Rabbi Schneider - God Is Attracted to You
Let me ask you a question. Do you think in your own life perhaps you've not been able to receive love and develop the type of intimate relationships that God has for you because you yourself, beloved, are dealing with shame, and a bad self-image? I want you to know Jesus is the one that heals this. You know, we go through life, and as we go through life, maybe we go back even to our elementary school years. Maybe if you're a man, you're picked last when you're picking up for a sports team and you know, you're still feeling bad about yourself because you weren't the best athlete in your class. Maybe you're a woman and you're still dealing with poor self-image because maybe you were a little too tall or a little too short, or a bit overweight, whatever it may be. Maybe you're dealing with low self-worth because of the way your parents treated you. Maybe your mom and dad said to you that you're never going to amount to anything or maybe there was just a lot of condemnation or a lot of shaming going on in your family.
These are important issues that need to be dealt with. A lot of times we try to cover them up. You know, we try to just accumulate the riches of the world trying to mask or cover up that wounding that's taken place in our soul. I want you to know Jesus wants to heal you and I of shame and low self-image. So Jesus once again, as she's shrinking back, Jesus comes to her, "Don't you realize how beautiful you are"? And as we continue on this theme, I want you to look with me in chapter 2 as we cover some new territory and Season 4. She's now restored in her self-image. And rather than saying what she said in chapter one, which she said, "I'm black and swarthy and the sun has burned me because my siblings were angry with me, and they made me go work out in the field all day".
In other words, what she was saying when she was saying she was black and swarthy was that she was working in a minimum wage job in our vernacular and that because of this, she was outside in the sun all day, which the lower wage workers worked like that and she was struggling with being like at the low echelon of society. Jesus comes to her, affirms her and He says, "Don't you know how beautiful you are"? Now notice as we come to Chapter 2, her self-image and her identity has been restored. So she says in verse 1, "I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys". And that's what Jesus did for me.
You know, I realized when I was 18 years old that I wasn't going to shoot up in my height. I always thought I was going to be tall. Even though I'm only five-five and a half, I never thought like I was short, because I have cousins, all of them over six feet, and they all shot up in their height when they were older. And so here I was, you know, ninth grade, five-five and a half; tenth grade, five-five and a half; eleventh grade, five-five and a half; senior, five-five and a half. I never thought anything about it till finally I was graduating high school and I was still five-five and a half, and I hadn't shot up. And I went to the doctor, he said, "No, you're not going to shoot up. There's no more room left in your bones to grow".
And when I realized I was going to be short for the rest of my life, it was devastating. It was a death blow to my self-image. And so I struggled like this. I mean, just struggling with low self-image. As a man, you want to be tall, right? Tall and handsome. Well, I realized I was never going to be tall. And it broke me. But you know what? King Jesus healed my soul. And that's what He did for the Shulamite bride. And for many of you, there's something about yourself.
Again, maybe a shame that came from your parents. Maybe it's shame that's due from your sin. Maybe it's when you were growing up people picked on you. I don't know what it was. But like the Shulamite bride, your self-image, your self-worth can be restored and your shame can be washed away. And the transformation is so evident here, where she goes from saying, "I am black and swarthy because I was out in the field and the sun burned me," she goes from that feeling rejected and ashamed, she goes from that to saying, "I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys". So I speak over you right now word of restoration. That your identity and your self-worth would be restored, and that you would comprehend the riches of the glory of God's inheritance in you according to the book of Ephesians.
Again, there's something so powerful, so glorious, so beautiful, so strong, so remarkable. There's a diamond of glory in you that's beyond anything that the human eyes can see. And so let's continue on now, that being said, with verse 2. She talks about being the lily of the valley, the rose of Sharon. And Jesus speaks back to her affirming that. And He says, "Like a lily among the thorns, so is my darling among the maidens". I want you to know you are accepted in the beloved. I want you to think about this. You are accepted in the Beloved. Jesus is affirming how beautiful she is. You know, a lot of us we're afraid to approach God.
