Living Hope

Pastor Philip Miller: To love deeply is to grieve deeply when love is bereft. And if you've ever grieved deeply, you will know how easily it is to start closing off, to start detaching, going numb, becoming hard and tough and trying to survive and getting jaded and cynical and even bitter. And in in Naomi's own words, that's where she's at.

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, I think a lot of us and many of our listeners have experienced exactly what Naomi is feeling. Hopeless.

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah. You know, I I think it's a pretty common experience in life to to to go through what we might call disappointment with God. You know, life hurts and sometimes when we become Christians, we think, oh, it's going to be it's going to be easy. I'm not going to have a life riddled with pain and loss and grief. But of course, in our better moments, we can zoom out and realize that's not a realistic expectation. But it still doesn't change how much it hurts when we go through hard things and it's easy to get into a place where we're like, I don't know if I can trust you again, God.

And that's where Naomi's at. She's bitter and and she's depressed and she's she's sort of cynical about everything. But here's the beautiful thing. God's not going to leave her there. In in his grace and mercy, he's going to pursue her and draw her heart back and teach her to hope again. And and that all starts today in this passage that we're going to be looking at as we we get these glimmers of hope, of redemption that start appearing in the story. And Naomi's heart starts to breathe and beat again as she begins to hope in the redemption of God.

Maybe God's not done with me. And so there's a lot of hope coming in this message today.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Beloved, please stay tuned after the message because Pastor Philip and I, we're going to have a conversation regarding why is it so hard to hope? But now, let's go to part one of the sermon, Glimmers of Hope.

Pastor Philip Miller: You know, to open your heart to love is risky business. It's very risky business. C. S. Lewis writes in his book The Four Loves, there is no safe investment. To love it all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.

It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell. Wow. See, friends, grief is the price of love. To love deeply is to grieve deeply when love is bereft. And if you've ever grieved deeply, you will know how easily it is to start closing off, to start detaching, going numb, becoming hard and tough and trying to survive and getting jaded and cynical and even bitter. And in in Naomi's own words, that's where she's at.

You'll remember in chapter one of Ruth, chapter one verse 20, Naomi came back into Bethlehem and said, don't call me Naomi. Her name means pleasant. Call me Mara, bitter. From pleasant to bitter. She says because the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. She says, I'm bitter and it's God's fault. She's lashing out. It's raw and it's un- filtered. And we can feel, can't we, the mistrust, the the pain. She feels betrayed by her God. How how could you do this to me, God? How could you let my husband and sons die? How could you leave me here to fend for myself?

How can I ever trust you again? And yet, as we saw in chapter one, she's coming home. She's coming back to Bethlehem. She's coming back into the land of the covenant. She's coming back into the presence of God. And so underneath all this bitterness, there's still some faith, a little tiny bit of trust, a fool's hope, a a mustard seed of faith. And as it turns out, that will be just enough. We come to Ruth chapter two today, verses 17 to 23. You'll remember last time we we were together speaking about Ruth. You'll remember that Naomi's daughter-in-law, Ruth, went out into the fields to glean from the margins.

There were rules in Israel in the old covenant that the farmers were not allowed to glean all the way to the outside of the field. They were to leave some of the grain grains standing. It was kind of a welfare system in those days and the poor could come and glean from the margins of the fields. And so Ruth heads out and she just happens to choose one of Boaz's fields. This character we're getting to know, but he's a really good man. And in kindness, he offers protection to her. He says, come stay with my young women.

Work in my fields. I don't know how you'll be treated in other places, but here I know you'll be safe. He invites her to lunch. He gives her roasted grain. She eats all that she wants and has leftovers. And then she is gleaning the rest of the field and he says to his workers, he says, listen, let her come on in and take stuff out of the middle of the field, out of my portion, out of the part of the field that belongs to me. Pull out extra grain from the stocks and give it to her.

