Power Walk Ministries

Guest (Male): Thanks for joining us for today's installment of Power Walk. Relationships, marriage, and family. That's a wide umbrella under which Pastor Cannings brings us this series about teaching God's mind on these matters. We're just beginning volume one in this series titled Are You Ready?

Taking us to the story of Naomi and Ruth and their encounter with Boaz, Pastor Cannings draws out key principles for us about the importance of getting to know and understand the mindset of a potential mate. So let's go to that lesson right now. Pastor Cannings.

Dr. Paul Cannings: Instead of Naomi being selfish, she said, "I'm taking you to a place where you're going to be lonely, you're never going to get married." Watch carefully, but Ruth said, and the word here means, "If you keep talking to me, Naomi, I'm going to keep saying the same thing to you." In other words, I'm determined to do this. You can't stop me, and I'm a grown woman. That's literally what it's saying in Hebrew.

She says, "Do not urge me to leave you." There's no obligation to this. You can't make it happen. "Turn back from following you." It's not going to happen. Instead of Naomi being selfish, she said, "There's no way I'm going to take you to a place you'll never get married just because of me. So let me turn around and tell you, go back to your people so at least you can be married. You ain't going to marry nobody in Jerusalem because it's not going to happen."

That's what it's like for a Moabite to arrive in Jerusalem. And Ruth persists anyway because she goes deeper. Ruth says, "I will lodge with you. Your people will be my people." Here it is, it gets deeper. "Your God," watch the personal pronouns, "will be my God." In other words, your God is God to you. I'm going to drop all my gods, and your God will become a person that I follow, period.

Matter of fact, I got in trouble one time when I said to this young man, he was all infatuated, thinking he's in love. So I said to the young lady sitting next to me, sitting next to him, rather, I said to her, "Please tell me what it costs you to do your hair. Just write it on a piece of paper for me." She wrote it down. Can't remember the number. I said, "Tell me, do you drive in a car?" "Yes." "You bought the car?" "Yes." All right, tell me, what's the car note? Write it down for me.

Oh man. Do you like how she smells? She smells good. I said, "Okay, take that perfume, write it down what it costs for me." So she wrote it down. I said, "Okay, you got any school loans?" "Yes." "Write it down for me. Write down how much it costs to do your nails. Write down what your clothing bill is." I said, "Well, now you got married, and she gets up in the morning, hairpiece missing, eyelashes not there." I'm just keeping it real. I'm saying, are you willing to pay all these bills to have that? "Well, Pastor, I don't know if I make that kind of money." Are you willing to not have these things because he can't pay for it? The whole room got quiet.

I said, "You are marrying somebody based on how you feel when you're around them. And the Bible is saying it ain't got nothing to do with your feelings. It has everything to do with whether or not that person is going to be committed to your God as my God. If you don't start there, you're messed up. Because anytime you talk about anything in this marriage that has to do with making the marriage work, it's going to be your opinion versus her opinion. It's not going to be my God opinion because your wisdom is foolishness to Him. He doesn't want to hear your common sense because He says that makes your path crooked. He just wants to know, what did I say? If you're not willing to do that, relationship is not going to work."

Because this woman you're marrying is well-educated, she ain't stupid. So you can't marry no woman that's going to go, "Yes, sir, whatever you say, honey baby child." That's not the woman you're marrying. Since you are marrying a woman that's got her own brain, you need to make sure her brain is fixed on God's mind. It's the fundamental issue y'all have is that Marvin Gaye was God, Earth, Wind and Fire was God. It was what the musicians were saying they were talking to each other about. "Girl, you the apple of my eye," all this other stuff, you don't get that out of no Bible.

The key to understanding getting into relationship is a divine providential hook-up. Please understand it. Anytime it's not a divine providential hook-up, you're in the flesh. And what does the flesh say? It's division, factions, anger. It doesn't work. It's telling you already. Even in the Bible, it says in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, "Marriage is trouble." Why would you go to trouble and not have God as the anchor? People say, "I'm having a lot of trouble in my marriage." Well, He told you up front that it is trouble. He didn't lie to you.

Well, here's a key thing. "Where you die, I will die." What did the Bible say? When you make a vow, you make it until death do us part. That's why she's ready for marriage. Some people will talk to you so beautiful while you're going to work. You're having a good day, all that sort of stuff, to keep you at bay that everything is all right. And when you come home, ain't nothing there. They didn't even leave you a note. They say, "You know the note. We've been writing this note for 20 years. Why I got to write you a note?" And they're gone.

