Ruth: Jesus Clings to Us

So we spent 47 sermons in John.

We're done with John, right?

Spent enough time in John.

And now to give us a little bit of a break to an idea of an extremely long sermon series.

We're going to do the book of Ruth.

It's an Old Testament book, four chapters, right?

So we're going to do go through Ruth.

Ruth's incredible story, the story of Ruth.

I mean, it is a big story in four chapters.

I mean, there is loss, there is heartache, there's redemption, there's love.

It will cause you, it will cause you to face realities in your life about hurt and about redemption that you don't want to face.

I mean, even this week, as I was reading it, spending time in it, there's this part of me that's loving it, loving the story, and what a big story.

And then there's this part of me that's in it going, I don't even know if I want to read this.

I don't am I like wishing it upon myself by studying it, like by by even endeavoring into these thoughts.

Uh, is there something bad's gonna happen to me all of a sudden, just to like be able to relate to the story?

Um but the thing that we're gonna learn is perhaps, just perhaps under the pain, under the pain that we have in life, under disappointment, just maybe God is doing something greater.

So the the scene of the time is Ruth, is the time of the judges in the Old Testament.

There's no central government going on in Israel.

Um, everybody is sort of doing whatever they want.

And so everybody's going their own way.

There's not a lot of allegiance of the people of God to God unless sort of the foreign countries around them were hostile, they would come in and invade.

And then all of a sudden, you know, it's like when the test arrives and you're like, all of a sudden you pray.

You know, when the difficulty comes, all of a sudden you're very spiritual.

And so this is what would happen with the people in Israel.

All of a sudden they'd all come back to God.

Deliver us, deliver us, God, deliver us, God.

And then those foreign invaders would leave, and the trial would be over, the trouble would be over, and then they would go back to doing whatever they wanted to do.

This cycle was going on.

Now in Judah, and so that's in Israel, kind of southern part.

Uh there's a town Bethlehem.

We've heard of Bethlehem, Jesus was born there, right?

Christmas and all that.

So in Bethlehem, there was a family.

And mama's name was Naomi, daddy's name was Elamelech, and then they had two boys, and there's a famine.

And so food's drying up.

You can imagine the conversation.

What are we gonna do, right?

What are we gonna do to feed the boys?

How are we gonna handle this?

And so they decide they're gonna pack up and they're gonna move to Moab.

Now, moving to Moab is no easy thing because Moab is hostile to these people, but at least there's food in Moab.

What's interesting is this name El Malek, uh, it means God is king.

And you've got to be thinking, if you're named God as king, and you're having to leave the land of God to go to a foreign land because there's no food in Bethlehem, which by the way means house of bread.

So the irony here of leaving the land of God, leaving the town of the house of bread, my name is God as king, to move to another country.

And you've got to be wondering, really?

Is he?

I mean, is he really is God really king?

Like, could God be king of a world and a world where famines occur?

Where Ebola occurs, where people are forced to migrate.

Could God really be king in my world where loneliness occurs?

And failure occurs, and anxiety occurs.

Could God be king over that?

And so these this family, they head to Moab.

And you know what mama's thinking.

You know Naomi's thinking, you know, we're gonna be there for a few years.

We'll be there for a little bit.

I'll be able to feed the boys, and and and hopefully they'll meet some girls.

We'll get them married, we'll have some grandbabies maybe.

But we're gonna come home.

And we're gonna come home as a family.

And that's how it's gonna play out, right?

You know, mama has a plan for how this is playing out and how she's gonna be able to feed her boys, and her husband's gonna be fed, and he's gonna be productive, and they're gonna be able to come home eventually, and then her husband dies.

She still has her boys.

So the boys end up marrying two Moabite girls.

Orpah, not Oprah.

Oprah's everywhere, but she's not in this story.

I mean, she is she was in Starbucks the other day, her face, just big right there when I was ordering.

I mean, she's everywhere, but she's not here.

This is Orpah and Ruth.

And they live there for ten years.

Naomi, mama, the boys who married Orpah and Ruth.

They live there for ten years, and what we don't see is we never see a grandbaby.

So this up and downs occurring, right?

Like, I got at least I have my family, now I don't have my husband, at least I have my boys, and they marry, but I don't have any grandchildren.

And then our boys die.

The two sons die.

So she's lost her husband, now she loses her two sons.

And so at this time, at this time in history, there is nothing more dishonoring than your family having no heirs.

