FROM MARA TO HOPE

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope Encounters with grace from Mara to hope. So Naomi returned and they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest. Ruth chapter one verse twenty two. The book of Ruth is sent in the days when the judges ruled. It was a violent, chaotic era, and it opens with famine driving an Israelite family out of Bethlehem. Bethlehem means ironically house of bread. Famine drove them into the pagan land of Moab. There over ten bitter years Naomi loses everything. First her homeland, homeland, then her husband, then both her sons. To be a widow in the ancient world was to be economically defenseless. To be a widow in a foreign land, childless was to be utterly destitute. Naomi comes home so hollowed by grief that she asks to be renamed Mara bitter, for she says the almighty has dealt very bitterly with her. Naomi cannot see it, but grace is already moving. She returns simply she returns empty, convinced God is against her, clinging only to a foreign daughter, daughter in law, she tried to send away. And the narrator drops a quiet, loaded detail. They arrive in the beginning of barley harvest. Into her season of emptiness comes the season of provision. The very god she accuses of taking everything is arranging through the loyalty of a Moabite widow, and the feels of a kinsman named Boaz, a redemption she cannot yet imagine. One that will make this bitter empty woman the great grandmother of King David. There are seasons when, like Naomi, we can only name our lives bitter, and we should be honest about that grief rather than paper over it. But bitterness is not the last chapter. God's grace is often already at work in the very season we call empty, planting a harvest we cannot yet see. When you come home with nothing, watch the timing of God. He tends to bring his people back at the beginning of the harvest. O Lord, you are the God of the empty and the grieving, and we have called our life our lives bitter sometimes. And maybe we are experiencing our bitterness right now. Please meet us at the beginning of the harvest and turn our Mara experience into hope by a redemption that we can't see now. Show yourself mighty on our behalf and let your will be done and your name be glorified through our experiences. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.