You’ve been to weddings where everything was perfect. The anticipation was electric, the ceremony was sacred and weighty, the reception was an extravagant celebration. Maybe you even cried during the vows. But when it was all over, it was just a really fun night. Something was still missing.

What is it about a wedding that gives us something to walk away with, whether we’re single or married? What sustains us the next morning, or ten years down the road, when we wake up face to face with our spouse and realize they might not be exactly the person we thought we were marrying?

Song of Solomon 3:11 gives us a surprising answer: “Go out, O daughters of Zion, and look upon King Solomon with the crown with which his mother crowned him on the day of his wedding, on the day of the gladness of his heart.”

Four Ingredients of a Healthy Marriage

Throughout this passage, we see a progression. The bride has been drawing our attention to something in the distance. First it’s Solomon’s entourage, then his men, then his carriage, and now she points our eyes directly to King Solomon himself. She’s been counseling the daughters of Jerusalem from early in chapter one, and here she is saying to them: take a good, long look at this King. This is the kind of man you want. This is the kind of marriage you want. Don’t settle for anything less.

Three elements have already been established. Anticipation, because marriage is worth waiting for and being excited about. Gravity, because marriage carries a holy seriousness. And extravagance, because marriage is worth celebrating with everything you have.

But the last thing she wants them to see about Solomon is his joy. His gladness. And this is the fourth ingredient, the one that is the beginning of every healthy marriage.

Why Joy and Marriage Are Inseparable

This is the only verse in all of Song of Solomon that contains the words “wedding” or “gladness” or “joy,” and they are placed right together. “On the day of his wedding, on the day of the gladness of his heart.” In Hebrew parallelism, these two lines are equated with one another. The day of his wedding is the day of the gladness of his heart.

This tells us something profound: the telos, the goal of romance, is marriage. It’s not sex. It’s not dating. It’s not the thrill and passion of young love. It’s the covenant.

But that raises a question. How do you actually have that kind of joy?

The Fastest Way to Kill Joy in Marriage

Maybe you’re someone with no prospects on the horizon, wondering if you need to get married to find joy. Maybe you’re someone who has messed up, living with a boyfriend or girlfriend, trying to cultivate the intimacy of marriage outside of it. Maybe you’ve been deeply hurt by someone you were in love with. Can you have that kind of joy?

Let me flip the question. Do you know the best way to make sure you don’t have joy, whether single or married? Make marriage everything. Make it bear the weight of all your hopes and dreams and expectations. Make marriage your salvation. That is the surest way to guarantee you won’t actually be able to enjoy it.

All of us approach marriage, or the idea of marriage, with a kind of story in mind. It might be a story of romance: “If I can just get married, I’ll finally have the romance or the intimacy I’ve been looking for.” It might be a story of satisfaction: “I’ll finally be satisfied because I’ll have the company of another person.” Maybe it’s a story of security: “I feel so insecure in life that I’ll finally be secure if someone takes care of me.” Or maybe it’s a story of significance: “I can finally be somebody because someone else wants to spend the rest of their life with me.”

What Happens When the Story Breaks Down

When marriage becomes your salvation, you will face stumbling blocks every single day. What happens when your wife or husband lies to you for the first time? What happens when you find out the intimacy is not as satisfying as you imagined? What happens when you’re ten years in with a house full of kids and you realize this person doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore?

If marriage is your salvation, one of three things will happen. You will despair because your spouse could not bear the weight of your hopes, dreams, and expectations. You will crush your spouse by continually demanding they meet those impossible standards. Or you will cheat, trying to find another person who can satisfy the deepest desires of your heart.

Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the famous book Eat, Pray, Love, put it well: “In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”

She’s spot on. Her advice, however, is terrible. She abandoned her husband and went searching for happiness across the globe, eventually landing in an exotic relationship with a man from Bali who was apparently her soulmate. But she has had several more soulmates since then, so that can’t be the answer. That can’t be the joy or the gladness of heart that Song of Solomon is describing.

Where Does Lasting Joy Come From?

So where do we find it? This couple would counsel us by looking us in the eye and saying: you need a different story. You need a story that you’re not at the center of. And that has been the secret to their happy marriage the whole time.

In the background, this couple has actually been reenacting an entirely different story. Something coming up out of the wilderness, led by a pillar or column of smoke. Men carrying on their shoulders poles that held a tent-like structure filled with precious wood and metals, burning fragrance as they come up out of the south into the land.