They did not die with you because they were not committed to die with God. Understand, marriage and relationships are providential appointments. And until we commit to see them as providential appointments, we will destroy ourselves. Here's a key thing. Chapter 2, verse 5, it tells us it also begins with a physical attraction. It begins with a physical attraction. So somebody comes to somebody and says, "Well, I don't really like how they look, but I like how they be." There's some issues.

The Bible is saying there's nothing wrong with having a sexual attraction to somebody else. I made them male, and I made them female starting out, before I made them man and woman. So please understand, a sexual attraction to somebody is fine. Now look at chapter 2, he says. Now Boaz, in verse 5, says, then Boaz said to his servant, in other words, not just one time he's talking. He's picking his lead servant, his lead person, his foreman. That's who he's picking.

His foreman, and he's coming to his foreman. He doesn't know nothing about Ruth, and there's a sexual attraction that makes him say, "Who's that woman?" Now, a Moabite is not that far removed from a Jew, but they don't look the same. And she could have been dressed like a Moabite. That's also true within the text. So some people automatically go to a sexual attraction, and technically, if you walk with the word of God biblically, it could also simply be that she was dressed different. She is a Moabite, so she's not looking like a Jew, and therefore he is wondering how in the world is she in this field. Please understand how this works.

You've got this field, this big field. It's only divided by a hedge. Mosaic law says that when you have widows, you can't just leave them out here when the average age is 45 years of age. You just can't leave them out here to die. So understand, this young lady, this situation is they could be young widows. You go in Luke chapter 2, the woman Anna is a widow that lived in the temple and didn't die until she was some years later waiting for Jesus as a widow.

So you got young widows. So they come, and these 30-something-year-old men will marry 17, 16-year-old girls. I know it's different in our culture, but that's what they marry them. Joseph, keep it real, you got this person marrying who? Mary. How old was Mary? Anywhere from 14 to 16, and Joseph was probably in his 30s. This is what happened. So you could have young widows. So when they're in the field, the persons in the field, the reapers, they're men. They're reaping.

But they know widows are behind them. They were ordered by God to drop sheaves down so that the widows could pick them up and have ability to eat. Ruth was aggressively grabbing it. These other widows are going along, picking it up, and Ruth was working hard. Please understand, this is sometime the hardest time of the year in a very dry climate. And he's watching this woman work hard. So many people say it may not be the sexual attraction; it is her commitment to work hard, how she looked, and how she dressed.

But it seemed, from watching the words and how the words work themselves out in Hebrew, it was that he said, "Who was that woman?" In verse 5 he says, then Boaz said to his servant, lead foreman who was in charge of the reapers, "Whose young woman is that?" Why is the text saying it like that? He doesn't know Ruth. God learns about Ruth. Naomi knows about Ruth. But Ruth is not somebody he knows. So what does he first do? Investigate.

One of the problems with us getting into relationship is we don't investigate nothing. She fine, let me just get your number right here. Look at that boy, he's a football star. He may make the NFL and make me some money. What's your number? You see, we don't go through nothing. Instead of asking, "Tell me about this person," we learn that they aren't who they say they are. At least they took the time to learn. Tell me about... he didn't stop there.

Boaz is going to go investigate. That's why he says later on in the same chapter, I'm going to show you where he says, "I know all about you." When the servant and the lead foreman spoke, he wasn't good enough for Boaz. Because Boaz had to do an investigation. And he put the FBI, the CIA... okay, he didn't do it that way, but he put people out there to learn what was going on. So he first learned about the person. We don't want to hear nothing.

If you come to somebody, some people in the family would say, "I don't know if you want to marry that person." You got uncles coming up to you on the side going, "You better be careful." And we going, "Shh." We go back to the person, "Your uncle said this," when the uncle is telling you the truth. "I don't know about that girl." God says you should have listened. I put somebody right next to you to give you a heads-up, and you didn't listen.

God didn't name Eve, Eve. Adam did by watching her character and defining in the Old Testament, they defined a person's name. And the Bible is careful to bring Genesis back into the book of Ruth by saying, "Who is this woman?"

Guest (Male): Amen, Pastor Cannings. Thank you for emphasizing the importance of not getting carried away by the outward appearance of a potential partner, but understanding their mindset, especially in regards to God. And now I'd like to encourage you to visit us online at powerwalkministries.org. That's powerwalkministries.org to learn more about our ministry. You can also call us at 281-260-7402. That's 281-260-7402.

And when you contact us, would you please consider a generous one-time financial contribution or an ongoing scheduled contribution on a monthly basis? Our mailing address is Power Walk Ministries, P.O. Box 920517, Houston, Texas 772092. And now as we leave you, remember, when looking for a mate, our hope is that you will find someone whose mind is fixed on God first.