Again, we feel like we're not worthy. We're just aware of our sin. We're just aware of our shortcomings. We're aware of our failings. But you need to understand, according to the book of Ephesians, that like this Shulamite bride that was accepted and seen as beautiful in the Lord's eyes, you too are esteemed and accepted in the Beloved. The Lord looks at us as holy and righteous and blameless before Him. And we need to have this confidence that we are unconditionally loved just like the Shulamite bride found. And as she did, she began to blossom. And we saw that in last time's broadcast. That as she was in his presence, her perfume began to give forth its fragrance.
When you and I stopped shrinking back in shame and instead. realize that we're righteous in Jesus, that we're beautiful and powerful and glorious in Him, that Christ inside us is our hope of glory, when we understand we're accepted and esteemed, we're going to begin to enter into the fullness of our potential, we're going to begin to see new levels of our personality coming forth, we're going to even see how we're able to communicate better and how our brains gonna function better. So this is what was going on here. Yeshua firms her, and she continues to open up coming into her fullness.
You know, when you have confidence you open up. The point is Jesus wants to affirm you so that you're confident in Him. And as you do, you're going to begin to blossom before Him. Talent that you have that you didn't realize that you have is going to begin to come forth from you. People are going to look at you and say, "You know what? You look really good". There's going to be a light that's going to begin to shine from your eyes. There's going to be a confidence and an assurance in your steps as you become assured in how beautiful you are to Jesus and how powerful you are in Him. She continues on in chapter 2, verse 4, she says, "He has brought me to his banquet hall," listen to this, "and his banner over me is love".
Again, we're driving at the same thing. She was so confident now in his love. She had been restored. Listen one more time because it's so beautiful. "He has brought me to his banquet hall, and his banner over me is love". Don't you want to walk in that kind of confidence? That you've been brought into the fullness of His presence and there's literally a banner that reigns over your life. And the banner reigning over your life and my life, beloved one is L-O-V-E in big capital letters. The blood of Yeshua covers us. And as a result of the blood of Yeshua covering us, the love of the Father and of our Bridegroom King Jesus is fully directed toward you and me. I want to encourage you to be confident, in God's love of you.
You know, we look at ourselves, and when we look at ourselves sometimes, again, we see our weakness, we see our failing, we stumble with our words sometimes, we do things that, you know, we question what we just did. You know, we say things and we say, "Why did I say that thing"? We don't feel confident in sometimes the way we walk and the way we handle ourselves. We make mistakes. We see all the limitations that we have in life, all the shortcomings. But I want to encourage you today God doesn't see any of those things. Yeah, He's aware of them but He doesn't withdraw His love for you. He's not less attracted to you because of those things. But rather, there is an unconditional banner of His love over your life that will never cease. His love never ceases. It's unfailing. You need to be confident in this.
I remember I watched an interview of a very, very successful comedian years ago. And as he was being interviewed, the interviewer asked him, "How did you become so successful"? You know what he said, "I knew my parents loved me unconditionally and so I wasn't afraid of failing". It was that confidence that came from knowing he was loved. And that's what I'm endeavoring to impart to you right now, beloved one. God's love for you is unfailing and it will never ever change. Listen, God is attracted to you. Now, that's a mind-bending thought, isn't it? God's attracted to me? I mean, some of us are older, we look in the mirror, you know, our hairs are turned gray, or they're falling out, you know, our skin starting to wrinkle. You know, I have dents in my arm where I used to have muscles.
Now I got a hole there where my muscle used to be. "God's attracted to me"? we look in the mirror. Yes, God is attracted to you. Not the flesh but again, your inner man because He created you in His own image. There is something so glorious in you and me, we can't comprehend it. And when we look at God's creation, and we look at the stars and the splendor, and the sunsets and the rivers and the mountains, and the birds flying in formation, we go, "Wow, how glorious". But there's something in you that's even more glorious. You're the crown of His creation. Gods attracted to you. That's why He sent His Son to die for you and I, even when we were still dead in our transgressions and sins. God is coming at you. God's attracted to you. And that's what the Song of Songs is about.
