God’s Story of Love
Ruth, Chapters 3 & 4


We are continuing through the story of Ruth and Naomi.  Since I shouldn’t assume you all were here last week, let me set the stage for what is happening in this story.  Naomi was a Jew and Ruth was her daughter-in-law and a gentile, a non-Jew.  Both were living in Ruth’s homeland of Moab when our story begins.  They were widows through tragic and unexpected deaths of their husbands; Ruth a very young widow.  And they decided to return to Naomi’s homeland in Israel having heard that the famine there had passed.  Ruth had to leave her own family, her friends, and her homeland to travel to Bethlehem with Naomi.  Neither had much hope that their life would ever again be filled with the joy of having a husband or bearing children.  Yet, while Naomi responded to her losses with bitterness, Ruth responded in faith and hope.

Last week’s episode ended with our gracious God beginning to fan Naomi’s smoldering-wick faith and barley-glowing-ember-hope back to flame.  God began to call Naomi out of bitterness, and seeing her life only as a tragedy, to a place where she could declare in chapter two, “God hasn't quite walked out on us after all!  He still loves us, in bad times as well as good!"  

As God’s story in Ruth continues, we discover how the fruit of faith and hope is always a life of love.  God’s love flowing through us, God’s agape love, is always the fruit of living in faith and hope.  And so, chapter three begins with Naomi’s revived faith and hope moving her out of self-centered pity into other-centered love.  

What a beautiful story of God’s love.  I say “God’s love” because while this is also a marvelous story of human love, this is also the inspired Word of God.  This story is included in the Bible to give us a portrait of how God loves us, and to reveal how God is weaving together every story of every life, and indeed the story of all human history, into His grand and good Salvation Story.

So what can we learn about love, God’s agape love, and how we are to love others, from God’s story of faith, hope, and love in Ruth?  


Our first love lesson is this: Love requires death.

To love another is to do what is best for the other regardless of personal cost.  Indeed, in every act of love something personal must die.  In our story, Ruth had to say no to the choice of staying in Moab and yes to going with Naomi.  In doing so, she had to give up, to die to, her family of origin, her homeland, her friends, in order to give what was required to love Naomi.  

Loving another requires saying yes to giving something of the self to the other, and every yes must include a no.  Sometimes the death that love requires is a small death of personal preference.  Sometimes love requires more sacrificial death of saying no to other relationships or commitments in order to have the required energy and time to focus on more primarily relationships.  For example, we must leave emotional, sometimes physically, our family of origin to give our spouse and children the attention they deserve.  And sometimes the death that love requires is actual death when someone sacrifices his or her life to save another.  And of course, the ultimate death that love required was that of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
For us as a congregation, very soon here we are going to have to say no to many of the ministry activity we have been doing for decades in order to say yes to new ministry activity that better reaches out with God’s love to those unreached in our city.  Love requires giving up personal preference for the sake of giving what is best for another.  Love requires costly sacrifice.  Love requires death.  Brothers and sisters, will we die so that others may live?!


Our second love lesson is this: Love requires sacred seduction.

Love is to do what is best for another regardless of personal cost.  And the best we can do for another is to help that person either come to faith in Christ in the first place, or if already a Christian, than to be drawn closer to Christ and to be more Christlike.  So we can define love as this:  Love is to move into another’s life in a way that calls that person to be all he or she can be in Christ.  

Sometimes this movement looks tender and it’s easy to see it as caring.  But sometimes love requires strong movement, many call this “tough love.”  This is because sometimes what will best help the other be all he or she can be in Christ require battling for their soul.  Remember, love is war!  And sometimes, this movement of love requires us to be shrewd, cunning, to be divinely deceptive, to engage in sacred seduction in order to woo another to Christ or Christlikeness!

In our story Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz all engage in such sacred shrewdness.  God had resurrected Naomi’s faith and she began to plot a scheme of how Ruth might be able to charm Boaz into marrying her.  Ruth was willing to take this redemptive risk and place herself in a very vulnerable position for the sake of loving both Naomi and Boaz well.  

The plan was this:  Boaz was the man that they thought was their closet relative who had the right to buy Naomi’s deceased husband’s property, and with that would come the right to marry Ruth.  Boaz was a throwing a harvest party, which was a common practice on the evening a farmer was to thresh out his harvest.  Naomi told Ruth to wait until Boaz had lots to eat, a good amount to drink, and after he was exhausted from threshing out his barley, and had fallen asleep on the threshing room floor, to then go to him, lay at his feet, and pull the corner of his blanket over her.  

Now this plan of a woman laying at a man’s feet and covering herself with the corner of a blanket was an acceptable way in that culture for a woman to let a man know she was offering herself as a bride.  However, in this case, this plan was somewhat scandalous and certainly risky.  The lesson here is that sometimes love requires us to be sacredly seductive or sanctifying shrewd in order to do what it takes to call another to be all he or she can be in Christ.

We see this same sacred shrewdness in Boaz.  Boaz wanted to marry Ruth.  But he knew that Naomi actually had a relative closer in line than he who had first rights of redemption.  So he set up a situation where he brought this relative in front of all the elders, which was there way of doing official business.  He told this man about his first rights to Naomi’s property.  At first, the man was all in favor of the deal.  
But then Boaz, who shrewdly did not have the lovely Ruth at this meeting,  added “O by the way, if you buy this property, remember you also have to take care of Naomi and marry her daughter-in-law.”  With that, the man declined the deal, leaving Boaz free to marry Ruth.  They got married, and God blessed them with a son.  

