Living Hope

Unidentified Speaker: God will never call you to pursue a godly end in an ungodly manner. It is true that God has a beautiful plan of redemption for each and every one of our lives, that he is working always to bring hope and a future, and he calls us to walk in obedience as we cling to that hope of redemption.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Welcome to Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy, and we're so glad you've joined us for this series on the book of Ruth. Now, Pastor Philip, let's be honest, it's often difficult to for any of us to see when we're trying to do the right thing in the wrong way, but this is where you bring us today. So what kind of temptation is Ruth facing here?

Pastor Philip Miller: Mm. Well, she's sort of trapped, right, between, on one hand, this pressure she's getting from her mother-in-law to go, proposition Boaz, get a baby, get this redemption moving, force God's hand, make it happen. But she's also, Ruth is also, on the other hand, she's learning about God's character, and she's learning about his promises and who he is, and she's been experiencing his grace and his kindness, and she knows what's moral and what's right. And so she's sort of, she's conflicted in this space, and we're going to see her make a very different choice than what Naomi sets up for her in the end.

So Ruth is going to come out on the other side of this in a much better place. But the temptation is something that I think we can all relate to, and that is to do the right thing, but do it in a wrong way, to take a shortcut. So to know this is where, this is what God, the good thing that God wants to give me in life, but I'm waiting on him to provide it. So in the meantime, I've got to rush and maybe shortcut or force and compromise and do something maybe a little sketchy to try to get to the outcome, and we can face that temptation. That's what we're going to be talking about today, that temptation we face when we say, okay, God, there's a good thing I think you want to give me in life, but now I'm tempted to get it in the wrong way, in the wrong time, to cut some corners.

We're going to learn what a danger that really is.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: All right, beloved. Now stay tuned after the message because Pastor Philip and I, we're going to discuss trusting God's plan even when they don't seem to be working. But now let's go to the pulpit of the Moody Church for part 2 of the sermon, Manipulating Grace.

Unidentified Speaker: Pretend that Ruth is your daughter. Is this the advice you would give your daughter on how to go get a husband? No, absolutely not. And yet, verse 5, Ruth replies, all that you say I will do. So she went down to the threshing floor and did just as her mother-in-law had commanded her. And when Boaz had eaten and drunk and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain. And then she came softly and uncovered his feet and lay down. And at midnight the man was startled and turned over, and behold, a woman lay at his feet. Of course he was surprised here. Hello, what is going on?

Well, first of all, Naomi here is taking matters into her own hands. Can you see that? She has seen God's little mercies that have hinted at redemption that is coming, but after two months, Naomi is getting tired of waiting, and she's done. She says, okay, God, if you're not going to get a move on, I will. and she's forcing a moment here. It's savvy and it works, but it's manipulative. The second thing that's going on here is Naomi is encouraging Ruth to fall back on her Moabite instincts here. After all, this is the Moabite way to get a man. If you know the history here, you will know that the Moabites were founded, this story is from Genesis 19, when Lot was drunk and his daughter slept with him.

And so the name Moab literally means Moab, who dad, who's your daddy, as a testimony to the scandal of how the people of Moab began. And just a few decades earlier, in Numbers 25, when the Israelites were coming into the promised land, the Moabites were alarmed, and the women, the Moabite women, tried to seduce the Israelite men as a whole in order to derail the plans of God. And so the Moabite women, friends, were known for being enticing. They had a reputation, and the Israelite men were known for having a weakness, for falling for Moabite women. And that's something that Naomi knows firsthand in watching her own sons, Mahlon and Kilion, fall for Ruth and Orpah.

And so what's happening here is Naomi is sending Ruth to proposition Boaz, to bathe and perfume, to put on her best clothing and avail herself to Boaz when he's happy from wine under the cover of darkness on the threshing floor in the middle of the night. And the Hebrew writer wants us to squirm a little bit here, and as a matter of fact, there's euphemisms all over this text. Reading the Hebrew will make you blush, and you can feel the tension and the scandal of it all. And you say, wait a minute, I thought Ruth was a good girl. Well, she is, but there's also a kind of risque side to her as well.

