JESUS'GRANDMOTHERS - RUTH

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope. Jesus' grandmothers. Ruth, a Moabite with no rights, no future, and unstoppable loyalty. Ruth was a Moabite, and Ruth Tail was not a minor footnote. The Moabites were a people born of the incestuous union between Lot and his eldest eldest daughter after the destruction of Sodom, Genesis nineteen. Their origin story was shameful and the stigma stuck. Deuteronomy twenty three verse three explicitly excluded Moabites from the assembly of Israel for ten generations. Ruth was not just a foreigner. She was from a people who were covenantally barred from God's community. When her Hebrew husband died in Moab, Ruth was left a childless widow in a foreign country with no legal rights, no inheritance, no children to care for her in old age and no social standing. Her mother-in-law Naomi, herself devastated by grief and bitterness, told Ruth plainly, go home, return to your people, your own gods, your own culture. There's nothing left for you with me. Ruth had every reason to go. Staying meant following a bitter old woman to a foreign country where she would be a complete outsider, where Moabites were not particularly welcome, where she had no family and no protection. The logical, reasonable, self-preserving thing to do was to go back to Moab. But Ruth clung to Naomi. The Hebrew word is the back, a fierce, tenacious clinging. And words, and she spoke words that have echoed through three thousand years of history. Where you go, I will go, and 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 the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely. If even death separates us. Ruth chapter one verses sixteen and seventeen. This was not a sweet sentiment. This was a vow. Ruth was choosing poverty over comfort, foreignness over familiarity, and a grieving mother in law over a fresh start. She was choosing a god she had come to believe in over the gods she had grown up with. She staked her entire future on that choice. In Bethlehem, Ruth did not sit and wait for God to provide. She went out to glean in the fields, back breaking, humiliating work reserved for the poorest of the poor, to feed herself and Naomi. She happened to glean in the field of Boaz, a wealthy kinsman redeemer. Boaz noticed her diligence and her faithfulness to Naomi. He protected her, fed her, and ultimately married her. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Ruth one verse sixteen. Ruth the Moabite, from a people born from the assembly of God, became the great grandmother of King David. Her son Obed sat and Oz Ne.

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And eventually it is through him, from him, we are Jesse and then David.

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Her name is in the genealogy of Jesus. And she has an entire book of the Bible named after her, one of only two women in scripture with that honor. The woman who had no legal right to be in Israel's community ended up at the very center of Israel's greatest royal dynasty. The outsider became the insider. The foreigner became family. The grief stricken widow became a mother of kings. God honors faithfulness even especially when it costs us everything. Working with what you have, where you are is how God positions you for what He has prepared for you. No barrier, no bloodline, no excluded background can stop God's grace when faith is present. O God, help us to have faith, to truly trust you. No matter how dark our circumstances get. Because it is in the darkness that your grace shine shines the brightest. We are happy to know, Lord, that in your plan, there are no castaways, there are no untouchables. Because your grace includes all. Your grace is all inclusive. You accept everyone and help us, oh God, no matter this despite where we are coming from, despite our backgrounds, help us to receive grace and become a part of your family.

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And help us to truly live as family. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.