Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Well, thanks for joining us today. My name is Doug Clark. I spend most of my time at the old Jacksonville campus in Tyler, but I'm spending a little bit more time doing some preaching at all the campuses. So grateful for that. We hired a campus pastor at the old Jacksonville campus back in August of last year. And so I've been able to get out a little bit more. And I enjoy being here with you. I think it's been almost exactly a year since I was here the last time and. And certainly things have changed. Two services and many of you are new. It's awesome. Grateful for that. For 62 years, God has used Grace Community Church to do things exactly like Dan Perez is talking about doing. Going around the world, but not just around the world. Going into our neighborhoods and into our regions and into our world and helping people know Jesus, helping people grow in Jesus, being disciples who make disciples.
[00:00:54] And I'm excited about how God's using Grace Community and specifically the Dover campus to do that. Grateful. So we're studying today from the Book of Ruth. We're starting a series in the Book of Ruth. And if you have your Bibles, why don't we turn there? Ruth is a love story, really. It's a story of tension and resolve. It's a story of despair, but also romance.
[00:01:19] It's a beautiful story that draws people in.
[00:01:23] And it's more, though, than just a love story between two people.
[00:01:28] It's God loving his people.
[00:01:31] So if you have your Bibles, Ruth, chapter one. Ruth is, by the way, just Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and then first Kings, right? Sandwiched in between, there is a short little book, but it starts this way in verse 1. In the days when the Judges ruled, there was famine in the land, and a man of Bethlehem in Judah and went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife Naomi. And the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion, and they were Ephrathites. From Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her sons. These took Moabite wives. The name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other was Ruth. And they lived there about 10 years. And both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.
[00:02:33] Verse 6. Then she arose with her daughters in law to return from the country of Moab. For she had heard in the fields of Moab that the Lord had visited his people and given them food.
[00:02:44] So she set out from the place where she was with her two daughters in law. And they went on the way to return to the land of Judah. But Naomi said to her daughters in law, go return each of you to her mother's house, and may the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me.
[00:03:04] And the Lord grant that you may find rest each of you in the house of her husband.
[00:03:10] Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept. And they said to her, no, they said, we will return with you to your people. But Naomi said, turn back, my daughters. Why will you go with me?
[00:03:26] Have I yet sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters. Go your way. Now look down to verse 14.
[00:03:36] Then they lifted up their voices and they wept again. And Orpah kissed her mother in law.
[00:03:42] But Ruth clung to her.
[00:03:44] And Naomi, that she in verse 15 said, See to Ruth, your sister in law has gone back to her people and to her gods. Return after your sister in law. But Ruth said, do not urge me to leave you or return from following you, for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God. Where you die, I'll die, and there I will be buried.
[00:04:15] May the Lord do so to me. And more also, if anything but death parts me from you. And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said, no more.
[00:04:31] In 1858, Charles Dickens published a book called the Tale of Two Cities.
[00:04:38] And maybe you know how that book starts. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. But that's not the only thing that Charles Dickens says to set the context. He also goes on to say that.
[00:04:52] But it was also the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief and the epoch of.
[00:05:04] I can't even say the word right.
[00:05:07] Incredulity. It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Do you see the juxtaposition there?
[00:05:19] The juxtaposition of the good and the bad, the joy and the sorrow, the hard times and the good times.
[00:05:27] It was chaotic times, as Charles Dickens writes. That, and why does he write it at the beginning is because he wants you to know what the context of the story is. He wants you to know where you are in the story. Every good storyteller is able to do that. And it's important to understand that for us to get the context of this particular passage. See, what we're going to find as we look at Ruth is that Ruth is living in a similar context as Charles Dickens writes about. And if you're anything like me, you also understand that Charles Dickens is writing in some ways about our life. The context that we have is a chaotic life, a life in the broken world, a life in the struggle of the context of it.
[00:06:14] And here we are to try to figure that out in the book of Ruth over the next several weeks. And today I want to help us get to this place where we understand what God's trying to do by asking three questions. First of all, what do we face in life?
