So we're starting a new series tonight, and for the next month, the month of October, in the Book of Ruth.

Are you familiar with the Book of Ruth?

It's this little book, four chapters long, tucked in amongst the, toward the start of the Old Testament, but it is a rich book.

It is densely packed full of all this beautiful imagery and beautiful ideas.

And that is quite a typical feature of Hebrew narrative.

So the Book of Ruth is written in the language Hebrew.

And one of the things that is particular about Hebrew is the ability to pack dense ideas and a lot of stuff into a short amount of space.

So we're going to see just in Ruth 1 alone, our story is going to propel us into all different parts of the Bible, and we're going to try and synthesize all that.

So, our mission tonight is to cover Ruth 1 and to sort of set the pieces for the story of Ruth that we're going to deal with for the next three weeks in the month of October.

Now, the way we're going to do that is just with this kind of observation that every story has three things.

Setting, character and plot.

Setting, character and plot.

We're going to look at the Book of Ruth, the story of Ruth through this lens and see what the Lord has for us.

Firstly, setting.

So, the setting of a story is the world in which it takes place, right?

The location, the time.

Think of Star Wars Episode IV.

Where's the story set?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

That's the setting of the story of Star Wars, but it's not a story about galaxies a long time ago.

It's a story about a boy who answers the call for help and is drawn into a world that's so much bigger than himself.

Think about the Lion King.

Where's that story set?

The African savanna, the Pride Lands.

It's set in Africa, but it's a story about guilt and shame and calling and wrestling with these things.

So, what's the setting of the story of Ruth?

We read in chapter one, verse one.

In the days when the judges ruled...

And we could pause there because in seven words, the Bible is opening up this whole world of associations and themes that the attentive Bible reader is supposed to pick up on.

In the days when the judges ruled.

So, let me give you a quick biblical history refresher of what's happened in the story so far.

So, in Genesis one, God creates a good world He places human beings in that world to rule it and to image God.

They decide, actually, they don't want to rule it with God, they want to rule it without God.

And so, God sends them out of the garden, but he promises at the end of Genesis three that from this woman Eve, eventually one man will come who is going to restore all things and make all things right again.

And then we get to Genesis 12 and God picks one man.

And so, we think, oh, is he the man, the one who's going to save everything?

It turns out, no, he's a messed up guy.

His name's Abram, Abraham.

He has a son, Isaac.

Isaac has Jacob.

Jacob has 12 sons.

They become the nation of Israel.

At the end of Genesis, the people of Israel go into slavery in Egypt.

The Book of Exodus is the second book of the Bible.

God brings the people of Israel out of Egypt through the 10 plagues, through the Red Sea, into the wilderness.

God gives them the law.

He leads them with a pillar of cloud and fire.

Deuteronomy ends with Moses' death in the Book of Joshua.

This young guy, Joshua, takes over the leadership of the nation of Israel, and he leads them into the promised land, where they have to sort of drive out the nations that are living there.

And then we enter this period of biblical history that is the Judges.

The pattern of the Book of Judges is Israel are terrible, they are forsaking God, so God raises up one of the nations surrounding Israel to conquer them, and then they repent, and God raises up one person from inside the nation to deliver them.

Fourteen times, that cycle happens in the Book of Judges.

So Deborah is another hero of the Book of Judges, Samson, Gideon, these are all some of the Judges in the Book of Judges.

And then we turn to this book, the Book of Ruth, the opening seven words in the days when the Judges ruled.

So we're looking at the setting of this story.

The historical setting is in this time period, the time period when the Judges ruled.

Now, if I could go from the first sentence of Ruth all the way to the last sentence, we read in chapter four, Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him.

The women living there said, Naomi has a son and they named him Obed.

He was the father of Jesse, the father of who?

David who?

Who David?

King David.

So, we're getting well ahead of ourselves.

We're not going to talk about King David for three or four weeks.

But the Book of Ruth is historically and in the scope of the story of the Bible, is set in this middle period between the Judges and the Kings, between the Judges and the Kings.

In fact, if you have a Bible and you were to look at the Book of Ruth and turn one page earlier, you would be in the end of Judges.

The last sentence of the Book of Judges is this, in those days, Israel had no king, everyone did as they saw fit.

So, this story opens with this line that it was in the days when the Judges ruled.

I think it's kind of like, you could imagine the music.

