I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.
The streets and broad ways here spoken of, into which the church, resolves to go in quest of Jesus, I should apprehend mean the public Ordinances of worship in the Lord's house of prayer. She had sought him in private prayer by night on her bed; but this mode being unsuccessful, she hastens with greater diligence to seek him, whom her soul loved, among the assemblies of the faithful. Reader! everything is beautiful in due order. When we follow up the employments of the closet with public worship, and again close the duties of the church with retirement and prayer, these are sweet successions. Our Lord was eminent in both. He graced the synagogue with his presence by day, and the stars witnessed the privacy of his devotions, when in their circuit passing by, they beheld him spending whole nights in prayer to his Father. Matthew 14:23. But we find the church, in this account given of her, alike unsuccessful in finding Jesus, in seeking him both in public and in private; for she found him not. Thus the Lord sometimes will exercise the faith of his people, and, no doubt, sometimes it is to show us, that however blessed the means of grace are, still they are but means. Nothing but Jesus himself can satisfy a seeking soul.