[00:06:29] Second of all, what do we crave as we face all that life is? And third of all, where do we get what we crave in life?
[00:06:39] So we're going to start there. See, Ruth is this love story.
[00:06:43] And it's really more about hope in the midst of chaos than it is about anything else. The love story is a backdrop. It's also a description of who God is. But primarily it's this, what the Bible Project calls a short story. That is a brilliant work of theological art that invites us to reflect on the question of how God is involved in, in the day to day joys and hardships of our life. What Ruth wants to teach us is how God is involved in the day to day hardships and joys of our life.
[00:07:20] We need that to understand how to live appropriately in this world.
[00:07:25] I mean, chaos, that's our situation, right? And chaos, we kind of all can figure out what that, you know, we can think of examples of it. But the definition of chaos could be helpful. It's.
[00:07:40] Webster says that it's the state of complete confusion and disorder.
[00:07:44] Do you feel it?
[00:07:46] Do you feel it? Remember that song, Is He Worthy? It starts off, do you feel the world is broken? And what's the response of the congregation? We do, right? We all feel it, we all understand it, we all know it, and we all know it when we see it.
[00:08:07] Three or four weeks ago at the, at the White House Press Corps dinner at the D.C. hilton, chaos erupted as a gunman made his way into the lobby and opened fire. And if you saw any of the video, you saw the Secret Service taking the President out and then the vice president and then all the higher level executive leaders out quickly to protect them and save them. But did you notice that the room was Was in utter chaos because the reporters who were there not being protected necessarily by the Secret service individually, but corporately, were diving under the tables. They were hiding from the gunman. They were trying to make sure that the chaos that erupted would not affect them.
[00:08:53] And that's a chaotic event that happens what seems to be almost daily in our world, right? People under fire, people at risk of their lives.
[00:09:05] But maybe your chaos this morning. I love what Kyle said as he began the service when he said, I want you to enter into here and whatever you're bringing in, I want to stop right there. Because you know, so many times in church services, people from the front will say, I want you to leave what you had and the struggles that you have outside and just enter into God. Do you know how ridiculous that is?
[00:09:35] First of all, God doesn't want you to leave anything outside. He wants you to experience all he is. And he wants to experience you with everything that you are.
[00:09:46] And the reality is, and the practical aspect of that is, even if somebody tells you to leave the chaos behind out that door and you can't do it.
[00:09:55] See, God doesn't want you to leave the chaos. God wants you to give him the chaos.
[00:10:00] And all of us have this kind of chaos.
[00:10:03] It may not be having to dive under table for cover from fire, but it might be a new baby who's causing a chaotic life in your house. Vicki and I were just away with our granddaughters, one and three and a half years old. And praise God, our kids have to raise them.
[00:10:24] We love them to death. I want to spoil them. We want to be with them as much as possible. But when the lights go out and the bedroom door gets closed, I don't want them.
[00:10:36] So praise you. I mean, yeah, awesome. Grateful. Your chaos is different than my chaos, right? Some of you are in a chaos situation with kids still, but maybe it's college or you're sending them off to college and all the chaos and getting ready for all that stuff, it's. It's nuts. Maybe some of you are experiencing the self inflicted chaos of a journey back into your addiction. And you're here today trying to figure out how do you get past that. But you've your, your self decisions, the, the things that you have brought on yourself through this addictive behavior has now got you into a place of more chaos.
[00:11:13] I mean, some of us are put in chaos by other people and some of us put ourselves in chaos and all of us at some point have put ourselves in chaos.
[00:11:23] That's the point. I mean, we're we're in these situations, it might be your job, it might be a financial situation. There are so many things that it could be. The relationships that you have might be chaotic, right?
[00:11:37] But what God wants to do is to help us see how much he loves us in the midst of all this and how we engage and interact with him today.
[00:11:46] And so we start with the context of Ruth.
[00:11:49] Talk about a chaotic environment.
[00:11:51] Talk about an experience that would be hard to live in. Let's go back to verse one.
[00:11:57] Here's the context of what's happening and why God speaks into this. In verse one, it says, in the days when the Judges ruled.