It sounds like the Exodus. It sounds like when God rescued His people out of Egypt, led them through the wilderness with a cloud of smoke, gave them His tabernacle and the ark of the covenant, and brought them into the Promised Land. That is exactly what this couple is doing. They are acting out the drama of their national identity, their national redemption.

Why Would They Go Through All This Trouble?

Because they want everyone who is watching to know that their marriage and their wedding is not ultimately about them. And that is the best news in the entire world.

Every single wedding you have ever been to is like this. It’s a reenactment. It’s a drama of another story, a cosmic story of redemption, a story of God sending His Son to rescue His Bride, to redeem her, to purify her, and then to present her to Himself.

What Every Wedding Is Really About

Revelation 19:6-9 says, “Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give Him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His Bride has made herself ready. It was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure,’ for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.'”

This is what every single marriage is pointing to. When you see the bride walking down the aisle, she represents the Church being presented pure and blameless before her Spouse, the Groom, Jesus Christ. And she wears beautiful white not because of her own purity, but because of the purity of Christ that He has given her.

This is why, when you sit at a wedding, you feel like you’re on the edge of something transcendent. It feels bigger than just a Saturday afternoon ceremony. There is something beautiful and otherworldly happening, and that’s because every single wedding is a window. It’s a window to a world that we are all invited to: the world of the marriage supper of the Lamb. Our hearts lean toward that. They ache for it.

Unless you see that, you won’t know the kind of joy described on this wedding day. But if you do see it, if every time you sit in a wedding and watch the bride come down the aisle, whether it’s you or someone else, if every time you look up and see the groom and wish it were you or it is you, and you have the eyes to see that something transcendent is happening here, then you understand. It’s a reenactment of the Church being presented to her beloved Spouse, Jesus Christ. And that is where the gladness of heart comes from.

Full sermon available on YouTube.

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A Solemn Charge to the Daughters of Jerusalem

After all the talk of love and romance and intimacy, after the imagery and the emotions and the feelings between this couple, the bride pauses. She turns to the daughters of Jerusalem, the young women who have been listening to this song, and in verse seven she gives them a stern charge: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the does of the field, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases.”

Another version puts it this way: “Do not awaken love before its time.”

For the bride, the time had come. She and her groom were in the wedding week, with the consummation of their marriage just around the corner. But the love language between them is so compelling, so magnetic, that you can’t help but be drawn in. You can’t help wanting to experience something like what she’s describing. And the bride knows this. So she looks at the young women around her and essentially says, “I’m giving you a solemn charge. I’m asking you to make an oath.” It is a vow to purity before the wedding.

She wants them to defer the desire, not forego the desire. That distinction matters.

What God’s Word Says About Sexual Purity

The activity of marital union is completely and wholly pleasing to the Lord, but not before marriage. God’s Word is crystal clear on this fact. It flies in the face of our culture, but God’s Word is crystal clear that any sexual activity outside the covenant bond of marriage between a husband and a wife is sin.

We can try to ignore sin. We can try to justify sin. We can try to hide sin, which we often do. But what we cannot do is redefine sin, because God has already done that for us.

To be a Christian is to live right side up in an upside-down world. And it’s not easy. That’s why we need accountability. That’s why we need the body of Christ. That’s why we need a group of people around us, cheering us on to live in purity.

What If You’re Already Living Outside of That Standard?

The best thing we can do if we’re not living in purity is to repent. And we, as a church, are here to walk beside you, to pray with and for you, to uphold you in that decision of faithfulness to the Lord. If you’re currently living with somebody you’re not married to, we are willing to step in and help find a place for one of you to live in the meantime before your marriage.

And here’s what I want to encourage you with: the beautiful reality on the other side of repentance is freedom, forgiveness, joy, and a new beginning. It is an incredible reality. God says to us in 1 John 1:9, “If you confess your sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive you of your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.”

And then Paul turns around in Romans 8 and says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

God doesn’t give us these standards, these commands, to in any way kill our joy. He gives them to us to maximize our joy in the context of a lifelong relationship between a husband and a wife.

What This Song Teaches Us About Christ and the Church

As we’ve seen this song being sung, this poem being read, these words of affirmation and attraction given between the bride and the groom who are soon to be, we remember something important. Although we have not taken the Song of Solomon as a strict allegory, meaning every single detail does not necessarily equate to something else, we do believe what Paul wrote in Ephesians 5.

