One Long Love Story

Dannah Gresh: In 2003 Nancy Leigh DeMoss began an episode of Revive Our Hearts like this.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Over the next several days I want to tell you a love story.

Everybody loves a love story. Isn't it true? I think of the story of Cinderella. Most of us grew up hearing and loving the story of Cinderella—about a rejected stepsister who ends up marrying a handsome prince.

Dannah: And now, over twenty years after that episode first aired, Cinderella is just as popular as ever. Here’s another love story Nancy mentioned.

Nancy: We grew up loving to watch The Sound of Music. How many of you have seen The Sound of Music? How many of you have seen it six times or more? Almost every hand in the room. Look at this! 

It's amazing. It will come on TV and you've got to watch it even through you've got a video of it in your closet.

Dannah: Like I said, it was 2003. We didn't have streaming back then. But Nancy's right. The Sound of Music is still a classic.

Nancy: There is something amazing about that story. I think part of it is just that we love a good love story.

Then I think of another story that started out to be what seemed like a great love story back in 1981, when it seemed that half the world—myself included—got up in the middle of the night here in the United States to watch the royal wedding. Princess Di and Prince Charles—the wedding of the century. 

Dannah: And now, of course, he's King Charles. She was talking about the parents of Prince William, whose marriage to Kate Middleton became the new wedding of the century. And of course Charles and Di were the parents of Prince Harry. His marriage to Meghan Markle captured the popular imagination, too.

Nancy: The whole world was intrigued by this wedding, because it seemed to be such a magnificent love story—a royal love story.

But you know, each of those love stories has a problem.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, for Wednesday, July 12, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Well since the time Nancy first taught that series in 2003, she experienced her own love story with Robert Wolgemuth. The video of their wedding is one of the most popular on the Revive Our Hearts YouTube channel. 

And you know, love stories never go out of style. There is something in the human heart that longs to live in intimacy. So we’re re-visiting this classic teaching from Nancy. She’s going to tell you about a love relationship that will never disappoint you and give you a brand-new identity.

The series is called “Here Comes the Bridegroom.”

Like Nancy mentioned in the introduction, all three love stories she mentioned present us with a problem.

Nancy: The problem with the story of Cinderella is that it didn't happen. It's a fairytale. It's not true. Then you think of The Sound of Music. Now that story is true, but the problem with The Sound of Music is it happened to somebody else. I mean, it happened to Maria, but not to me.

Then you think of Princess Di and Prince Charles. What started out as the wedding of the century ended in tragedy and terrible disappointment and diaster. And I think of some of you who started out in your marriage with stars in your eyes and got to the altar and made those promises of undying love and devotion, for better or for worse, only to have that dream shattered at some point. Deep pain. Disappointment. Loss.

You know, it's not just Charles and Diana who have weddings and what seem to be idyllic love relationships that turn sour. It's people everywhere. You realize that people are desperate for love. They're desperate for intimacy. They want to know, "Does anybody love me? Does anybody care? Do I matter to anyone?" Those are really the questions that all our hearts ask in one way or another.

I want to tell you a love story that is different than any other love story you've ever heard—any love story that you've ever experienced. It's the story of a love between God and His people. It's a love story that is found in this Book, the Bible.

In fact, you know the more I read this Book—and I've read it many times over many years—the more I discover that from the very first page to the very last, this Book, the Bible, is really one great big love story. That's what it is, the love of a God for His people.

 

"For God so loved the world that He gave." From Genesis to Revelation, it's the love of God and how that love unfolds toward His people. Unlike Cinderella, this story is not a fairytale. It's true. It's absolutely true. Unlike The Sound of Music, this story is not for somebody else. This story is for you. This story is for me. It has our names written in it. We can claim it as our own.

Unlike the royal couple and their wedding, this story will not end in tragedy or disappointment. At times in your relationship with the Lord, you may feel it's not very much like a love story.