[00:12:08] Now you got to stop right there to understand the context of this. There was the time in Israel when they were in bondage to the Egyptians, and they were delivered from that bondage by God and Moses, using Moses.
[00:12:23] And then they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, right? And then there was a period of time where they began to defeat and take possession of the promised land of Israel that God was giving them. And, and during that time, they. They won the battles and drove the nations out. Not totally and completely, but that's not where we're going today.
[00:12:47] But they. They drove the nations out and they began to dwell there. And while they were. At that point, while they were dwelling there, it was the time of the Judges. God was leading the nation of Israel through a series of Judges who would come on the scene in the time of Israel's rebellion and lead them away from the punishment that God had been giving them and then bring them into a place of repentance and then a place of restoration. And there was this cycle that was going on in the Book of Judges, about seven of them, throughout the Book of Judges, where, where there would be a time of rebellion and a time of deliverance and a time of repentance and a time of obedience and. And a time of rebellion. Does that sound like your life? A little bit.
[00:13:32] Right. That's sometimes a week, that. Sometimes it's a moment by moment thing, not even a week by week thing. But, you know, we're at times, we're in. We're in obedience, and then we. We end up in rebellion and we get disciplined and then we repent and then we become obedient again. And it just becomes this process. And so. But that's a chaotic situation, right? So in this period of time, there were this, this family, right, Who. Who were living in a chaotic environment.
[00:14:00] And what the chaotic environment was is that it was kind of like the time when rebellion and obedience were just back and forth, and nobody knew where we were going to be at that time. But then you notice something else was added to the chaos. Famine.
[00:14:16] And this kind of famine isn't just like, I'm hungry because I missed lunch. This is the kind of famine where, man, people are dying because they don't have anything to eat.
[00:14:26] This is serious stuff. And. And so there's uncertainty, there's fear, there's all of this happening. So more into this famine and into this famine and into this time of the Judges, we get introduced to a guy from the. To a guy by the name of Emma, sorry, from Bethlehem, whose name is Elimelech. And what's really crazy about that is that Bethlehem is brought up specifically.
[00:14:55] Do you know what the word Bethlehem means?
[00:14:58] It's house of bread.
[00:15:00] So really what this verse is saying is that in the time of the Judges, there was a famine in the land, so that the house of bread had no bread.
[00:15:09] The people of God were not being supplied the needs that they had. And in the midst of that, Elimelech decides that he's going to take his family to another place. But before we get too far down that road, let me just remind you of something. Sometimes it's important to look at the names of God, the names of people in the scriptures. Elimelech.
[00:15:32] That. That name sounds like one. We've not. We don't use that name. If you have named your son or Elimelech, then you are really progressive, and that's really cool. But it's a great name because you know what it means? God. God is king. That's what that name means. God is king. And, and Elimelech is married to this woman by the name of Naomi, and her name means pleasant or, or, you know, enjoyable or experiencing enjoyment. And so that's. That's Naomi, and that's. And that's Elimelech. And they're together and.
[00:16:09] And they have these two sons.
[00:16:11] And the problem is that when we think about how we have pleasantry in life, how we engage in life, you know, it's cool that you look at Elimelech, whose name means God is king, and Naomi, whose name means pleasant, and you realize something. It's pretty easy to be pleasant when you allow God to be king, right? And it's not only that, it's pretty easy to make God your king when everything is pleasant, right?
[00:16:52] And what we'll discover throughout this whole first chapter is that Naomi goes through a chaotic life and tragedy, and she ends up being, not Naomi, pleasant, but it Mara Bitter.
[00:17:07] And here's how that all comes about.
[00:17:12] In verse two, Elimelech and Naomi sojourn to Moab.
[00:17:18] Moab.
[00:17:19] Now, that's chaotic. And let me tell you why.
[00:17:24] Moab got its start right after Sodom and Gomorrah.
[00:17:30] Remember the name Lot, Abraham's nephew?
[00:17:36] Everyone except for Lot and his two daughters in Sodom and Gomorrah die.