If you’re familiar with Paul’s writing, you know this passage. If you’ve ever been to a wedding ceremony, you’ve probably heard something from it. It’s where Paul describes the relationship between a husband and a wife, the roles they should live out in the context of their marriage. It’s a beautiful passage. And at the end of Ephesians 5, he says, “And the two will become one flesh,” and then adds, “This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church.”

We are meant to learn something about Christ and the church, something about the gospel, when we see this poetic imagery played out before us. When we see the strength of their love for one another, it reminds us of the strength of God’s love for us.

God Sings Over You

Just as the words of the man provided assurance and identity and security for the woman, so God’s Word provides the same for us. Just as the couple sang this song over one another, did you know that Zephaniah says God rejoices over us with singing? If you’re ever wondering what God thinks of you, just turn to Zephaniah chapter 3. It says He rejoices over you with singing.

He’s not angry at you. He’s not mad at you. He’s not waiting for you to step out of line so He can smack you back into place. If you’ve come to know Him through repentance and faith, you are His divinely adopted son or daughter, and He loves you. Even if there have been past failures and hurt, even if there has been a train wreck of a life in the past, through repentance and faith, He loves you, and He rejoices over you with singing.

Love Is His Banner Over You

Just as the couple’s relationship thrived in the context of the community, so our relationship with God thrives in the context of the body of Christ. And just as his banner over her was love, God’s banner over you today is love. He loves you.

That is the message woven through every chapter of this ancient love poem. The purity it calls us to is not a burden. The boundaries it celebrates are not restrictions. They are the context in which love, real love, the kind that reflects the gospel itself, is free to flourish.

Watch the full sermon here.

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A Relationship Built on Covenant

Before anything else, it is important to understand where this woman is speaking from. Song of Solomon 1:2 opens with an exclamation: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” If your daughter ran into the living room declaring that, you would want to have a conversation about this boy.

But here is the key. This book is developmental in the way it treats the marriage relationship. This woman is talking about her husband in the context of a relationship that already exists. There is already commitment. They are already married. So when she talks about intimacy, when she talks about desire, she does so from a place where the relationship is secure. That security is what gives her the freedom to be so expressive.

Throughout the book, there is a group of women called the Daughters of Jerusalem, women who are not yet married, and this wife counsels them from her place of experience. She tells them how the relationship works, how they ought to act, and how they ought to “not awaken love until it desires.” She speaks from a place of safety and intimacy with her husband, which is why she can talk like this.

Invitation, Not Initiation

Notice what she does not say. She does not say, “I am going to kiss him.” She says, “Let him kiss me.” The way she navigates the relationship with her husband is from a place of invitation, not initiation. It is invitation, not aggression. The Bible gives room for this woman to be expressive and clear, to invite, not demand.

And why does she want this man to kiss her? “Your love is better than wine” (Song of Solomon 1:2). Wine in Scripture is associated with celebration, agricultural provision, and great blessing. The Psalms say that God “put more joy in my heart than when grain and new wine abound.” The best of the best. And this woman says that her husband’s love surpasses all of it.

Reserve Kisses

Married folks know there are different kinds of kisses. There is the good morning, mouth-closed, morning breath kiss. There is the goodbye kiss on the way out the door. But then my wife has a term she uses in our marriage. She calls them reserve kisses. These are not wine-in-the-box kisses. These are not wine-cooler-in-a-can kisses. These are wine cellar kisses. The kind where you want to know what is on the menu, and it is more than twenty-eight dollars.

You go out somewhere nice, flip through the wine book, and wonder what the most expensive bottle is. I think we went somewhere a couple weeks ago and found out the most expensive bottle on the list was about three grand. That is the kind of love this woman is describing. She says, “Your love, your kisses, are better than the best wine.”

More Than Physical Attraction

Verse three takes a turn: “Your anointing oils are fragrant” (Song of Solomon 1:3). Anointing oils were a very specific kind of oil in the ancient Near East. Olive oil was obtained through multiple pressings. The first pressing produced the purest oil, reserved for the most sacred purposes: anointing priests, anointing kings, and consecrating the tabernacle implements. The second pressing was used for cooking and household lamps. The third pressing was used for things like soap.

Oil in the ancient Near East also served two practical purposes. First, it helped men look good, a little in the hair for presentation. Second, in an era where water was not common and baths were not daily, it helped mask what needed masking. So when this woman says his anointing oils are fragrant, the practical takeaway is simple: men, take a shower, wash that towel, and get some cologne.