This is extraordinary generosity and kindness. And now Ruth is about to bring back the fruit of all of her labors of working in the fields that day and she's going to bring it back and show Naomi what what her day's been like. And she is going to bring this barley, all these little seeds that she's threshed out, and she's going to bring them home to Naomi. And there's something about this barley that is going to trigger something in Naomi's soul soul. The barley is a glimmer of hope and her heart starts beating again. And if you've ever been through grief and you want to know how to get back to life, how to get back to hope, how to get back into the land of the living, Naomi's going to show us how today.

So let's grab our Bibles. We're going to be in Ruth chapter two, verses 17 to 23. Before we jump in, would you bow your heads? Let's pray together. Father, we ask now that you would come by your Holy Spirit. Help us to see our hearts, the way our grief operates. Help us to understand your mercies in the shadows, in the hard places of life and help us to hope again. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Ruth chapter two, beginning here in verse 17. As I read here, just follow along with me. So she, this is Ruth, gleaned in the field until evening.

Then she beat out what she had gleaned and it was about an of barley. And she took it up and went into the city. Her mother-in-law saw what she had gleaned and she also brought out and gave her food, what food she had left over after being satisfied. Just pause there for a moment. So just imagine here, Ruth walks in with a sack over her shoulder, this huge sack of barley grain. And Naomi looks up from whatever sort of depressed bitter placement as as she's sitting there and and Ruth plops this sack down, un- opens it up and and says, look at what I've got, right?

She has an of barley, 22 L. This is about two thirds of a bushel, 30 lbs of grain here, two to three weeks worth of food for one person and about a half months of of wages gathered here in one day. Pretty good for a day's hall, right? And she opens it up and and Naomi's eyes get wide. And she says, and not only that, and she opens up the roasted grain for lunch. I have more roasted grain. I'm already full. I got everything I need. Do you want some? Taste it. And so in light of all this bounty, now Naomi is is is going to respond here with wonderment in her voice.

Verse 19. And her mother-in-law said to her, where did you glean today? And where have you worked? Blessed is the man who took notice of you. So Naomi knows Ruth has worked hard here, but this is more than just hard work. This is kindness. Someone has been generous, extraordinarily, exceptionally kind to her. But who was it? Verse 19B, the second half here. So she, Ruth, told her mother-in-law with whom she had worked and said, the man's name with whom I worked today is Boaz. And Naomi said to her daughter-in-law, may he be blessed by the Lord whose kindness has not forsaken the living or the dead.

Naomi also said to her, this man is a close relative of ours, one of our redeemers. So when Ruth here mentions Boaz's name, she doesn't realize the significance of the connections here. But but it's not lost on Naomi. She knows Boaz. He's in the family. He's of the clan of Elimelech. And furthermore, he's a redeemer. If the word is Goel, he's a Goel. Remember we talked about earlier. We talked about leveret marriage, this weird concept from ancient Near Eastern cultures that if a woman's husband died, it was the obligation of the brother of the deceased man to come and marry, if he was unmarried, to marry the uh the widow of his deceased brother in order to father an heir in his brother's name who would inherit his property and preserve the clan.

Now, if there was no brother around to provide this service, um there were other relatives that could volunteer. They weren't obligated, but they could volunteer, no pressure, uh to do to do the task to be a Goel. And Naomi is saying here, Boaz is not required to. But if he chose to, if he wanted to, Boaz could rescue us. And something here begins to stir in Naomi's heart. Something that she scarce allowed herself to believe and hope in before for the first time in forever. Naomi has a glimmer of hope, of life, of a future, of redemption.

And you could feel her heart beating as she comes back and responds. But watch this. Ruth changes the subject. Verse 21. And Ruth the Moabite said beside, he said to me, you shall keep close by my young men until they have finished all my harvest. Now here's what's interesting to me. That's not what Boaz said. If you go back and look at verse eight, you will see Boaz told Ruth, you keep close with my young women. You stay with the young women. I've told the young men not to touch you. But Ruth here says, he told me I could hang out with his young men.

What's going on here? Well, Ruth's got her eyes eyes on the boys here. That's what's going on. Ruth is sitting here going, Ruth has redemption in mind here, but of a very different kind. She's imagining one of these strapping young Jewish worker boys will cozy up to her when she's out in the field and that will lead to one thing or another and then she'll get married and then she'll have a second chance at life and a future and all of this. But Naomi here admonishes her. Look at verse 22. And Naomi said to to Ruth, her daughter-in-law, it is good, my daughter, that you should go out with his young women.

