Ruth: Jesus Redeems Us

Thank you, Sam.

That's actually the perfect song for the series we're in.

We're going through the book of Ruth, which is this huge story in this little book in the Old Testament.

And so even that chorus, your plans are still to prosper.

You have not forgotten us.

You're with us in the fire and the flood.

Faithful forever, perfect in love.

You're sovereign over us.

I mean, this is what Naomi, if you were here last week, we talked about Naomi.

You remember the story?

So review quickly if you weren't with us last week.

Naomi is married to a guy named Elimelech, and they lived in Judah.

They lived in a town called Bethlehem, and a famine was going on, and so they needed to leave with their two boys, and so they moved to Moab.

And so they arrive in Moab, which would have been a hostile area to them, and they get there and Elimelech dies.

And then the boys marry, but no grandchildren come.

And then the boys die.

And so now we're down to Naomi and the two daughters-in-law.

I mean, you want to talk about this song.

This is what she was living out.

And so finally she hears that back in Judah there's food.

And so it's time to go home.

And so she starts home and they start headed home and they get a ways down the road, and then she turns to her two daughters-in-law and she says, Hey, uh, y'all head back because your future in Judah is not good.

Uh the men are going to be hostile to you.

Nobody's going to marry you.

I'm not going to have any more sons for you to marry.

It's not looking good for you.

And so one of the daughters-in-law, Orpah, she heads back to Moab, but the other girl, Ruth, it says she clings to Naomi and she stays with her with a covenant love.

And so last week we talked about how Ruth was this picture of Jesus for us.

And so they get back, they get back to Bethlehem, they get back to Judah, and what we get is not a great situation.

There's some food there for them, but they have this land that Elimelech had that hasn't been farmed in a very long time.

These two ladies, they have no resources, they have no ability to farm the land, they have no ability to guard the land or harvest the land.

They are helpless.

They have nothing.

Now there's a law at the time that said that somebody who was struggling like that, they could uh they could glean from the edges of uh landowners' fields.

So you know, like along the edge where like the seed didn't quite get as well, you could go along there and you could glean.

So this would have been for a traveler or foreigner or a beggar, uh, you could come and you could at least have enough to eat off of these edges.

So uh one day Ruth decides to go out to the fields to do this.

Now, this would have been even a risky thing because out in these areas, this would have been, for a female, this would have been a little dangerous.

I mean, this would have been where women are taken advantage of, they're beaten, they're harassed, they're raped.

I mean, this would have been a risky thing for her to even go into, and so she, but she heads out because they're hungry.

They have nothing.

And so she gets out there, and apparently what kind of plays out is she goes up to the foreman of the fields and she doesn't ask to just reap along the side, she makes a boulder request, is what we get from the text.

And then apparently she doesn't get the answer from the foreman she wants, and so she is waiting around for the owner to show up.

And it just happens to be that this is this guy, Boaz's field, and it just happens to be he shows up to inspect the workers and the grain.

And Boaz he shows up and he sees the girl.

And guys, we were we remember this, right?

I mean, we remember when you were supposed to be inspecting the grain, but you you saw a girl.

Maybe you're still waiting for that.

You're like, I'm waiting for the moment to see the girl.

And so he sees the girl and he looks at his foreman and he says, Whose woman is that?

And the foreman says, Well, that's the Moabite woman who came with Naomi.

And he knows a little bit of the story because Naomi was a kind of a relative of his.

And then we get this starting in verse 7 of chapter 2 of Ruth, we get this dialogue which begins with the foreman talking to Boaz.

She said, So this is acting, sorry, this is this is uh Ruth talking to the foreman, please let me glean and gather among the sheaves behind the harvesters.

So this is not the edge of the field, she's asking for a little bit more.

She came into the field and has remained here uh from morning till now, except for a short rest in the shelter.

So now there's the foreman telling Boaz, here's what she did, here's what she wants.

