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The Love Song

Based off the book, Song of Solomon.

(Chorus) 2:7

Do not waken love

Till it so desires, till it so desires

Vs.1

All the love around me

Are thorns that bring me pain  (2:2)

But when your love surrounds me

I sit beneath your shade (2:3)

When you kiss me

It’s like sweet wine on my lips (1:2)

Arise my darling

My beautiful one, come with me (2:10)

(Chorus)

But do not waken love

Till it so desires, till it so desires

Vs. 2

All the nighttime waiting

Waiting for my heart’s desire (3:1)

Through the streets I’m searching

Looking for the one my heart it loves (3:2)

When I find you

I’ll open up my garden

Let your wind come

And blow into my garden

Come to me (4:16)

Bridge

You are light you’re the purest of Gold (5:10-11)

You are mine and my heart is yours (6:3)

I belong to you, I belong to you (7:10)

Place me like a seal on your heart

For love is strong as death (8:6)

Burn me with the fire of your love

Your love it can’t be washed away (8:7)

Your banner over me is love

Your banner over me is love (2:4)

Awaken now my love

You’re all that I desire, all that I desire

Ok, here is another song that kind goes along with what i wrote last week.  It is about how we naturally put forth our best face and try to hide our weaknesses and failures cause we don’t want people to know how bad we really are. We all do it and I think if we say we don’t then we are doing it by saying that.   It seems that Jesus really believed that too.  He was so harsh with the religious people that were always putting on a show.  Kyle, one of the kids in our Youth group had just read Mathew  6 and we were talking about how once we get a religious discipline under our belt we love to show all our fellow club members how good we have gotten. I remember the first time I led someone to Christ, I bragged about it till I was blue in the face.  We want people to see how good we are and how well we follow God’s law.  It makes us feel special and unique and better than those who don’t or can’t be as good as us.   Jesus did such a good job at showing how this form of thinking is actually worse and more destructive in our relationship with God than outright sin that everyone sees. There is an older woman (we’ll call her Crystal)  who is a heroine addict in our community who will do anything or anyone to get her next fix. She is one of the biggest rejects in our community and seemingly impossible to change. Even the lowest person still despise her and considers them self better than her.  We have reached out to her for the last 4 years and seen nothing.  No change and no desire to change.  But there is something refreshing about Crystal in the sense that her sin isn’t hidden.  It is exposed to us all and it disgusts us and destroys her family and this community.  We can learn a lot from her and we can actually see ourselves on a cosmic level before God when we look at her. Jesus showed that all of us are Crystals in the Kingdom of heaven. All of our sin is utterly exposed for everything it is whether we can see it or not. God sees us all as we see Crystal.  He sees our hearts for what they are: selfish prideful and rebellious toward the saving grace he has given. We are addicted to ourselves and we even do thing in His name to satisfy those selfish desires of our hearts We whore ourselves to get whatever fix we think we need in order to feel alive and consequential. We use religion to cover up our filth, but eventually even the strongest moral fabric human’s can weave on their religious spindles will rip and expose the sickness rotting beneath. Even our best smelling religious colognes that we cover ourselves with will eventually wear off and the stench of our spiritual BO will plague those who are closest to us.  But the King of the universe is not like us.  He doesn’t treat us the way we treat Crystal.  He himself has come into our filth and been clothed in the same stinking flesh that we all have.  But for some reason his didn’t stink.  He was refreshing and those who got near Him and got to know him were either driven away by His purity or they embraced it. He brought hope and new life to those who knew they needed a savior. Those who saw that their sin and their best deeds were one in the same.  Those who saw they had no hope in knowing the perfect God through their own imperfect works. But those who wanted to justify themselves through religion, and those who loved their sin hated Him and killed him.  But even that was part of the plan, for in His death, all  the failures and darkness of His loved ones was taken on Him and utterly consumed in His light as He rose again from the dead. In that miracle, something amazing happened to those who put their hope in Him.  Crystals like me got a new heart and new clothes.  The stinking rotting sin begins to fade as the  gospel works itself deeper into our hearts and we actually begin to enjoy the look and the new life it brings.  We start to love the way He loved and live the way He lived.  Not because we have to but because we really want to and because we love our savior and believe what He has done for us.

