How beautiful and pleasant you are, oh, loved one, with all your delights.
– Song of Solomon 7:6
This is one of the only verses in Song of Solomon 7 that I felt comfortable reading in light of a lot of different people of different ages listening to this podcast because this chapter is full of descriptions of delights that a husband and a wife experience in one another in marriage. And that’s the point, and you see it, hear it here in verse six, “How beautiful and pleasant you are, oh loved one, with all your delights.”
Song of Solomon 7:6 calls us to praise our spouses for their delights.
This husband is just listing out all the things that are delightful about his wife, all of her delights. And this perspective is so important, yes, in marriage and in any friendship or relationship with other people to look for all the different evidences of God’s grace and God’s beauty in that person.
So the way it plays out in marriage… And this is so important because in marriage, yes another person sees you and all the delightful things in you, but also sees the things in you that are not as delightful. I mean, marriage is so humbling because you start to see in yourself things that are not delightful. And no person is perfect and every single thing in us is delightful. I mean, we all have weaknesses and struggles.
And so if we’re not careful in marriage, we can get focused on those things instead of continually stepping back and saying, “Here are the things that are delightful about you,” and continually pointing to those things and encouraging one another with those things even as we help each other grow in areas where we are weak or where we struggle. That’s part of the point of spiritual friendship, to help each other grow in Christ, and it’s certainly part of the point of marriage, to help us become more like Jesus. I have a responsibility and privilege in my marriage of helping my wife become more like Jesus, and I need her to help me become more like Jesus all the while encouraging one another with the parts of our lives that do reflect Jesus and the parts of our lives that do delight one another.
Song of Solomon 7:6 calls us to continually encourage and delight in our spouse.
So I want us to pray for this kind of encouragement and delight in our marriages and in others’ marriages, and to pray for this in our friendships. If we’re not careful in any friendship, we can focus on things that we don’t like about someone else or that annoy us about someone else. But it’s really important to step back and see the evidence of God’s grace in someone and to encourage them accordingly.
So God, we pray in light of this picture, in Song of Solomon 7:6, specifically for marriages, for our marriages, for others’ marriages around us, God we pray that there would be delight in each other and in your grace in each other. God, that there would be constant encouragement and praise and acknowledgment of beautiful things in one another.
And God, for areas where we want and need to grow in Christ, God we pray for marriages, our marriages, others’ marriages, to help one another grow in beauty in Christ to, just as Ephesians 5 talks about, to become more and more like you, Lord Jesus, through our marriages.
This verse calls us to acknowledge evidences of grace in our marriages.
God, we pray for that in marriages and we pray for that in our friendships and our relationships in your church with brothers and sisters in Christ, with all kinds of people around us. As we think about our friendships, God, we pray that you would help us to be intentional about acknowledging evidences of your grace in others’ lives and encouraging them accordingly even as we help people and serve people, pray for people, and encourage people to become more like you.
Oh God, in all of this, we praise you for evidence of your grace in our lives. Anything good in us comes from you. Any beauty or pleasantness to you, Song of Solomon 7:6 language, anything delightful in us is a picture of your handiwork, for which we praise you and we pray that you would make us more pleasant and more beautiful and more like Jesus today.
Prayer for the Odienne Jula People
And we pray that you would help us to lead others to life and beauty in you, Jesus, through the gospel today. And we pray this for people groups around the world, God for the Odienne Jula people of Côte d’Ivoire, 169,000 Muslims who have little to no knowledge, no known followers of Christ among the Odienne Jula people of Côte d’Ivoire. God, please change that, we pray. Please cause the good news of Jesus to spread to the Odienne Jula people of Côte d’Ivoire… That they might be reached with your love, that their lives might be transformed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We pray all this according to your Word in Song of Solomon 7:6. In Jesus’ name, amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
