Good morning. Merry Christmas.
Welcome to Resurrection Church. My name is Daniel.
I'm the lead pastor here. Hey, so because it's the holiday
seasons, I don't know if you know this, but Hallmark has been
cranking out the movies, man. You know the one, because they
all go about the same way. There's the big city lady who
somehow gets trapped in a small town over the holidays and then
accidentally, coincidentally bumps into that very roguish,
very handsome man, always wearing flannel.
And he sweeps them off their feet and reintroduces them to
love in some cheesy, predictable way that we can't seem to stop
watching because every single plot is the same with just
different character names. Well, last week in the Book of
Ruth, we kind of interrupted our love story at the end of Chapter
3. It was right.
It was like kind of building up into that tension.
And then it was like commercial break.
Oh, sorry for you younger people, a commercial break.
You'll figure it out. So quick recap if you, if you've
missed any of the last three weeks, we've been, we've been
reading through this love story in the book of Ruth, which is
also kind of a Christmas story, which we've been explaining
along the way, even though it took place 1100 years before
Christmas. And so there is a Moabite woman,
her name is Ruth, and she and her Jewish mother-in-law, they
had come back from the land of Moab and they're widowed.
And so as they come back and Moab is the is Israel's enemy.
As they come back to the town of Bethlehem in Israel, a God
provides for them substantially. During the barley harvest, they
end up with food to eat, even though they were destitute and
starving. And in this last chapter that we
covered last week, there's this man named Boaz.
He's the landowner in which they've gotten food.
He has shown Ruth kindness along the way.
And Ruth makes a very bold move. She goes to him and asks him to
be something called a Redeemer. And that word means, in their
culture, to marry her to, to take her in and protect her, to
provide for her. And he agrees and he says at the
very end of last week, I will deal with this today.
And chapter 4 is today. So welcome to what we hope to be
the the kind of culmination of this love story slash Christmas
story. Here's the big idea.
So if you if you've come today and you get nothing else out of
today, you have to, you have to leave with just one thought.
It's this love fixes what the law fails.
Love fixes what the law fails. And we'll explain that.
Join me in reading God's word, Ruth chapter 4, starting with
verse one. Give you a minute to get there.
Now Boaz, this is the landowner. Now Boaz who made this promise
had gone up to the gate and sat down there and behold, the
Redeemer of whom Boaz had spoken came by.
So Boaz said, turn aside, friend, sit down here.
Now in in ancient cities, the gate was where they did all of
the business transactions. The gate, because that's where
everyone would enter or or leave the city from was the was the
place they would do they would do business deals, they would do
court proceedings. Everything happened at the gate
of the city. And so Boaz in the last chapter
said, Hey, there's a, a Redeemer closer than I.
And what he meant was there's a relative to Naomi and Ruth that
is the closest relative. And in that ancient community
man family had certain obligations.
And so there's a a man that is closest in relation.
He needs to go talk to that man. And he says, hey, come over
here, let's sit down, let's have a conversation.
So he finds him at the gate. This is the by the way, this is
the day after harvest. So they've just been grueling
work for months. This is the next day.
It's like the first day off. And Can you imagine this guy?
He has no idea what's going on. He's just walking like finally
this thing's over. He's just like on his way to
work like us. He's going to go to Dutch Bros
and get a coffee. And all of a sudden it's like,
hey, Fran, come over here. What is this?
Sit down. Now.
I, I want you to catch something that I think is, is it's so
important. It's so easy to miss.
He says, hey, friend, come over here.
Now here's the here's the way that that's easy to miss.
In the Hebrew that this was written in, the word he uses
does not mean friend. It actually is really a vague
word. It means so and so, so and so.
Someone of no consequence, like so and so.
He goes, hey, so and so come over here.
That's a weird thing. That's a really weird thing to
say, actually. And, and I've been saying for a
few weeks now that the author of this story, this is a masterful
storyteller who's very detailed at certain things and very vague
about other things on purpose so that you will see and understand
and even feel this story. So this storyteller absolutely
knows the name of this man. This is the closest relation to
the protagonist in the entire story.
They know exactly who this is. In fact, in a few verses, you're
going to get a genealogy of 12 generations of people.