Do you remember, remember in Matthew, chapter 1, in the genealogy of Jesus, there are 5 women who are mentioned by name in that genealogy, and they're all of them strong women with a hint of scandal in the background. So you have Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law. You have Rahab, the prostitute, who, by the way, is Boaz's mom. Interesting. Then you have Ruth, our character here. You have Bathsheba, who had an affair with King David, and you have Mary, who has the scandal of an unwed pregnancy. Of course, this is by the Holy Spirit. There's no indiscretion on her part, but Matthew is highlighting these scandals on purpose because he's trying to say that scandal is no stranger to the redemptive plan of God.

He's used it in the past, and he will continue to use it in the future in Mary's life. But here's the point. Ruth is not the one exception in the list. No, she fits in with the rest here. There's real scandal in what she's doing. This is not the right way to get a husband. But here's Naomi's line of thinking. She's thought this out. If Boaz is with Ruth out in the field and then decides not to marry her, he'll want to keep this hushed up. And so Naomi and Ruth will be well taken care of in exchange for their silence. If Boaz is with Ruth and then decides, I want to marry this girl, everybody wins.

It all works out. If he's a man of strong character and says, no, not now, but I will marry you later, then everything works out. If he says, no, away with you, what are you doing? How dare you come meet me like this in the middle of the field? Well, they're not that much worse off, are they? They've gotten pretty much everything they can get from Boaz this harvest season, and they're just as destitute as they were before. They can't fall much lower on the social scale, and probably they'll have to resort to this kind of lifestyle in order to survive anyway. Now, spoiler alert, everything does happen to work out, doesn't it?

We'll see it next week. Boaz turns out to be a man of tremendous character, and he chooses to do the right thing in the right way here. And God is incredibly merciful to Naomi and Ruth anyway. But listen, listen, it does not make what they did right here. They are not acting in faith in this moment. This is not full of trust and obedience in the way of God. They are manipulating, they are scheming, they are controlling, and they are trying to get redemption, even if it means seduction and scandal. These are not examples we should follow. In fact, as I read this text, I see three warnings for us to keep in mind when we also have a line of sight to the redemption that God might bring into our life, and we're tired of waiting for it.

Three warnings. Number one, first warning, we can pursue the right thing at the wrong time. We can pursue the right thing at the wrong time. You know, when we pray to God, one of the hardest things is when God tells us to wait. There's 3 ways he can answer our prayers. He can say yes, and then we're like, yay, God, thanks. Then he could say no, and we're like, oh, disappointed, but I can get over that. I trust you, God. But the hardest one, I think, is when God says wait. It's the right thing, and I'll bring it eventually, but right now I need you to wait. Not now. And it's hard because in that waiting space, we can end up doing something really stupid.

We may want to be married so badly, and God says, wait. And in our desperation, we lower our standards, and we settle things, and we rush, and we take shortcuts. Or maybe we need money, and God says, wait. And in our desperation, we can grow dishonest and steal and take shortcuts. Or maybe we want relief from the pain, the sorrow, the grief we're experiencing, we just want to get to the other side, and God says, not now, wait. And in our desperation, we can take matters into our own hands and take shortcuts. It's so dangerous. I'm reminded of 1st Samuel 13, and the story of King Saul, who, he and his army were pinned down by the Philistines, and Samuel, the prophet of God, had promised to come and meet him to make a sacrifice so that God would bless them in their battle.

And Samuel was delayed in coming, and Saul grew impatient in waiting and decided, I can't wait anymore. I'm going to do the sacrifice myself. And he assembled all the stuff, and he performed the sacrifice, and then Samuel showed up and said, what on earth did you do? It's the right thing, wrong timing. Right thing, wrong timing. To obey is better than sacrifice, the famous line. And so, friends, here's the takeaway for us. We've got to wait upon God's perfect timing. We've got to wait upon God's perfect timing. I wonder what would have happened if Naomi and Ruth had let things unfold just a little bit longer.

If they had waited just a few more days and allowed God to work, I wonder what story might have unfolded. I wonder what would have happened, and but we will never know, will we? And maybe God has you waiting right now, and you're tempted to rush ahead and get things moving. But friends, listen to me. God makes all things beautiful in his time, and his time is always perfect. His time is always perfect. And so we wait on him, we trust in him, and we learn not to rush ahead of God. It's the first warning here. The second warning is that we can pursue the right thing in the wrong way. We can pursue the right thing in the wrong way.