We see here how beautiful this Shulamite bride, that's a reflection of you and I, is to King Jesus. And as we go on, once again she says, "He has brought me to his banquet hall, and his banner over me is love". He's attracted to her. He comes to really love her. He's looking for intimacy with her. He actually gets enjoyment from their relationship and not only blesses her, it blesses him and it moves him. And notice the next thing she says here in verse 5 of chapter 2. She calls out to him, "Sustain me with raisin cakes, and refresh me with apples, because I am love sick".
So she's actually weak because she's so in love with Jesus that is literally making her weak. There is such a focus on Him. It's such an emotional expenditure of her energy because she loves Him so much that she literally was asking Him to sustain her because she was feeling weak. Some of you remember perhaps even when you were younger, you had a puppy love on somebody, and it literally made you weak. I remember as a young boy, I think I was in seventh grade, and there was this girl that I had a crush on. I never even had talked to her before. You know, it's such a mysterious thing how that works. You see people when you're a little kid, you know, and you have a crush on them even though you know nothing about them, you never talked to them, you never spent any time with them. You just looked at them and quote, "fell in love".
So I remember there was this one girl, I walked by her classroom one day, like I said, I had a crush on that girl, I literally felt like that energy drained out of my body. I still remember it. And I almost fainted. I was in seventh grade. I'm 64 years old now. I still remember almost fainting because of this girl. And so this is what she's talking about here. She says, "Sustain me with raisin cakes... because," she says, "I'm lovesick". Of course, this was much more than a puppy love, but just illustrating that she loved him so much it was making her feel weak.
I remember a glorious testimony and manifestation of God's glory I saw years ago. I was preaching on this exact verse in the congregation that I oversee. And we had a young couple in my congregation. They were in their 20s. They were married. And the man, the husband, well, he had a terminal disease and he was dying. He's passed away now. But I preached the Sermon on "refresh me with apple, sustain me with raisin cakes". He went home that weekend, and the next day, a neighbor came over knowing nothing. I mean, how many of you have had a raisin cake? I mean, it's not a normal food. But you know what happened? The next day, the neighbor showed up at this man's house with a raisin cake. He never talked to her about raisin cakes, they never had raisin cakes together, you know, raisin cakes were as far away as, you know, they're thousands of miles.
But here the neighbor shows up, she says, "I just was thinking about you and I just wanted to make you this raisin cake". And he knew that was the love of Jesus sustaining him in his terminal illness. He passed away. And as far as I know, he's with the Lord right now. But the Lord sustains you and I with raisin cakes, the little things he does in our life to just encourage us. People that he brings into our life to just speak a word to us, divine favors. I want you to be aware of how the Lord is continually encouraging you by doing little supernatural things. He's sustaining you even as the Shulamite bride asked to be sustained with raisins cake. Little things that He does that He doesn't have to do, but He does.
Look for those things that you might think are just coincidences, but they're actually tokens of the Lord's love and favor upon your life. She's just experiencing this incredible journey. She said, "Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me". So she's gone through this incredible season of just being ministered to by the Lord. But things are about to change. The season is about to shift. You know, there's times when a little child, they're just kept so safe in their mom and dad's arm. But then it comes time for them to face some challenges. And the little children are afraid to do it. Maybe it's going to school the first day, maybe it's learning how to ride a bike. But the little child goes from just feeling completely embraced and safe.
Now they have to grow up and begin to face some of the challenges of life. And that's what happens next in this journey. And I want you to see as you continue with me, as I study the Song of Songs, how the Lord goes from just nurturing us as infants in Him, as newborn babes, and once we're strong enough, He now begins to cause us to face the challenges of darkness and to overcome the world in the flesh and the devil so that our intimacy with Him can grow roots that could have never been grown if life was always easy. Beloved, I bless you today and I release over you a new revelation of the supernatural God into your life. And I declare that you're going to begin to experience His favor on you. And you're going to come into the awareness of how beautiful you are to Him in a way, beloved, that you've never experienced before.