You may have heard how rates of depression (and even suicide) tend to rise during the Christmas season. What many consider the happiest time of the year is, for some, the hardest to get through. But Christmas is not the only time of year when this happens: Valentine’s Day can be excruciating for those without a valentine. The way the holiday is celebrated in America can make you feel like you’re at a party where everyone is having a good time except for you — and you just have to stand there and watch. Our culture’s tragic elevation of sexual fulfillment into an idol makes this even worse.

Strange as it might sound, however, you don’t have to avoid the Song of Songs if this time of year is hard for you. In fact, the Bible’s one book about marital love and romance can be a place of comfort and calm for singles in three ways.

Don’t Try to Fall in Love

Our society gives relentless attention and pressure to finding that one special someone who will completely fulfill your longings within. (Think how many movies portray a romantic connection in such unrealistic terms.) Your own family may make matters worse by constantly dropping hints about how long you’ve been single. These pressures can make it easy to start giving as much energy as possible to trying to fall in love — or settling for someone you’re not crazy about, just to get out of the “single” category (see Isaiah 4:1).

Strikingly, however, the Song tells us to do the opposite:

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. (2:7; 3:5; 8:4)

This is the most frequently repeated verse in the book, its refrain, and the main lesson its readers are supposed to remember: let love awaken on its own or not at all. Being in love can look so wonderful from the outside, and the rapturous speeches of the Song’s young couple might lead readers of the book to try to taste this experience for themselves as soon as possible. But the Song goes out of its way to tell us this is unwise.

“If love and romance never awaken for you, you can still be vibrantly alive in God’s world.”

For those unmarried, this verse is your Creator giving you permission to excuse yourself from the romantic rat race. If love and romance never awaken for you, you can still be vibrantly alive in God’s world. Our culture makes sexual fulfillment central to human fulfillment; I get the sense a lot of people think you’re not fully alive (and maybe not even fully human) unless you’re dating or married. God’s word is far kinder. If you fall in love, that’s wonderful. If you don’t, there is no need to worry about it — get on with the business of enjoying life and imaging God in the world, waiting patiently on his timing.

No ‘Happily Ever After’

The Song, along with the rest of the Bible, portrays marriage as a deeply good gift, and falling in love as something so beautiful it almost will not go into words. But the same book that poetically adorns romance also makes it clear that love will not always be easy or pain-free. We see this mostly clearly in 5:2–6:3, which describes, in dream-like fashion, a break in the couple’s relationship that is eventually healed.

That’s what seems to happen, anyway; the shifting, prismatic poetry makes it difficult to be sure. The passage begins with the woman refusing to open a locked door to her husband, either teasing him or making excuses (5:2–3); but even the sound of him at the door awakens her desire, and she throws the door open (verses 4–5). As sometimes happens in dreams, however, he simply vanishes. The woman searches everywhere, calling without answer (verse 6); things become nightmarish when she gets beaten up (verse 7; apparently the city guards think she’s an intruder or prostitute).

Thankfully, the woman is not abandoned. After describing her husband to the “daughters of Jerusalem” (verses 10–16), her friends are convinced to help her look for him (6:1) — but there is no need. She has found him already, in the garden they both share (6:2). Apparently, the sexual bond between wife and husband means that breakdowns in the relationship will be temporary.

A married couple I know extended hospitality to a single woman in their church by giving her a key to their house: she was welcome to invite herself over any time. The couple said that one of the benefits of their generosity was that their single friend got to see a marriage from the inside, and that marriage is not always great. This passage is doing the same. Just because the bond is so profound, married couples will at times suffer excruciating pain, for reasons they won’t always understand. The grass is definitely not always greener.

You can see this aspect of the Song in another way. The book begins and ends on the same note of unfulfilled desire, as the couple expresses their desire to get away together (1:2–4; 8:14). As beautiful as the book (and love itself) is, there isn’t much forward progress. The emotional and sexual fulfilment of marriage is temporary and sporadic; a sense of longing and unfulfillment is as much a part of marriage as anything else. This reality guards us against any unwise romanticization of romance.