And there are no heirs.

And Naomi's getting older.

And she has these two daughters-in-laws underneath her.

She can't provide, she doesn't have any other sons for her sons to marry them.

And she's got to be feeling the weight of I never, I was unable to kind of the legacy of my husband.

There's no heirs.

You know when you go to the party and you're sipping on your little sweet tea, your glass of red wine, and you're mingling about, and you meet a new person, and you start talking, and you talk about, well, isn't the weather nice in fall?

And you talk about, you know, what you're planting in your yard, that's what I talk about, and they just nod along and they get bored.

And eventually, what's the question that comes up pretty much right away?

What do you do?

Right?

I was at a wedding last night.

I mean, this this is this is what played out over and over and over again.

Isn't the weather nice?

What are you doing?

Why do we do this?

We all do this.

It, I mean, I've gone into parties trying not to do it, and I still do it.

And the reason we do it is we're an individualistic culture.

The way that we define meaning and understand each other is by our resumes.

Where'd you go to school?

Where have you worked?

Who have you worked with?

Like, this is how we understand ourselves, this is how we understand each other.

And if it's a good record, we sort of like nod along with the person, but we get interested in.

Maybe I want to saddle up to this person and ride them into success.

And if you have a bad record, you sort of hate the question, but you still have to play along because it's the way that our culture understands each other, the way you understand yourself.

But can you imagine at that same party and you have your sweet tea or your glass of red wine?

Can you imagine being back at that party and talking about blah, blah, blah, and inquiring about the weather and talking about the weather, and just saying, you know, can you tell me about your genealogy?

I really wanted to know about your genealogy.

Would love to know that.

Who are your people?

Tell me about your people.

Where do your people come from?

Well, Naomi has none.

She has no people.

Culturally, she is at the bottom.

She's broken, she's ashamed, she's without security, a provision.

So the wording here in the Hebrew in the text, in those first five verses of Ruth 1, it speaks about she didn't just lose her family, she lost her identity.

Let's jump in in verse 6.

When Naomi heard in Moab, a little glimpse of sunshine here into this story, when Naomi heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her husband she and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there.

With her two daughters-in-law, she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road and would take them back to the land of Judah.

Then Naomi said to her, two daughters-in-law, go back, each of you, to your mother's home.

May the Lord show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me.

May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.

She's saying, Hey, there's no future here with me.

You go get your own future.

There's future here for you.

If you come with me, I mean, the chances of a Hebrew man marrying you are so outrageous because they're hostile to Moabite women.

You need to go home.

You need to bail on me.

And the first point of this sermon is we have to embrace it so generic.

Almost is like, is this really a point?

It's so generic.

But we have to embrace it.

It is reality.

It is reality whether you're Christian or non-Christian or Hindu or Muslim or whatever you are in this world.

Point number one: life is full of joys and life is full of sorrows.

That's life.

You get the boy, you lose the friend, you get the job, you lose the health, you get the promotion, you lose the investment, you get the applause, you lose the favor.

Naomi gets the family, and she loses her husband.

She gets daughters-in-laws, and she loses her sons.

Point number two.

That was a short point, wasn't it?

Point number two.

None of this is random.

But all of it is a part of a larger, glorious puzzle.

Years ago, I I I was in college, I was a much bigger punk than I am now.

Uh still can be a punk, but back then I was a much bigger punk.

And a group of friends went to my buddy's uh family's cabin in North Carolina, and it's out in the wilderness.

It ended up being a rainy weekend, bad weekend to pick, but we're all up there, and so we're kind of closed indoors.

And so if you're in a cabin indoors, up in the mountains, there's nothing to do.

It's quickly developed uh puzzle people, game people, conversation people, right?

And we all know who each other are, and I'm not a puzzle person.

I don't want a part piece of that puzzle, I don't want anything to do with it.

You can keep your puzzle.

I'll dabble in the games and I want to talk.

But puzzle people, you just let's just raise your hand if you're you're going for the puzzle, and you're like, thousand piece, you're in, two thousand, more exciting, like like how challenging.

Non-puzzle people walk up, and we're disgusted by this whole endeavor.

So the puzzle people, they start getting at it at the card table, and it is a thousand pieces.

And I mean, I'm oh it just looks like a nightmare to me.

And I was a punk, I was a little bit of a punk.

So I walk up, it's the beginning of the day, and I just slide one piece into my pocket.

