Ruth 4

Chippy the parakeet had no idea what was happening. He never saw it coming. One second, he was peacefully perched in his cage. The next, he was sucked in, washed up, and blown over. The problems began when Chippy's owner decided to clean Chippy's cage with a vacuum cleaner. She removed the attachment from the end of the hose and stuck it in the cage.

The phone rang, and as she turned to pick it up, she barely noticed when Chippy got sucked in. The bird gasped, she put down the phone, turned off the vacuum, and opened the bag. There was Chippy, still alive, but stunned. Since the bird was covered in dust and soot, she grabbed him, raced to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and held Chippy under the running water. Then, realising that Chippy was soaked and shivering, she did what any compassionate bird owner would do: she reached for the hairdryer and blasted him with hot air.

Poor Chippy never knew what hit him. A few days after the trauma, the reporter who'd initially written about the event contacted Chippy's owner to see how the bird was recovering. Well, she replied, Chippy doesn't sing much anymore. He just sits and stares. Life might deal us some pretty hard cards.

You may be facing some tough challenges now. You might face some tough challenges in the future. You may be sucked in, washed up, and spit back out like poor old Chippy. What do we do in those situations? What do we do in those situations?

How do we see God in those situations? How does He fit into our suffering and our pain? Is there any possible hope for our pain and our suffering, even the most severe grief and loss? We're going to be looking at the story of grief and loss again this morning with the story of Ruth and Naomi.

We're going to read the ending of this story. So let's open our Bibles to Ruth chapter four. And just to refresh our minds, the story of Ruth is about a woman called Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth who return to Bethlehem, their homeland, to pretty much nothing: to no food, no income, no friends, no family. And the story is about how God looks after them in the most desperate situations.

God sends a man called Boaz across their path who is a wealthy man who owns land and who has great crops, and Boaz promises to look after these two ladies. We pick up the story at the beginning of Ruth chapter four, verse one. The book of Ruth doesn't begin with Ruth. It doesn't even end with Ruth. The book of Ruth begins and ends with Naomi.

The story of Ruth is the story of Naomi, how God fills empty broken people with good things. We see in this story something amazing happening. We see that God takes an empty, broken, bitter woman through a journey of growth, of spiritual growth, of a revelation of who He is. And at the end of this beautiful short story, Naomi has a baby grandson. The lady who had no family line, whose name would disappear, whose husband's name would disappear from the record books forever, has someone that will continue that name, has a son-in-law who will look after her.

We see how the Lord empties Naomi of her self-centred life. At the beginning of the book, we see how Naomi returns from the land of Moab. She goes to Moab with her husband Elimelech. They go for greener pastures, for a bigger paycheck, for a cushier job. Kilion, her son, and Mahlon, they die.

Elimelech dies. She returns back to her family, her friends in Bethlehem and says, don't call me Naomi anymore, which means sweetheart. Call me Mara, which means bitter. Because the Lord Almighty has made my life very bitter, she says. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.

Naomi's perspective on life that she had then at the beginning of the story shows us something of how this story is going to develop. Naomi's perspective was very self-centred. The reason she left for Moab was for her own welfare and the welfare of her family. She comes back and she is filled with self-pity when tragedy strikes. It is very important for us to grasp that a self-centred life is a miserable life.

The quality of life lived in self-centredness can never be compared to the life of those who centre themselves on God or whose lives are centred on God. Naomi did not know that God was the giver of life. Maybe she did know that. She knew that God was a taker of life. That's why she said, the Lord has afflicted me.

He has taken these things from me. But she didn't know that God was the provider. She didn't really believe it. That's why she left Bethlehem for greener pastures, for a better lifestyle. She didn't rely on the truth that God provides for us.

A provision of livelihood, of happiness, of fulfilment depended on her, on Elimelech. She could provide. She could plan. She could organise. Meanwhile, God smashed those misconceptions.

He humbled her deeply, and He showed her how wonderfully magnificent His power, His provision, His redemption can truly be. If accented, you do not have the anchor of God, and therefore you are swept along by every kind of situation and circumstance. If you are self-centred, all the power that you have is all the power you have. Self-centredness tends to draw us into interpreting life in extremes. It makes us either say that we are not to blame at all for our circumstances.

What has happened doesn't have anything to do with me. I'm not to blame. Or the other extreme is that we are all to blame. We feel really bad. We feel really guilty.

We feel really ashamed. We speak of it in terms of it's not my fault or it is all my fault. A self-centred person has that focus on themselves and how what has happened will affect them. Looking at this whole story of Ruth, we see that self-pity was not the only response for Naomi. We only have to look at someone like Job who went through an immense amount of pain and suffering, who lost his family, who lost all his possessions.

