His Banner Over Me is Love
This is a transcript of Suzanne’s talk on December 16 at the “Brunch & Branches” event at Panton Community Church.
Whenever I hear the title for this event, “Brunch and Branches,” a song pops into my head. It’s a song we used to sing in Sunday school. Sing it with me if you know it. With hand motions!
The Lord is mine and I am His
His banner over me is love
He bids me to His banqueting table
His banner over me is love
He is the vine, and we are the branches
His banner over me is love
This is an interesting phrase… “His banner over me is love.” You may be wondering what in the world does that mean?
It’s a quote from the “Song of Solomon” in the Bible – your Bible may call it the “Song of Songs.”
It’s a book in the Old Testament written by King Solomon, who wrote it as a play. And it’s a love story between the king (Solomon) and his bride.
Now, Bible scholars often compare it – or they might say that it is a metaphor of God’s great love for us.
It’s hard to describe the amazing love God has for us, and the special relationship between us and God. Sometimes the Bible compares it to the love a parent has for their children. Sometimes it compares it to a very close friendship. But in other places, it compares God’s love for us like that between a husband and a wife.
In the book of Revelation, the church is called the “BRIDE OF CHRIST.”
In Matthew 9, Jesus refers to himself as the “BRIDEGROOM.”
So you can read the book – the play – of Song of Solomon with that in mind, that Jesus is the king, and we (as Christians) are his bride.
So here’s the verse in context. I’m going to start at the beginning of chapter 2.
The Beloved one (that’s us) says:
I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.
Then the King says:
Like a lily among thorns is my darling among the maidens.
Then the Beloved one, speaking to the audience, says:
Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my lover among the young men.
I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste.
Now here’s our verse:
He has brought me to his banquet hall, And his banner over me is love.
Now what exactly does that mean? “His banner over me is love?”
So I had to do a little research on this.
If the King were to call you to come to his courts. You would have to come with an escort. You can’t just show up at the castle gate and say, “I’m here to have dinner with the king.”
No, if the King calls you - bids you to come to his banquet hall, you would come with soldiers. Perhaps on horseback, to allow you to enter into the palace, into the presence of the King.
And they would have a standard – a flag – that represented the King. To bear witness to the fact that they are on duty for the King. This is something the King has requested.
And in this case, it’s not a white flag of surrender, or a flag of battle or war.
What kind of flag is it? LOVE!
Why are you coming to have a banquet with the King in his palace?
Because he loves you.
He loves you intimately, and he loves you infinitely.
Will you repeat that after me?
God loves me intimately. . . . . . And God loves me infinitely.
If you read the rest of the book of Song of Solomon, you’ll find that it gets pretty intimate! A little steamy perhaps. But the point is that God loves you in a very personal way.
He loves you intimately.
The Bible is chock full of stories of people who had personal encounters with God – sometimes in desperate moments – when they needed to know that God loved them. I’m going to touch on just 2 stories today, but I’m sure you all can think of others. I want to look at one woman from the Old Testament, and one woman from the New Testament.
The first is Hagar. Her story is found in Genesis 16. Hagar is a servant girl. She basically belongs to Sarai, Abram’s wife. Now, God had promised Abram that he would have countless descendants – a numerous as the stars in the sky - but Sarai had so far not been able to have a child.
So Sarai comes up with this scheme to give her maidservant, Hagar to Abram to bear a child.
Abram sleeps with Hagar and she gets pregnant.
The text says,
4“When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
Oh, don’t you feel for Hagar? She has been given to this old man (the Bible says Abram is 86 years old when this happens) and she is pregnant, and now Sarai is mistreating her – like of course this is not a recipe for a good relationship between a woman and her maidservant… So Hagar runs away.
Let’s keep reading:
7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.
9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”
11 The angel of the Lord also said to her:
“You are now pregnant
and you will give birth to a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,[a]
for the Lord has heard of your misery.
(The note in my Bible says that Ishmael means “God hears.”) Then, in verse 13:
13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”
Maybe you are wondering today if God sees you.
Maybe you are wondering if God hears you.
Dear friend, God loves you intimately, and God loves you infinitely.
Let’s look at a woman from the New Testament, in Jesus’s day. The Woman at the Well
It’s in John 4.
Jesus and his disciples are going through Samaria – a place that Jews in those days avoided. They stop at a well in the middle of the day, and Jesus’ disciples leave him there, sitting at the well while they go into town to buy food. And while he’s sitting there, alone, a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. They have this conversation – she is shocked that Jesus would even speak to her, because she is a Samaritan woman, and Jews don’t associate with Samaritans. Jesus reveals to her that he knows everything about her. He tells her that she has had 5 husbands and the man she now has is not her husband. And then, he reveals to her who he is.
Verse 25:
The woman said, “I know that messiah (called Christ) is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.
Then Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he.”
Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking to a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her.”
Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people:
“Come see a man who told me everything I ever did.”
He knew everything about her. And he chose to reveal himself to her as the Christ.
She is the first! He hadn’t told anyone else yet. Knowing everything about her, he loved her.
God knows everything about you.
He loves you intimately . . . and He loves you infinitely.