She's she's just standing in the shelter, she's just waiting, she's being kind of stubborn.

So Boaz said to Ruth, My daughter, listen to me.

Don't go and glean in another field, don't go away from here.

Stay here with the women who work for me.

Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the women.

So he gives her a pretty good boost here.

I mean, not the edge of the field.

He says, You can follow behind the women harvesting.

This was a pretty big, uh pretty big move for her.

I have told the men not to lay a hand on you.

Gives her some protection.

And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.

At this she bowed down with her face to the ground because she's had nothing.

She's had nothing.

And she asked him, Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me a foreigner?

And Boaz replied, I have been told about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband.

How you left your father and mother in your homeland, and you came to live with a people you did not know before.

May the Lord repay you for what you have done.

May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.

So he sort of gives her status.

I mean, she was like, she was like the beggar outside of your office building, like the homeless lady.

And Boaz is like the president of the company coming down and saying, Hey, I'll I'll give you a cubicle.

You can come up and you can do some paperwork.

I mean, this is what this move was.

I mean, she went from beggar outside to in the building.

She's in the building, and then Boaz gives instructions to all the work.

Hey, leave her alone.

Don't hurt her, don't mess with her.

And she is absolutely overwhelmed by the grace that's been shown to her because she knows, even though she's in the building, she has the cubicle, she's going to go home with a paycheck at the end of the day.

She knows she's a beggar.

And this is what we get in this chapter two, chapter three, going into four, over and over and over again, we get this clear picture of Ruth and Naomi's plight and their poverty and their neediness, and they have no status, and we see it up against Boaz's wealth and influence and ability to provide for them.

And then it gets sweeter for Ruth.

Boaz offers her to come and eat with him and his workers.

I mean, this is like lunchtime comes along and she's working in the cubicle, and then Boaz comes out and says, Hey, do you want to eat with the company's uh senior team in the conference room?

Come down.

I mean, we ordered in from the Optimist.

We have the lobster roll sandwich.

Uh, we have those coming.

Do you want to come down and eat?

And she eats until she is full, and then in chapter 2, verses 14 and 15, something's cooking up in Boaz.

We're not quite sure.

Um, we're not sure if it's romance, we're not sure if it's compassion.

It's probably kind of a blend of the two because when she gets up to walk away, uh he looks at his workers and he says, uh, you know, he gives her even more uh ability to glean in the fields.

So she's gone from like cubicle to now like she has an office with a window.

I mean, this has been a day.

This has been a huge day for Ruth.

I mean, she started the day as a beggar.

So Ruth heads home and Naomi's there, and Naomi sees this truckload of grain coming in.

And what must have this been like?

To have been in need, to have been hungry, I mean, for for a long time, and to finally see this coming.

I mean, have you ever been just getting by?

Right?

Or maybe you're there right now.

And then someone shows up last year when we started the church and we just had uh just a handful of families.

We had a little bit of money in a bank account.

It gave me a little bit of a head start to uh raise some money, to share the vision of what we wanted to do, to share with other people, and that's what I was doing every day, January.

I mean, send out letters, I'm doing breakfasts, I'm doing lunches, I'm doing dinners.

Sometimes it's like the triple threat one day, so the other day it might just be double, but I mean it's just over and over and over again, and it's follow-ups up, and it's phone calls, it's emails, and it's texts, and you know, will you support us?

Will you support what we're doing?

Here's what we want to do, and it's over and over and over.

And January goes by, nothing's coming in.

February.

You remember?

Brian remembers, he just gave me a little nod.

Brad remembers because about February is where we started to sweat a little bit because nothing's coming in.

And then in February, I mean like middle of February, I was in I was in my office and I get a phone call, and it was it was a it was a relative of mine.

And I won't say who it was, she would be embarrassed, and and she says, hold on a second, let me get my husband on the phone, and the husband gets on the phone, and she says, I I just want you to know we're gonna send you$10,000.