Imagine Hans Zimmer or John Williams was asked to compose a piece of music to go under Ruth.

The opening sentence of Ruth is this, like, foreboding kind of dark music, in the days when the Judges ruled, there was no king.

This is the historical setting of Ruth.

We continue in verse one.

There was a famine in the land.

And just pause again, that's another seven words that are rich with meaning and association.

If we're reading the Bible from start to finish, then by this point in the story, we have already seen three famines.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all experienced a famine in Genesis 12, 26 and 42 respectively.

And the story of the Bible shows that bad things happen in times of famine.

So once again, the author of the story of Ruth is playing this menacing music to open the story.

It was in the days when the Judges ruled, there was no king in Israel and there was a famine in the land.

Which brings us to...

This is actually why our graphic is kind of an agricultural theme, because the Book of Ruth is an agricultural kind of story of famine and fields and harvest.

Which brings us to the third part of verse 1.

So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab.

This is the final layer of the setting of Ruth, and that is geographic setting.

This town called Bethlehem is a small village in the land of Judah, which is one-twelfth of the broader land of Israel in the biblical time, at the very bottom.

And this little town of Bethlehem, if you were to look east, straight east from Bethlehem, you would be looking down a valley, a big valley called the Jordan Valley.

At the bottom of the valley, when you look east, is the Dead Sea.

Now the Dead Sea is what the Jordan River, which runs north-south, runs straight into the Dead Sea and it doesn't flow out, that's why it's called the Dead Sea.

If you were to look beyond the valley, looking east from Bethlehem, you would see the mountains of Moab.

And on the other side of those mountains is all the fertile, flat agricultural fields of Moab.

So this story is geographically set in Bethlehem, looking east towards the mountains of Moab.

Now, Moab, let's just talk about Moab for a moment, because if we're reading our Bible, there's this story in Genesis 19, where Abraham's nephew Lot has two daughters, and there's no men for the daughters to marry, so they conspire to sleep with their father and have children.

There's a word for that, incest.

And the children of one of the daughters of this incestuous relationship is Moab.

So from the start, this book is giving us all this background, foreboding information about what is happening behind the story.

The people of Moab are descended kind of as a branch off of the people of Israel, the people of God, but in a weird way, the result of wickedness and incest and a lot of weird stuff.

So a man from Bethlehem, together with his wife and two sons went to live for a while in the country of Moab.

That is one verse.

And there's all these rich kind of background layers in the setting, which brings us to the characters of the story of Ruth.

Now, you know what a character is.

The characters are the actors within a story, the people who struggle for and against.

When we look at stories, we typically think that there are two main types of characters.

There's the protagonist and the antagonist and the surrounding characters that either help or hinder them.

Agony means struggle, the agonist is the struggler.

And so, the protagonist of the story, of any story, is the one struggling for and the antagonist is the one struggling against.

So, who's the protagonist and the antagonist of Ruth?

We've been hinted at the first character that has appeared so far is a man from Bethlehem.

We read in verse 2, The man's name was Elimelech, his wife's name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Marlon and Killion.

They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah, and they went to Moab and lived there.

Now, I don't want to spoil the plot, because we're going to get to that in a second, but just observing what the text gives us at this point, we can look at what the names of these characters mean in Hebrew.

So, Elimelech or Elimelech means, My God is King.

Now, you think in the context of Judges, the period where Israel had no king, if your name is God is My King or My God is King, that's kind of like a good, like the music turns hopeful for a moment.

Here's a person who believes that God is his king in the context of the land that has no king.

Naomi, his wife, her name means pleasant or lovely, which is a lovely name.

And the names of the two sons, I don't know what mom and dad were thinking, but Marlon and Killian mean sickly and frail.

That's what they named their children, sickly and frail.

And I won't spoil the plot of what happens to sickly and frail, but we'll see shortly.

So we're introduced to four characters in the second verse of Ruth, but I'm trying not to spoil the story, but only one of those characters lives past verse five.

And that character is Naomi.

Naomi is the central character of the Book of Ruth.

The Book of Ruth doesn't bear Naomi's name.

She's not the first character mentioned or the last, but she is the character whose name appears most in the story of Ruth.

And when you read it and reread it, I think the eyes that we're invited to see the story of Ruth through is Naomi's eyes.

This is Naomi's story.