One of my favorite go-to passages that I memorized years ago is Psalm 139. It has been a comfort for me in moments of crisis - when I don’t know what else to do or where to turn.
Listen to these words that speak of how intimately God knows you and loves you.
Psalm 139
1 You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
Say it again:
God loves me intimately. . . And God loves me infinitely.
A few weeks ago I was at a low point. It wasn’t my lowest. Haha, I’ve had worse! Just a bad week. Maybe a bad month.
I had twisted my knee and was still recovering. For those of you who don’t know, I have CMT, which is a progressive neuro-muscular thing, anyway, there’s that.
We had just gotten back from a trip to see our kids and grandson in Chicago, and saying goodbye is always heart-wrenching.
I was worried about my mom and her health.
I had said “yes” to way too many volunteer things - you know how that goes, and there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do all that I had committed to do.
The laundry was piling up.
I was just stressed out, and I kept pushing the emotions back to the back of my brain. I was just functioning. Trying to just do everything and not think too much about anything too emotional.
I was trying to get a load of laundry done before piano students arrived that afternoon, and I was setting up a drying rack in my kitchen, you know for sweaters and a couple of blouses that I don’t put in the dryer. I don’t remember why, but I stumbled and fell; the next minute I was sitting awkwardly on the kitchen floor with pieces of the broken drying rack under me.
I couldn’t get up. I crawled over to the kitchen table where my phone was lying, and called my husband at work. You know the commercial, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”
Now, my husband walks to work everyday. It’s about a 20-minute walk from our house to Collins. So he says, “Okay, I’ll start walking home. But in the meantime, if you figure out how to get up, just call me.” So I hung up and sat there for a minute, and I had an idea. I crawled into our little family room where there is a chair that is pretty low… and tried to push myself up against the chair.
It took three tries, but I finally managed to get part of my hip up on the chair, and then took a deep breath and turned so that I was sitting. So I called my husband and said, “I did it.”
He said, “Are you sure you’re okay?” and I reassured him, so he turned around and went back to work.
And then I finally let myself cry. This was everything bottled up inside me for the past few weeks and I let it all out. And when the sobs slowed down, through my tears, my eyes began to focus on the pattern of the rug on the floor in that room. It’s kind of a brown floral pattern, and I had never noticed before, but there’s sort of the face of a lion in one of the big flowers.
Now, I admit this is kinda silly, but it made me think of Aslan – the lion that represents Jesus in the Chronicles of Narnia – Jesus, the Lion of Judah – and it just reminded me that he was there, watching me.
Now honestly! I’m embarrassed that God had to use the pattern of a rug to remind me of his faithfulness to me.
Girls, my faith is not founded on the pattern of a rug.
My faith is founded on the plethora of scriptures that tell me that God loves me,
and that he is with me.
That he sees me.
He hears me.
That he knows me intimately.
Matthew 10:29-31 says:
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
Lamentations 3 - many of you know this pasaage:
I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.
The ESV puts it this way: AND HERE’S THE INFINITE PART
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.
It’s new every morning. It goes on and on – his love is infinite.
And how about Psalm 136:
1 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
His love endures forever.
2 Give thanks to the God of gods.
His love endures forever.
3 Give thanks to the Lord of lords:
His love endures forever.
4 to him who alone does great wonders, (say it with me)
His love endures forever.
5 who by his understanding made the heavens,
His love endures forever.
6 who spread out the earth upon the waters,
His love endures forever.
7 who made the great lights—
His love endures forever.
8 the sun to govern the day,
His love endures forever.
9 the moon and stars to govern the night;
His love endures forever.
Here's another great verse about his infinite love:
Ephesians 3:17-19
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge –
You can’t get your head around it, and you can’t get your arms around it!
He loves you intimately, and He loves you infinitely.
Now, there is something that messes up our relationship with God. Just like we mess up our relationships with friends and loved ones. We fail. We disappoint people. We gossip. We deceive. We screw up, and we have to ask people to forgive us in order to restore the relationship.
And it’s the same with God. We mess up. We have to ask him to forgive us.
In his model prayer, Jesus taught us to say, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Or maybe your Bible translation says debts. Or some translations say “sins.”
He wants us to ask God to forgive us. To restore the relationship.
He wants to have a close relationship with you. He wants everything to be good between you. He paid for your sins on the cross. He loves you. He sees you. He knows you.
Say it with me again:
God loves me intimately. . . .And God loves me infinitely.
I want to close by going back to the place we started, in Song of Solomon, with the banner of love.
I just want to read this beautiful section, 10 verses, starting with that verse about the banquet and the banner. This is the NIV: Listen to the intimate way God loves you.
Chapter 2, starting in verse 4
4 Let him lead me to the banquet hall,
and let his banner over me be love.
5 Strengthen me with raisins,
refresh me with apples,
for I am faint with love.
6 His left arm is under my head,
and his right arm embraces me.
7 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
by the gazelles and by the does of the field:
Do not arouse or awaken love
until it so desires.
8 Listen! My beloved!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
10 My beloved spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”
I love the idea of Jesus peering in through the window, through the lattice, and saying to you, Come, my darling! The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, Arise, come, my beautiful one, come with me.
He loves you intimately. And he loves you infinitely.