Nothing had been coming in.

And I just wept.

Because nothing had been coming in.

Can you imagine Naomi?

Nothing had been coming in, and Ruth goes away for one day of work and shows back up with this truckload of grain.

Verse 19, Naomi asks her, Where did you glean today?

Where did you work?

Blessed be the man who took notice of you.

Then Ruth told her mother-in-law about the one at whose place she had been working.

The name of the man I worked with today is Boaz, she said.

The Lord bless him, Naomi said to her daughter-in-law.

He has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.

That man is our close relative.

He is one of our guardian redeemers.

So this gives us kind of point number one.

That is, hope is bankrupt.

Bankrupt until we encounter love.

I mean, that's what that phone call,$10,000, was about.

It was about love.

That's what Boaz's uh motivation to help Ruth was about.

It was about love.

And maybe you're here, you've been upset at the Lord about provision.

You've been upset at the Lord about the lack of harvest in your own life.

And this story is so fantastic because this story is reality.

I mean, last week Naomi was like almost cursing the Lord.

His hand is against me.

My life is horrible.

I can't believe what he has done to my life.

And then in this chapter, uh, she has seen the puzzle pieces starting to come together.

And she says, he has not stopped showing kindness to the living and to the dead.

She's seeing the puzzle come together that she couldn't see last week.

And she says, Boaz is one of our guardian redeemers.

Now that you might have just read right over that.

Here's what this means in the Old Testament.

A guardian redeemer is this.

A blood relative who could redeem property belonging to relatives.

So he could redeem property that had to be sold.

He could redeem and buy back goods.

He could even redeem and buy back a person who'd been sold into slavery.

He had the right as the blood relative to buy it back, to bring it back into the family.

See, Boaz could do this for Ruth and Naomi.

So Ruth keeps working with the girls through the harvest.

And then one day, uh Naomi, she's picking her moment.

She's a mama.

She wants to do some matchmaking.

I can remember, my mom's here.

I can remember when for years she would say, you know, that Christy Queen, my wife, she sure is cute.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alright, well, Naomi, Naomi picks her moment and she says, Well, you you know, uh you know, Ruth, uh, that Boaz, he's kin of ours.

Which nowadays would be weird, but back then it was a good thing.

And then she says this, which is kind of strange advice from a mom.

She uh she says this.

She says, Hey, tonight he's gonna be drinking down on the threshing floor.

So all the men, they would they would drink in the evenings of the harvest, and they would they would sleep on the threshing floor to guard the harvest so nobody stole it.

She says, Here's what you do, Ruth.

Go wash up.

Baby, wash up, put on some good clothes, put on some perfume, and go down there, sneak up on him once he's asleep, and uncover his feet so he'll wake up.

I mean, this is advice like uh, hey, hey, hey, baby, uh, sneak into the frat house.

Okay?

Sneak in aft after that boy's been drinking uh all night, sneak in there about 3:30 after he's passed out in his room, sneak in his room and uncover his feet.

Yeah, this is gonna work out really well.

This is really good advice.

This is kind of insane advice, but this is what's playing out.

And so Ruth goes for it.

And this is insane.

Because this is actually down on the threshing floor, there would have been prostitutes sneaking in.

So, you know, so she's risking being mistaken as a prostitute and having that image put on her, and she's risking being taken advantage of by a by a drunk guy.

There's so much risk going into this advice from Naomi, but but she does it.

She goes down there and and uh and Boaz is asleep.

She sneaks up.

She's gotta be so I mean she's gotta be terrified.

You know, it's just dark.

Bunch of drunk men sleeping.

Verse 9 of chapter 3.

Boaz wakes up.

Who are you?

I'm your servant Ruth, she said.

Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian redeemer of our family.

And she's saying this, she's saying, uh, that means marry me.

Woo! Right?

She just went for it.

Will you marry me?

The Lord bless you, my daughter, he replied.