And I let the day play out.

I'm playing games and talking, they're making their progress, and the day's going on, and they're they have they have a lot, they have like five or six people.

They're working, man.

They are invested in this puzzle.

And I would every once in a while look at my little piece of the puzzle, and and it had little jagged edges, and and the color.

You couldn't tell anything about anything with this one little piece.

And so the end of the day comes, and the puzzle's all done, and they're on the search for the last piece.

And I pick my moment just right when they're all gathered around.

I'm I make sure they're gonna see this.

I don't want any at the bathroom.

I don't want somebody filling up with lemonade.

I want them all around, and I just walk up and I pull it out and I just slide it in, and I said, look at my puzzle.

And they all hated me, cussed me, words I don't want to hear were coming out at me.

And all of a sudden, uh it made sense.

Right?

That one little piece I was carrying around all the sudden made sense.

But it doesn't make sense when you just have one piece.

Right?

And that's what we have.

In loss, we have one piece.

Naomi has one piece.

Of course she can't see the whole picture.

She just has one piece.

Jumping back into verse 9, she's told them to go home.

She told her girls, her daughter-in-law, go home.

And then she kissed them goodbye, and they wept aloud and said to her, Will we go back with you?

We will go back with you to your people.

She said, No, no, we're not going back, we're not going back home.

We want to go with you.

Verse 11, but Naomi said, No, return home, my daughters.

Why would you come with me?

Am I going to have any more sons?

Who could become your husbands?

You have no future with me, is what she's saying.

Return home, my daughters.

I am too old to have another husband, even if I thought there was still hope for me.

Even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons, would you wait until they grew up?

Would you remain unmarried for them?

No, my daughters.

It is more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord's hand has turned against me.

Naomi absolutely hates that her loss has affected these girls.

Is it possible just maybe when when we sense, when we sense the Lord's hand is against us, that he could be doing something deeper?

That perhaps you just have one piece of a thousand-piece puzzle.

Could there be a bigger plan at play?

Verse 14.

The girls wept aloud again.

Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.

We're gonna come back to that.

Look, said Naomi, your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods.

Go back with her.

But Ruth replied, Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.

Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people and your God, my God.

Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.

May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.

When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

So Naomi and Ruth, they go to Bethlehem and they get there, and you could imagine this is where Naomi was from.

And so, you know, the streets are familiar, and maybe she's having some good memories, and maybe she's joyful in some regard, and then we get we get this interaction where uh most likely it's some friends come up to her and they say joyfully, they say, Is this Naomi?

Which means lovely.

And all the bitterness of all of her loss floods into her, and she says, Don't call me Naomi.

Don't call me lovely, call me Mara, call me bitter.

For the Lord has dealt with me bitterly.

And she says, I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty.

That's pretty depressing, right?

And then we get verse 22.

It's just a slight little glimpse of sunshine here at the end of the chapter.

And basically it just says, they returned home when the barley harvest was occurring.

Just this little hint of new life.

Okay, so interesting story.

What does it have to do with me?

Well, last night I sat around a table at a wedding and I started to think about this story, uh, to think about being lovely or to think about being bitter, to think about being a Naomi or to think about being a Mara.

And I was thinking about these people around this table who I knew very well.

And around this table, and it wasn't a big table with a lot of people, mind you, there was abuse, addiction, failed marriages, depression, rebellious children, loss of a spouse to cancer.

Every reason to be bitter.

And I'm sure that has existed in them.

And I'm wondering this morning, which are you?

Lovely or bitter about that hurt, that loss, that person, that friend toward your dad, toward your mom, toward God.

And what Ruth teaches us is it teaches us whether you are lovely or bitter.

This has everything to do with hope.

Let me define what that means.

Hope is the expectation in the present due to looking forward to something or someone in the future.

So hope is that moment when you were a senior in high school and you went out to the mailbox and you opened the mailbox and there's an envelope from the SAT.

And it's your test results.

And hope is the moment when you're opening it.

Hope is when when uh you were dialing the girl's phone number, and for me at my house, it was not the it wasn't that.

We got rid of that, right?

What was that rodeol?

Rotary.

Rotary?

Rotary.

I should have Googled it.

Uh but we had the where you hit the hit the number, but it went.

You remember that?

And so you hit like the anybody have that for a while before you went over to the complete touch tone thing.

All right, so I'm, you know, you're dialing in our town, it was just seven digits, all you had to dial.