But the truth is, the hope is, the certainty, the fact is that the ending of your love story and your relationship with God—if you are a child of God—the end of that story will be even more glorious than its beginning, more wonderful than anything we've ever experienced to date.

In fact, the Scripture says, "Eyes have never seen, ears have never entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for those who love Him." So no matter where you are in your walk with the Lord right now, no matter where you have been and what you have done . . . Maybe as we're talking about this love story stuff you're thinking, I don't even know that I have a love relationship at all with God.

No matter where you are or where you've been, you can be in an intimate, growing, vital, deepening love relationship with the Lord Jesus that will continue and deepen. Ultimately, the end of the story will be even greater than anything you've ever hoped could be possible.

I want to suggest that the heart of the Christian life is not what you do for God. It's not what you know about God. It's not how busy you are or how perfect you are. None of us could be if we tried, and some are trying real hard. The heart of the Christian life is a love relationship. It's a love story.

I want to take time this week to tell you that story, maybe in a little different way than you've heard it before. No matter how many times you've heard this story, even more than The Sound of Music, this story never gets old. It's always fresh and it can always be new. We need to tell it and hear it again and again and again.

So today, at the beginning of this series, I want to read this love story to you. Now, I'm not going to read the whole thing. That would take longer than we have, but I want to read some selected portions of the Scripture, both in the Old and the New Testaments, and just string them together so that you can get an overview of this love story.

I want to start in an unusual place, in the Old Testament in the book of the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon happens to be one of my very favorite books in all of God's Word, because it is (in a micro sense) a picture of the love of God for His people.

Later in this series, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this story. But for today, I just want to read portions from that story. I won't even give you the verses, because I'm going to skip around in the book. I want you to just listen with your heart. Then I'll read from the New Testament.

But we begin in the Song of Solomon, and we're hearing an exchange between a bride and her beloved, her groom who is a king. She begins by speaking. She says,

The voice of my beloved!
Behold, he comes,
Leaping upon the mountains,
Skipping upon the hills. (2:8)

My beloved spoke, and said to me:
"Rise up, my love, my fair one,
And come away.
For lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of singing has come. . . .
Rise up, my love, my fair one,
And come away." (2:10–12, 13b)

Then he says to her,

"O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,
In the secret places of the cliff,
Let me see your face,
Let me hear your voice;
For your voice is sweet,
And your face is lovely." (2:14)

Then he says,

Catch us the foxes,
The little foxes that spoil the vines,
For our vines [our love relationship] have tender grapes. (2:15)

We need to be careful with every little aspect of our love relationship, he is saying. Then she responds to him and she says,

My beloved is mine and I am his.
He feeds among the lilies. . . .
He brought me to the banqueting house [the picture of abundance and pleasure and joy],
His banner over me is love. . . .
His left hand is under my head,
And his right hand embraces me. (2:16, 2:4, 8:3)

That's the picture of the intimacy of the relationship. Then she says,

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—
For your love is better than wine. (1:2)

Then he speaks to her and he says,

You are all fair, my love,
And there is no spot in you. (4:7)

He is saying, "In my eyes, you are perfect." He says to her,

You have ravished my heart,
My sister, my spouse.
You have ravished my heart
With one look of your eyes. (4:9)

Then again she responds, and you see the initiative and response here in this relationship. It's a two-way relationship. She says,

I am my beloved's,
And my beloved is mine.
I  my beloved's,
And his desire is toward me. (7:10)

As we move into the New Testament, we're given more light on the nature of this love relationship. We read in Ephesians 5, right at the end of a lengthy passage on marriage—the relationship between a husband and a wife. The apostle Paul goes on to say, Ephesians 5,

This is a profound mystery [marriage is] because I am talking about Christ and the church. . . .
Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church [his bride], without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless." (5:32, 25–27 NIV)

Christ has a Bride. We are privileged, if we are children of God, to be part of that Bride.