This kindness is greater than that which you showed earlier.

You have not run after the younger men, whether rich or poor, and now, my daughter, don't be afraid.

I will do for you all you ask.

All the people of my town know that you are a woman of noble character.

Although it is true that I am a guardian redeemer of our family, there is another who is more closely related than I.

So there's a little problem.

We've got to get through a little problem.

Stay here for the night.

And in the morning, if he wants to do his duty as your guardian redeemer, good let him redeem you.

But if he's not willing, as surely as the Lord lives, I will do it.

Lie here until morning.

Hey, we're not sure if she slept the rest of the night.

I can guarantee she did not sleep the rest of the night.

She just asked a man to marry her in the dark, down on the threshing floor.

I mean, she's risking everything here.

She probably lay there terrified the rest of the night until she could get out of there and get back to Naomi.

But the problem is, is he's not the first in line.

There's another guy.

And so Boaz, he goes to the town gate and he finds the man who's closer in relationship to Naomi, and he goes up to him and he says, Hey, uh, Naomi needs to sell her land.

You're first in line.

Will you buy it?

Will you redeem the land?

And the guy says, sure.

I mean, he's thinking, you know, I'm going to bring some more land into my estate.

This is fantastic.

Yeah, I'm all for it.

Then we get verse 5 of chapter 4.

Then Boaz said, On the day you buy the land from Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the dead man's widow, in order to maintain the name of the dead with his property.

At this, the guardian redeemer said, Then I cannot redeem it because I might endanger my own estate.

You redeem it yourself.

I cannot do it.

So the man bails.

He bails, uh he bails because he's not compassionate.

He bails out of economic reasons.

Because if he takes the, if he buys the land, he has to take on Ruth.

If he takes on Ruth as his wife, he's gonna have a child, that child goes back to the family line of Elamelech, which means that land goes to Elamelech, not him, and not his line.

And so he says, I'm not doing that.

I'm not spending money to buy land that's going under that guy.

If I can't bring it into my own estate, I'm out.

You do it.

So now we're down to Boaz.

He's the only one who can redeem Naomi and Ruth from their condition.

All right, so what does this have to do with you?

Well, point number one was hope is always bankrupt until we encounter love.

Same point, point number two is kind of the same point, just rearranged a little bit.

Hope is only found as we encounter the redeemer.

So let me flesh this out just a little bit for a couple minutes.

We're all trying to redeem ourselves.

You and I.

We're all trying to redeem ourselves.

This is sin.

This is what sin is.

God, I don't need you.

Your provision of a redeemer.

I don't need Jesus.

I don't need it.

I don't need you to buy back the land.

What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fill up my own accounts with my own achievements, my own moralistic record, my own Christian activities, all the good things that we should be doing out of response to being redeemed.

I'm gonna fill up my accounts so that when I feel insecure and when I feel like my standing before God is not right, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come before you, God.

I'm gonna present my accounts to you.

I'm gonna try to buy it back myself.

This is what it means to be your own redeemer.

This is sin.

But we have the wrong currency.

So 15 years ago, I went to Europe with a few friends, and we trained all over the place.

As before the Euro was kind of widely accepted.

And I can remember training from one country to the other, and you show up in the next country, and you get off the train, you go up to the little sandwich shop as you're hungry, and you'd order the sandwich, you'd pull out your money, and you had the money from the last country, and then some countries would take that money, and sometimes there's a little argument, sometimes there's confusion.

And more times than not, they didn't want that currency.

They'd wave their finger, and no, no, no, especially the French, they don't want anything of that.

I'm like, your countries are as big as counties.

Give me a break here.

I mean, it was 10 minutes away.

But they point you to the ATM and you'd go over there and you get the right currency, you have to come back, right?

And there's some purchases.

You have to have the right currency.

Here's what the Bible says about redemption.

You don't have the right currency.

I don't have the right currency.