A Name Like Oil Poured Out

But here is where the passage deepens. She does not stop at physical scent. She says, “Your name is oil poured out” (Song of Solomon 1:3). In the Bible, a person’s name represents the totality of who they are. When we pray in the name of Jesus, we are praying according to all of who He is. So when this woman says his name is like oil poured out, she is not talking about Dawn dish soap. She is talking about the first pressing, the sacred oil, the best of the best.

I was in the office a couple months ago, and we had been slowly decorating, putting up shelves and arranging things. On one shelf sat a book of Spurgeon sermons, the Westminster Biblical Atlas, and this small blue vial. I had no idea what it was. So I opened it, poorly, like a bear, and the top fell off. It got on my hands, on the carpet, everywhere. It turned out to be some kind of perfume, and I could not get it off. It would not wash away.

That is exactly the picture this woman paints. When you pour oil out, when you spill perfume, it is everywhere. You wash your hands and it will not go away. His name, his reputation, has an aroma to it. Not only does he have a physical scent, but now she is comparing his character and reputation to something that fills the room.

What Does the Bible Say Attracts a Godly Spouse?

This is where Song of Solomon becomes deeply practical for anyone thinking about dating, marriage, or what it means to be the kind of person worth committing to. This woman is drawn to a man whose reputation precedes him. She is asking, in essence: Are you known as a man with courage, conviction, and integrity? Are you known as somebody with standards who can be trusted? Someone whose yes is yes and whose no is no, who is consistent, biblical, godly, and prayerful?

This man does not just smell good. His reputation has an aroma to it. “Your name is oil poured out. Therefore virgins love you” (Song of Solomon 1:3). He is popular. When he walks into the room, people notice. And this woman is emboldening him. She is speaking life into him, giving him the affection he desires. Proverbs tells us that life and death are in the power of the tongue, and here is a wife using hers to affirm and bless her husband.

Draw Me After You

Verse four shifts the focus again: “Draw me after you, let us run together” (Song of Solomon 1:4). The question this raises is simple. Is this man stationary, or is he going somewhere?

Adam received two things before he ever received a wife: a God and a garden. He had a right relationship with the God of heaven and earth, and he had a responsibility to work and keep before a wife ever entered the picture. It is very hard for a woman to follow, commit to, and respect a man who is inert and immovable. But this woman looks at this man and says, “I want to hitch my wagon to where you are headed.”

When “Me” and “You” Become “Us”

This verse is so instructive for marriage. She says, “Draw me after you.” Does this man have ambition to serve the Lord? Is he faithful in the things God has called him to? Is he dreaming about how his life can be used for God’s purposes? No woman says, “I want a man who is indecisive, unsure about God, and not really sure where he is headed with his career.” This woman says, “You are headed somewhere, and I want to be a part of your life.”

And watch how the “me” and the “you” turn into an “us” by the end of the verse. That is exactly what happened when my wife and I got married. Some singles may think, “You got married at 22, you do not know what it is like.” Wrong. I got married at 31, and yes, we have had six kids since then, so we have been busy. But we started our marriage like this. I had dreams and plans for ministry. I felt called to what God was doing. At the same time, my wife was being faithful to the things she was called to. The more we started talking, the closer we got. And the closer we got, the more we began to develop an ambition for what God could do together in our marriage.

We started asking God, “What do You want us to do? Where do You want us to go? Where do You want us to live? Who do You want us to minister to?” Our lives started intersecting, and it made total sense.

The Right Person Sees What Others Miss

Before Suzanne, I was dating someone else, and the relationship was not going well. Suzanne, who was one of my close friends at the time (I had known her for three or four years and we were in the same friend groups), called me up and said something none of my other friends had the courage to say: “You are not happy.”

Eventually, that relationship ended. I talked to one of my best friends afterward, the man who would become the best man in our wedding. I told him about the breakup, and he said, “Oh yeah, I would have never let you marry that girl.” I could not believe it. Then he said, “I would not let you marry anyone unless you get along with them the way you get along with Suzanne.”

And here we are, seventeen years later.

A Marriage Worth Building

Song of Solomon opens with a picture of a marriage that is alive, expressive, and rooted in covenant. This woman affirms her husband’s character, is drawn to his direction, and speaks life into who he is. And this man is not passive. He is going somewhere with God, and she wants to run alongside him. That is the biblical vision for marriage: two people, individually faithful, who discover that their lives make more sense together than apart, and who build something greater than either could alone.

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