Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] All right. Well, good morning.
[00:00:03] I want to take a moment at the outset and thank the Lord for the men and women who gave their lives in our armed forces and just thank the Lord for their sacrifice, their example. We also want to just pray for our country, pray for our leadership, that they would submit to the Lord and just lean on his wisdom in the way that they lead our country. And so let's just take a moment as brothers and sisters and do this together.
[00:00:27] Well, Father, in Jesus name, we thank you.
[00:00:30] We thank you for the example and really the way that there were men and women who gave their life so that we can have a country they defended. And Lord, we praise you for them and praise you for their families who certainly miss them. And I just pray that your spirit would just be present with them today.
[00:00:49] Lord, I pray for our country, that we would be one that that would understand that our true home is found in you and Lord God, that we would lead lives that correspond to that fact.
[00:01:00] Father, we thank you so much just for the fact that we get to pray for our leadership, our president. We pray, Lord God, that you would give them wisdom, that you would soften their heart and draw them to yourself and they would be led by you. Father, we thank you for these things. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:01:17] So this weekend it reminds us that loss changes people.
[00:01:22] Anyone who has walked through deep grief knows there's usually in their timeline of life, a before it happened and an after it happened in their life. And the fact is, so many of our losses are so heavy that they reshape everything about us. The way that we see ourselves, the way that we see others, the way that we see the Lord.
[00:01:43] And so the fact is, even in seasons of loss, like bitterness and uncertainty, that the gift is we can discover that God is quietly working a redemptive purpose through his faithful love and his grace and kindness, through his covenant that he's made for us in Christ Jesus. But these seasons where everything seems familiar begins to fall apart, really shake things up. A family moves because of hardship. We got dreams that collapse, relationships that change, and death enters the home for some of us. And as a result, everything seems to be falling apart and God feels distant.
[00:02:21] What began with hope for many of us looks like it's only emptiness.
[00:02:25] But God is still at work, even when his providence feels painful. This word providence is a word that we're really going to lean on for the next few weeks as we study the book of Ruth. And I want to go ahead and encourage you to turn your Bibles there to the Book of Ruth. We're going to be in chapter one today. But Ruth really helps us understand the fact that God provides amazing things. And sometimes it happens in the moment, but sometimes by God's grace, it happens before the need is even there.
[00:02:53] And that's one of the things we're going to discover as we study the Book of Ruth together in that darkness, we're going to see this small family story that reveals something massive about God, his covenant faithfulness and the fact that it has not failed. And so if you would look with me in Ruth 1, beginning in verse 1, in just the first few phrases, we get really a backdrop, a context of what's happening. It says there in the days when the Judges ruled, there was a famine in the land.
[00:03:24] Now, the days when the Judges ruled lets us know about the storyline of what's happening behind the scenes. So if you know the Book of Judges. The Book of Judges is a time where there was rebellion and idolatry among God's people. There was compromise, covenant, unfaithfulness. They were spiritually chaotic and they were morally unstable.
[00:03:45] The theme that we have in the Book of Judges is everyone did what was right in their own eyes. And that kind of mark marked that timeline for the people of God. And then it says there was a famine in the land, there was drought, and as a result, the food supply was low. And it says, a man of Bethlehem. Now, what's going to be interesting as we study this today is that several of the names and town names have meaning, hidden meaning that are part of the story with Bethlehem. It means it's a house of bread.
[00:04:19] The irony is there was no bread in the house of bread.
[00:04:23] That's the rub here. So there in Judah, they went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech. Now, the irony here is his name means God is my king. But he didn't trust God to provide for them, so he left for another place. So he and his wife Naomi, and the names of their two sons were Mahlon, which means weakness, and Chilion, which means wasting away.
[00:04:51] They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem and Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons.
[00:05:05] These, her two sons 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.
[00:05:15] And both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.
