“My beloved!” (Song of Solomon 2:8)  

Every saint, even in the worst of times, should be able to truthfully say of Christ, “My beloved is mine, and I am His” (Song of Solomon 2:16). Can you call Christ "My beloved", even when God is disciplining you? Isaiah, even when he prophesied how God was bringing judgment on Israel, started with, "Now let me sing to my Well-beloved” (Isaiah 5:1). Christ identified Himself as the Well-Beloved in Isaiah’s prophesy when He told the parable of the vineyard in which He said the keepers of the vineyard would kill Him (Matthew 21:39). 

 The Beloved has always been with His saints. Most theologians believe it was Christ who walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden, and killed a living thing for the first time to clothe them when they saw themselves as naked (Genesis 3:21). Christ appears hundreds of times in the Old Testament as the “Angel of the LORD”. He has always been present with His people, since He is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). He was Melchizedek (Genesis 14:8), the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:2), the Fourth Man in the furnace (Daniel 3:25), and the Rock from which Israel drank in the wilderness (1 Corinthians 10:4), to name a few Christophanies. 

 The Apostle Paul describes the love of Christ for His saints best: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? ... I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35-39). Paul challenges the whole universe to try to separate saints from the love of Christ, and declares that neither tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword have been able to do it, so he joyously boasts, "in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us”. 

 “My sole possession is Thy love; In earth beneath, or heaven above, I have no other store; And though with fervent suit I pray, And importune Thee day by day, I ask Thee nothing more”.