Song of Songs 4:8 A Honeymoon With Jesus 5 Amazing Destinations

Hidden Treasures of the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's. How fun to go on a honeymoon with Jesus is kind of where we're going today. And I think I now have a new favorite verse in the Song of Songs, or maybe the new favorite verse in the Bible.

Oh my goodness, is this a mouthful? And let me say before I get going that I made a mistake. And two episodes ago, I mentioned that I always watch Netflix. I don't watch Netflix. I watch PureFlix, because that way I don't see anything weird. So I want to make that clear that my movies, I get them off PureFlix.

That's much better than Netflix, in my view. But anyway, to get into this honeymoon with Jesus, like, oh my goodness, it is the eighth verse of the fourth chapter. And as we've talked about so many times, the 119th Psalm, the eighth verse, is the letter Het, and has to do with the ideas of miracles. And so man, oh man, oh man, how fun is this verse? So I'll read it.

It's a bit hard to understand, but that's what makes it spectacular. Again, we're going on a honeymoon, because what happened, right? Jesus just described us as spotless. And now he says, come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon.

Look from the top of Ammana, from the top of Cheniere and Herman, from the lion's dens, and from the mountains of the leopards. So here he goes. Like, you know, we are now his spouse. This is the first time in the book he describes us as that. And I think it's really cool. It's sometimes referred to as the daughter-in-law. And as we talked about in our last episode, since God is technically our father-in-law, you know, we're the daughter-in-law.

So you know, I can't help but just pick up that interesting thing. And it has to do with this very strong desire of the heart. And so here, how beautiful is that, that our Savior refers to us as his spouse.

Can't you hardly wait to hear that? And so when we do that, we're going to go, it says, come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon. So he repeats it twice, which that idea of Lebanon, as we've talked about, is this place of the heart.

And I think it's kind of like he's saying from your comfort zone here. We're going to take a wild adventure. We're going to go high. We're going to go to the mountains. So apparently, you know, we're going to go on the top of Ammana. Now these mountains, I'm sure that Rashi and Matthew Henry explained that these are like border mountains.

So you can see all of Israel from the north and the south and the west. But one of the neat things about these is when you look at these words in Hebrew, and so when you look, when you hear the word Ammana, you can hear in it, amen. And the reason why you hear amen is because it's an Aleph, a Mem, and a Nun.

And what is that? That means faithful. That is the very word that means faith, truth.

It's a very basic idea. And so you can think of this high mountaintop experience of faith. I mean, that's our first stop on our honeymoon is we're going to go to the top of the mountain of faith.

How spectacular is that? To see how deep and how wide and how amazing Jesus' love is for us. First step on our honeymoon, Mount Ammana. And then it says to the mountaintop of Shiner. Now Shiner, wow, this is the one of high adventure because this starts with the letter shin, which we talk about always is this idea of refining.

So we're going to the head refinery right here. We're going into the fire and we're going to this place of testing, which, you know, is how cool is that? That now that we have faith, we're going to go get our faith tested some and turned into this beautiful mountaintop idea of seeing what it's like.

I would suppose even Jesus experienced this as he went out in the desert to be tested in so many different ways. And I think you'll see where that leads here in a minute as we go to our fourth and fifth stops. But first we got to make our stop on Mount Hermon. And I love the way that's spelled because my grandfather Dilmore, so my father's father was named Hermon and it was spelled like this, not H-E-R-M-A-N like Herman Munster, but H-E-R-M-O-N like Mount Herman.

And Herman is a sanctuary. So we go from, how cool is this? We go from that place of the refinery of Shire to Hermon to this place of a sanctuary of being set apart and like, oh my goodness, how fun is that on our honeymoon? And then it gets even more cryptic.

It's our next two stops on our honeymoon. It's like, oh my goodness. So then he says, from the lion's dens and from the mountains of the leopards. So there you have some questions that you get to deal with and I get to deal with like, do you think that these lion's dens are, and I'm sure that John Eldred would tell you that we are in a battle against, and Matthew Henry definitely came down on this side, that this is Satan. And that now that you are married to Christ, you have an enemy and you have an enemy and it has now become a life and death thing. And he is out to ambush you, which is very much what that lion word looks like in Hebrew.

And you now have something that you're going to have to reckon with. And certainly when Jesus went on his honeymoon after he was anointed, right? He got a chance to experience this lion in so many different ways. But there's also another way to think of lion, right?

Because Jesus is the lion of the tribe of Judah. And that word den is really spectacular as it has to do with this place of extreme kingdom and power. And so, you know, it's interesting thing.

You can take on either side of this particular part of our honeymoon and maybe it's both, I don't know, but I think it's really, really cool that we're going to make this stop on our honeymoon. And then the last is perhaps the most cryptic, is the mountain of the leopards. And so, you know, really beautiful. We talked about it in actually the last couple episodes that this idea of a mountain is this starting of God's expression. And so here, you know, God is going to express us in a way of the leopard. And the leopard, the word leopard in Hebrew, if you could translate it, it's like limpid or the idea of clear or purity. So now that we've had our chance to be at the mountaintop of the refinery, we now get this idea of the mountains of purity, these leopard mountains.