And in response to that in Job one, verses twenty and twenty-one, this is how Job responds to losing everything. Job arose when he heard the news, tore his robe, and shaved his head, and he fell to the ground and worshiped. He said, naked I have come from my mother's womb and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

In all this, Job did not sin or charge God with any wrong. Job responded by humbly worshiping God. When we respond to a tragedy in self-pity, when we feel sorry for ourselves in those hard situations, it exposes the fact that we ignore God and we focus on ourselves. You and I are responsible for the way we handle our situations, for the way we respond to that difficult thing that has happened in our life. It is very important for us to remember that self-pity is sinful.

That's a hard thing to say. Remember, however, that there's a difference between self-pity and grieving or mourning. There's a difference. Grieving and mourning, according to scripture, is fine, is natural, is good. It's a normal response.

A broken, imperfect situation we find ourselves in, a world that is broken, a world that is ravaged by sin. Mourning is normal in response to that. But when we engage in self-pity, however, we are in a position of rebellion, of pride, of mistrust. Rebellion in that I am not willing to submit to the will of God for my life.

Pride in that we say through our self-pity, I am too good for this. I am too good for this. I do not deserve this. Or in mistrust that we don't trust in God's providence, in God's care, in God's control of our situation. Self-pity is rebellion, is pride, is mistrust.

Self-pity is a wrong response to life's circumstances, and it is a response that we ought to avoid. Now how do we do that? Well, I think there are four important things for us to remember in avoiding self-pity. We see from Ruth a few of these factors that someone like Ruth, on the other hand, exemplified. The first is while we may not understand why God in His providence has ruled certain things to happen.

We nevertheless accept that not only is He sovereign, but He is also wise, that He is also holy and loving. Ruth, in her amazing young faith, believed that God was still in control, that He was loving, and that He would provide. God doesn't make mistakes. God doesn't make mistakes. There's a plan.

There's a purpose. He is still in control. The second way we can avoid self-pity is that while we might be confused about God's providence, we may be confused about why He has let these things happen, we nevertheless know what God wants us to do in that situation. What is that? What are we meant to do in that situation?

Simply, God wants us to be faithful to Him. God wants us to depend on Him. I've seen people in those situations feel so sorry for themselves that they throw out God and their allegiance to Him altogether. This is not fair. This is not fair.

I do not deserve this. God, you're a bully. I will not follow you. No matter what happens, we know what God requires of us. Difficult times is no excuse for bad behaviour.

We know from His word what He requires. It's not like God has left us without any insight onto what His will is for us. The third thing, the third way that we can avoid falling into this trap of self-pity is that while we may be emotionally hurt and battered, we nevertheless believe that God is working to bring about good things for His purposes. That is very important to remember. God is bringing about good things.

He will not cause His children to suffer needless pain or shed needless tears because that's the worst. If it's needless, if our pain and suffering is without any redemption, without any purpose, then we are truly lost. Then we are truly hopeless. But the Bible says that Jesus Christ in His humanity has become our mediator. And He's even able to sympathise with us.

He understands our pain, but the fact that He became our mediator also means there is an amazing purpose, an amazing hope for all of us. The fourth point is that while we may see our private world broken and shattered, we must remember that our lives are not about us. Our lives are part of a greater story that God is writing, a greater purpose. All of us are actors on His stage. We are all participants with Him of this story.

We were created by God in order for Him to glorify Himself. In that situation, we have to remember that God saved us not only to make us happy, not only to please us, but to glorify Himself, to have us enjoy Him. God saved us for us to enjoy Him. Pride would have you believe that life is about you and that God is man-centred and that He is committed to our happiness. But every now and then, we need the reality check that it's not about us.

It's not about us. God's great ambition for you is for you to glorify Him and to enjoy Him. And we can only do that by centring our lives on Him and the big picture, the big picture of what our lives mean. The question Naomi wanted answered was, why did I have to go through so much pain and suffering? Like Naomi, we often ask the question, why?

Why am I suffering? Why am I going through pain? Listen to what one commentator, what one scholar, writes about this question of Naomi. Why am I suffering? Sinclair Ferguson, the commentator, writes, in the case of Naomi, part of the answer is one word.

In fact, a name: Ruth. Ruth's conversion is part of the explanation of Naomi's pain. The story of Naomi is a story about Ruth, or more accurately, it is about God bringing Ruth to Himself and positioning her in the ongoing unfolding of His purposes for the world. He goes on, this is the one reason why we can never say the full equation in Naomi's life. You know, that she sinned and therefore she is suffering.

