Ruth’s Story Is About More Than Romance | A Cloud Of Witnesses | Pastor Derek Irvin

Well, my name is Derek Irvin, and I'm the marriage and care pastor, and our biblical character this week is Ruth. And so the book of Ruth is a love story. So I think it was kind of like, well, if we got a love story, let's get the marriage guy in here, you know? I'm all about it, put me in coach, you know? So I love the book of Ruth because it's a beautiful love story. There are quotable moments, there are practical applications, but honestly, if you've read through Judges, by the time you get to Ruth, it's kind of just this refreshing change of pace, you know? I mean, Judges is kind of dark. It's like, I'm ready for a lighthearted love story. The last two weeks we've been in Judges. So two weeks ago, we talked about Gideon, and last week, Samson. And what we've been talking about in the book of Judges is this was a time when the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. And whatever happens when you have a culture who ignores God's word and does whatever seems right in their own eyes, things tend to degrade to the lowest basis common denominator. You know, what you have is oppression, you have violence, you have injustice,

and the people would find themselves being oppressed by an enemy, and God would raise up a judge. Now, a judge wasn't what we think of a judge. A judge was actually like a military leader to liberate them. And so there would be a time of peace followed by them doing whatever seemed right in their own eyes, and they would find themselves oppressed and calling out to God. And there was a redemption cycle that would happen where God is long-suffering, He's patient, He would hear their cries, raise up another judge to liberate them. If you've read the book of Judges, I mean, I'm talking just read it page by page, there's some dark stories in there. I'll share one with you, and I'm gonna try and be as delicate as I can with this. So there's a guy who throws his concubine out of the safety and security of his house, knowingly into a angry, brutal mob of men. They leave her for dead. The next morning, he gets up, finds her body, and he is indignant of what has happened. Like not that he played any role in this, even though he did, but what he decides to do is post-mortem, send 12 pieces of her to the 12 tribes of Israel

to send a message that this is an outrage, that this could happen in the land of Israel. I mean, you read that, you're like, well, that's dark. Yeah, so by the time you get to Ruth, it's like, yeah, I'm ready for a palate cleanser here. My wife and I will, a lot of times we'll watch a TV show before we go to bed. I remember one night we were watching a true crime docu-series, and it was the same kind of thing. You know, the show ends and it's like, I'm not ready to go to bed yet. My wife's like, what if we put on the Hallmark Channel? I'm like, yeah, let's do that. I want that to be the last image in my mind. And you know, as we come to the book of Ruth, I kind of think it's a bit like a Hallmark movie. Let me see if I can pitch the book of Ruth to you as a Hallmark movie. All right, so we have, one of our main characters is Naomi. And Naomi is a heartbroken woman who leaves the big city after losing everything. Because rule number one in a Hallmark movie is the main character moves to a small town, right? Moves to a small town to start over. And then you have Ruth. She's the loyal younger woman who quits her old life to start over. So the two together go to a charming small town.

Everybody knows everybody. It's a picturesque landscape. And they meet Boaz, the surprisingly handsome farmer. Yeah, you see what I'm doing here? And he takes an interest in Ruth. And you know, the matchmaking ensues, right? The women know it, the servants know it. Naomi definitely knows it. The only person who doesn't know it is our heroine, Ruth, who's clueless that she is the romantic leader of the story. Until an adorably awkward first meeting. And wise relationship advice from the widow leads us to the crucial romantic scene that takes place under the stars in a rustic environment. But no Hallmark movie would be complete without the plot twist complication that happens with exactly about 20 minutes before the end of the movie. A new suitor appears. Legal difficulties arise. The town gathers to discuss it. And alas, crisis is averted just in time for the big beautiful wedding as the whole town gathers together to celebrate the happy ending. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We'll call it. Harvest of Hope, coming to the Hallmark Channel this fall. All right, so I'll tell you what, let's take a look at the original screenplay. And if you have your Bibles, let's turn to Ruth chapter one, verse one. It says, in the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem and Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. The man's name was Elimelech. His wife's name was Naomi, and the names of the two sons were Malan and Kilian. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah, and they went to Moab to live there. All right, so before we get into the whole love story part, I wanna give you some of the geographical and cultural background. I feel like when we understand the background, it helps us to appreciate the story better. And so the first thing I would wanna draw your attention to is the geography. We have two lands mentioned. We have Bethlehem and we have Moab. Now you all know Bethlehem. We sing Christmas carols about Bethlehem. It's where Jesus was born. And also, you may not know this,