Single Sexuality Still Achieves God’s Purpose

For most people, the desire to fall in love and get married can be overwhelming, especially when you are young. This can make it unfortunately easy to feel resentment toward God if he does not send anyone to you. Why would he give us overpowering desires and then not give (to some, anyway) any way of fulfilling them without disobeying him?

“The Bible’s one book about marital love and romance can be a place of comfort and calm for singles.”

The Song’s most famous passage answers this when it describes romantic love as “the very flame of the Lord” (8:6). Romantic love is ultimately a reflection of God’s character. The ultimate reason God made you sexual was not so you could fulfill that desire in marriage (good as that is). Your sexuality is meant to give you the vocabulary and imagination to appreciate how your divine Husband feels about his bride — the only Lover whose love is stronger than death, jealous beyond the grave, fierce, not to be denied. The next time you are driven to distraction by your own desires, think, “My feelings right now are the merest echo of the desire of our divine husband” (see Isaiah 62:5).

Think of it this way: if you had to describe the human experience of falling in love to an alien whose species reproduced asexually, what would you say? You’d be reduced to metaphor. God created human sexuality because without it, we would be blind and deaf toward one dimension of his love for us.

Even if you aren’t married, your sexuality is still achieving God’s ultimate purpose for which it is designed. If you long for a wedding day and honeymoon, your divine Husband longs for his eschatological wedding day and eternal honeymoon even more. Without the sexual dimension of the human person, you would not be able to understand this aspect of God’s character. Your longing for love and romance is a subset of a much deeper longing that, fortunately, has no doubt about its fulfillment. The ardour of your divine husband will not allow it.

The seventeenth-century English poet William Habington said, “He who is good is happy.” Indeed. He who is good and abounds in all good things is happiest and most blessed. And because none is good like God is good, none is blessed like God is blessed.

God’s blessedness or felicity (that is, his enjoyment of the highest good) was not given much attention in the work of the Reformers. Even after the time of the Reformation, blessedness does not receive the type of attention that other attributes do. Interestingly, in the medieval period of church history, two of the most famous theologians, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, gave copious attention to God’s blessedness. Others before the medieval period, like Augustine in the early church, were clearly not unaware of this special attribute of God when they connected the highest good with God’s own felicity and blessedness.

We live in a time when a reacquaintance with God’s blessedness could prove extremely useful for pastors and their flocks. This attribute may also function as an evangelistic tool to a generation of people, young and old, who are decidedly not experiencing true blessedness and joy.

Rediscovering Blessedness

Meditating upon God’s blessedness should, in a certain sense, cause us some holy envy of what God possesses. His attributes, as we conceive of them, involve a perfect union of all that is good. So, for example, his blessedness is an unchangeable blessedness, an eternal blessedness, an infinite blessedness, and so on. God’s delight is chiefly in himself as a fully self-sufficient being who needs nothing because he possesses everything. The apostle Paul speaks of “the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” and calls God “the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords” (1 Timothy 1:11; 6:15).

The idea of blessedness as the union of all good things is not particularly difficult to understand. If we could conceive of a good God who is unable to effect good because he lacks the power to do so, he would not be happy but miserable. Or consider a God both holy and merciful but lacking the wisdom to be both just and the justifier of sinners — he also would be miserable. God is a perfect being insofar as his attributes are not in competition with one another, but instead gloriously harmonize in a way that can only mean he is blessed above all.

Theologians refer to God as a fully actualized being such that he is not just blessed but infinitely blessed. He cannot be more or less blessed than he is. Where unchangeable and infinite holiness, justice, power, knowledge, wisdom, and goodness exist, there must be blessedness.

Blessed Knowledge

God enjoys blessedness because there is no ignorance in him. He knows himself fully. As Stephen Charnock says,

The blessedness of God consists not in the knowledge of anything without him but in the knowledge of himself and his own excellency, as the principle of all things. If, therefore, he did not perfectly know himself and his own happiness, he could not enjoy a happiness. For to be and not to know to be is as if a thing were not. “He is God blessed forever” (Romans 9:5) and therefore forever had a knowledge of himself. (The Existence and Attributes of God, 624)

God is blessed because he fully knows his blessedness. God’s life is “most happy,” as the Reformed theologian Benedict Pictet said. Anyone who understands true happiness will affirm that God is “most happy” since he is “in need of nothing, finds all comfort in himself, and possesses all things; is free from evil, and filled with all good” (Theologia Christiana Benedicti Picteti, 2.4.7).

