How beautiful you are, my darling!
Oh how beautiful!
You are altogether beautiful, my darling;
There is no flaw in you.
Song of songs 4:1,7
How easily does the thought of Jesus calling you “my darling” come? I’d hazard a guess that to most Christians it is a strange thought. The humbling thought of our unholiness compared to the beauty of Christ is a much more common one, for Isaiah 64:6 says that our righteous acts are as filthy rags.
Jesus calling you or me ‘my darling’ is a picture of unmatched grace being poured out on our lives, cleansing our every action and making them acceptable to God, a picture that should permeate our theology and influence our actions. But even through all this we find in the words of Scripture that the feeling of a man calling his loved one “flawless” is what Christ feels for us.
We are called to live a life of gratitude, Christ has saved us from our sins and yet to live a life that is not empowered by the new nature that we are given, is to miss the opportunity of living as the bride of the living God. Looking through this renewed lens to see ourselves as Jesus sees us, flawless and beyond beauty, will bring the manifested flow of God’s love over our lives onto others, it will help us to pray more boldly, to resist temptation more effectively and most importantly to love our Saviour more deeply and more fully just as He has loved us.
Dan Scott