Ruth 2: Faithfulness Grows a Good Rep

Theme: We overestimate what we can do in the short term. We wildly underestimate what God can do through a lifetime of faithfulness.

The sovereignty of our great God is clearly seen in the story of Ruth. He guided her every step of the way to become His child and fulfill His plan for her to become an ancestor of Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:5). In the same way, we have assurance that God has a plan for each of us. Just as Naomi and Ruth trusted Him to provide for them, so should we.

Let’s read it together.

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Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT).
Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Today’s Focus: Ruth 2
• 0:54 Community Updates & Subscriber Push
• 1:28 Setting: Judges Era and God’s Quiet Work
• 2:22 Theme: Everyday Faithfulness Over Hype
• 3:12 Ruth’s Risk: Gleaning as a Vulnerable Outsider
• 4:00 Boaz Notices: Protection and Provision Begin
• 5:37 Reputation Built by Faithfulness
• 7:39 Kinsman-Redeemer Explained
• 8:46 Application: Be Faithful, Leave Outcomes to God
• 10:45 Prayer and Lineage: Ruth to Jesus

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey everyone, and welcome to the Bible Breakdown Podcast. In this podcast, we will be breaking down the Bible one chapter a day. Whether you are a new believer or have been following Christ for a while, we believe that you will learn something new and fresh every single day. So thank you for joining us. Let's get into breaking down the Bible together.