This is intentionally vague. This is purposefully vague.
This is the closest relative to the hero of the story or the to
the protagonist of the story. And yet you're not going to hear
their name mentioned at all. And so they're going to be named
in the story. So and so if the title of the
credits rolled at the end of the Netflix film, it would be like
so and so played by. So for our purposes, we're going
to call this person Joe Blow. So and so we got to pick a name.
They didn't give us one. So he says, hey, so so sit down
here and he turned aside and he sat down and Boaz took ten men
of the elders of the city and said, sit down here.
So they sat down. He's just put a a jury, a whole
series of witnesses. So this is about to get serious.
You can say this is getting serious like it's it's going to
be a legal procedure. It's going to it's going to have
witnesses. They're they're about to do a
transaction. Verse 3.
Then he said to the Redeemer, Joe Blow, so and so Naomi, who
has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel
of land that belonged to our relative, her husband Elimelech.
So I thought I would tell you of it and say, buy it in the
presence of those sitting here. That's the way the witnesses are
there. And in the presence of the
elders of my people. If you will redeem it, redeem
it. But if you will not tell me that
I may know for there's no one beside you to redeem it and I
come after you and he said I will redeem it.
But you see how quick that that reaction was and I'll explain
why. OK, so this is a little weird
because we don't do any of this stuff anymore like this.
And, and even historians and, and, and commentators on this
section of Ruth are very split on exactly what's happening here
because it sounds like a legal proceeding and it kind of is.
The problem is it doesn't exactly match the laws that we
knew about for that time. So we're all a little bit
confused. There were some laws established
in, in, in the Judaic law in ancient times back in Leviticus
25. And according to that law, you
could never sell land forever. You couldn't sell land forever
because even if you thought it was yours, it wasn't really
yours. It was God's.
So the only thing you could sell is you could sell the right to
use it for a little while, but they would go back to whomever
God had granted it to originally.
It was called redeeming the land.
And so he's saying, look, this land when the limit like bailed
on Israel and ran off the Moab, like you shouldn't have.
He sold this land during a famine, but now it needs to be
redeemed. So buy it back because you're
the closest relative. So the losses, you have to buy
it back. Now, here's the interesting
thing. When it got sold, it was a
famine. It wasn't worth anything.
But now there are bumper crops. The land is producing
plentifully. There's food everywhere, so this
land now is worth a lot and he gets to buy it for pennies on
the dollar. Pretty good deal.
Sounds pretty good. In fact, sounds so good.
See how quick he agrees. Hey, if you want to buy it, I'll
buy it. Yep, got that dollar signs.
You ever seen a good deal? You're like, it's too good to
pass up. I know that there's a lot of
good deals because there's a lot of Amazon boxes on my front
porch. He's like, yeah, I'll do that.
I don't know if you've ever watched any of those courtroom
dramas on TV where one lawyer is trying to trick another lawyer
into admitting a piece of evidence because if he does, the
whole case breaks open. You ever seen one of those
things? You know what I'm talking about.
My daughter's in mock trial right now in high school.
And they actually go to the Superior Court and they have an
actual Kern County Superior Court judge in the room as they
they argue a made-up trial in front of a real judge, which is
both cute and comical at the same time, if you can believe
it, because they are on each other like, like you're like,
oh, these dudes are serious. They're like freshman in high
school and they're just doodles. They were like arguing up the
admissibility of a laptop and a thing.
I'm just listening and we're going.
But The thing is that they get points if they can catch the
other person, if they can impeach the witness or if they
can catch him. So they're always trying to like
jump on them. And sometimes they do it too
early. They're like, aha, objection.
And the judge is trying not to laugh because he, like, you got
that a little early there. But that's actually what's
happening in our story. You see, Boaz just set this guy
up to admit something that will then come with a secondary
obligation he's not ready for. And you're going to see that
unfold right now. And it's it's brilliant.
It's actually pretty cool. It's like you're watching suits
on USATV. What did he just do?
Watch what he does, Verse 5. Then Boaz says.
He's like, yeah, I'll buy it, I'll buy it.
I'll buy it, Boaz says. Well, the day you buy the field
from the hand of Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the
widow of the dead, in order to perpetuate the name of the dead
in his inheritance. Oops.