“Unlike humans, God does not need anything outside of himself to make him happy and blessed.”

Unlike humans, God does not need anything outside of himself to make him happy and blessed. The blessedness in this universe, wherever it may be, is from God and can only be from God. Even the human nature of Christ receives its happiness from the divine essence. As Edward Leigh once said, “The human nature of Christ himself in heaven . . . lives in God, and God in it, in a full dependence on God, and receiving blessed and glorious communications from him” (A Treatise of Divinity, 2:200).

Trinitarian Blessedness

When we say that God is “most blessed” we are affirming that the Father, Son, and Spirit all equally possess this infinite happiness. There is no divine attribute that belongs to one person and not another.

John Owen, who never shied away from his robust Trinitarian theology, speaks of the blessedness of God as the “ineffable [that is, indescribable] mutual inbeing of the three holy persons in the same nature, with the immanent reciprocal actings of the Father and the Son in the eternal love and complacency of the Spirit” (Works of John Owen, 1:325). The reciprocal love between the persons makes them blessed. True love is the ground for true happiness. The one who loves most is most happy.

We worship and serve a most happy God, which should make us happy. We bow before the three persons knowing they are not distressed like the pagan gods but rather full of joy, which is good news for us. God is not just happy but free from all miseries. “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). God knows his perfect blessedness, which means he also knows he cannot not be blessed. It is impossible for any misery to ever be in God.

Christ’s Blessedness

Affirming God’s blessedness raises an important question for us regarding our Savior, Jesus Christ. We drink from God’s blessedness because Christ drank in our misery as the God-man. God sent his Son to make us happy. But what, then, can we say about Christ’s own felicity, joy, and blessedness?

Was not Christ “a man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3)? Or was he a man of joy at the same time? While possessing a human nature allows for the experience of real misery, we should also think of our Savior as a man of joy who was always aware of his blessedness. Christ was always joyful and therefore blessed while on earth, even though he was also acquainted with grief.

As one who received the Spirit without measure (John 3:34), he would necessarily have been joyful (Galatians 5:22). As one free from sin, he did not possess the miseries of a sinful nature; rather, he was holy, innocent, and unstained (Hebrews 7:26). He would have been supremely satisfied in his holiness, which he received from the Father through the Spirit. Our Lord also knew that he was doing God’s will (John 4:34; 17:4), which brings joy and blessedness. Even going to the cross, Christ had joy set before him (Hebrews 12:2). Knowing that all he was doing would lead to the salvation of his bride would be cause for great felicity. At one time, we read of Jesus rejoicing in the Spirit because the Father had revealed to “little children” the salvation accomplished through defeating the devil (Luke 10:18–21; Hebrews 2:14).

Our Lord was and especially now is a blessed man, the most blessed man.

His Blessedness Is Ours

What does the church gain by recovering blessedness today? There is no denying that we are living in a day when people are lacking joy. Depression is on the rise, and many are coping in unhealthy ways with their miseries.

We believe that God is the fountain of all blessedness and joy. We cannot experience true joy in this life until the triune God becomes our God. We are only as happy or miserable as the God we serve. Blessedness is not only something God is but something he offers, appropriate to our creaturely condition. God has decided to offer the best to us in and through his Son, Jesus Christ, which we can receive by our union with him and the Spirit’s dwelling in our hearts.

George Swinnock wisely states,

Those who serve the flesh as their god are miserable (Romans 16:18; Philippians 3:18) because their god is vile, weak, deceitful, and transitory (Psalm 49:20; 73:25; Isaiah 31:3; Jeremiah 17:9). Similarly, those who prize the world as their god are miserable because their god is vain, troublesome, uncertain, and fleeting (Ecclesiastes 1:2–3; 5:10; 1 Corinthians 7:29–31; 1 Timothy 6:9–10). But those who have an interest in this great God are happy: “Happy is that people, whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 144:15). (The Blessed and Boundless God, 167)

The Lord Jesus received his happiness from God through the Spirit. We receive our happiness from God, in Christ, through the Spirit. This blessedness is the only blessedness worth having because it comes from an inexhaustible fountain overflowing into our hearts, a joy that will be ours forever.