it's also where King David was born. But you may not know as much about the land of Moab. But I promise you, the people in this text, let me tell you, they knew Moab. There was history between Israel and Moab. It's kind of like if I said to you, remember 9-11? And it's like, well, of course, like it brings up a whole lot of things in memories because we all know I'm talking about more than just a date on the calendar. Or if I say Pearl Harbor, we all know I'm talking more than just a geographical point in Hawaii. No, these were events that shaped the psyche of generation. Same was true with Moab in Israel. Let me give you the backstory. So the Israelites left Egypt from slavery and they're on their way to the promised land. And we all know they took the long way there, right? And as they're going, they're wandering through a wilderness in a desert. They were hungry, they needed food, they needed water, and they come upon Moab. And Moab refuses not only to give them food and water that they needed, but they wouldn't even sell it to them. Which was, it was a major breach just in the hospitality, high value of the culture, but it also was dangerous. Moab had it in for Israel and they didn't stop with that because the next thing they did is the king of Moab,

he sought out what I feel like best could be described as a sorcerer for hire. And he paid him money to curse the Israelites. And it's a big thing, story in numbers that you can read, but basically it doesn't work. And so they pivot and they say, well, if we can't curse them, what if we could corrupt them? And so that's what they do. They get the Moabite women involved in this and they seduce the Israelite men into sexual immorality and pagan worship. And it ignites the wrath of God and a plague breaks out. And that day, 24,000 Israelites were killed in this plague. It was a national tragedy. So you better believe when somebody in this culture reads a story that says they're starting out in Bethlehem, which means the house of bread. They're in a famine, leaving the house of bread to go to Moab, it raises an eyebrow. All right, so let's pick up in our story here in verse three. It says, now Elimelech, Naomi's husband died and she was left with her two sons. They married Moabite women, one Orpah, the other Ruth. After they had lived there about 10 years, both Malam and Kilian also died. And Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband. All right, we'll skip down to verse 20. Naomi decides she needs to go back to Bethlehem. And as she arrives, the people say, oh, it's Naomi. And she says, don't call me Naomi.

You see, her name Naomi literally meant pleasant. She said, don't call me Naomi, which means pleasant. She told them, call me Marah, which means bitter. Because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. She left full and she returned back to Bethlehem empty and bitter. And what I want you to see in this is she had good reason to feel empty and bitter. Not only was she grieving the loss of her husband and her sons, but you gotta understand her entire world had collapsed. It was a complete and utter collapse of her economic, her social, and her legal. security. She had nothing. It's an agrarian culture where the men work the land and provide the income and the food. And so in that culture, if your husband dies, you better hope that you have sons. Because if you have a son, then the land, they will inherit the land, they'll work the land, they will take care of her into her old age. But if you lose your husband and your sons, man, you are in risk of having lost everything. You see, as a woman, she had no legal right to that land. And she had no means of income or support or food, which is one of the reasons why in the ancient Near East being a widow was one of the most vulnerable things that one could be. Because we just had no legal standing apart from a male family member, you couldn't perpetuate your family line and you were at risk of poverty and exploitation, which is one of the reasons why the Mosaic Law just consistently instructed the Israelites, I want you to care for the widow, the orphan and the foreigner. Well, as Naomi gets ready to go back to Bethlehem, her two

daughter in laws, Orpah and Ruth want to go with her, they love her. But Ruth just strenuously like, No, ladies, you can't. No. Like I don't have a husband. I don't have a son. I don't have income. I don't have land security. I don't have a future guaranteed. I'm going back to my homeland to live on the very edge of survival. Ladies, there's nothing there for you. Don't hitch your wagon to me. And Orpah decides to stay. But Ruth insists on coming. And look what she says in verse 16. Ruth replies, Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Wherever you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God. I love that Ruth is willing to leave what she knows to follow God into the unknown. And I love that Naomi is the catalyst. Her relationship with God is the catalyst. Because Ruth has had a front row seat into seeing how Naomi lives out her relationship with God and something about the way she has lived out that relationship with God makes her say, I want that. You ever had somebody in your life, maybe a mother, a father, a pastor, a friend, a mentor, that just the way they live out their relationship with God made you say, Oh my goodness, like I want what they've got. I experienced that when I graduated from college, I in college drifted in my faith spiritually. But post college, I got involved in a young adults group at a local church. And I got to tell you, there was something about seeing people my own age, who were authentic in their pursuit of God, they were real. It was transformative to me. And it made me willing to say, you know what, I am, I am ready to leave some things behind to be all in with this because I want what I see in them. It catapulted my faith and it changed the direction in the course of my life. You see, Ruth was willing