[00:05:23] So we see that Elimelech leaves the promised Land and moves his family to Moab, a nation historically hostile towards Israel. They had a troubled history with Israel. They opposed them and seduced them in the time of the wilderness period. And they represented spiritual compromise, and they had what was called an outsider status towards Israel.
[00:05:46] This move may have seemed like practical and reasonable. He's just going to a place that's a little bit more fruitful and easy for his family to take care of them. But throughout the Old Testament, leaving the land often symbolized a spiritual compromise or a lack of trust in God's provision.
[00:06:04] But this tragedy that happened, it intensified like rapidly, right?
[00:06:09] All of a sudden, Naomi has three graves in a foreign land. She's left with two Moabite daughters in law. She has no security, no provider, no future. She's left vulnerable. Her family line is stopped, and she's left economically in a place of devastation.
[00:06:30] She finds herself, as you would, broken.
[00:06:35] And this is where the story meets this climax of pain and really just honesty. Look at this with me in verse 6.
[00:06:45] 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. Now there's bread in the house of bread.
[00:07:01] So she went out from the place where she was with her 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 your mother's house. May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me the Lord grant that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband. Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and they wept.
[00:07:32] And they said to her, no, we will return with you to your people.
[00:07:37] But Naomi said, turn back, my daughters. Why will you go with me? Have I yet sons in my womb that you may become?
[00:07:46] They become your husbands. Turn back, my daughters. Go your way. For I am too old to have a husband. If I should have hope, even if I should have a husband, this night should bear sons.
[00:08:00] Would you therefore wait till they were grown? Would you therefore refrain from marrying? No, my daughters. For is it exceedingly bitter to me for your sake that the hand of the Lord has gone out against me?
[00:08:14] And then they lifted up their voices and wept again. Orpah kissed her mother in law, but Ruth clung to her and she said, see, your sister in law has gone back to her people and to her gods to return after your sister in law. So she encourages Ruth to go back with Orpah and just go back to what was familiar, what was safe, what was normal for her. But it said Ruth clung to her. And then we get this incredible covenant promise from Ruth to Naomi. And it sounds beautiful, it's poetic, it's a great promise. But there's more to the story here, and I want you to see this with me. But Ruth said, do not urge me to leave you or to 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 will die, and there I will be buried. And then she gives this declaration on herself.
[00:09:15] May the Lord do so to me. And more also, if anything but death parts me from you, you see this uncommon covenant commitment, this promise.
[00:09:26] And it says, and when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said, no more. She gave in.
[00:09:34] What's powerful here is Ruth is leaving her homeland. She's leaving her family, her culture, what's comfortable, what's normal, what's predictable. She's leaving the gods that she worshiped, her security, her. Her old identity. It is costly, it is risky. But Ruth demonstrates something powerful for us in this culture we don't have. Usually when hard things get hard, we bail. But for her, she leaned in and committed. We see faithful love that stays here.
[00:10:06] We see love that sacrifices. We see love that binds itself to another person despite what they would offer her in return at personal cost to herself. This is an uncommon gift of love.
[00:10:21] Now let's look at the return.
[00:10:24] This is when they go back to Bethlehem.
[00:10:27] Verse 19.
[00:10:29] So the two of them went until they came to Bethlehem. And when they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them.
[00:10:37] And the women said, is this Naomi?
[00:10:41] She said to them, do not call me Naomi. Call me Mara. Again, part of the story is in the names.
[00:10:49] The name Naomi means sweet.
[00:10:52] She says, don't call me sweet, call me Mara. Because that means bitter.
[00:10:59] She says, for the Lord Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty.
[00:11:08] Why call me Naomi sweet when the Lord has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?
[00:11:16] So Naomi returned, and Ruth, the Moabite, her daughter in law, with her, who returned from the country of Moab. And here's the silver lining at the end of this chapter and they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest.
[00:11:32] There was hope on the horizon.
[00:11:35] One of the things that we see in this text that's so encouraging as we unpack it over the next few weeks, is that God often begins his greatest redemptive work when his people think the story is over. He's doing something.