Then the Redeemer said I cannot redeem it for myself lest I
impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption
yourself, for I cannot redeem it.
Well, that's a, that's a 180. That's a pretty fast reversal.
He got out of that pretty quick. What just happened?
You see, Boaz hooked that guy with greed.
Hey, there's this land, really good land, producing a lot, and
you're the first relative to redeem it, and you're going to
be able to get it for almost nothing.
What do you think? I'm on it.
Oh, but by the way, if you're really the closest relative,
then there's an obligation to care for these people.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That doesn't sound so good. So one law says in the Bible
says, you know, there's this right to buy back a family land.
But there's another law that says if your brother dies and is
married, it's your responsibility to marry their
widow. And so Joe Blow so and so is
fine with the one that makes him a lot of money.
He's not so fine with the law that's going to cost him
something. And So what Boaz has done is
he's tied these two laws together.
You want eliminates land. You're also on the hook for his
daughter-in-law. And that's really smart.
That's really smart because he does it in front of 10
witnesses. So there's no getting back out
of it. And I and I like I want to tell
you how how. How strategic Boaz is in the
moment. If you've been with us and
you've been listening to, you know, chapters one and two and
three and four, for two chapters, Boaz has been
overflowing with praise about the character of Ruth.
Yes. I mean, he's been like, man,
everyone in town knows that you are a woman of good character.
I mean, just compliment after compliment about the renowned by
which people see her, her loyalty, her integrity, all of
these things. He doesn't say a word of that
here. What does he say?
The Moabite? Ruth, where are all the
compliments? Where'd they all go?
The woman of good character? The whole town knows I'm saying
none of that. What does he say?
The Moabite? You got to marry the outsider.
You know what that is? Strategory.
Pretty sure that's the word. And immediately Joe blows.
Oh, and so goes no, I can't, can't do that, lest I inher and
impair my own inheritance. Now, what in the world does that
mean? Why does he stop, reverse
course, and head out the other way?
Well, marrying and producing a child with Ruth, because Ruth is
a Moabite. Remember, a Moabite was an enemy
of God. He thinks it'll ruin his
inheritance. And that text is a little bit
vague because we, again, historians don't even agree
about it specifically. But let me tell you what I think
happened in that moment. I think what he's saying is
either I'm already married or a plan to be and I'm going to
produce an heir. And that that heir that I
produce with my wife, who's not named Ruth is going to be
considered, at least for me, pure Israelite.
And if I marry Ruth and produce an heir, now I have two
different heirs. And not only is there a, is
there a complexity to having two different heirs, but one of them
is going to be pure and one of them is going to be maybe not so
pure because now I've made an air with a Moabite woman, my air
will be mixed, not completely of the people of God.
And in his mind and in a lot of Jewish minds, there would have
been two categories. There would have been a category
of an in crowd and a category of a kind of the out crowd.
See, we Israelites, we're God's people and everyone else is not
God's people. Therefore there's in and there's
out and Ruth is out. And so in essence, I believe
what he's saying is, listen, yeah, I know God can redeem some
people. I mean, he can redeem
Israelites, but I don't know about a foreigner in in this in
this moment of the story. I think what the author wants
you to see is this is so contrary to the gospel of Jesus
Christ, because you and I often times do this.
We'll look at a world and we'll say, listen, there's a good
crowd and there's a bad crowd. There are moral people and there
are immoral people. And in that we will judge the
world not on whether or not they know Christ, but rather we'll
judge them on their morals or judge them on their political
party, or we'll judge them on their political leaning, or how
they live or the way they dress or lots of things.
And we'll create in our minds an in crowd and an out crowd, a
pure crowd and an impure crowd. You know, there's kind of the
people I want to deal with and there's the people that maybe I
don't really want to deal with. The wonderful reason to come to
church in person and not just online is you have to deal with
both. You're welcome.
It's easy to avoid on your couch, not so easy on the Pew.
You see, to understand life and the world the way this job blow
so and so is looking at it is is to not understand Christmas.
It's to not understand the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It's to misunderstand Jesus himself.
Because there there is no in crowd apart from Christ.
There is no good and bad. We are all bad.