She is the number one character.

The second man character is this one that the story keeps calling Ruth the Moabite.

And we hear the word Moabite and we shut up because especially a Moabite woman, because that whole nation of Moab over those mountains when you look east from Bethlehem, were descended from an incestuous, messed up relationship.

So Ruth the Moabite is the second man character in this story.

And yet in chapter 3 verse 11, there's this phrase that says Ruth is a woman of noble character.

What does that kind of make you think of?

Proverbs 31, the wife of noble character.

Scholars think that one of the beautiful complex, multi-layered things that is happening in the Book of Ruth is that it is a narrative illustration of the Proverbs 31 woman.

When you look at Ruth, she is, she may be a Moabite, a Moabite shudder, but she is a woman of noble character.

So the story is inviting us to flip our expectations upside down.

The third main character is Boaz, but we don't meet him till next week, so don't worry about him.

Those are the protagonists, the three main strugglers forward in the story, Naomi, Ruth and Boaz.

So who is the antagonist?

Who is the one who is fighting back against them?

Well, no one.

When you read Ruth, there's no human, at least.

There's no person who is in conflict with the three main protagonists.

And that's part of the beauty of the story of Ruth.

The circumstance is the antagonist, which brings us to the plot of the story of Ruth.

So every story has a plot, right?

The plot is the central conflict, the problem that has to be overcome.

Think of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo discovers the ring of power.

What's he going to do?

That's the plot event.

Think of Luke, Star Wars theme.

When Luke fiddles with R2-D2 and the hologram comes up, Leia is calling for help.

What's Luke going to do?

This is the inciting plot event.

Think of Harry finding out he's a wizard.

The plot is kicked off with this conflict event.

So what's the plot of the Book of Ruth?

We read in verse 3.

Now Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died.

And she was left with her two sons.

They married Moabite, Shiva, women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth.

After they had lived there about 10 years, both Marlon and Killion, aka Sickly and Frail, also died.

And Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.

In five verses of Ruth chapter 1, we've had famine, immigration, death, suspicious marriage, suspicious marriage, death, death.

The Book of Ruth opens with tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy.

It reads like the Book of Job.

In the very start of Job, just terrible, terrible things coming.

And so Ruth is the story of a widowed, childless woman living in a foreign, hostile land in a time of famine.

The story, the plot of Ruth is what happens to that widowed, childless woman living in a hostile, foreign land in a time of famine.

The story of Ruth is Naomi's story.

On one level, that's the plot.

That's the conflict that has to be overcome.

Verse 6 says, when Naomi heard in Moab that Yahweh had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her daughters-in-law, or Orpah and Ruth, prepared to return home from there.

With her two daughters-in-law, Naomi left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah.

Now here in verse 6, this is the first time God is mentioned in the story.

So there's a new character enters the scene.

God enters the scene.

And I wonder how you feel musically, like emotionally at this moment.

Remember this music that Hans Zimmer has composed.

It starts ominous, but now God enters the scene.

What does the music do?

When I was first reading Ruth over and over over the past couple of weeks, I felt the music go hopeful at this point, because God enters the story.

And then as I read it again and again, and especially saw the story through Naomi's eyes, I actually started to feel like the emotional feeling, the emotion, was the opposite of that.

Because you think about this story from Naomi's perspective, tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy has visited her.

She has left Bethlehem and gone to a foreign land where her husband and two sons have died.

And then from that place, she hears that God was active in providing food for his people back in Bethlehem.

Now, great, great that God is active over there, but where is God right here, right now in my circumstance?

I think that's the question that Naomi is wrestling with.

Do you relate to that question at all?

It's great to remember the times when God was active in your life, when you were younger, the things he did.

It's great to celebrate God's activity in somebody else right now.

But this question at the heart of Ruth is, where is God right here, right now in my circumstance?

It's great that he's provided food.

But where is God now?

If you've ever asked that question, then Ruth is a story for you.

It's our story.

I think Ruth invites us to see the reality of life, that plot happens.

Plot happens, and I'm being a bit euphemistic.

Life happens, suffering happens, tragedy strikes.

Plot happens to us.

Naomi did not choose for a famine to strike her hometown.

She did not choose to go to this hostile land of Moab.

She didn't choose for her husband to die and her two sons to follow shortly after.

But plot happens, stuff happens, suffering hits, tragedy strikes.