Friends, the ends do not justify the means. And God, listen, God will never call you to pursue a godly end in an ungodly manner. It is true that God has a beautiful plan of redemption for each and every one of our lives, that he is working always to bring hope and a future, and he calls us to walk in obedience as we cling to that hope of redemption. In other words, faith, looking to what God will do, and obedience, being attentive and following him in the now, go together. Faith and obedience, trust and obey. I'm again reminded of another story from the Old Testament, Genesis 16, where Abraham and Sarah learned this the hard way.

God had promised Abraham and Sarah, I'm going to make you a great nation. I will give you a son, and he will become a great people, and I will bless all the nations of the earth through you. But Abraham and Sarah, at this point in chapter 16, are still childless. They've been waiting a long time. No child has been born, and Sarah concocts a plan and says, listen, I want you to father a child with my slave, with Hagar. This is a common custom in the ancient Near East, pretty messed up, but they decide to have a kid the wrong way. Right thing, an heir, a son, someone to multiply their line, but the wrong way.

Right thing, wrong way. And the story that comes out of that is a disaster of this rivalry between Sarah and Hagar, between Ishmael and Isaac, and it's a huge mess down through history, even to this very day, the dynamics that started in that error. And so, friends, we learn, here's our takeaway, we learn to submit ourselves to God's perfect will. Submit to God's perfect will. Friends, God has a beautiful, redemptive, and hope-filled story for you as you follow after Jesus. Don't compromise, friends. Don't take shortcuts. Trust and obey.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy, and beloved, this program reaches into the lives of everyday people to give hope, and that's only possible because listeners like you partner with us. As a thank you for your gift today, we have a resource we'd love to share with you. Go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us 1-800-215-5001. We're so glad you've joined us today as we explore the dangers of doing the right thing, but in the wrong way. Pastor Philip, when we look at Naomi's plan, it does, it feels like manipulation. So how should we view Ruth's following Naomi's advice?

Is she obeying her elders? Is she blindly following a bad plan, or is there something else going on here?

Pastor Philip Miller: Well, there's a lot of layers to what's going on, right? And we lose a lot of it in terms of the background just because we're not familiar with it. But Naomi is basically falling back on what's happened in the history of Israel with Judah and Tamar, that Tamar had to act like a prostitute to get a baby from Judah because he wasn't doing the levirate marriage thing. And so there's this pattern. It's ungodly, it's a mess, but it is how things have played out before in Israel's history. So Naomi's thinking about that. And then it's really also inviting Ruth to think of her old life, right? So the Moabites got their origin when Lot's daughters seduced him in the night when he was drunk, got pregnant, and that's where the Moabites come from.

And we know in just a few years earlier, the Moabite women had come and they tried to seduce the Israelite men. So that this is sort of like in the DNA of what it means to be a Moabite, and that's Ruth's heritage. And so, but that's not who she is now. She's a, she's come under the shelter of the wings of the almighty covenant-keeping God, and she's not to act like she used to, you know, in the old heritage of her people. And so Ruth is being brought now into a space where Naomi's giving her bad advice, her own heritage is giving her a bad template, but she's beginning to trust in the covenant-keeping God and realizing God doesn't play by all these rules, and maybe I can actually trust him into the future in a different way.

And so what we're going to see is that Ruth follows Naomi's advice to a point, but we're going to see this later. She actually deviates and goes in a different direction, a much more noble, righteous direction, on her own terms as she trusts God with her future. But so there's all these layers going on in this story, but the main central point is God has a redemptive plan that he's working. Boaz is going to be the redeemer. Naomi can see it, but she's tired of waiting on God's timing. She thinks I've got to give this a push, we've got to make this happen, and so they're, she's giving the advice here to pursue doing the right thing, but in a wrong way, and that is something that I think we can all relate to.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: So, talking about relating to it now, how do we relate? The call is to trust and obey, but to be honest, I don't see it working. Can I get an amen out there, listeners? So how do we do this? How do we trust and obey when it doesn't seem like God's plan is working at all?