to leave some things behind. She was leaving the land of Moab. And the Old Testament, as you read through the Old Testament, each of these lands that we read about, had tied to them a deity, it was kind of a national God, a national deity. And in Moab, the national deity was Chemosh. And what that meant is if you were a Moabite, you were by definition a Chemosh worshiper. If you were a Moabite, you participated in offering sacrifices to Chemosh and doing the rituals and incantations and all of those things. And I think for us in our culture, we read that and it's hard, it's hard to contextualize that to us. It's just so foreign from anything that we would do. But let me do this because I think it helps to maybe kind of make it applicable to us when you think about it like this. You see, what they were doing was they were trying to control and manipulate their environment to get their needs and their wants met. And they lived in an agrarian society. So they needed rain to be able to have the crops to grow to be able to eat. So the whole deal with these gods was they believe that if we do the right mix of cantations, incantations, like if we do the right sacrifice followed by this, it will compel this God to give us rain, which will give us what we need and want. And when you think about it through that lens, oh yeah, we do a version of that. Whether if it's we want and desire love or acceptance or wealth or success, possessions, whatever it is, we certainly have a pattern at times of sacrificing way too much to attempt to control and manipulate our environment to get our needs and wants met.

Anytime that we take something, even a good thing, and we elevate it above God, we turn that thing into an idol. You see, Ruth was not only willing to leave some things behind, but she was also willing to trust God enough to follow Him into the unknown. And Ruth, I love she says, your God will be my God. And in that moment, what I hear is a person making this a personal decision. There's a difference between I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, I go to church, and I have made Him my God. You see, that's the moment. And when we're starting our services this weekend with baptism, I want you to know that's what you're seeing in that moment. You're seeing people who are saying, hey, I want everyone to know that there was a moment when I made a decision to leave some things behind to trust God enough to follow Him into the unknown. And I want everyone to know it. I have made Him my God. It is a personal decision, but hear me on this, it is not a private decision. How do I know that? Well, because the very first thing after us saying, God, I'll do whatever you ask me to do, that God asks us to do is to get baptized, which is a public expression of faith.

And I'm like, why would God do that? Well, I think part of why He does that is He knows that to live out this walk with God, we are gonna need people, brothers and sisters in Christ, to encourage us and support us along the way. We're gonna need our people. I love how Ruth says, your people will be my people. Your God will be my God. And I just wanna ask you here, do you have your people? I mean, do you have people in your life that can speak truth into your life? You've given them permission to speak truth. You have permission to speak truth into their life. People who know you well enough to know what's really going on, you know, that you do life with, that you trust each other, that you follow God together and encourage one another. It's possible that you could say, yeah, I have my church, but I don't have my people. And listen, if you have your church and you don't have your people, you only have half the church. And we want to help you find the other half of church. It's why we put so much energy and work into creating environments like our small groups and our gatherings, our life groups. We have life groups meeting every night of the week, all across the city, across all of our campuses. We have soap Bible studies that meet in most of our campuses on multiple mornings a week.

We have a re-engaged marriage small group that meets every Tuesday night, 6.30 to 8.30 with childcare. On top of that, our gatherings, we have monthly gatherings of men, which is called Valor. We have That Girl, which is for women, and Grace Marriage, which is a monthly gathering for marriage. We do all of this because we want you to find your people, because it's gonna be important for your spiritual growth along the way. All right, let's get back to the love story. All right, so we have Naomi and Ruth, and they go back to Bethlehem. And Ruth says, I'm gonna go out to one of the fields and I'm just gonna see if they'll let me gather the leftover grain so that we can eat. And she ends up in the field of Boaz. And Boaz has put together who she is, and Boaz goes to her and he says, hey, listen, I want you to know, you can stay in this field as long as you like. I've already told the men to leave you alone. You can have all the water you like. And here is what she says. This is chapter two, verse. 10, at this she bowed down with her face to the ground. She asked him, why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me a foreigner? I love in this, I love that he notices her character and reputation first.

You see, she says, why would you notice me? Listen to what he says. Boaz replied, hey, I've been told all about what you've done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband and how you left your father and mother in your homeland and 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. I think there's some principles here in just the kind of person that one would want to pick to be in a relationship with or a marriage with. And let me just start by saying, listen, I fully get that everyone who is not married doesn't necessarily want to be in a relationship or be married. I'm not trying to suggest you should, not trying to talk you into it. But there are some people here who would say, yeah, I would like to be in a relationship or maybe be married someday. And to those folks, I just wanna say, hey, here are some things, some principles to look for along the way. First is I noticed that Boaz notices who she is first. Second thing is decide in advance what you want in a spouse and even the type of person that you allow yourself to be attracted to.