SPEAKER_01: 0:23

Well hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Bible Breakdown Podcast with your host, Pastor Brandon. Today, Ruth chapter two. And if I could give this one a title, it would be Faithfulness Grows a Good Rip. Faithfulness Grows a Good Rip. We're going to see how Ruth making this seemingly dumb decision actually starts to pay off in ways you would have never imagined because she is now at the bottom of the social totem pole. And I mean the bottom, which means all kinds of bad stuff could happen. But we're going to get into that in just a moment. As always, if you like what we're doing here, make sure you like, share, and subscribe to the YouTube channel. We're on the road to 1000. We're about halfway there. And you guys are helping us get there one subscription at the time. And it's going to be awesome when we get there. So make sure you're doing that. Also on the podcast, leave us a five-star review. And then if you don't mind, all of us are rallying at the Facebook discussion group called the Bible Breakdown Discussion, where man, we are just growing as the more we dig, the more we find. And I want to say thank you so much to those who are leaving comments and engaging with God's word. It is an honor to read God's word together. And if you have your Bibles, you want to open them up with me to Romans chapter two, is your friendly neighborhood Bible tour guide. I love the book of Ruth. Because as we learned yesterday, the book of Ruth is during the time of the judges. And what's amazing to me too is even in the time of chaos and confusion, God's always doing great stuff. And God's doing this great stuff right in the middle of a time of just weirdness. And that helps me because and I just be honest with you, I feel like we're living in a time of weirdness. And so it helps me to realize that even in that, God is always doing great things. And also we we tend to be in a generation and in a life where we celebrate big moments. You know, we you know someone said one time that social media is comparing your everyday reality to other people's highlight reels. And that really is true a lot of times. We think that unless we're hitting the home run or closing the deal or getting the promotion, that our life just doesn't matter. What the reality is it's the everyday faithfulness that God rewards. That's why I love kind of a a theme of the book of Ruth would be we tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term, but we wildly underestimate what God can do through a lifetime of faithfulness. And we learned yesterday that when Naomi, when her husband and her two sons died and left her with just two young daughters-in-law, she just really had lost everything. And when she was a an Israelite who had been living in Moab and she come goes back to live in Bethlehem again, one of her daughters-in-law says, Look, I can't do this, and she left. But the other one, Ruth, said, Hey, listen, I don't care what it's going to cost me. I know that we have nothing now. I'm not going to leave you like this. I'm going to be faithful to you. And this faithfulness really seemed like a dumb idea at the time. When she was young enough, she could go back and get married and have a family and be taken care of, but instead she's going to risk it all to be faithful. And we're going to see what starts to happen. Let's read this together. If you've got your Bibles, Ruth chapter 2, verse 1 says this. Now there was a wealthy and influential man in Bethlehem named Boaz, who was a relative of Naomi's husband, Elimelech. One day, Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, Let me go out into the harvest fields and pick up stalks of grain left behind by anyone who is kind enough to let me do it. Naomi replied, All right, my daughter, go ahead. So Ruth went out to gather grain behind the harvesters, and as it happens, she found herself working in a field that belonged to Boaz, the relative of her father-in-law, Elimelech. Now, pause for a moment. This was completely okay to do. As a matter of fact, in the first five books of Moses, what the people were required to do is they were required to leave the edges and the corners of the field, and for anything that fell, they were required to leave that alone for the widow, for the orphan, and for the traveler, the foreigner. And so you have a widow and a foreigner. So she fits in both of those. Because these people in the social hierarchy were considered the bottom of the totem pole. And you got to think, if you live in the United States, or if you live in a country that has this, you know, a lot of times now we have social safety nets that help people that are in these situations. Well, back then they didn't have that. Families took care of families, communities took care of communities. And so if you were a widow, an orphan, or a foreigner, you didn't have any of that. And so this was their way of helping those people. And so what she is doing, she is going and she is doing these things, but here's the catch is there was no safety for you either. You're a widow, you're an orphan, you're a foreigner, and so there's no one there to take care of you. So a lot of times, if you were attacked, there's no one to take care of you. Sometimes, unfortunately, and I hate to put it like this, that was almost like the cost of doing business. That if you were sexually assaulted or something like that, it's not supposed to happen, right? But who are you gonna tell? You're a widow, you're an orphan, you're a foreigner. So there was no one there to rescue you. And so sometimes that was just the way it worked. And so we're gonna see in a moment, Boaz doesn't want that to happen to her, and so he's gonna take care of her because of something very important that we're about to read. Verse 4. While she was there, Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and greeted the harvesters. The Lord be with you, he said. The Lord bless you, the harvesters replied. And then Boaz asked the foreman, Who is this young woman over there? And who does she belong to? In other words, who's her family? The foreman replied, She is the young woman of from Boab who came back with Naomi. She asked me this morning if she could gather grain behind the harvesters. She's been hard at work ever since, except for a few minutes to rest in the shelter. Boaz went over and said to Ruth, Listen, my daughter, stay right here with us when you gather grain. Don't go to any other field. Stay right behind the young women working in my field. See which part of the field that they are harvesting, and then follow them. I have warned the young men not to treat you roughly. In other words, don't do the cost for business to this lady. Leave her alone. And when you are thirsty, help yourself to the water that they have drawn from the well. Ruth fell at his feet and thanked him warmly. What have I done to deserve such kindness? she asked. I am only a foreigner. Yes, I know, Boaz replied, but I also know about everything you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband. I have heard how you left your father and your mother and your own land to live here among complete strangers. May the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge, reward you fully for what you have done. I hope to continue to please you, sir, she replied. You have comforted me by speaking so kindly to me, even though I am not one of your workers. At mealtime, Boaz called to her, Come over here and help yourself to some food. You can dip your bread in the sour wine, kind of like, you know, salsa, you know, that kind of thing, just to give it some flavor. And so she sat with the harvesters, and Boaz gave her some roasted grain to eat, and she ate all she wanted and still had some left over. So when Ruth went back to work again, Boaz ordered his young men, let her gather grain right among the sheaves without stopping her, and pull out some heads of barley from the bundles and kind of drop them on purpose for her. Let her pick them up and don't give her a hard time. So Ruth gathered the barley there all day, and when she had beat out the grain that evening, she filled an entire basket and she carried it back into town and showed it to her mother-in-law. Ruth also gave her some of the roasted grain that was left over from the meal. So imagine they're so they're so um destitute that she actually kept some of the food, and that's what they ate for dinner. And that's really a dire strait, but she's still thankful for what she had. Verse 19. Where did you gather all this grain today? Naomi asked. Where did you work? May the Lord bless the one who helped you. So Ruth told her mother-in-law about the man whose field she had worked, and she said, The man I worked with today, his name is Boaz. May the Lord bless him. Naomi told her daughter-in-law, he is known, uh he is showing his kindness to us as well as to your dead husband. This man is one of our closest relatives, one of our family redeemers. Other translations call him a kinsman redeemer. Then Ruth said, What's more, Boaz even told me to come back and to stay with the harvesters until the entire harvest is completed. Good, Naomi exclaimed. Do as he says, my daughter. Stay with his young women right there through the whole harvest. You might be harassed in other fields, but you'll be safe with him. So Ruth worked right alongside the women in Boaz's fields and gathered grain with them until the end of the barley harvest. Then she continued working with him through the wheat harvest in early summer. And all the while she lived with her mother-in-law. So what is happening is that she is being protected now because she's grown a good reputation for her faithfulness. Can I tell you a lot of times in life being faithful isn't fun? You know, it's it's fun when things begin, but as you continue to have and that's what faithfulness is, is continuing to do the right thing when nobody else is looking, it gets harder, it gets more difficult, it gets more complicated. But as we continue to do these things, God is continually faithful to us. And so I want to encourage you that if you find yourself in a season, it's just not fun anymore. You're just I feel like you're just spinning your wills and just constantly going through. Can I encourage you to be like Ruth? To be faithful because it's the right thing. Not because it's interesting or it's exciting, but because it's the right thing to do. Because what you don't realize is that likely people all around you may be in your family, maybe your extended family, maybe co-workers, maybe strangers. People are watching you. And you're slowly developing a good reputation as someone who is faithful. And maybe even something better is that you're not developing a reputation, but you're giving God a reputation of this is what it looks like. Not to be perfect, but to be faithful. And that's what really at the end we're called to do. Did you know we're not called to be successful? That's God's job. There's so many things that we can't account for that we can't do to cause us to be successful in life. God's called us to be faithful. And it's through our faithfulness that He determines our level of success. That doesn't mean we don't try with everything we have, of course, but we leave that to Him. We leave the level of accomplishment up to Him. We can't determine outcomes. We can determine our effort. And we want to have all the effort we can to be faithful because we wildly overestimate what we can do in the short term, but we wildly underestimate what God can do through us to a lifetime of faithfulness. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much. That Lord, you are more in control than we can imagine. That your word says that we can be confident that He who has begun a good work in us will continue to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. So I pray today, God, that we will grow in faithfulness so that we can grow in all you have for us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. Don't forget that Ruth 4.17 said that the women said, Naomi has a son that would be Ruth's offspring. And that Ruth's son was named Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse. And Jesse was the father of David. And David was the great, great, great, great, great grandfather of Jesus. Faithfulness may put you in line for the greatest blessing that you can't even imagine. I love you. I'll see you tomorrow for Ruth chapter three.