Understand Thou What Thou Readest?

New Covenant Church pastor Doug O'Donnell's first sermon in a series on the Song of Songs, titled Understand Thou What Thou Readest?, provides a helpful orientation to the Song of Songs.  The title indicates that this is a book that requires explanation, that requires a guide, like the Ethiopian eunuch needed a guide to understand Isaiah's prophesy (Acts 8).  So Doug explains S. of S. 1:1 and gives "four guide posts" for approaching the book.

The four guide posts:

1)  This is a song (1:1 identifies the genre).
2)  It's a song about human love set in the context of marriage.
3)  This is a song about marriage love found in the Bible .
4)  It's written to give us wisdom (it participates in the wisdom genre). 

I found this sermon personally helpful and encouraging, especially the first guide post.  The first guide post tells us that we're reading poetry, not prose, or anything else.  And so we should let it function as poetry and have its full impact.  The sermon also has a number of healthy injuctions for the married and unmarried alike.

May we be doers of the word and not hearers only!