The Spirit and The Bride

'And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!”’

Lord, work in me that my voice would be found in this chorus!

Revelation 22:17 shows us the Spirit and the bride together as one seeking the Person, the presence, and involvement of the Lord Jesus Christ. This verse placed at the Revelation’s end and at the end of our bibles summarizes the condition of those swept up in God’s redemptive work and history which opens itself to us in Genesis. Lord, if I claim participation in Your salvation, but my heart and lips fail to cry for You, lead me by Your Spirit back into these pages that I might hear You, see You, know You, and come to cherish You beyond all else that I could ever know or desire. Something is in the way. May nothing stand that causes me to not hear the Spirit’s voice and that keeps me from voicing my own cry for You.

The Spirit and the bride know and agree on who Jesus is and what He is about. The Spirit has known this from eternity. The bride knows all this now. The bride understands and is fully convinced of all the Spirit has revealed and brought to life in her. She is complete. She is prepared. She lives the truth that Jesus Christ loves, purifies, and cleanses her in preparation of bringing her to their wedding day and to Himself. The Spirit has brought to earth that heavenly life and nurtured it along the way by evidencing Christ, Who in turn reveals the Father. The church’s relationship to Christ Jesus is her primary thought while in this world, and from it she looks to Him and sees beyond mere human history into life as His story. Additionally, the Spirit and the bride understand, welcome, and work with the means whereby Jesus Christ is set upon to prepare her for that day. Such an understanding would have governed the primitive church that received John’s writing and would have fortified their thinking and faith against pressures from the earthly powers that were against them and sought their destruction, and it would have anchored the early church’s mind and heart on the sovereign Lord of all Who rules over all. Finally, the verse reveals to us the place and role of “desire,” the oft overlooked but foundational and essential element to the inner essence of the Christian life. The Spirit and the bride passionately want to be with the Bridegroom, the Husband, the Head, and they desire all such union entails and where it leads.

Oh Holy Spirit of God, you come before any life or utterance the bride sounds! The Spirit is positioned first. The Spirit’s primary task as revealed in the New Testament is to bring to life and completion the redemptive work of Christ and God the Father, where what has been eternally ordained through and for the Son reaches completion in the Father’s presence. The Spirit’s action is a bringing together the two—One from Heaven to earth and back to Heaven; One from earth to Heaven—and it summarizes the Spirit’s entire ministry. The Spirit, being the life and breath of the bride, moves her collective (and thus every member’s) mind, affections, and will to passionately single out, see, hear, know, long and cry out for, then pursue her Head and Husband above all else. The Spirit brought to her the heavenly life in the beginning, enlightens, empowers and drives the bride toward her Husband, labors to purify her from false lovers, and the Spirit does all this in a way that the bride’s will is not discounted, dismissed, disengaged or overridden, but it is instead influenced in a manner where the brides’ wants and affections so latch on to Christ as the choicest of any object of desire that her will follows hard after those desires and moves passionately steadily toward Christ above all else.

God does not crush and bypass the human will, certainly not that of His Son’s bride. She is no forced marriage! As the Shulamite so longed for her beloved, whose banner over her was love, so does the bride of Christ only long for Him, and only through this experience of longing for Him does she know both herself and Him. To glorify Himself, thus triumphing over all sin and evil, God works through the will by means of His love relation to her. Courting her she gains true understanding of Him: experiencing His goodness and power, His light dispelling darkness; that transformation being undeniably real, His goodness and purity capturing her gaze, as if stealing it from seeing (thus knowing) nothing but darkness and sin to seeing all things, thereby breaking through her as if newly born or created and seeing for the very first time her Creator, Who loving her she loves, Who seeing her she sees, Who wanting her she solely wants. Their eyes meet, and forever she has affections for no other. Dawn has broken to her, and it occurred within her. His look is for Her. He isolates it and gives it to her only. He is faithful to her, and He looks not this way at any other.

This divine gaze changes the one looked upon. Certainly, such a bride will not cry and shout for a return to that darkened womb of the world from which she came! She dare not, or her Husband to be—the Great Shepherd of the sheep—will alter her path toward Him and allow her to feel again that pointed and trying way she only knew before He set His love on her. This He may do, as God, to glorify Himself and purify her affections and desires, through repentance, in preparation of being with Him upon their marriage forever. She is to dwell in the Father’s house, in His presence, and the Son—above all others—knows those preparations required to fit the church for the eternity of that experience.

Recall, my friend, the virgins as they waited for their day. (Matt 25:1-10) Must we not go through our wait and maintain our own want, if He delays a bit longer? Should we not also know the fruit found in delay? Must we not realize the divine work that attends a humble trust and quite patience? Furthermore, would it not be essential and foundational to our Christian maturity to recognize the Lord Jesus’ actual presence during the time of “apparent “delay? What does this notion of delay do with you? Have your affections for the One with whom you will spend eternity grown dim with the world’s dirt and ungodliness? Are we stained? Or, have our desires to be with Christ only grown with fervor and intensity, as we have with increased passion pursued our Head and Husband, the one Whose’ love was set upon us and redeemed us from sin and destruction? Where are you my friend?

God’s love and grace experienced by an individual Christian, and the totality of Christ’s body, enlightened with knowledge and infused with ultimate desire, anchors on the God from which these come, so that the Christian, and the body as one, longs above all else to be with the Source of Life from which these flow. If we have truly tasted of that river of life from above, what fount of apparent and false life could tempt and appear to satisfy us from here below? All we need do is examine our own lives to see the collection of things we have more affection and desire for than the Lord Jesus Christ. What do you see? Could you today participate in the chorus, “Come Lord Jesus! Come!” If not, examine your desires. Recall the role of the Spirit in bringing you that heavenly life, testifying of Christ, and cleansing you of ungodliness. Pursue through faith and repentance what God offers you to prepare you for life with Him.