When my wife and I actually, before my wife and I started dating, my wife created a list of the character traits that she wanted in a husband. And so she was a single mom and guys, she was not messing around. Like she was a dialed in focused woman. Our first date felt a bit more like a job interview. I mean, literally first question, so where do you see yourself in five years? Followed by where do you see yourself in 10 years? And then I'm like, okay, I think I'm doing okay. And then she goes, I noticed that you said you think you might be married. What kind of woman would you look for for a wife? This woman is intense, man. It was so over the top. Honestly, it was endearing to me. Yeah, I liked her. So, but I appreciated that she wasn't willing to settle. Some things to look for once you start dating. How do they treat people who have no way to benefit them? How do they treat the waiters in a restaurant? And then how do they interact in different relationships in their life? So how do they interact with their coworkers, their parents, their kids, if they have them, friends, neighbors, just, or even their exes? Like, what does all that look like? And is there congruency in that?

And follow the 90 day rule. The 90 day rule says, don't let your heart get attached until 90 days have passed. And the reason for that is that it gives time to see if the words and the actions match. It creates enough space to see how they respond when they're disappointed or frustrated. It gives time to see if their private life and their public life are similar. And a big deal in this is you're looking for patterns and patterns take time to emerge. Patterns are a way better foreteller than promises. Listen, there's a reason why businesses hire people on a 90 day probation period, because we can all fake it for about 90 days. But then our true colors start to show up. And you don't wanna have your heart attached and be head over heels before you've really gotten a good look at what's there. All right, other principle. If you want a God-centered marriage one day, look for and only date somebody who has God in the center of their life right now. You want more than somebody who's just willing to go to church with you. You want somebody who's like, I'm gonna be in church because those are my people. And then another one has to do with how you manage your relationship before you're married from a physical intimacy standpoint.

Listen, the Bible says that we're to abstain from sex until we're married. Our culture says that's foolishness. What I would say is anybody who's wanting to have a God-centered marriage, in a God-centered marriage, I promise you, there are gonna be many things together as a couple where you're gonna have to decide, are we gonna do what God wants us to do or are we gonna do what we wanna do? And this is kind of one of the first things that he gives you as a couple to steward together. So make the decision to do it the right way. Make a decision to. say, you know what, we're gonna set a precedent as for me and my house, we're gonna follow God in this. And my final thought on this is don't marry a project. Like, Fixer Upper is a great TV show. It's a lousy, lousy dating strategy, all right? So we have Ruth saw some character traits or Boaz saw some character traits in Ruth, but we see some things that are pretty impressive in Boaz as well that I wanna point out. I love that Boaz is a provider and he's a protector. Boaz provides for her. He actually goes to his people who are gathering the grain and he's like, hey, make sure you drop a bunch of extra grain for Ruth to pick up. He's a protector. I was talking to my wife about this and she's like,

you know, I love that he's proactive in his protection. You know, being a woman in that environment with no, you know, a widow was dangerous. It was a vulnerable place and he protected her physically, he protected her reputation, he protected her purity. They end up in a position where he could have let things go too far, but he doesn't. I really like that about him. And guys, if I can just talk to the Christian husbands in the room, you know, we're called to be a provider and a protector, but sometimes I think, we think that's all there is to this job description. You know, we're like, I'm a provider, I'm a protector, why isn't she happy? My goodness. And what I wanna suggest to you is provider and protector is just the cover charge into the game, okay? It is needed, but it is not all that's needed. See, the other two things that are needed is to be a pursuer and an initiator. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Pursuer is you're gonna pursue her heart. And listen, we all do this when we're trying to win her heart over. That's why we write the silly love notes and we go to the flower and patio show and whatever you want, babe. Until we get married, we're like, whew, glad that's over with, all right? But what I wanna suggest to you is that we need

to engage in our marriages with the same kind of intentionality that we did when we were trying to win our wife's heart. An intentional marriage is a healthy marriage. And then finally, in addition to being provider, protector, pursuer is being an initiator. So this has to do with the idea of being the spiritual leader of the family. Dr. David Stoop, is an author, speaker, the late Dr. Stoop stood on this stage about 10 years ago and he said something that really stuck with me that I wanna share with you. He said, you know, when we talk about spiritual leader, we often get it wrong because we go to kind of the one up, one down thought of leadership. Like it's about them doing what I say. But if you wanna understand how the Bible describes spiritual leadership for us guys as husbands, it has more to do with substitute leadership for initiator. Be the spiritual initiator in your family. It's so easy for us to be and get passive in these things. And so being a spiritual initiator means that we're gonna be the ones who brings it up. We're gonna be the ones that say, hey babe, why I think we do need to find our people. What if we get a group? What if we check something like that out? Like on our app, we have easy ways to get into a group right there on our app, or you can go and talk to a campus pastor or adult ministry leader.