We tend to think of such shrewdness as unethical or at least manipulative.  Yet the shocking truth is that throughout the Bible, we discover God on many occasions praising such sanctified shrewdness when it was done for the sake of love, and did not violate the law or really harm another.  God favored Jacob whose name meant and actions were that of a trickster manipulator.  In the “Parable of the Shrewd Manager,” Jesus directly instructs us to be shrewd in how we interact with unbelievers.  And again when Jesus sent out the disciples to proclaim the gospel he instructed them to be as “innocent as doves, but as shrewd as snakes!”   

Sometimes love requires tender movement.  Sometimes love requires forceful movement.  Sometimes love requires sacred seduction.  And…


Our third love lesson is this: Love always requires redemptive risk.
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Ruth was a gentile woman presenting herself to a Jewish man.  She was going to him in the dark of night, while he was a bit drunk, and she lay at his feet on the floor of a secluded barn!  Ruth didn’t really know this man all that well.  A lesser man could have easily taken sexual advantage of Ruth’s vulnerable offer.  Even though she suspected given Boaz’s past gestures that he was a man of integrity, she still didn’t know if he would accept her offer of love, and how embarrassing, even a bit shameful, that would that have been.  Love always requires risk.  

Ruth was willing to take such a risk of love because she loved Naomi and saw this as there only hope, because she loved Boaz and saw it as her calling to call him to rise up and be the man of God he should be and fulfill his kinsman-redeemer responsibilities, and most of all, Ruth was empowered by her faith that believed that God was up to something good and was writing a good story even in the midst of the current chapter of tragedy.  Such faith and hope is always what empowers love!

To love is to place ourselves in a vulnerable position where we can get hurt.  How can it be otherwise?  We are called to love fallen people who are guaranteed to occasionally respond out of their fallenness in sinful, sometimes very hurtful, ways.  So we have two paths to take in every relational situation: self-protection or agape love.

You see here is the deep structure of our fallenness.  We are born into this world designed for a perfect world, with perfect joy and perfect relationships.  Instead, we get a sin-filled world with sin-filled people.  So there we are, naïve little babies, reaching out in ignorant innocence, thinking, “I’m the baby, gotta luv me!”  Depending on how nurturing or not of a home we are born into, for the most part, most of us, initially receive loving movement.  But no matter how good a home, it doesn’t take long before we experience some degree of emotional pain.  And we say to ourselves, “Hmmm, don’t like that feeling….really like those good feelings when someone loves me well.”  
And then, mostly all subconsciously, we begin to develop a structure of relating to reality and a style of relating to others that is based on minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure.  Now because we are broken sinful people from birth on, these styles of relating are driven more by sinful self-protection than agape love of others.

This is a powerful and important way to evaluate your life as to where you need God’s forgiving and empowering grace.  In what ways have you structured your life, and how you relate to others, driven more by protecting your heart from hurt than being driven by the redemptive risk that love requires?  In each relational moment, we are called to ask this agape question:  How can I move or respond in this situation that will best call this person to Christ or Christlikeness?  Does this situation require tender movement, touch-love movement, or sacred-seduction movement?  


So what have we learned from God’s Story of Faith, Hope, and Love in Ruth?

We have learned that Agape Love is this: Love is to move into another’s life in a way that calls that person to be all he or she can be in Christ.  

We have learned that Hope is this: to live with the inconsolable ache of delayed happiness for the sake of living sacrificial lives now trusting that God will reward us in the eternal kingdom with joy and riches beyond our wildest imagination.

We have learned that Faith is this: to trust God’s heart when you cannot see His plans; to believe that God is writing a good story with ultimately a happy ending with your life and with all human history no matter how tragic the current chapter may look.


When Naomi and her husband moved to Moab, when they really should have stayed in Bethlehem and trusted God’s provision, they didn’t know that God was weaving their story of mistrust into His story of Naomi connecting with Ruth…

When Naomi lost her husband and sons, she had no idea that God was at work weaving her story of tragedy into His story of faith and hope.  The story of Ruth begins with Naomi declaring, “I left Bethlehem fill, but now God has brought me back empty.”  The story of Ruth ends with Naomi sitting in a rocking chair, her lap full, holding Ruth’s firstborn baby Obed in her arms, cuddling him and cooing with him.  So close was that relationship that all the woman in the community called the baby, “Naomi’s son.”  

When Boaz in his kindness and integrity became the kinsman-redeemer for Naomi and Ruth, he only saw his story as a way of doing the right thing, and as way of immediate happiness of getting a young beautiful wife.  He had no idea that God was weaving his story of earthy happiness and godliness into a much larger story, God’s story of salvation for all humanity…

Even Ruth, who was granted the gift of faith all along to trust that God was writing a good story with all their lives, she too had no idea that God was weaving her story of humility and devotion into His grand salvation story.
You see the story of Ruth ends with a genealogy.  "Ruth’s son was named Obed.  Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David.”  Boaz, and gentile, former idol-worshiper Ruth, became the great grandparents of King David, and the great, great, great, great, 29 times great grandparents of Jesus Christ!

So whether the current chapter of your life is a tragedy, a romance, a drama, or a comedy, you must always ask, “How is God weaving your story into His grand and good salvation story?”