Ecclesiastes, right?

Meaningless, meaningless.

What do people gain from all their work in this world?

Meaningless is the message of Ecclesiastes.

Plot happens.

Life is like a story that we don't get to write in some ways.

Ruth would never have chosen that to be her story.

She would never have chosen to be the widowed, childless woman living in a hostile foreign land in a time of famine.

But plot happens.

Life happens to all of us.

Life is a story we don't get to write.

Or maybe it's more like a story where we only get to write every second page.

Because while it's true that plot happens, suffering comes to us, whether we like it or not, and we can't control that, we can choose how we respond when suffering hits.

Life is a story where we only get to write every second page, which brings us to the response that Naomi and Orpah and Ruth have.

Notice at this point in the story, they've all experienced the same thing.

They've all lost a husband.

They're all in the same boat.

Granted, Naomi has also lost two sons.

But these three women are in the same situation, and yet we see three very different responses to their suffering.

So verse 8.

Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, Go back, each of you, to your mother's home.

May Yahweh show you kindness, as you have showed kindness to your dead husbands and to me.

May Yahweh grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.

Then she kissed them goodbye, and they wept aloud, and said to her, We'll go back with you, to your people.

But Naomi said, Return home, my daughters.

Why would you come with me?

Am I going to have any more sons who could become your husbands?

Return home, my daughters.

I'm too old to have another husband.

Even if I thought there was still hope for me, even if I had a husband tonight, and then gave birth to sons, would you wait until they grew up?

Would you remain unmarried for them?

No, my daughters, it's more bitter for me than for you, because Yahweh's hand has turned against me.

At this, they wept aloud again.

Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.

Look, said Naomi, your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods.

Go back with her.

But Ruth replied, don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.

Where you go, I will go.

Where you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people and your god my god.

Where you die, I will die and there I will be buried.

May Yahweh deal with me, be it ever so severely if even death separates you and me.

When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

Three responses when plot happens, when suffering hits and tragedy strikes, three responses, Orpah, Naomi and Ruth.

They model three different perspectives, responses that we can have.

Orpah separates, Naomi isolates and Ruth consecrates.

Orpah separates, Naomi isolates and Ruth consecrates.

So firstly, Orpah separates, verse 14, At this the three women wept aloud again, then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.

Look, said Naomi, your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods.

Go back with her.

Orpah's approach when plot happens, when suffering hits, is to distance herself from the pain, from the people and from God himself.

She separates herself in the middle of her suffering.

And fair enough, it's a valid response.

In Orpah's case, she's young enough that she could start over.

She could find a good Moabite man, even though we get shivers when we hear that.

She could find a man, have children and live a life.

But in this story, she is separating herself from the pain, trying to move on, trying to replace it with other things.

She is separated from the community that she had found herself in, from Naomi and Ruth.

And she even separates from God himself.

Naomi said that, Naomi said that Auper was going to return to her gods, separating.

And so for our plot in life, it's all too common to want to separate ourselves from the pain.

We do this in a hundred million ways, with distracting ourselves from our pain or medicating it with whatever pain medication, drug of choice.

We had this quite a profound moment at Youth Group a few months ago.

I was talking with a group of five or so teenage boys about anxiety.

Anxiety is not an easy thing to talk about with anyone, let alone five 15-year-old boys, but we were trying.

And we came across this idea that sometimes anxiety or feelings like that in life can feel like this big mountain that's just next to you, just casting its shadow over you, just this ominous thing that's always there.

And so I was asking the boys, like, what, like, do you relate to that feeling of anxiety?

Like, what do you do?

What, what, what are the ways that people deal with anxiety in life?

And one of the boys said, well, you could just get drunk.

He said, yeah, if you get drunk, you'll forget the mountains there and have a good time.

And I'm like, oh, okay, this is a moment, like this, I got to say the right thing right now, because this is a critical moment.

Now, he's 15 years old.

I'm certain that this is hypothetical for him.

But he's seen enough of the world to know that that's what people do with the mountain of anxiety that is overshadowing them.

He says, people just get drunk and they forget about it and they live a good life again.

And so I'm like, praying, God, like, help me right now, help me say the right thing that would not lead this boy on the wrong path.

And not that God gave me this, but what I did say is, yeah, I think it would work for one night.

And then you'll wake up the next morning and the mountain's still there.