[00:11:49] JRR Tolkien, the guy that wrote the Lord of the Rings, called this way of thinking a eucatastrophe, the sudden turn in a story which grace breaks into the moment of despair.
[00:12:04] The barley harvest is another whisper that God has not abandoned Naomi. The other whisper is the covenant of her daughter in law, Ruth.
[00:12:15] And here's reality, not just for Naomi, but for many of us who are going through hard things. Naomi can't see that there is grace in the pain. She can't see that there's hope beneath the sorrow. And she can't see that there's fullness hidden inside of her emptiness.
[00:12:33] So many people in our church today have grief, hidden grief, things of pain that are happening all the time in our life.
[00:12:41] Some of us have lost a spouse.
[00:12:44] Some of us have prodigal children who've left the faith. Some of us are really in a place of financial ruin. Some of us are dealing with loss on a variety of levels. And even in this room, some of you are masking the physical pain and chronic illness that you feel. In this room.
[00:13:00] You have disappointment of how your life turned out and wondering what next could go wrong.
[00:13:06] The story reminds us that the Bible speaks honestly about pain and not pretending at all that suffering is small.
[00:13:14] But suffering we'll see has purpose. God uses it. God is gracious to really develop in us something that we wouldn't have outside of it. We may sometimes interpret God's providence, Him providing in ways through our present pain instead of through his character. That's the problem when we go through things. The gift is to see it through his character that he is good despite what's going on. These are moments, like many of us, we get to this place where we just don't understand what God's doing. Have you been there?
[00:13:47] Okay, let me just say it this way. Has anybody besides me been there where you're in a situation where God seems far away, where honestly what's going on just doesn't feel good?
[00:14:03] This teaches us that God's silence is not God's absence.
[00:14:08] We may correctly believe that God is sovereign while at the same time emotionally wrestling with suffering.
[00:14:15] And don't miss this. This is powerful too. We often focus on Naomi's Suffering. But Ruth, she experienced loss too.
[00:14:24] But she chose to leave her past behind for the covenant she made with her husband's mom.
[00:14:32] Ruth's sacrificial covenant promise to Naomi. Here's the gift of it. It foreshadows Christ's greater covenant, faithfulness to us.
[00:14:41] In fact, you're going to learn. If you don't know the story of Ruth already, it's because of this faithful promise, this covenant she made with Naomi. We have redemption too. Her story is part of our story.
[00:14:54] Christ came through the line of Ruth as a result of her faithfulness. God used a foreign Moabite woman to bring salvation to us.
[00:15:03] And here's what is real and powerful. That God is sovereign even in our suffering.
[00:15:10] Nothing in this chapter that we just read is random.
[00:15:14] God's providence is often mysterious, but it's never absent.
[00:15:18] Hear it again. It's often mysterious, but it's never absent.
[00:15:24] Consider this quote. This is from Tim Keller.
[00:15:28] When Jesus Christ, he says, was in the Garden of Gethsemane and the ultimate darkness was coming down on him, and he knew it was coming, he didn't abandon you.
[00:15:39] He died for you. And if Jesus didn't abandon you in his darkness, the ultimate darkness, why would he abandon you now?
[00:15:48] Yours, you see, he leans in. He is present with you. And God works through ordinary faithfulness. That's what's powerful about this story of Ruth. These four chapters. There's no miracles.
[00:16:01] There's no God doing some supernatural work to bring about this change. In fact, he's using things that he put in place back in Exodus to benefit those people here in the time of the Judges, these promises of the kinsman Redeemer, which we'll understand in the next couple of weeks. We'll understand more about the gleaning laws. All part of God's providence in this moment for Naomi.
[00:16:26] And so we get to understand that God works through these things powerfully. He specializes in filling empty people up.
[00:16:34] The cross itself looked like defeat.
[00:16:37] Yet through his suffering, you and I experience redemption.