Many people think that riches or prestige will make them blessed, but those gifts easily turn into curses when God is not put first. And it is hard to put God first when we receive riches and prestige. Unless we receive the greatest gift that God can give — his Son — we cannot receive any blessing well. David understood this in Psalm 16. He speaks of how the lines fell for him in pleasant places (verse 6), but only in the context of enjoying the Lord as his “chosen portion” (verse 5). At God’s right hand are pleasures forevermore (verse 11), which is how one may be truly blessed in this life and the life to come.

And we should not forget who is at God’s right hand now: the exalted Christ. At God’s right hand is his greatest pleasure, his Son, and we are most like the Father when we love what he loves, which is true blessedness.

I love starting in on sermon prep.

Oh, the possibilities! Any passage in the God-breathed Book holds glories waiting to be spotted and meditated on and shared. And all the prospects for application! How might this text speak to our generation, and our specific church, and individual hearts, at this particular time? And what concrete illustrations and examples might I bring in from elsewhere in the Bible, or from history, or my own life, that would illuminate the text and hold the hearers’ attention? Brainstorming sermon possibilities can be thrilling.

Then, alas, comes the hardest part: narrowing down all those insights, questions, stories, warnings, and encouragements to what actually fits in the few minutes I have this Sunday. Widening out the prospects of what might be is one thing; narrowing it down to what actually makes it in — and what’s out — is often the most difficult work.

How, then, might we navigate this frequent trial and decide what to preach this Sunday? After wrestling hard with our text — and grasping its meaning in its context, in Christian theology, and in our lives — how do we decide what gold to leave on the cutting-room floor?

And if we find we’ve prepared an overlong sermon, how might we go about shortening it?

Tragedy of Boring Preaching

First, I’ll share a conviction: boring sermons are a great tragedy. Either the hearers did not hear well-preached glories, or the preacher did not proclaim them well.

Of course, on any given Sunday, the spiritual condition of those hearing the message will be all over the map. Some hearts are tender, full of the Spirit, ready to hear with faith; others are dull, apathetic, distracted. As pastors and preachers, we can help our people with this over time, but what we have most control over is ourselves. Ask first, Does the tragedy begin with me? To what extent is the sermon boring because of the preacher, rather than the hearers?

The word of God is objectively and emphatically not boring. The problem is never with God, his glories, and the revelation of himself in this book and in his Son. The problem is with us: in our minds and hearts, in our words and expressions, with our ears and dullness. God, his word, his grace, his mercy, his Son, his cross, his resurrection, his Spirit, his church, his coming return — these are truly the most thrilling and important realities in the universe. Who God is, and what God does, is never boring. It’s only because of our sin and weakness that we yawn at such majesties.

So, as a preacher — unable to control my hearers, but able to control myself — I’m resolved to do my level best, as far as it depends on me, not to bore the church with the most fascinating, amazing, wonderful, marvelous truths in all the universe. That’s the conviction.

How, then, might such a conviction prove practically helpful to preachers in our preparation? When faced with the predicament of what not to preach, how might this conviction help me know which glories to leave on the cutting-room floor for now and what to include in the few precious minutes of my sermon this Sunday?

What Are You Excited to Preach?

I’ll give the summary counsel, then put it in a larger framework to guard against abuse and distortion. First, the counsel: among all the possibilities that are true to your text and true to the needs of your church, prioritize the three or four you’re most excited to preach. In other words, let your own (hopefully sanctified) enthusiasm help you decide what to preach now, and what to leave for another time.

“As preachers we want to affect our hearers with the glory of God and the wonders of his grace.”