God's ultimate purpose has not been to punish her for her family's spiritual failures in abandoning the land and the promises. Rather, through the mysterious intermingling of His providential control of history with Naomi's family's failures, the Lord's purposes has been to reach through Naomi's life to bring Ruth to Himself. Isn't that an amazing perspective? Naomi was a woman full of bitterness and self-pity. But the story in the book of Ruth shows that the Lord is in the process of refining Naomi, healing her, filling her with a God-centred, not a self-centred life.

That is His story. That's how it unfolds. Before the Lord filled Naomi with Himself, He had to empty her of herself. She was full of herself. God cannot work with people who rely on themselves.

That is the ultimate sin. That is the unpardonable sin, I guess. People who are content, people who are full of themselves, rely on themselves, God cannot work with that. At the centre of our rebellious hearts towards Him lies pride saying, I can do it my way. I know best.

Let me sort this problem out. Followers of God are those who have emptied themselves of arrogance and humbly come to God in all their grief, but in all their joy, in all their mundane life. DL Moody, the famous pastor and evangelist, once said, God sends no one away except those who are full of themselves. God sends no one away empty except those who are full of themselves. Looking back at the story as we followed it, the truth is that without Naomi's emptiness, she would never have left the land of Moab to return back to Bethlehem.

If life was good, she would not have come back. Had she stayed contently full as she hoped in Moab, Naomi would have missed out on a far greater blessing of a prime place in the story of God's redemption of the whole world. She was so caught up in what she had lost, however, that she could not see the far greater treasure that she had been given in Ruth. It was a token of God's grace. It was a token of hope.

Naomi didn't grasp the greatness of God's blessing in giving her a daughter-in-law like Ruth. She didn't see it. And while it's relatively easy to see how God emptied Naomi's life, it is rather a bit more difficult to see whether Naomi adopted a God-centred way of thinking because we don't, we don't see at the end of chapter four, we don't see her expressing anything like that. The story ends abruptly, but we do see a grandson. We do see a livelihood.

The story of Naomi isn't a story about emptiness or bitterness, of pain or suffering. It is a story of redemption. A widow called Ruth is saved by a gentleman called Boaz. It's a beautiful story. It's what stories like Pride and Prejudice is made of.

But what's even more beautiful a story is how a grief-stricken, emotionally destroyed woman called Naomi, who called herself empty and bitter, became whole again. The story of Ruth begins with empty fields in Bethlehem, but by the end of the book, they are full of grain. The story of Ruth begins with empty threshing floors that are now full of wheat. Empty stomachs that are full of food and drink. An empty lap, an empty womb that is filled with a baby boy.

Empty hearts filled with faith. An empty future that is filled with hope. That is the story of Naomi and Ruth. This morning, you may not know where you find yourself in your story, in this journey that you're on, this screenplay that's directed by God. We cannot know how far or near we are to the resolution of our pain, to the hope for our doubts, to the courage for our fears.

We cannot know how near or far even that great resolution, the coming of Jesus Christ, is. But what we do know is that we have been reminded of again in this story of Naomi and Ruth. And that is that God is faithful. That God has a plan, that He is in the process of bringing about good things. God is always true.

Trust in Him. Depend on Him. And He will give us the fulfilment that only comes from a soul that is centred on Him. The stability in your life, you might still face many more uncertainties and pain and no matter how good the future lies ahead of you, the pain now you might think is so real and so intense. But somehow in God's timing, that promise from Romans that God is working for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes rings true for us.

The story of Ruth and Naomi ends with a baby boy called Obed. And the women of Bethlehem are overjoyed looking at Naomi holding her grandson. Obed, they call him, who was to become the father of Jesse. And Jesse, the father of David, the king of Israel, the forefather of Jesus of Nazareth. God is so good.

An empty, bitter old woman is made joyful and at peace with a little baby in her arms. That's redemption. God redeemed Ruth out of certain death by providing Boaz a loving husband. God redeemed Naomi with a son to carry her husband's name into the future. God even was concerned about Elimelech.

And through that, God would ultimately redeem the world through His son, Jesus Christ. God gave His son to Ruth and Naomi. But one day, God would give His only son for the world. Our self-pity is just a form of pride. The same pride that causes us to rebel against God.

Self-pity says, I'm too good for this, but friends, because of the gospel, our hearts have come to the point of realising I'm not good enough for any of this. All I have, all I have is grace. God can take our broken, our bitter circumstances, and He can change it into beautiful, lasting acts.