Pastor Philip Miller: Well, so this is where, you know, we're caught in this moment where you've got the promises of God, that he is our redeemer, that he has hope and glory, and it's coming. His promises are yes and amen, right? And yet, here I am, I'm trying to get by in life, I'm trying to pay my bills, I'm trying to find love, I'm trying to, build a career, I'm trying to do all my everyday life.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: The right way.

Pastor Philip Miller: And, yeah, I'm trying to do it the right way, and it, but it's not happening, right? And so, what do you do in that space where-

Pastor Larry McCarthy: And how about this? The people I see doing it the wrong way, they're the ones prospering. So now-

Pastor Philip Miller: God's blessing the wicked, right?

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Yeah, so now what do I do?

Pastor Philip Miller: What do I do? Right. And the temptation is, well, this is just the formula is not working, and so I've got to change, and maybe I compromise a little, maybe I just act like what everyone else is doing it, maybe I just shift. It's a little unrighteousness, it's a little bit of compromise, it's a little bit of blending in, acting like everyone else. I don't have to do the Jesus way all the time. I'll just go with the flow. I'm going to blend, right? And then all of a sudden we think that's going to be the way I get to the blessings of God, the good things that I think God's promised me, a spouse and a career and a family or whatever, right?

And it can really become a problem. Yeah.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: So the day-to-day of it, though, that's what we're trying to encourage people today. I mean, you're going to face this stuff in your job, at your school, on your campus. It's the day-to-day making that right decision and trusting God. Now, is this possible absent having a relationship with Jesus?

Pastor Philip Miller: Well, we need the Lord in our life, of course, right? And we need to trust the promises of God, even when it's hard, even when there's a gap. That's where faith kicks in, right? If everything we were hoping for was ours right here and now, it wouldn't be hope. Hope is believing in faith and trusting in righteousness and doing the right thing in light of a hope that has not yet been received, right? And that gap is normal. That's where faith lives. And so there's, there is making it really practical. You said day to day, like, this is as practical as like if you're dating, if you're in the dating pool, right, and you're like, I know, I believe God's called me to marriage.

I believe he has someone for me. I want to get married. I want to have a family. I want to have all of this stuff, and I'm in the dating pool, and there's all this pressure. You know, it's the third date, and there's all this expectation culturally, and everyone's doing it, and it might feel like this is the easiest way to just secure this and make it happen and then you feel the pressure and the temptation and that's just so real, isn't it? But we've got to trust, we got to trust that God's love is all sufficient, that he's enough, that even if we never get married, that he'll be fully sufficient for us in life and that obedience to Jesus is always the right thing, even when it's hard, even when it doesn't seem like it's getting to the outcome that we believe is promised, we've got to trust him.

Or we might be in our career, and we might be like everyone is fudging the numbers, and everyone is like doing whatever they need to do, compromising integrity to get ahead in the industry, and we're trying to toe the line and do what's right, and it's, but they're, we're not getting promoted, and it feels like the career is stalled out, even though, you know, and maybe it would just be a little easier to just flex and compromise and shade it. No, right? To be righteous before the Lord in our careers with our integrity, to trust him with the outcomes. Our job is to do the right thing and trust God with the outcomes no matter what.

That's where faith lives, and it's a hard path, but this is pick up your cross daily and follow him. This is the call of obedience, and God always rewards obedience when we follow him, always.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Amen. That trust and obey, that is, that's faith language. And Pastor, I so appreciate your illustration on marriage, because that's the last place where you want to rush and hurry or manipulate or get in front of God. I mean, I'm happily married, and I know you are too, I'm not saying that, but that's not the place where you want to get in front of God's will for you. Trust and obey. We sing that, don't we? Most of us learned it before we understood it fully. That's how faith gets handed down, in songs, in stories. That's why I love our resource this month. One, two, three, Jesus loves me for little ones.

This book by Rebecca Lutzer would make a wonderful gift from the very first page, something you can give a little one in your life. There's no better seed to sow in a child than this, that God loves them. Written with children newborn to six years old in mind, you can request a copy today of One, Two, Three, Jesus Loves Me for little ones. Simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call 1-800-215-5001. That's livinghopeoffer.com, 1-800-215-5001. You can also write to us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Doing the right thing the wrong way still isn't the right thing, and next time we'll talk about mistaking the giver for the gift.

Thanks for joining us for Living Hope, where you'll always find gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by the Moody Church.