I Decided to Stay

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. If you open up to the book of Revelations at the end, it says that they defeated the enemy by the blood of the Lamb, which is Jesus, and the word of their testimony, which is their story. So Jesus, plus their story, is the way that we can defeat the enemy, so that more and more people may know and acknowledge the truth of Jesus and who he is. So this is important. This is why we're reflecting upon this as a community and that we're getting into this. We gave you a note card about a couple weeks ago, and on this note card, it said, hey, I wanted to be able to, I decided to start, I decided to stop, and then today we're going to be talking about deciding to stay. But also the beautiful thing about our story as well is that, if you reflect back, there's probably a lot of brokenness. When I've been with our fellow TSM students, we're saying, hey, God uses our sin, our brokenness, for his glory. And the best way that I've been describing it to them is saying, hey, you are a masterpiece. So in Ephesians 2, verse 10, it says this from the New Living Translations, where we are God's masterpiece, and he has created us anew in Christ Jesus so that we can do good things that he has planned for us long ago. We are his masterpiece. So whether you think that your story is not good enough or it's too jacked up or too messed up, God says, no, no, no, I'm going to make you into something greater. I'm going to make you into a masterpiece, and I'm not going to say too much about that, because God is going to be preaching about that next week. But the beautiful imagery that I've been sharing with our students with the masterpiece is, have you ever seen a mosaic before? It's little pieces of tile or glass, and they're shattered and they're broken. But the really cool thing about the mosaic is, if you gather the pieces together, it forms some of the most beautiful artwork around. In fact, we see it in cathedrals. We've seen it in museums. We've even seen it in furniture where it looks really cool and trendy and you can make something beautiful. And yet God takes the brokenness of who we are and makes us into a masterpiece. So this is why our story is important. This is why it's important for us to say, hey, we need to start something. Hey, this is why it's important to say, hey, it's important to stop whatever that may be. And even today, we're looking at the book of Ruth and saying, hey, it's important for us even to stay. So let's open up that book. I'm going to summarize what is going on through this chapter. And if you read this before, we're going to go through a quick review. But there are two main characters we have in this to start off this particular passage. We have Naomi and her husband. And what happened was they had two sons and they decided that they needed to move away because there was famine. They said, hey, this place is not good for us to be right now in our hometown, which is Bethlehem. Let's move to Moab and we'll settle our family there and we'll make our home to be there. We'll start there. So they actually decided not to stay and they went to this new place. And their family soon grew and then their two sons met two women, two women named Ruth, which is actually the main character of our story. And the other one is Orpah. All right. Now, quick fact, I just learned this the other day and I thought this was really interesting. OK, you know, Oprah, she was actually named after Orpah. What happened was she was born and the birth certificate, they spelled it wrong. And so then they spelled her name to be Oprah instead of Orpah. So you're welcome. It would have been the Orpah Winfrey Show. And now we have Oprah. So really, her name was named after that. So we have Ruth and we have Orpah that married their two sons. And, you know, they had a happy family. Things were looking good. You know, crops were great. The family business, I'm sure, was great. And then all of a sudden, Naomi's husband passed away. And that's OK, because there's still the two sons to be able to take on the family business, the family trade. Everything was hopefully going to be OK. And, you know, things were moving around. And next thing you know, we find out shortly in the story that both the sons passed away. So we have Naomi and her two daughter in laws, Ruth and Orpah. All right. And so if you know anything about these times, if the men were to be passed away, the women had nothing. They were to become beggars because they couldn't get jobs. They couldn't have anything. They was basically their lives were miserable. It was going to be hopeless. And that was probably going to be the end of it all. So Naomi, you know, gives both of these women the option saying, hey, this, you know, this has happened. So what you really should do, you should go back to your families and Moab and maybe you can remarry...