So here is the song.  I recorded this one actually a few years ago.  You can click on the link and hear it.

Shining Shells and Cheap Cologne

Put on a shining shell, for all to see

to somehow hide what lies beneath

The secret’s dark the shame is real

You’d do anything

To convince yourself and everyone else

That everything will be alright

You tell yourself and everyone else

That everything will be alright

You’ve fallen hard

You’ve fallen far and you want to come back

You’ve fallen hard

You’ve fallen far and you want to come back

Put on your cheap cologne

to cover up the rotting things that lie beneath

A heart of stone, that’s all alone

You’d do anything

To convince yourself and everyone else

That everything will be alright

You tell yourself and everyone else

That everything will be alright

You’ve fallen hard

You’ve fallen far and you want to come back

You’ve fallen hard

You’ve fallen far and you want to come back

I don’t want to be the one that sees you

But can’t believe you, so promise me

I won’t have to be that way again

I don’t want to be the one that sees you

But can’t believe you, so promise me

I won’t have to be that way again

I don’t want to be that way

I’ve fallen hard

I’ve fallen far and I wanna come back

I’ve fallen hard

I’ve fallen far and I wanna come back

Bring me back

Take off my dirty clothes and give me yours

So I can be like you

Rip out my heart of stone and give me yours

So I can be like you

Jesus make me just like you

I wrote this song while thinking of the hopelessness of this world and the need we have for a savior. Not a savior that we could ever create, but a savior that comes from the Most High Himself. it is a miracle when He overcomes the life of someone and rescues them from themselves.  That is how I truly feel. God is rescuing me from myself. He is ripping out this heart that is so cold, and so selfish toward Him and others and feels so hopeless and fractured by this fallen world and the sin that so easily overtakes us all.  I guess I wrote this after meeting Roberto, a Bisexual homeless crack addict that couldn’t stop talking about other people’s problems and how much He hated the world.  I see myself in Roberto, and when I get really honest with myself and severely honest with my heart I really am just like him.  Maybe not in my outward display of the human condition, but in my heart I am addicted to myself and always trying to feel above others and doing anything I can to make people think I am somehow better.  I remember Roberto saying “I am really worried about my boyfriend, he can’t seem to get off heroine and he has terrible health problems. I wish I could just help him stop and then everything would be fine.”  It was almost like he was saying, “if I could just get him to settle with crack and give up heroin he would be fine like me.”  He wanted to bring his boyfriend up to his level of morality, because in his mind, the state he was living in was better than that of his boyfriend.    hmmmm But then in my mind I am thinking “I want to bring both of them up to my level of morality, then both of them will be fine.”  But as I reflect I see that none of us were really coming up with the solution.  I was looking at Roberto the same way he was looking at his boyfriend. I was saying in my heart “if I could just bring him up to the level of religious discipline I have achieved, then he will be satisfied and his life will be better.”  I wasn’t getting it either. You see, there is someone else in the world saying the same thing about people like me. “If he would just take out his earrings then he would be a better Christian like me.” or  “If he would just dress more conservative, or talk this way or do this or do that….”  Fill in the blank.  We as humans are always trying to be one step up the ladder than our fellow man and unfortunately religion only adds to the chaos because our hearts naturally use it to make us feel better and more “spiritual” or moral than others and in a sense we use its teachings to justify judgmental condescending attitudes and self righteousness.  So what is the point of all this…  I guess I am still trying to figure it out too.  One thing I do know for sure is that Jesus loves Roberto and His boyfriend just as much as He loves me, and that He came to seek those who were lost and those who were spiritually bankrupt and knew they needed a Savior.  Jesus’ death and resurrection didn’t happen for us when we try and achieve our righteousness through the things we do.  In fact, the cross is worthless to us if we don’t see our utter failure to do anything right and our hopelessness to really know God apart from the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit.  Those are some thoughts… a bit scattered and they probably don’t make much sense. Like I said, I am still trying to understand the vastness of this Gospel that Jesus taught and it is so deep I think I just might have to spend my whole life diving even deeper.