And when you think about a leopard of the majesty of that, even a snow leopard, if you've ever seen that thing, you know, I've seen them on National Geographic, they are spectacular animals. And so here is this place and the leopard is often in iniquity, an image when you see it in a painting or something of life and death, a life and death struggle. And so obviously, as we go on this adventure with Jesus, like, oh, my goodness, we are on a life and death struggle.

But it's not any longer our life and death. It's all these people that God has sent us to on this amazing adventure. And I don't know if you ever thought about this, but it's cool to me that Rashi describes this verse as going into exile, that the Lord will be with them when they're in exile. So when he's saying, come with me from Lebanon, from Lebanon, he's saying they're going out of Israel and you're going into exile.

That's an interesting thing. I don't know if you ever thought about it, but in the book of Acts, when the church was supposed to go out and share the love of Jesus, the gospel of all the world, when they didn't do that, 70 A.D. came about in this huge dispersion of the Jews throughout the world. They were exiled in their own way again. But even the disciples were exiled around the world so that the message of God got out as a result, because they were all sent out into the world. And so maybe there's an angle of that is that we're married to Christ like he's got to get us out and about so that we can show him off in the mountaintops and down with the leopards, all these different things that we're describing here. So there's all those things to think about when we are on our honeymoon with Jesus, but I can't help but tell you what this looks like.

I have so many beautiful examples in my life of people that have gone on this honeymoon to the mountaintop of faith, to the place of purification in the refinery, the beginning of the refinery, to the place of the Mount Hermon of the sanctuary, and then to the lion's den, and then obviously to the mountain of the leopard. So I have this friend. His name is Andy Bowersox. He does this ministry called Energized Ministries, and he's a ministry, mostly a recreational ministry for pastors. Pray for your pastors. He wants to be a friend to pastors who it's difficult to have friends in a congregation because if they find out anything you're doing, they might go bad for you in the church. And so here he has this unbelievable ministry, and I've known him for years and years and years, but I have known him to always be this person that when he has some instruction for God, he goes on that honeymoon.

In other words, he goes to that place of faith. He goes to that place of the great refinery and the purity that that's made him in that ministry of his is just unbelievable. Like right this very minute, I know Andy is in Kentucky looking for people that are in floods, churches that need to be rescued. Last year, he was there with the tornado victor's victims finding money to put a roof on a church. He's always doing something amazing.

I got to just tell you this one story that to me is like, man, I just can't believe it. So he he when I first met him, it was kind of a broke builder who wanted to start this ministry. And it seemed kind of crazy to me that he was a recreational ministry to pastors. But nonetheless, God used it and it was growing and he was raising money to go out and do these things for pastors because it really was his heart. And he really, really, really loves pastors.

And he really I mean, he stands for them in the gap in so many different ways, takes these guys to places does adventures with them, actually kind of, he has his own mountaintop retreat. But anyway, he was raising money for his ministry. And somehow or another, he landed Matt Marr to do a benefit concert for him.

Now, I understand that Matt Marr or you know, Lord, I need you that song. I mean, this guy, it was a major is a major major name, obviously, draw if you want to do a benefit concert, and he got him right at his church in the high point of it was spectacular. And he called me and asked me to be the emcee for this event. And wow, I mean, you can imagine the love offering that they were gonna get for his ministry was going to be huge. And what what a wonderful opportunity for energized ministries to have Matt Matt Marr do this benefit concert.

Well, here comes the mountaintop experience. So the day of the concert, Andy calls me right on the MC Robbie, I need to tell you that the Lord has put it on my heart that there is this pastor that was a biker church, I think in Trinity anyway, they had a horrible accident, and he was in the hospital had tons of medical bills, and they're even having to teach him his memory again, they didn't know if he could ever be and reinstalled in his ministry. And he said, Robbie, I just feel like the Lord's put it on my heart to give the offering tonight, everything that goes, as I recall to this pastor.

And I was like, What? I mean, this is his operating budget. He's worked so hard to get and he got Matt Marr and all this and now he is going to, by faith, give this all to this needy pastor, like, Oh, my goodness, I couldn't, you know, like, and so that night, if I'm not, you know, and again, my memory, it's been a number of years ago, I think they raised $20,000.

Right. And, and Andy wasn't a little bit glad about giving that money to that pastor, he was, he was couldn't be more and more and more excited, I could probably tell you 10 or 15 more Andy Bowersock stories, because he's just one of those people that God gives him something. And he goes to the mountain.

I mean, he, he goes up there to get a good view. And he goes on this honeymoon with Jesus, because he will take you out of your comfort zone, he will take you on adventures that are just absolutely unbelievable. Um, but it requires faith, it requires that trip to the Amen Mountain, it requires that faith requires the refining of sheer and it requires the sanctuary vermin. It certainly requires the den of the lions and the mountain of the leopard Oh, and for him to hear for us to hear. Oh, you're my spouse, Lord. I pray that all of us will hear that today. In Jesus name. Amen.