[00:17:42] And his two daughters, when they're finally away in safety, are fearful that they're never going to have children. And so they get their father drunk, and the first son who was an offspring of that in incestuous relationship was named Moab.
[00:18:02] That's pretty crazy. But Moab had a greater history, because then the nation of Moab interacts with the nation of Israel and Moses. And the people say, hey, can you give us some food as we travel through this land? And they say, no.
[00:18:19] In fact, they not only say, we're not going to provide for your spiritual needs, we're actually going to give you destruction. Because the king of Moab wants Balaam, the priest and the prophet, to bless.
[00:18:37] I'm sorry, curse Israel and bless Moab.
[00:18:41] And you know that story, Balaam gets reinstructed by his donkey. You ever been reinstructed by a donkey? I. I mean, a talking donkey. That's serious business and almost sounds like a joke, but it's true.
[00:18:56] And as they come to this place where they are engaged with the Moabites and the Israelites dealing with these issues, the king of Moab, he sends women of Moab in to entice the men of Israel to follow the gods of Moab, BAAL and Molech, these false gods.
[00:19:19] And so because of that, you know, there's this history of confusion and chaos that reigns. That's where. That's what we're finding. And so there's famine, there's displacement, and now there's this false worship that's taking place before their eyes in the place that they've chosen to be. That's part of the chaos in verse three. It gets worse. You think Jonah, or I'm sorry, you think Job has it bad, Naomi has it terrible. Her husband Elimelech dies, and she's left raising two sons. How chaotic would that be?
[00:19:54] And then they marry Moabite women.
[00:19:58] Some of you who've had children, have you prayed for your child to find a spouse who loves Jesus and who wants to follow him?
[00:20:07] And maybe you've been in a situation where that didn't exactly happen, and how heartbreaking that is.
[00:20:12] I mean, here's this woman who probably prayed the same kinds of prayers for her sons, Mary, God, would you provide with them wives who love the law, who love you, who love Israel? And it wasn't as they. As she expected. It wasn't what she prayed. She receives these two wives who are Moabite women. Chaotic. And then even worse, in verse five, the boys die.
[00:20:40] And by far it wasn't the best of times at all. As Charles Dickens would say, it was the worst of times for her. Totally chaos.
[00:20:52] Going from life and living to death and dying. That's what she was doing. That's what she was experiencing.
[00:20:59] And what happens, and you know this. In chaos, a craving begins, a craving for relief.
[00:21:08] And she was experiencing that craving for relief.
[00:21:11] That leads us to the second question.
[00:21:14] What do we crave in the chaos?
[00:21:17] If what do we face is the chaos, what do we crave as we go through that chaos?
[00:21:25] And I just want to give you a little bit of an advanced statement about this, that we all crave the same thing.
[00:21:35] We crave loving kindness being given to us and rest from the chaos.
[00:21:42] We want kindness and love, and we want rest from the chaos. And it may look differently, and you may define it a little bit differently, but. But ultimately at the end, everyone going through chaos wants love and kindness and rest from that.
[00:21:59] So let's unpack how that plays out in Naomi's chaos. And in our chaos, this love and rest seem unachievable. It does. I mean, in those times when life has been chaotic for me, when lives have been, when time has been chaos all around me, it does feel like the idea that that rest or that love or that kindness would be bestowed on me doesn't seem like it's possible. And I'm sure that's where Naomi found herself. But here's how we get to that. Look at verse six. Naomi arose with her daughter in law, daughters in law, to return from the country of Moab. For she had heard in the fields of Moab that the Lord had visited his people and given them food.
[00:22:42] Visited his people. That doesn't mean that he just showed up and said hello and got away and went away. That means the connotation of that is that he met his need, he met their needs. He showed up with food. That's what God does.
[00:22:55] When God visits his people, he meets their needs and does what needs to be done. And he does that in our lives too.
[00:23:01] And if that doesn't feel like what God's done in your life, that doesn't mean that he's not trying to bring this to your life. A lot of times when we see the, the need that. When we see this chaotic life that we're living and God brings the need, we can't see that God's providing relief for us. But every time God comes, when he visits his people, he brings the need that we have and restores us in relief. I want us to keep that in mind.