Mathew 6 (The Message)

19-21“Don’t hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it’s safe from moth and rust and burglars. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.

How I want my heart to delight in heaven.  How I want my heart to desire to be in the presence of the Lord and in His majesty.  It is so true that when we are delighting in the Lord and our hearts are soaring with Him, we put our hope not in the things of this world but rather in the things that He has given; in the spiritual treasure that He has freely lavished on us through Christ. It is my prayer that I may understand this more. I want to understand what it means to be an heir of God and co-heir with Christ.  I want to be able to imagine the inheritance that is stored up for me in Christ and the Spiritual blessings that spill forth as a result of the sacrifice of Christ and the new life he has raised me up into.  How I want my greatest treasure to be the Lord. I want to bask in the riches of His love and grace, overjoyed at the great news, that an infidel like I has been given the rights of a son.  A prodigal such as I has been taken back and completely forgiven. A whore such as I has been wooed and proposed to.  How can my heart not rejoice at such news?  How can the worry, fears and doubts that storm into my thoughts not be silenced and calmed by such joy inflicting tidings..  Once I was far from God, and possessed nothing but the treasures of Hell.  But God in His mercy, at an infinite cost to Himself has purchased me as his own. He has changed this slave into a child, breaking the chains of bondage that held me to this world and its utter meaningless investments and has loved me and is raising me into a warrior for righteousness, a son of the great King.

Oh great captain you are, great captain of my heart

Lead me on toward the battles of your will

Lead me on this path of war, as I live out my part

Light my way and keep my heart still

On the rock of your truth, let me sharpen my sword

In the strength of your arm may I fight

In my darkest of moments, turn my face to you Lord

May I bask in your marvelous light.

Below is a poem I wrote yesterday when I as in bed.  I just got my tonsils removed.  man it hurts. This has nothing to do with that but everything to do with  what I have been thinking in the midst of all things that have been happening in our lives in this community.  This will be a song someday as soon as I get my voice back.

Once again I spread my legs

To any lover who says they’ll pay

But their currency is worth nothing in an economy of hopelessness

I try to spend it, try and make it last

But it buys me things that fade so fast

This temporary fix will have to do in an economy of hopelessness

I use the senses that you created

To try and create a sense of purpose

But everything stinks of rotting flesh in this economy of hopelessness.

I use this body to numb the feeling

That there’s something more, something worth believing

A different kingdom that’s coming to replace this economy of hopelessness

Its just so hard to see when your watching from the bleachers

All the airplane crashers and the TV Preachers

They say they found the reason that we were given life

And they’ll rip each others heads off just prove that they are right.

They spend millions building shopping malls and call them their churches

But they’re really just places for your next religious purchase.

The whore on the corner marvels at the sight

Then walks away sadly to find a warm place for the night

Once again I spread my legs

To any lover who is willing to pay

But then I burn the money to keep me warm

Cause there’s no heat in this abandoned apartment

There’s no heat anywhere

I just want meaning, that’s all I really want

I just want love without a price tag on it.

I just want purpose that is deeper than my addictions

I just want to not feel thirsty anymore

If every sunrise brings us hope that light can shine in our darkest moments

That healing comes when we see our sickness

That freedom comes when we see our bondage

That salvation was made for all the hopeless

Then let your sun rise in my darkness

Bring your healing to my sickness

Set me free from these chains of bondage

Bring me hope through your salvation