The Unsatisfied Life

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. SONG OF SOLOMON 1:2

Union and Communion is Hudson Taylor’s most personal book. A short series of meditations on the Song of Solomon, written out of his experience of Christ after 1869, it reads less like a commentary than a letter from a man who has found what he was looking for. Its opening section is called The Unsatisfied Life and its Remedy.

A key to the book

Taylor knew that many Christians find the Song baffling. “Read without the key,” he says, “this book is specially unintelligible.” The key, he believed, lies in the rest of Scripture. The prophets taught Israel that her Maker was her Husband. John the Baptist called Christ the Bridegroom. Paul, in Ephesians 5, taught that the union of Christ and His Church underlies marriage itself. “The Incarnate Word,” Taylor writes, “is the true key to the written Word.”

For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name. ISAIAH 54:5

This way of reading the Song, as a picture of the love between Christ and His people, has a long history in the Church, from the early fathers through Bernard of Clairvaux to the Puritans. Many careful readers today take the Song first as what it appears to be, a poem celebrating the love of man and woman, and apply it to Christ more cautiously. Taylor reads it as allegory throughout, and at times presses details of the poem further than they will bear. But his central conviction does not depend on those details. The New Testament itself calls Christ the Bridegroom and the Church His bride, and Taylor’s book is a meditation on what that means.

Longing without rest

The section opens with the bride longing for the Bridegroom. She has seen His beauty; the world can never again be to her what it was. But her experience ebbs and flows like the tide. His visits are precious but occasional. Now her joy in Him is heaven below; now she is longing, and longing in vain.

Taylor turns at once to his readers. Are there not many of the Lord’s people, he asks, whose experience is just like hers? They know Christ, and love Him, but they do not know the rest of abiding in Him, nor why it is not theirs. Some look back to the delight of their first love and feel they have lost it. Others find the interruptions to their communion more and more unbearable.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. PSALM 63:1

The unsurrendered will

The Bridegroom is not reluctant. He is waiting all the time, and the conditions that keep Him away are of the bride’s own making. Taylor pictures a betrothed woman who longs for her lover but will not trust him fully, who wants to claim him without giving herself to him, keeping her own name, her own possessions and her own will. It can never be, he says. While she keeps her own name she cannot take his. She cannot promise to love and honour if she will not promise to obey.

Then comes the sentence at the heart of the section: “The real secret of an unsatisfied life lies too often in an unsurrendered will.”

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. MATTHEW 7:21

What holds us back? Taylor names it: a deep-seated distrust of our loving Lord, which fears that if we give ourselves entirely to Him He might ask something beyond our powers, or something we should find it hard to give. He asks what an earthly bridegroom would feel if he discovered that his bride was dreading the wedding for fear he would make her life unbearable once he had the power. Yet that is how many redeemed people treat Christ, and it is no wonder they are neither happy nor satisfied.

Not a cross, but a King

At last the bride can bear His absence no longer, and resolves to surrender everything, whatever it costs. If He leads her to Moriah, or even to Calvary, she will follow. Draw me, she cries; we will run after thee. And what follows, Taylor says, is “a wondrously glad surprise.” No Moriah, no Calvary; instead, a King. “When the heart submits, then Jesus reigns. And when Jesus reigns, there is rest.”

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers. SONG OF SOLOMON 1:4

This is not a promise that surrender brings no suffering. Taylor’s own life after 1869 held some of the heaviest sorrows he ever knew. What he means is that the thing we fear in surrender, the loss of everything good, is a lie. The One to whom we yield is not a tyrant but a Bridegroom-King whose will for us is love.

And where does He lead the surrendered bride? Not first to the banqueting house, Taylor notes, though that will come, but into His chambers, to be alone with Him. Before public service comes private communion.

Seeking Him for His own sake

The section then turns the searchlight further in. Are we not all too apt, Taylor asks, “to seek Him rather because of our need than for His joy and pleasure?” We do not admire children who think only of what they can get from their parents. Many of us once thought that to please God meant simply not to sin against Him. But pleasing God, he says, “means giving Him pleasure.” The Bridegroom longs for our fellowship more than we long for His.

Let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. SONG OF SOLOMON 2:14

The section ends with the bride at rest in His arms, and the Bridegroom charging the daughters of Jerusalem not to disturb her. “It is never by His will,” Taylor writes, “that our rest in Him is disturbed.”

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. HEBREWS 13:8

What to take from it

A caution and an encouragement belong together. The caution is that surrender can become one more thing to measure anxiously. Some tender consciences read a chapter like this and spend years wondering whether they have yielded enough. Taylor’s point is not that we must achieve a perfect surrender before Christ will draw near. It is that He is already near, already willing, and that our distrust of Him is what keeps us restless. The remedy is not more effort but more trust.

The encouragement is that the unsatisfied life is not the normal Christian life, however common it may be. Christ does not create longings in order to tantalise them. He means to satisfy them, and He will.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask whether your experience of Christ ebbs and flows like the bride’s, and be honest about why.

2. Name the thing you most fear God might ask of you. Consider whether that fear rests on a lie about His character.

3. Tell Christ, in your own words, that you give Him your name, your possessions and your will, and ask Him to reign.

4. Spend some time in prayer this week asking nothing for yourself, simply seeking to give Him pleasure.

5. If you are anxious about whether your surrender is complete enough, turn your eyes from your surrender to His love.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, Bridegroom of my soul, I have loved You and still kept my own will, and I have wondered why I was not at rest.

Forgive my distrust. I have feared that You would ask too much, when You have only ever asked to love me.

Draw me, and I will run after You. Reign in me, and let me find, as Your servant did, not a cross I dreaded but a King I can trust.

And teach me to seek You not only for what You give, but for Your own joy. Amen.