Lest in another field you be assaulted. Naomi gives Ruth the same counsel that Boaz gave uh to Ruth. Stay close with the young women. There's protection in the numbers here and she's but Naomi's also pondering something. What will happen here? Boaz is a good man. He is a generous man. He's been kind and just and he's shown favor to Ruth. Could he be even maybe more than all of this?

Pastor Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy and conversations like this one reach people because listeners choose to make this program possible. If you'd like to join us in this work, we have a resource we'd love to share with you as a thank you gift. Go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us 1 800 215 5001. We're so glad you joined us today as we explore Ruth and Naomi's hope for redemption. Pastor Philip, this is such a practical topic today. These these glimmers of hope that each of these ladies have, but they're really looking at two different things.

They're looking at hope from really two different perspectives. You call them these glimmers of hope, but they're coming from two different approaches, aren't they?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah. They their hope is sort of angled in different directions, right? So uh yeah, you've got Ruth who has uh she's noticed, hey, we're getting provided for. This is good. God's been good to us. There's grace coming into our lives. Maybe there's hope. And what she particularly notices is these young strapping men who are working for Boaz out in the field. And she's I I think she she that's who she points out. She says, he said I could hang out with this young man, you know. And I And I think she's starting to think like, well, maybe one of them will, you know, notice me and will we could get married and maybe I have a second chance at life and a marriage and a family and all the rest, right?

So she has a line of sight to a kind of redemption. Naomi though has a very different line of sight. That why she reinforces what Boaz said and says, you stick with the young women. You stick with the young women because she she's again, she's seen that Boaz has been kind and and nurturing. He's provided in so many ways, but she knows something about Boaz and that's that he is a potential redeemer. And so she has a a has a mindset on other things. Maybe this guy could marry Ruth and we could we could restore the line of Elimelech and that would provide inheritance rights and get our family tree back on the map and all of this.

So so they really do have very different lenses as they're thinking about what the future might hold. And uh but but again, it it's the first time that they are really daring to hope again. And that's really a beautiful thing as the mercies of God are starting to woo their hearts and and give them a sense of maybe there's more to your story than just the loss and grief you've experienced this far.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Okay, you're you're you're dipping our toes in the deep end here. So I'm just going to ask it. Can we Is there Can we hope in the wrong thing? Can we just put our hope in our government, our system, our the wrong thing? I'll stop there.

Pastor Philip Miller: Well, so there is a potential danger, isn't it? Like in in both what Ruth and Naomi have in mind here, there there there's a potential here that they might be looking for human redemption, human solutions, uh that it's the grace of God that's coming to them through these avenues, but it would be very easy for them to start wanting all the blessings of what God is providing rather than actually wanting him to trust God and to really put all of their hope in God's redemption and who God is and God's promises and his faithfulness. It it it it could be they could easily miss the mark a little bit and actually settle for human redemption instead of lifting their eyes to the bigger redemption and the bigger redeemer, capital R redeemer, that's God himself who is their covenant faithful God who is watching over them.

So it it's easy It's actually really easy for us to do this today as well. We we can get into a mode where we actually want God's stuff rather than wanting him.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Oh my.

Pastor Philip Miller: And and it's easy to want the blessings of God and just have a good life and uh you know, be able to have a healthy marriage and a blessing on my career and life and just like if if life can just go well, you know, if I could have the blessings of God to fall in love with that rather than fall in love with who God is, that that's a danger, right? And and and we can't just like we if if if we were in a relationship with someone and and let's say we had a bunch of money and and and we were dating and then all of a sudden we're going to get married and and the the potential future spouse realizes that the way the money structured it's in a trust or something and they'll never have access to it and if they were to break up and dump us at that moment, we we would feel betrayed.

