My heart is troubled. My heart aches. I don't mean that I have been hurt by things in my life. Well I have been; we all have been hurt and have had trouble in out lives. But that is not what I am talking about.
What I am talking about is my "burden." It is the deep ache in my heart that is there all the time. It is (at least in part) the same ache that I believe is on God's heart. I say "at least in part" because I am not going to claim to be perfectly aligned with God's heart.
This is very difficult to write because I hardly know what to say, or how to say it. I don't know where to begin. This is the third (or fourth) time I have created a website, not counting some early experimental sites. The first two significant times, I felt like the Lord was leading me to create the site and write articles for them, and then with each there came a time that I felt the Lord said to take it down, so I did. I now understand that the Lord was, on one hand letting me gain experience in writing, and in creating a website. There was a lot to learn there, technically. But more importantly, He wanted to shift the focus of my articles more in the direction of what was on His heart.
One of my first domain names was Greatest-News.Net. It was the closest name to GoodNews.Net that was available to buy. It was a good name and I still have it. The gospel of the Kingdom of God is the Greatest News this world has ever heard. But over time the ache in my heart shifted to the need to Return to that Greatest News. The gospel so commonly preached all over the world has been simplified to the point of being horribly incomplete. I have written about that.
As I continued to write articles, there came to be so many aspects where the gospel, that Good News had been so trimmed down and made so incomplete that my burden shifted some more to the need to Return to the Good News as it was first given. So in November of 2020 I bought the domain name ReturnReturn.Net and started again with another new website. I put up my first article there "Return, Return" from the only verse in the Bible that has that word doubled like that. That verse actually has "Return" doubled twice. "Return, return, O Shulamite; Return, return, that we may look upon you!" (Song of Solomon 6:13 NKJV).
In this book, "The Song of Song's which is Solomon's" (SoS 1:1 NKJV), Solomon "the son of David" is a "type" of Jesus, who is called "the son of David." Solomon is an Old Testament example picture of Jesus Christ, Jesus, the King of Kings. This Song is really a prophecy about Jesus and the love of his heart, which is His church. In the Song of Solomon, the Shulamite is his bride, the love of his life. But something happened. It is not clear, from the story in this book, where she has gone, but here in chapter 6, verse 13, it is the cry, not only of Solomon, but the cry of the community for her to return!
So Solomon the king is a shadow picture of Jesus the King of Kings, and this most beautiful woman, the Shulamite, is a shadow picture of the church, the bride of the King of Kings. His bride was born on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus resurrection from the dead. You can read about the birth of the church in Acts chapter 2. That day, 3000 brand new believers were added. That was the beginning of the most beautiful community of people this world has ever seen.
But where has she gone?
When a person hears the gospel and believes the message, often there is a dramatic change in their life, and they have a great hunger to read the Bible. When a person is reading the Bible, like a very hungry person eating a delicious Thanksgiving dinner feast, and they read the first few chapters of Acts, and they see the description of what the early church was like, they typically have a great desire to be a part of that. But when they start to "go to church" they start to wonder what happened. They may get involved at first and even though there is a nagging feeling inside telling them that something is wrong, the nagging often gets suppressed, and sadly, for some, it may be pushed down for the rest of their lives. But if they could read those words again with the fresh eyes they had as a hungry new believer, they would realize that there was actually a deep desire "to see her again." The cry of their heart would be "Return, return that we may look upon you!" That is the cry of my heart. And it is the cry of Jesus' heart. He wants His bride to "make herself ready" as it says in Revelation.