Then we come to the last book of the Bible. I want to pick up in Revelation 19. The apostle John says,

Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude. Like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder. (v. 6 NIV)

Now keep in mind, John has been given a vision into what heaven is like. What he is seeing is what is going on in heaven. He heard this sound, this great multitude. They were shouting. Here's what they were saying,

"Hallelujah!
   For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
   and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
   and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
   was given her to wear."

(Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.) (vv. 6–8 NIV)

Then the apostle John says,

Then the angel said to me, "Write this down: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!" (v. 9 NIV)

Then the apostle says,

I saw "a new heaven and a new earth," for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away." (21:1 NIV)

I've moved, by the way, over to chapter 21. I'm going to just skip through some verses here. He says,

I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. (v. 2 NIV)

Well, the passage goes on to tell us,

One of the seven angels . . . came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb." And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. (21:9–11 NIV)

So here we see a picture of a wedding. It's a time of joy. It's a time of celebration. It's a time of feasting. It's a time of the bride and her groom consummating their marriage relationship and entering into an eternal bliss together as husband and wife. It's the last chapter in the story of human history. It's a story of Christ being eternally united with His Bride, the Church.

We read that the bride has made herself ready for the occasion. I attended a wedding last weekend. It was the son of longtime friends of mine. I've known this young man all his life.

But as I was there for the wedding and just watched all these young people—the bride and the groom and the attendants making all their preparations and getting everything just right and just ready—and I saw that bride then come down the aisle. She had made herself ready for her groom.

I was watching. In fact, I had a better view of the groom than I did of the bride. I was watching him down at the front—just the radiance on his face as he watched her come through that door, never having seen her in this dress before.

And, I might add, never having kissed her until the end of that wedding, at which point they got a standing ovation. But just watching him as he was so delighted that his bride had made herself ready. She was beautifully dressed as a bride for her bridegroom.

So through this series, I want us to look at the Bride in this wedding. Then we're going to look at the Bridegroom. Then we're going to look at what it takes to get ready for the wedding. How do we get ready for that wedding that we will experience finally in heaven?

The Scripture teaches that if you have been born again, if you have come to repentance in faith to become a child of God, that you are a part of the Bride of Christ. This is true of all believers of all time that together we make up the Bride of Christ. You are part of something very special if you are a child of God.

There is also a sense in which individually we have a Bride relationship with the Lord Jesus. Now, you may not be feeling very bride-like. In fact, at times you may not act very much like a bride. But nonetheless, when we go to the Word of God we find that we are a bride, the Bride of Christ.

Now, I want to talk about what it means to be His bride. Let me do that initially by telling you a story. We started by reading a portion of this story in the Song of Solomon. We read of the exchange between a bride and her beloved. It's the story of a king. He lived in a palace. He lived in a capital city. He decided that he wanted to get married. He wanted a bride.

As the news got out that he was looking for a bride, you can just imagine if I could use a little sanctified imagination here, that all the women of the city, who in the Song of Solomon are called the daughters of Jerusalem, they're the other women in the city. You can imagine the eligible women thinking, Will I be the one he'll choose?

I can imagine one women thinking, I won "Miss Jerusalem" last year. She the beauty queen of city. Surely, he'll choose me because I'm the most beautiful in the city, or everyone says I am.

I can imagine a woman not quite as beautiful as "Miss Jerusalem," but she just got her PhD at the University of Jerusalem, and she is brilliant. Maybe she is thinking, Maybe he'll choose me because I really am a bright woman!

Or maybe a woman who wasn't particularly bright or particularly beautiful, but she was connected. She came from a good line. Maybe she was thinking, Certainly, a royal king would marry someone like me. [Now, what I just said is not in the Song of Solomon. That's my imagination there.]

Much to everyone's surprise, he didn't marry any of the daughters of Jerusalem. In fact, he left his palace. He left the royal city, and he went out through the suburbs out into a rural countryside area.

There he found a common ordinary peasant girl. I mean, a nobody. There's no evidence that she was beautiful or brilliant or well-connected. There's no indication of why. The fact is he said to her, "I want you to be my bride. I want you to be the queen."