[00:23:31] What he brings is rest and relief.
[00:23:35] Verse 6. He visited the people and he brought them food. The house of bread once again had bread. God revived and restored the people. And Naomi said, we got to go back.
[00:23:48] Now here's what he. Here's what she says as she does that in verse eight and nine. I mean, as they start to return, Naomi says to her daughters in law, I want you to go back to your mom's house. To go back to your house. Because see, I'm old and, and I don't have. I'm not capable of having children to provide you sons. And even if I was capable of doing that, by the time they were old enough to be married, you would be long gone. So I want you to go back to your homes. In fact, she says, I want you to go back to your homes and to your gods.
[00:24:21] And the one daughter in law says this Orpah, she says, okay, I'll go.
[00:24:29] And the other daughter in law, Ruth, says, there's no way I'm going.
[00:24:33] But what's crazy about this is that in the process of it, Naomi says to them, a blessing. I want to give you a blessing in the midst of this. And while you're deciding what you're going to do and whether you're going to go back to your home of origin, I want you to know this. Look at verse eight. After returning, she says, I want you to return each of you to her mother's house. And may the Lord first deal with you kindly, number one.
[00:25:03] And then verse nine, it says, may the Lord grant you that you find rest.
[00:25:09] Those two things that we mentioned earlier, what Naomi says is that in this chaos and this chaotic world, you need the loving kindness of God. In verse 8, that word kindness is about the concept of hesed, which is a Hebrew word found throughout the Old Testament, where God is providing long lasting, covenantal, eternal love for his people. The kindness of God being bestowed on the people. We all need that in the midst of our chaos. But not just that. We need. We need rest, we need peace.
[00:25:50] We need.
[00:25:51] What connects these words together to the New Testament is what Jesus says in Matthew 11:28, where he says, I want you to lay down your burdens. Actually, I want you to give me your burdens and I want you to experience rest. Because when you give me your burdens, Matthew 11:28 says, you will experience rest.
[00:26:14] Now, as she says this to these ladies, you know, the one Orpah, she makes a choice, because that's really part of the deal. Once we know what we need in this chaos, we have a choice where we're going to seek to get it.
[00:26:35] Isn't that true?
[00:26:36] When you know, when you figure out what you need and what relief needs to come to your life, then you come to this place where you make a decision on what you're going to do to get it. And there are basically two options. The first option is to chase after something of the world or yourself, or to chase after God.
[00:26:56] And what Orpah does is she chases after the world. Look at verse 15, and let's start with verse 14.
[00:27:04] And they lifted up their voices and they wept again. And Orpah kissed her mother in law, but Ruth clung to her.
[00:27:12] And she said, this is Naomi talking now. See, your sister in law has gone back to her people and to her gods. Return after your sister in law.
[00:27:24] Naomi is telling Ruth, listen, follow your sister in law Orpah's example. Go back to the people, go back to their gods. And Orpah runs after that, in a sense, full steam.
[00:27:41] When you are in the midst of chaos, where do you find relief? Where do you seek relief? Where do you seek this loving kindness and this rest?
[00:27:52] You know, Orpah was going back to her gods, a God, Molech, a great God, baal, that was absolutely powerless to provide any sense of relief whatsoever. And while you might not be chasing an official foreign idol, you probably are chasing something in your life that provides the exact same kind of result.
[00:28:12] Nothing.
[00:28:14] You're chasing after things that might feel like and the world might tell you, money, success, Acceptance, pleasure. The things that you think are going to bring you this rest and relief, but they don't because they don't have the power to do it.
[00:28:35] See, what Ruth did was she chose to go after this rest and relief in a way that only provides the only way that provides rest and relief. Here's a. Here's a little bit of a spoiler alert. I mean, Kyle's going to spend the next three weeks talking about this love story between Ruth and Boaz. But God provided this man, Boaz, as a gift to rescue her and to save her and to redeem her. And it's all a picture of what God wants to do for our lives. He wants to bring redeeming love and provide this rest and this help and this hope for us.