Now, your own excitement (however sanctified) to say something from a pulpit could prove dangerous without some qualifications. Critical to being able to trust your own enthusiasm like this are some real checks of holiness: the presence and influence of the ungrieved, indwelling Spirit; growing conformity over time to patterns of God’s word, rather than the world; a heart of pastoral love and concern for the church to care best for the people’s souls, to build them up, rather than entertain them and make much of the preacher.

To adequately check ourselves, then, we might bring in a triperspectival approach based on (1) the biblical text itself (the normative perspective), (2) the context and congregation (situational), and then (3) the heart and enthusiasm of the preacher himself (existential).

Norm: God’s Word

First and foremost, Christian preachers are stewards. We are not apostles, but we say with them,

This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful. (1 Corinthians 4:1–2)

And if the apostles are servants and stewards, then how much more we lowly, local-church officers charged to preach the apostolic word?

As pastors, with “the aim of our charge” being love for our people (1 Timothy 1:5), our burden in the sermon will take its cues from the burden of our text. And our own hearts will pulse to “not shrink from declaring,” but expose our people, over time, to “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). We cannot let our personal preferences and weekly whims undermine our stewardship and undercut their diet. Our thoughts and desires are not the norm of our preaching; the word of God is.

To be clear, brother preachers, don’t presume your enthusiasm for God’s word. Check it. Ask yourself, Does the Book still excite me? Can I still sing along with King David, “More to be desired are [God’s words] than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10)? Do I savor the responsibility of laboring over these God-breathed words, discerning their meaning, and connecting them with real needs in my church?

Context: Church’s Need

Also vital to faithful and effective preaching is humbling ourselves to speak into the particular people and church and moment to which God has assigned us. We intentionally preach not only to “humans” (and all within internet earshot), but to our specific flock, the local church that is our lot, the little patch of earth where we’ve been assigned as undershepherds.

According to 1 Peter 5:1–2, good pastors are doubly among our people. And so, as both sheep and overseers, we are aware of and sensitive to the specific needs and temptations, right now, in this congregation. With a heart of love for this people, this Sunday, we ask, What would be most helpful to emphasize and visit from and through this text? How might the sermon serve as a bridge between the text God has given us this week and the needs of this flock this Sunday, this year, in this generation?

And so we might check ourselves, Does my heart still rise to meet the needs in this church? Am I keeping watch over this flock “with joy and not with groaning” (Hebrews 13:17)? Am I still eager to see these brothers and sisters home to glory (1 Peter 5:2)?

Joy: Preacher’s Heart

With those qualifications in place, then, I’d like to encourage some preachers to consider taking more of their cues from the desires of their healthy, guarded, holy hearts. Given that your soul has been steeping in this text, and given that you deeply love your people and are sensitive to your specific context, ask yourself sometime deep into your brainstorming, with all these wonderful possibilities before you, What am I most excited to preach?

One reason for this self-check is that it’s hard to inspire others with what doesn’t inspire you. In general (without pushing this to extremes), the people will get more from you preaching what you are most excited to preach from this text. And besides, if the preacher has a good heart, and knows his text and congregation well, his heart will rise to meet their needs with faithfulness to the text. The burden of the text and the needs of the people will draw out the preacher’s heart and influence what he’s most excited to preach on this particular occasion.

Preach with Holy Affection

For most of us, the white-hot zeal of spiritual enthusiasm in our hearts rarely translates into white-hot zeal in communication. What we feel at an eight (out of ten), we might communicate at a five or six, and our hearers will experience in a range of intensity in their own hearts. Some get it at a five or six. A few blessed souls, already pulsing with the Spirit, might get the eight with us, despite the dampening of our communicative abilities. They might even glow with a nine. Others experience it at a two or three. Others still, apathetic or distracted, are totally unaffected.

But as preachers we want to affect our hearers with the glory of God and the wonders of his grace. We want to first be affected ourselves by the biblical text, and then, through the miracle of preaching, model how the Christian soul is rightly affected by our text. We want to help our hearers to be appropriately affected by the truth of our text, however much their personalities and momentary circumstances color and veil their responses.

And so we preachers will do well to say with Jonathan Edwards,

I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided they are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.

How might we do this? By lifting up and pressing home the glories in our text that have raised our own affections highest.