So then what do you do?

And he said, well, you get drunk again.

And I said, then you wake up the next morning, the mountain's still there, what do you do?

And we went on.

I don't know what he took from that experience, but the place that we landed that night was Philippians 4.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the peace of God, which transcends understanding, will guard your heart.

That's where I was trying to take him.

That all of the pain medication options that the world offers will not deal with the mountain itself.

They will make it go away for one night until it returns again in the morning.

Only God is able to take that away.

And so I think Orpah, bless her, I hope she was able to deal with the suffering, but separating ourselves from our suffering, numbing ourselves from feeling it doesn't make it go away.

It just makes it come back the next day.

Pete Scazzero says, his wisdom is, don't bury your feelings alive.

It's a good line.

If you bury your feelings alive, they'll come back as a zombie and they'll get you later.

Which brings us to the second response in the midst of suffering.

Verse 8, Naomi said to her daughters-in-law, go back each of you to your mother's home.

May Yahweh show you kindness as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me.

May Yahweh grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.

This is Naomi's response.

Her response is to isolate herself in her suffering.

Notice this is a different approach than what Orpah takes.

Orpah just drops it all and tries to leave and forget about it and separate.

Naomi, in a sense, bundles up all of her pain and she just wants to isolate herself and live with it and deal with it.

She firstly kind of succumbs to this isolation of the pain itself.

She says, there's no hope for me.

I can't have another husband.

I can't have more kids.

This is my life now.

I'm going to be a widowed, childless woman living in a foreign land for the rest of my life.

She isolates herself in her suffering.

And she also, I mean, is gracious, it's noble, that she tells her daughters-in-law to go and find a life for themselves.

But she's also just isolating herself from the community that God has placed her in to help her in the midst of her suffering.

And she's isolated from God as well.

Later on in Ruth chapter 1, Naomi says that Yahweh's hand has turned against me.

Now that's an isolating feeling if you think that God has turned against you.

So she bundles up her suffering and she isolates herself from everyone else.

And maybe that's what we're tempted to do in our suffering.

When plot happens, when tragedy strikes, sometimes we just grab it all and we isolate and we pull back from community, we pull back from God, we pull back by ourselves, we isolate.

And again, it's valid.

Especially if you have in the past had something hard and community was not helpful in dealing with that stuff.

It's valid to want to bundle it up and just say, peace out community, I'm just dealing with this one alone.

But Naomi, what's she going to do?

Go back to Bethlehem and just live alone.

And there's no future for her if she isolates from the community that God has placed her in and from the God who is working all things for good as well.

Which brings us to the third response in life when suffering hits.

Verse 16.

Ruth replied to Naomi, don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.

Where you go, I will go.

Where you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people.

Your God, my God.

Where you die, I will die.

There, I will be buried.

May Yahweh deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.

When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

This is Ruth's response.

The third response, when plot happens, when suffering hits, Ruth consecrates herself to God and to community in the midst of her suffering.

The word consecrate means to make holy, to set apart, to devote to God.

That's what Ruth does.

The language that she says in verse 14, Orpah kissed her mother in law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her, consecrated herself to Naomi and to Naomi's God.

This word clung in Hebrew is the word that's used in Genesis 2 in reference to the closest human relationship.

Genesis 2 verse 24.

That is why a man leaves his father and mother, this is talking about marriage, and is united.

This is the same Hebrew word, to cling, clings to his wife and they become one flesh.

Now, Ruth and Naomi don't get married, but it's this picture of clinging to each other.

Ruth consecrates herself to God and to community in the midst of her suffering.

She says, your God will be my God, your people my people, your death will be my death.

In English, we have an idiom, a phrase, through thick and thin.

Through thick and thin.

That's what Ruth consecrates herself in, I mean, marriage vows, say, in sickness and in health, in plenty and in want, for better, for worse, until we, you know, as long as we both shall live.

That's effectively what Ruth does.

She consecrates herself in thick and thin to God and to Naomi.

And I think she had the best response of them all.

You know, Jesus never promised that we would have a pain-free life.

He never said that.

In fact, he said the opposite.

In verse 33 of John 16, Jesus said, I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace.

In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world.

He says, you will have trouble.

The promise is there will be suffering, but there's a but, a massive but.

But I have overcome the world.

Take heart, Jesus says.