I don't know how big your account of achievement is, how big your account of moralistic effort is.

It doesn't matter.

You don't have the right currency.

No one can save us but Jesus.

He is the redeemer to wash away our sin, to free us, to secure our standing with God.

The more we refuse Jesus' sufficiency for our redemption before God, the more we're just sitting on a plot of land that we have no ability to farm, no ability to harvest, no ability to guard.

Boaz bought the land.

He married Ruth.

The name Boaz means in strength.

Can you imagine the relief of Naomi and Ruth?

Can you imagine this relief when the marriage happened?

They don't have to be strong anymore.

I mean, they had been trying to be strong for so long.

Finally, someone else would be strong for them.

Last week we said, last week we said, we're not Ruth, we're Naomi.

This week it kind of flips around because we are Ruth.

We're not Boaz.

Do you see it?

Do you see how tired you get when you're trying to become your own redeemer?

You don't have to be strong anymore.

I mean, this is this is what it means to rest in the Lord.

It means when you wake up at 6 a.m.

and everything in you switches to like, I will redeem myself, uh, my validation, my justification before God, my justification of this world as a human being, I will redeem myself by my productivity and all that kicks in, and you're ready to fire it up all day and prove to everybody.

It means that you can speak to yourself a message of redemption that occurs to you from outside of yourself, and you can be at peace.

It means when it's it's noon and you've you've had 27 tweets you sent out and 30 inches.

Instagrams and you're monitoring every like and every person's feedback, and when the feedbacks are higher than they were like the day before, you're feeling better about yourself, and you're using all of that to feel redeemed, you don't have to do that.

You don't have to use your online status to feel redeemed.

It means when you get passed over for the promotion or passed over for the other boy or the other girl or passed over for whatever, your child screws up, or you screw up, and your whole life feels weak.

That you can still be redeemed because you're redeemed by a strength outside of yourself.

Right?

What it means is this afternoon, I re-question everything I said this morning, because that'll happen somewhere between like a football game and a House Hunters International, which I'm way too addicted to at this point.

Christy would testify.

Like, how many of you watched in a row?

When all that neediness comes back up, I'll have to re-preach it to myself.

And here's what it is get it down to one sentence.

I'm redeemed by his strength for me, not mine for myself.

We have to say over and over and over and over and over again and over again, and tomorrow and the next day, and all day, every day, I am redeemed by his strength for me, not mine for myself.

And we have to say it to ourselves.

We have to preach it to ourselves.

We have to rest in it.

That's what all the that's what you have a Bible study, or you have prayer time, you go for a walk, all these good Christian activities.

That's what it's about.

Remembering that.

I am redeemed by his strength for me, not mine for myself.

So these two, Ruth and Naomi, can finally rest.

See, Boaz for us is is he gave well for them, he gave them freedom.

He's a picture for us of Jesus.

Do you see it?

Do you see it?

Do you see that that we we live and we rest in his strength for us, not being consumed by bolstering our own strength.

We are redeemed by his strength for us, not our strength for ourselves.

Heavenly Father, we come before you and we thank you that you provided a strength for us that's outside of ourselves because we know we are on a plot of land.

We have no ability to harvest, no ability to guard.

We need redemption.

We have a currency that does not pay the price for our sin, for our shame, for our falling short of the standard you have called us to.

And we live so grateful in response that you provided yourself as the Redeemer.

God, forgive us for trying to be our own redeemers.

So many of us, even now, have never shifted faith from being our own redeemers to you being our redeemer.

And God, we pray even during this communion time, that people could place faith in Christ for redemption and salvation and forgiveness.

For so many of us, we've done that.

But we wait, we woke up this morning, and there's parts of us that just are gonna are living out redeeming ourselves.

And God, help us.

Help us to relearn and repreach to ourselves that we are redeemed by your strength for us, not ours for ourselves.

Thank you.

In Jesus' name, amen.