And so, you know, you get hope is the seventh digit, and you're calling the girl.

And you're hoping dad doesn't answer, and mom doesn't answer.

It was back then you had to call the home, so you had to talk to mom and dad to get to the girl, and they'd say, Well, who's speaking?

And you had to say, This is this is Russ Masterson.

Hope is that process before she gets on the line, and you say, Hey, do you want to go out?

Hope's the in-between.

It's when the football's in the air on the kick, but you don't know if it's in or out.

Hope is the walk to Moab.

Hope is ten years of waiting for a grandchild.

And here's what we learn.

Sometimes we hope for things that never happen.

Naomi hoped for a traditional family, and she did not get it.

Here's the question been eating at me this week.

Could our constant disappointments be that we are hoping in something God never guaranteed us?

And this goes back to one huge, and this is point number three for the sermon, uh, is God's pursuit of us is to help us let go of hopes that will never bring us lasting joy in order to help us understand only hope in Him will.

Point number three: God's pursuit of us is to help us let go of all the hopes that will never bring us lasting joy, to help us understand it is only hope in Him that will.

So love your family, love your job, love your yard, love your car, love your stuff, love your trips, love your children, love your grandchildren, love all of it.

But your hope is anchored somewhere else.

It's anchored somewhere that is secure, that nothing can touch, and nothing can break, and nothing can alter.

Naomi didn't see it.

On her way back to Bethlehem, what she didn't see, she thought the world had ended and there was nothing.

She didn't see that.

Ruth had clung to her.

She had somebody.

And Ruth is full of hope.

She's in.

The lesson here for us is not like, hey, be Ruth.

Go be Ruth.

Don't be Naomi, be Ruth.

The lesson here is you are Naomi.

Sometimes you're lovely, and sometimes you're bitter, and you really need a Ruth.

Last night there was another person at the wedding of which uh my past could create bitterness toward.

And on my drive home, you know, it was late, and uh having, you know, you get these like moments with the Lord, having a moment, right?

And so uh I have Have the fish on.

You know, that's part of having a moment with the Lord is having the Christian radio station on.

I mean, you know you're having a real moment with the Lord when Life House is on, and you can have a moment with the Lord to Life House.

That's maybe you know you maybe you don't know what I'm talking about.

And I was just thinking back over all of the years that when I was bitter, even now when I become bitter, and to know that he, that Christ Jesus clings to me, whether I'm lovely or whether I'm bitter.

That's what the story's about.

Ruth is the hero in this story.

While we have nothing to offer, while Naomi had nothing to offer, Ruth clung to her with covenantal, unmerited love.

Incredible.

And while we have nothing to offer, Christ clings to us with covenantal, unmerited love.

What we learn later in this book, and we also learn it in Matthew at the beginning of Matthew, and that one of those long genealogies that we can think so often is just so pointless, what we learn is that Ruth is a distant great-grandmother of Jesus.

See, Ruth points us to the one who comes out of her.

She is like him.

And he clings to us even when we have bottomed out.

So you have nothing to offer, you're at the bottom, you're broken.

He clings to you with covenantal, unmerited love.

And it is secured on the cross for you because all of it, the Christian faith, is about what has been done for you on the cross, not what you do for him.

Such good news to know that God through Christ wants to cling to me.

And maybe you first heard this story when you were eight or you were 14 or you were 20.

Maybe you're just hearing it today.

I mean, most days I sort of operate to provide for my family and do my job and hopefully do a good job at it, and sometimes you know tie that in with a lot of idolatry, with achievement and other stuff like that.

But underneath layers of false hopes and duties of life, there's a heart that is broken at times and bitter at times and lovely at times.

And what I need to know, what you need to know, is that you are being clung to by him.

So as we come to the table to receive, let's come with great gratitude.

Whether you're bitter or you're lovely, there is one that is perfectly lovely that clings to you.

Let's pray together.

God, we confess that often we're bitter about the losses that we've had in life, and whether they were yesterday or coming later this afternoon, or whether they were 10 years ago or 50 years ago, we can let them overcome us.

God, we know we should become better and not bitter, and yet at the same time, we know we are often bitter.

And we are often not what you've called us to be, and we are often not lovely.

But we take great relief and rest that there is a puzzle being formed that is more glorious than the little piece that we hold in our hand.

And that there is a hero, and it is not me.

That there is a hero that clings to me, that was perfectly lovely in my place.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.