We have a, we sing a song here at Northern Life.

We have for a few years called You've Already Won.

And it was written by Shane and Shane around 2020, I think.

And the original parenthetical title of the song was You've Already Won, Song for Ukraine.

I've heard Shane Barnard, who co-wrote the song, tell the story of it was just when the stuff was really breaking onto the, breaking out against Russia and Ukraine.

And he wrote this song for those people five years ago.

And the words of the chorus that we sing so often are, I don't know what you're doing, but I know what you've done.

And I think that that's the invitation that God has for us tonight, that in the midst of our plot in life, when plot happens, we can't necessarily see what God is doing, but we look back and we see what he did.

When Jesus took on himself all of our sin and weakness and brokenness and guilt on the cross.

And we somehow ask that the Spirit might let that reframe what we are going through now.

We look back to what he's done and we also look forward to what he will do.

You know, the Bible ends with that picture of the new creation where every tear is wiped away, where the old is gone and the new has come, where we live with joy and freedom and peace forever.

But again, that's great for God to do something at the end of time.

Where is God right now?

Could God be present in the midst of your suffering in life?

I can't give you practical wisdom on how to take Ruth's path.

All I can do is point to it and say, she chose the best thing.

She consecrated herself.

She set herself apart and devoted herself to Naomi, to community around her and to God.

She doesn't know what God is doing in the midst, but she know what, I mean, this is pre Jesus, but we could say today, we don't know what God is doing right now, but we know what he has done and we know what he will do.

And we ask that that might reframe what we are going through in the present.

So as we finish, this is the way chapter one finishes.

In verse 19.

So the two women, Naomi and Ruth, went on until they came to Bethlehem.

When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them.

Remember, it's been ten years.

Naomi has been in Moab for ten years.

The whole town was stirred because of them and the women explained, can this be Naomi?

Don't call me Naomi, which means lovely.

She told them, call me Mara, which means bitter, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter.

I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.

So why call me Naomi?

Yahweh has afflicted me.

The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.

Can you hear the music?

It's in a minor key, definitely.

It's sad, it's somber.

This is, I mean, you'll have to come back next week to see what happens in episode 2 of the story and afterwards.

But for now, we've come to the end of chapter 1 and we've established the pieces that we need to establish for the next 3 weeks.

The setting, the character and the plot of Ruth.

And so now let's finish with actually the end of chapter 1.

I was a bit cheeky before I cut off a verse.

Verse 22.

So Naomi returned from Moab, accompanied by Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

Surely the music as the barley harvest was beginning turns hopeful.

Ruth and Naomi are consecrated to each other and to God.

They don't know what God is doing, but they're trusting that He will do something in the midst of this circumstance.

And they arrive in Bethlehem as the harvest was beginning.

The famine is over and the food is coming.

So, please come back next week, or just read Ruth chapter 2, over and over and over again, to see what happens next.

We don't get to write our story.

At best, we write every second page.

Life happens to us.

We can't choose that, but we can choose how we respond.

So let me encourage you to look at the example of Ruth, the example of someone who consecrated herself to God and to her community in the midst of suffering.

I pray that that might be an example for you.

We don't get to write our story.

We get to write every second page.

But as we finish, let me read Psalm 139.

Your eyes, O God, saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

We don't get to write our story, but we know the one who does.

We know the one who has already written the end of the story.

And let that be an encouragement for you in the midst of what you're going through.

That our Father in heaven is underwriting every page of our story.

And He's gracious enough to let us hold the pen sometimes.

So let me pray and then we'll worship together.

Lord Jesus, we cast the eyes of our heart now to what you did for us on the cross.

When you died for our sin, you took our weight of guilt and shame upon yourself.

We thank you that in that moment, death was, and in the resurrection that followed, death was defeated and the end of the story was brought into the present.

And yet Lord, in so many of our lives, my brothers and sisters here, we're feeling, we're in a season of trial and suffering and pain.

And so we thank you that we know how the story ends, but we ask that you would be present here and now in the midst of our suffering.

God, would you be gracious enough to invite us by your Spirit to consecrate ourselves even deeper in relationship with you and with others?

Help us know that we don't carry this burden alone and that you work all things for good.

And as we worship now, we pray that your presence might be especially manifest and felt in this room tonight.

Comfort us as we lift up the name of Jesus.

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