We would feel used, right? Because they didn't love us. They loved They wanted the stuff. They didn't want us, right? And God's the same way. He doesn't He doesn't want us to to be gold diggers, you know, just wanting his stuff. He wants to be loved for who he is and he's the greatest treasure of all. It's not his stuff. It's who he is. That's the treasure. And so that's the danger here is that they can actually fall in love with human redemption and forget that God is their great redeemer. And so there there is a danger here.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: When you said that, man, I would my heart was just leaping for joy cuz I know Lameeta loves me cuz I have no money. Why is it, brother, that it's so hard to hope? I mean, if we we look at them, why is this so difficult?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah. Well, God really is wooing them back, isn't he? Because I I think what happens, you know, when we love and and when we're disappointed in life and things don't work out like we want, there's a grief. And And I think a natural impulse is to sort of close off and to be guarded and to be a little cynical and say, well, I'm not going to get burnt again. I'm I'm not going to get hurt again. I put myself out there before, but and it didn't go well. And so I'm I'm not going to take that risk, you know.

And we can do this with God. We can think, okay, God's in my life. I have a relationship with him. That means it it's not a fair assumption, but we think that means my life's going to go well and I'm not going to face hardship. I'm not going to face loss. I'm not going to have to grieve like other people because God's going to keep me from all that kind of stuff. And it's a naive mindset, but I think some of us think that. And then so when life doesn't work out the way we thought it would or suffering comes into our life that's unexpected, our expectations are unmet,

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Yes.

Pastor Philip Miller: and we're in this place of disappointment with God. We're like, God, I I trusted you and yet you allowed this hard thing into my life and it hurts and I And now I don't know if I can trust you again. I think that's real. I think that's where a lot of us live and that's where Naomi's at and what's happening in this story. And this is happening with Ruth as well because she's she's been hurt too. As God is wooing them back to himself, he's saying, I know you're hurt, but but here's a glimmer of hope.

Here's a little bit of mercy. Here's a little bit of grace. Here's a little picture of who I am. And what he's doing is he's he's teaching them to let their hearts beat again, to finally come out of the shadows and say, well, maybe maybe God is trustworthy. Maybe he's not done with me. Maybe his mercies have never actually abandoned me, but that God is my heavenly father, my my good shepherd. He's walked through the valley of the shadow of death with me and it wasn't easy, but he never left my side.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Yes.

Pastor Philip Miller: And his grace is with me. His mercy is coming toward me. And he's been faithful and sustained me and his promises are still true. And you know, like to to just and all of a sudden the heart it's like we we're just we're opening up again a little bit. And that's what's happening with Naomi. It's happening with Ruth. God is wooing them out to finally say, am I willing to trust you again, God, with my future, with my life, with my everything, even though it's been so hard?

Pastor Larry McCarthy: And even though it may be hard.

Pastor Philip Miller: And it may be hard, but he'll never leave you and never forsake you and his mercies are with you every step of the way. Can you imagine going through life without him? And so so the alternative is really not good. I don't want to go through all this stuff. I'm going to go through hard stuff anyway. So I'm the choice is whether I'm going to go through it with God or whether I'm going to try to do it on my own. And that's not going to end well. So God is but he's but he's so kind, isn't he?

They've shut down Naomi especially and God is wooing them back and he is he's teaching them that he really is trustworthy. They can trust him again. They can open their hearts and they can begin to hope because he's a faithful God. And I think that's something that happens in all of our lives. We go through seasons of disappointment with God, uh but he never gives up uh on us even when maybe we thought we had given up on him. And he woos us back and he teaches us to trust him again.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: What a wonderful reminder for us today that we're really never alone, beloved. And even when these unrealistic or unmet expectations confront us, God is still there. He said he'd never leave us. He'd never forsake us. That's the hope. You know, a redemption, it's much bigger than we can even imagine. But beginning to understand that truth doesn't have to wait until a child is grown for it to start taking root. Our latest resource, 1 2 3 Jesus Loves Me for Little Ones brings that gospel hope down to the size of a toddler can hold on to counting from 1 to 10 exactly where two to six year olds already live.

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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. God's redemption is never smaller than our need for it. And next time we'll talk about how God tends to manifest his mercy. 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.