[00:16:42] So I want to give you some ways to begin to frame your mindset when you're dealing with hard times, when we, you and I, are in moments where we are identifying ourselves by our loss, what happens is we miss the hope of God's redemption that he's already preparing. When we identify ourselves by our loss, we allow grief to speak louder than grace.
[00:17:08] When we identify ourselves by our loss, we forget that God's providence is still unfolding.
[00:17:16] When we identify ourselves by our loss, we start reading the middle of the story as though it was the end. And it is not.
[00:17:24] When we identify ourselves by our loss, we reduce ourselves to what has been taken from us instead of remembering what has been given to us in Christ Jesus.
[00:17:34] When we identify ourselves by our loss, we miss the greater reality that God still defines us by his covenant grace, not our present pain.
[00:17:46] If you belong to him, you need to know that whatever you're dealing with right now, your bitterness, your brokenness is not the end of the story.
[00:17:56] We're just in the middle.
[00:17:58] God is gracious to do a work of redemption in the heart. He specializes it in the hard times.
[00:18:06] The hope of the gospel is here for us. I want to let you know too. Look at this line. I want you to understand that the last line of this chapter and the barley harvest was beginning. Think about that. For many of us, we're in a moment of famine. Things are hard, things are desperate. We're in dire straits, so to speak.
[00:18:30] But God is doing a work. He is already at work in your problem. So I want to have a moment for you to think about this.
[00:18:39] One of the things that we say with regularity is that we get to serve alongside of one another.
[00:18:47] One of the things this story tells us is that you and I get to suffer alongside of one another too.
[00:18:55] We get to suffer alongside of one another as well.
[00:18:59] You and I can bring our pain. We don't need to mask it when we come here.
[00:19:04] You need to know that you are not alone.
[00:19:08] One of the gifts, and this is one of my favorite things I learned as a kid when I came from a hard family situation, is that my church was like a home to me. I saw them as family and they treated me as such, especially when I was out of line.
[00:19:23] Carol former spanked me this guy that was one of our leaders because I earned it.
[00:19:28] Not that I would recommend that, but that did have happen. True story.
[00:19:32] But I say that to say, like you need to know, we get to serve alongside of one another, but we also get to suffer alongside of one another.
[00:19:41] But many of us try to pull our story out of it and think they don't care about this. Part of the whole gift of church is the community that we're in this together. We are not alone.
[00:19:54] And one of the things I love about this story is that Ruth could have done what her sister in law, Orpah did and just left.
[00:20:02] But she didn't.
[00:20:04] Christ didn't leave.
[00:20:08] He stayed. He died.
[00:20:11] He dealt with our sin, he dealt with our pain. And as a result, we're not alone. And we have an opportunity when the Spirit of God takes a hold of our life to do this for one another.
[00:20:22] My hope is that you and I would begin to own that not just responsibility, but that opportunity to share our suffering, to share our burdens with one another and there see God meet us in the middle of those things.
[00:20:38] So I want to take a moment and just pray for us as a church that God in his grace would just do a work of just drawing us to himself and let's find out that we're not alone there. And I also want to let you know too, if you're here and you need prayer, it would be our joy. We're going to have our elders up here and they would love to pray for you as well.
[00:20:55] Pray.
[00:20:58] Father, in Jesus name. We thank you so much for this moment, Lord God, that we get to approach you, that we get to seek your face.
[00:21:11] We ask, Lord God, that your Holy Spirit would just help us see that in the midst of our bitter or broken moments, Lord God, that we're not alone.
[00:21:21] The Lord God, you're doing a work of providence, of grace and kindness, meeting us there.
[00:21:27] And Father, I pray that you would help us as brothers and sisters own the fact that we are walking alongside of other people that may be suffering and we need to lean in and love and point them to the hope found in you.
[00:21:40] Lord, we thank you for this time that we get to share. We thank you for this moment. We pray that your spirit would be with us as we sing.
[00:21:46] We thank you for this. In Jesus name, amen. Please stand as we sing.