[00:29:17] He wants to help us understand that he reigns over chaos.
[00:29:21] I mean, in Psalm 29:10, it says, the Lord sits enthroned over the flood. The Lord sits enthroned as the king forever. You know what the flood is often called? It's chaotic, it's chaos. It turns everything upside down. And here's what Psalm says about that.
[00:29:41] God reigns over that. You know what that means? God controls it.
[00:29:46] There's no power in it. God has the power over it.
[00:29:50] And this redemption is just a beautiful picture. And the idea of bread, this house of bread, it's like, what do you need? You need rest and relief, just like you need physical nourishment from bread.
[00:30:05] I love bread, don't you? I mean, I love it so much that if I don't stop eating it, I'm going to probably balloon to a thousand pounds. But whatever.
[00:30:16] That is a beautiful picture, this idea of bread.
[00:30:21] It's this idea that God has this nourishment that he wants to give us. He wants to bring us from chaos to order. And the way he does that is bringing us loving kindness and his mercy and his help, which provides us the rest that we need.
[00:30:45] We crave the relief of our chaos.
[00:30:50] And that relief comes from the loving kindness of God and the rest that he provides.
[00:30:59] At Christmas Eve at the old Jacksonville campus this year, I started the service like this. I said, I want to tell you, if I told you that what's in the bag here is the real meaning of Christmas, you know, what would you say that's in the bag? And I know it's a wine bottle, so don't. It's not. I mean, a wine bag, so it's not. I'm going to give you that. It's not a wine bag.
[00:31:24] I mean, it's not a wine bottle.
[00:31:26] But what if I told you that the real meaning of Christmas is bread?
[00:31:36] I mean, think about it for just a minute.
[00:31:38] Where was Jesus born, huh? Bethlehem. Remember what we said? Bethlehem meant the house of bread, right?
[00:31:49] Who was Jesus by his own admission?
[00:31:53] What did Jesus call himself?
[00:31:55] The bread of life.
[00:31:57] So you got the bread of life being born, where?
[00:32:01] In the house of bread.
[00:32:03] Now think about this. Where did Mary and Joseph lay Jesus, the bread of life, on that first night?
[00:32:13] In a manger. Great. Yeah, awesome. You know what a manger is?
[00:32:19] Manger is a thing that holds hay, right? It's a feeding trough, isn't that crazy that the bread of life was born in the house of bread and then laid for all of the world to taste of that bread, to eat of that bread, to be nourished by that bread, to allow that bread to.
[00:32:44] To be the relief of all of us in chaos.
[00:32:49] The bread of life, which brings the loving kindness of God and his rest into our lives, Ruth, is a love story.
[00:32:59] But it's not just a love story between two people.
[00:33:02] It's a love story between the God of the universe and you.
[00:33:10] God, in his passion for you and the chaos that you're experiencing right now, deeply desires for you to experience his loving kindness in Jesus Christ.
[00:33:23] The death and resurrection of Christ that provides the forgiveness of your sin, that then brings the rest that we desperately need and want the forgiveness of sin, which brings forth peace with God and peace with life.
[00:33:42] Chaos gets relieved by the loving kindness of God and the rest that he provides and the provision of that is the bread.
[00:33:54] Let's pray.
[00:33:56] God, thank you so much for what you've done through our lives and in our lives.
[00:34:03] And I pray, Lord, that you would help us as we walk through whatever it is you got us walking through right now, whatever chaotic situation that is our life right now or the lives of this room. I pray, God, that we would cling to your loving kindness, to the rest that you provide in your son Jesus, that we would keep chasing after you with a close, personal, abiding relationship, that we would find our help and our hope in you alone.
[00:34:36] And that every time we get tempted to find relief in another avenue or another venue, that you would turn us back to yourself.
[00:34:44] Thank you, Jesus, for your love for us that chases us that is unceasing, unwavering, unswerving and unconditional.
[00:34:55] In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Let's stand and worship together.
