Ruth

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. Do not urge me to leave you. I will not leave you. Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Where you die, I will die. Your people will be my people. Your God, my God. No, this is not the promise of a substitute pastor. This is the promise of Ruth. It couldn't be more different than Samson. Now last week John put out an announcement before he went on vacation anticipating Ruth and I gave you Samson. There could not be more opposite. Samson is gregarious, big. He could be a Marvel character. He's absolutely just all about women and defeating Philistines and strength and muscle and took a Nazarene vow, had long hair that was a part of his promise of God at a absolutely incredibly story unfolding prophetic announcement of his conception and his birth. It's all big. It's all huge. It's just enormous. Ruth, Ruth is quiet. Ruth doesn't even live in Israel. She starts the story in Moab. You're thinking, Moab? I hate Moab. Well, I know but that's where she's at. That's what she's doing. So we're gonna go from Samson, big, gregarious, muscle-bound, you know, like me guy, to Ruth who's quiet, whose husband just died, whose father-in-law just died, whose sister's husband just died in the middle of a country that nobody likes, especially the Israelites, with no apparent hope, no apparent direction, place or way to go. We're going to talk about Ruth today and how powerfully God is present in the big, the mighty, the powerful, the fantastic, the loud-mouthed, big-voiced Peter and Mary who's quiet, humble, sullen. How God is present in those who are convinced and will charge forward and move on to the light brigade and those who are kind of frightened, super quiet and afraid to take the next step. The beauty I want you to pull out of the message here today of God's Word is that God is present and as an operating system, as the software, as the hand behind creation, as the hand behind salvation, as the worker of all things for the good of those who love him in every and any circumstance, from the Samson's to the Ruth's, from Jesus to the Spirit, it's all present. So, I went ahead this week and did Ruth because, well, I missed Ruth the first week and doing that again and again. John will straighten all that out next week. What I want you to do is, there's probably not a lot of us who've read the book of Ruth. It's really small and it contains that one scripture which is probably the most famous, which is, as a pastor for my 38 years, I've probably preached more at sermons than I have for its actual context. There's nothing to do with the wedding, per se, but that still sounds really good at a wedding, you know, nothing to do with it. Anyway, so what I wanted to do is start off by showing you a wonderful summary. It's seven minutes, so it's a little bit long, but it's really good, I think, anyway, and I wanted you to have a context and a storyline for the book of Ruth that you might understand the nature of, how it contrasts with Samson, and the whole point of the message is going to be the presence and power of God from the big and powerful to the small and frightened and grieving. God is at work. Let's watch this summary. The book of Ruth. It's a brilliant work of theological art and it invites us to reflect on the question of how God is involved in the day-to-day joys and hardships of our lives. There are three main characters in the book, Naomi the widow, Ruth the Moabite, and Boaz the Israelite farmer, and their story is told in four chapters that are beautifully designed. Let's just dive in and see how this all unfolds. Chapter one opens with this line, in the days when the judges ruled, and it reminds us of the very dark and difficult days from the book of Judges, and here we meet an Israelite family in Bethlehem, struggling to survive through a famine, and so in search of food they move on to the land of Moab, Israel's ancient enemy, and there the father of the family dies, and the sons marry two Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah, and then the sons, they die too, and so they leave only Naomi and these new daughters-in-law, and so Naomi, she has no reason to stay anymore, and so she tells her new daughters-in-law that she's moving back home, and Naomi, she knows that the life of an unmarried foreign widow in Israel is going to be very hard, and so she compels the women to stay behind. Orpah agrees, but Ruth does not. She shows remarkable loyalty to Naomi, and she says, wherever you go, I'm going to go. Your people will become my people, and your God will become my God, and so the two of them return to Israel together, and the chapter concludes with Naomi changing her name to Marah, which means bitter in Hebrew, and she laments her tragic fate. Chapter two begins with Naomi and Ruth discussing where they're going to find food, and it just so happens to be the beginning of...