The great colonial American pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) once preached a magnifcent sermon titled "Spiritual Appetites Need No Bounds." In Edwards's day many preachers understood the Old Testament book Song of Solomon (also known as the "Song of Songs") mainly to paint a picture of the love relationship between Jesus and the church. Edwards thus based his sermon on Song of Solomon 5:1. Whether his choice of a text was right our wrong, his words are certainly spot-on, and they breathe the passionate and unbounded love for God that we all want to enjoy in the deepest recesses of our hearts. In the following paragraph Edwards explains that the command to eat and drink in abundance in Song of Solomon 5:1 is a call to satisfy our deepest spiritual appetites in the beauty and glory of God:
Men cannot exceed the degreee of those [spiritual] appetites. There is no such thing as inordinateness in holy affections; there is no such thing as excess in longings after the discoveries of the beauty of Christ Jesus, greater degrees of holiness, or the enjoyment of communion with God. Men may be as covetous as they please (if I may so speak) after spiritual riches, as eager as they please to heap up treasure in heaven, as ambitious as they please of spiritual and eternal honor and glory, and as voluptuous as they please with respect to spiritual pleasure.
Jonathan Edwards, "Spiritual Appetites Need No Bounds," reprinted in The Puritan Pulpit: Jonathan Edwards (Morgan, Penn.: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2004), 227.
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