “surrender”, and we sing about it and speak of it as if it is normal and simple, but this encounter I had with the Lord over it proved different. In essence, what the Lord was saying to me was, “you don’t know the first thing about ‘surrender’.”
DEFINING SURRENDER
Immediately my response of course was, “Lord! Teach me what you mean by surrender!” It has been a painful process daily as He has unfolded little by little in His kindness teaching me this. While in prayer and meditation over the verses in the Song of Solomon, the Lord showed me a scene in my minds eye of a man robbing another man and he said to him, “surrender your wallet.”
When I saw this, it was as if the Lord said, “Will the man ever receive his wallet back? Will the man care about his wallet in that moment? Or his life?” As I understood the picture the Lord was showing me, I understood another layer of surrender I never saw before.
Laying something down, laying our lives down even, is not about a condition of our heart, the posture we have or a character trait. It’s about fully giving it up, not keeping a hand on it while God’s hand shares possession of it. When you surrender, you give it away, never to be taken back again. God showed me that most believers have actually never truly surrendered. We aren’t laying our lives down if we are holding onto it. Period.
OUR HEARTS INVITATION
Laying something down, laying our lives down even, is not about a condition of our heart, the posture we have or a character trait. It’s about fully giving it up, not keeping a hand on it while God’s hand shares possession of it. When you surrender, you give it away, never to be taken back again. God showed me that most believers have actually never truly surrendered. We aren’t laying our lives down if we are holding onto it. Period.
The beauty of the Song of Solomon analogy is that when we see ourselves like the bride of Christ the way the Shulamite is the bride to Solomon, we can see the correlation with the growing maturity in love, trust and surrender required for covenantal relationship.
THE WINDS OF ADVERSITY
Surrender has everything to do with trust and letting go. One of the biggest reasons we do not surrender parts of our heart to Jesus is that we simply don’t trust Him. We don’t believe He will really take care of us, that He really has good intentions for us, or that if we truly let go of it we will “be o.k.”
To truly surrender, like the man surrendering his wallet, we have to decide that the thing we are letting go of has a lesser significance than our life in Christ. In other words, our eternal relationship with God is more precious than our life in this age on the earth.
BLOW YOUR WINDS
In this verse, SOS 4:16, when the Shulamite, after surrendering her garden and inviting the Lord fully inside, now says, “blow your winds”, this is the evidence of a surrendered heart. The very evidence that she has truly allowed Him into every part of her heart and surrendered is that she now trusts Him to not just allow adversity to come into her life, but she asks Him to test her! She says in a sense, “I am yours and to prove it, bring the hardships so I can show you that I trust you to hold me, lead me and carry me through it.”
THE TESTING OF OUR TRUST
These “north winds” are the bitter cold winds of the winter which reflect the cross, the ‘picking up and carrying our cross’. North winds in the natural will come and test the strength of the trees and plants in your yard or farm. The cold is a time of testing in a general sense and people who farm rarely would pray for a ‘harsh winter’. Here she is actually asking the Lord to test her love, to test her surrender. And because she trusts Him so much now, she follows it by declaring her faith in that He will also bless her with the warm south winds following.
EVIDENCE OF OUR WORTHINESS
The Lord knows the perfect balance we need in ever season and is faithful to produce the right combination of north winds and south winds that will work in us the maturity in our love toward Christ. He knows the intensity needed in each season we are in of both the adversity and sweet blessings to journey us forward into maturity and working in us His good pleasure that we may become the mature bride of Christ He has called us to be. In fact the very evidence that He has called us worthy of the calling is that we see trials and tribulations at work in our lives! Then and only then can we be assured that He is fashioning us and forming us for His good pleasure! We are in fact being refined as gold. (2 Thessalonians 1:3-11)
Let us pray this over ourselves and one another daily that we would be strengthen in adversity, understanding that we are being prepared as the mature Bride of Christ.