INTIMACY IV

It says in Song of Solomon 4:12 that “my sister, my spouse, is a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” It is the man who has the power to initiate love, as Christ initiated love to The Church, and the husband and wife relationship is depicted in that way in Ephesians 5. Christ loved us a long time before we loved Him. He didn’t love us because we did something. He loved us because He is love. God has made man to have the same ability to initiate love, and many men have passively drawn back from giving and expressing love. Love produces love. When men initiate love, it opens up a fountain in their family, a spring, something within the family that produces a flow and only love can do that. It is a flow of life, a flow of fruit and riches, not based on domination or control. When there is a flow, we don’t have to pray for everything, but we just live and have a natural flow of life. If we worry about whether we are doing the spiritual thing or we have to pray to love our spouse or pray to love our kids, we are like a fountain sealed up because there is no clarity, no flow of life coming from us to bring freshness. Only when we have a flow will we have a different level of depth. We can never know the depth of a river because the swiftness of the current and the flow of life will bring different levels of depth in our lives. When we have no depth within us, we have no revelation. It is from the depths of my life that a flow comes, and that flow is a river of life. The flow comes when we are able to submit to God in the circumstances; when we embrace the principles of Christ; when we yield our carnal mind to submit to the Spirit and start living out what we know in Christ.

When we submit to Christ in our daily lives, we start to produce spices it says in the verses in Song of Solomon. These spices are a whole study in itself. Spices are produced through a process, and not just picked off the tree like a leaf. Myrrh comes from a wound in the bark of a tree and has a bitter scent that speaks of suffering. There are other spices that are sweet in smell. God has caused the process in our lives, so that He can produce these spices in us.

I met a young woman who had a health spa, and she sells body oils and works with fragrances. She told me some interesting things about fragrances and smell. She said she went to California to study fragrances. At that seminar they took a group of women, blindfolded them, and then asked them to choose between an artificial fragrance and the natural fragrance of different things such as strawberries. Almost the entire group when asked which smell was artificial and which was natural chose the artificial smell over the natural smell. They could not detect the real life smell. They did it with many fruits and flavors, and it was the same result. Many of us have lost the ability to detect the authentic fragrances in life. I have read studies on smell and how they have discovered that smell awakens things within us. Some smells that have been over powering can stay in our memory for years, and when our brain brings back that particular memory it can immediately evoke a reaction in us such as nausea.

On a spiritual level, many of us in The Church today have no smell. We have no fragrance of Christ that attracts people. What we have is something artificially produced. It is like when hunters who are experienced go into the bush in Africa. The animals can detect the artificial fragrances on the bodies of humans that are not a part of the natural environment of the bush and they know some one is coming a long time before they are near.

In the home it is the fragrance we produce through the process of life that makes home a delight. The home is meant to be a garden that is filled with the spices of Christ. The bridegroom had a garden, but he would not come to his garden until spices started to come out of the garden. We can only release those spices in our lives through the rubbing and drying of the flower parts. It is the crushing that produces a smell that can last for two thousand years as the fragrance of Christ does today. It is the fragrance of the crucified one and of the resurrection declaring that the tomb is empty. Some of our marriages are so plastic that there is no scent, even though we wear the most expensive perfume that we can buy.

In His Love,
      Sigi

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