Now, the people of Jerusalem were astounded, but no one was more amazed than this young woman. Throughout the early parts of this book, you find her in a sense of wonder and awe. "Why would he have chosen me?" She knows that she is just a common ordinary country girl.

In fact, she says in the first chapter of the book, she says, "My skin is dark." Today we think of having a suntan as being beautiful. But in those days, royal women had very pale, fair skin.

Why was her skin dark? Because she had been working in her family vineyard. It was sunburnt. It was as if she was saying, "My skin is tough and leathery. It's not that beautiful, protected skin of a royal woman."

Then she says, "Yet somehow I'm lovely in his eyes. What does he see in me?" There's this sense of amazement. You know, he never gives an answer throughout this book as to why he chose her. He just chose her. The only answer is "I love you, and I want you to be mine."

He brings that woman with him back to the palace. He takes her into the palace and into the bedchamber. Some of the translations read, "He gives himself intimately to her." Never is there any reason given as to why he would have chosen her.

When I read this story, I think about how when I was a four-year-old little girl, May 14, 1963, I first realized that Jesus wanted me to be His Bride. I didn't know all the implications of this. I didn't know the theology. But I knew that He had chosen me to be His. He called me to Himself. I didn't understand then why He would have chosen me.

You know, I still don't understand. My heart has wondered so many times over the years, Lord, why? Knowing what You know about me, why would You have chosen me?

You know, He has never given me an answer, except that He loves me. I've never gotten over the wonder of that. I hope I never do for all of eternity.

I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene
And wonder why He would love me,
A sinner, condemned, unclean;

O how marvelous,
O how wonderful!
And my song shall ever be:

O how marvelous,
O how wonderful
is my Savior's love for me.¹

Lord, we stand in awe of Your incredible love. Thank You that this love story is not just for someone else, but that it has my name in it. Thank You for choosing me. Thank You for loving me.

When there was nothing in me to attract You, You loved me. You chose me. You said, "I want you to be My Bride." Lord, all I can do is say, "Thank You" and love You in return, and I do. Amen.

Dannah: I hope you hear every episode of this love story. Today’s program begins a teaching series from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth called “Here Comes the Bridegroom.”

[ding]

Wait a minute, what, I’m getting texts while recording? Oh, dear. I’ve got to remember to pick up that thing I forgot. Chris, do you have a notepad? 

[notepad being thrown]

Thanks.

[sound of writing]

Ok, let me try this again. “Here Comes the Bridegroom . . .”

[ding]

Oh no, not another one! Oh dear, that’s an even bigger emergency. Let me write that down too. 

[ding]

Ugh! I can’t handle another emergency! Lord, help me juggle everything that is happening in my life! 

Hmm, what’s this?

The notepad says “Anything that makes me need God is a blessing.” That’s a classic quote from Nancy—one I need to hear right now. Oh! This is the new Revive Our Hearts notepad! Wow, it has a nice magnetic back, so I can stick it anywhere I need it.

What an important reminder. No matter what you have to write down, this notepad will give you perspective every time you see it. Again, it reads, “Anything that makes me need God is a blessing.”

Revive Our Hearts is facing a lot of needs this month. But you know what? Anything that makes us need God is a blessing. And one blessing is knowing that listeners like you are praying for the ministry and generously giving to meet those needs.

When you support Revive Our Hearts, we’d like to say "thanks" by sending you one of these notepads. Consider it a thank-you gift. Just visit ReviveOurHearts.com, make a donation of any size and request the notepad, or call 1-800-569-5959.

Tomorrow Nancy will pick back up in this series, “Here Comes the Bridegroom.” She will help you remember how loved you are, no matter what. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to remind you of your amazing identity in Christ.

¹"I Stand Amazed in the Presence" by Charles H. Gabriel.

All Scripture is taken from the NKJV unless otherwise noted.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.