Being a spiritual initiator says, I wanna carve out time for us, just you and me as a couple or family devotionals or whatever it may be, it's rejecting passivity and saying, I'm gonna be the one who leads out spiritually within the family. All of that has to do with how we think of what God has called us to be as Christian men and husbands. So we have Boaz appreciates Ruth's character. We have Ruth is very aware of Boaz's integrity. And so you have this story is more than just two godly people who found each other because we still have a significant problem that needs to be resolved. And the significant problem that needs to be resolved is that Naomi is still a widow. Ruth is still a widow and Naomi's deceased husband, the Limelech is still in danger of his family line disappearing, of the land, the family land being lost forever. So fortunately, the Bible made a provision for just this kind of situation that is called a kinsmen redeemer. The NIV and the Bible and NIV calls it a family guardian, but basically it was a provision in the Old Testament law that said, hey, when this kind of thing happens, a close relative can step in to restore what is lost. been lost. And Boaz qualified as a close enough relative to step in as a kinsman redeemer. But the way that it worked is there was actually somebody who was closer in line kind of ahead of line of Boaz, who first had to have the right of first refusal. Boaz takes it to this person. And at first, he's like, Yeah, I think I am going to exercise the option to redeem

the land. But when he learns that he would also have to marry Ruth the Moabitess, he decides to pass. Boaz is eager to step in. He redeems the land, he marries Ruth, and he restores hope to a family who had lost all hope. Naomi begins the story empty. And she ends the story full. Ruth has a husband, a son has been born, the family line has been perpetuated. And that son becomes the grandfather of King David. In this love story, Boaz as the kinsman redeemer is the hero of this love story. But in the broader love story of the Bible, Jesus is the hero, and he is our kinsman redeemer. Because we are spiritually bankrupt. And Jesus took on human flesh to become a part of our family to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. He paid the price to redeem us. So Boaz redeems a family, Jesus Christ, he redeems mankind, Boaz restores an inheritance, Jesus restores relationship to God. Boaz rescues Naomi and Ruth from an uncertain future and Jesus rescues us from the very power of sin and death itself. Praise God. As we draw to a close in our time here, I want to pray for what could be two different groups of people that are in the room here today. The first group that I would want to pray for would be anybody who would say, the truth is, is that I have made a decision to follow Jesus. But I have drifted into a place of compromise, where I'm finding myself doing whatever seems right, in my own eyes. And I know that it's not what God wants for me. Others here this morning might say, you know what I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, I always have. I don't know that I've ever had a I'm gonna make him my God, kind of personal moment. And if that is you, if you would say I would want to step into this life to leave some things behind to trust God enough to follow into the unknown. I would like to pray for you as well. If you

would just if you would bow your head and close your eyes. If you're here today and you would say, Lord, you know that I believe in you. But I want to follow you. I need to make this relationship with you personal. I want you to be my God. And there's nothing that I'm not willing to do for you. I will leave things behind I will trust you enough to follow you into the unknown. Will you come into my life today? If you do that, if you say that if you whisper that in your heart, God will come into your life. You will be born again, you will become a new creation in Christ. For anybody here this morning, it would say I actually have made that decision to make God my God, but I have gotten myself in some situations that I know I should not be in. I have allowed myself to pursue things that just seem right in my own eyes knowing full well, it's not what God wants for me. Right here in this moment, God I confess, this isn't what you want for me. And this isn't what I want for me. And I make a decision to turn from this Lord. I thank you that you've forgiven me I want today to be a changing moment. I want to pursue you with all of my heart, all of my soul, all of my strength, all of my might, Lord, give me the strength to do that. In Jesus name. Amen. If you made a decision to make God your God, this morning, I would love it if you would text the word yes to the number on the screen 85379. The reason that I want you to do that is that we want to disciple you. We want to help you grow in this faith. We want to come alongside you along the way. Well, God bless you guys. It was an honor to be able to share with you this morning.