There is no moral and immoral. We're all immoral.
Jesus would say the same thing in Scripture.
Someone would come and go, good teacher.
He'd go whoa, whoa, whoa, why do you call me good?
There's no one good but God. At the root of our sinfulness is
a hypocrisy in which we justify ourselves and we think that
everyone else is immoral. Everybody else is the insider or
the outsider. But that's not the case at all.
The gospel of Christ says that everyone's bad.
Everyone was born into sin. Everyone was an enemy of God.
That's what the gospel says. You and I, every single one of
us, have rebelled against God. We, we chose our own way over
his. We've hurt people.
We've been selfish. We've lied to us ourselves about
who we really are. And left to ourselves, we are
spiritually dead, separated from the God who made us, with no way
to fix that on our own. So whether it's the religious
person who who looks down on others spiritually dead, or the
moral person who trusts in their own morality spiritually dead,
or the immoral person who knows they're spiritually dead.
And every single one of us needs a Redeemer.
And all of us start as a Moabite, an outsider.
That's the story of the Bible. But God being rich in mercy
because of the great kindness with which He shows up, steps
into the moment and begins to raise people from spiritual
death to spiritual life, from enemy of God to child of God,
from foreigner to a son or a daughter of the king.
Therefore there is no Greek or Jew, barbarian or Scythian, male
or female, slave or owner, Democrat or republican, moral or
immoral. There is either saved by the
blood of Jesus Christ and identify through the
righteousness of his robes, or there is lost.
And to understand the world and the gospel that way will mean
that no longer Christian do I get to shake my fist and all
those immoral people because they are you and I am them, but
for the grace of God. So instead of shaking our our
fists at those people that infuriate us, we open our hands
offering to serve them in hopes that we could call them to see
Christ and that they might enter into life from death.
That's the gospel of Jesus Christ.
That's why Christmas matters so much that every one of us,
foreigner, Moabite, destitute, starving widows, separated from
God, might be saved by God. And to know Christ changes
everything. So no, we're not in the in
crowd. We're not the Israelites who
don't want to sully our inheritance.
We're not the moral. We're the beggars who have found
the Savior who came from Bethlehem, the House of bread,
which is what Bethlehem actually means.
We're beggars who have found bread.
And our job is to find other beggars and tell them, hey, we
don't tell them, hey, I figured it out.
We tell them, hey, I know where you can find bread.
Let me show you. This is why Ruth, the Book of
Ruth is a love story. And a Christmas story, you think
about this, there has been these laws that he's, he's basically
rolling out today and talking about in our story, these laws
have been in place already. And yet for over 2 months wrote
Ruth and Naomi have been in town And conveniently Joe Blow so and
so has not seen fit to have any sort of obligation between for
these widows who have been hurting and alone and in need.
And you know, Joe, Joe probably has enough enough Gray area in
the law that he could argue that's not really my obligation.
You know, like there's some great, but the law that was
there to help them has not helped them at all.
So it's not the law that steps in and saves the day for Ruth
and Naomi. It's actually the sacrificial
love of Boaz stepping in to fix a hopeless situation with
hopeless people. And Boaz steps into Ruth's life
not because there's any legal obligation to do so.
He chooses to love her. He chooses to serve her.
He chooses to redeem her. He's not compelled to.
Love fixes what the law fails. This story, this concept is
actually a microcosm of the entire story of Scripture.
If you've read the Bible at all, especially the Old Testament,
there's plenty of law about what we should do right and wrong.
And and all of the stories of the Old Testament are about
people reading and going, yeah, sounds good.
I'm not going to do that. See, the problem in the Bible is
not that people don't know what to do.
It's that frankly, we just don't want to do it.
You know, the problem in my life, possibly the problem in
your life is not that you don't know what to do.
So we don't want to do it, and sometimes we want to do it.
We don't find ourselves compelled to actually get it
done consistently, which is the well, it's the same problem that
poor old Joe Blow so and so illustrates.
Just like Boaz is redeeming an enemy, Ruth is a Moabite and
making her his family. He's going to make her his wife.
Well, that that's my story too. I grew up a Christian.
I grew up in a wonderful home. I grew up with godly parents.
I knew what was right. I chose wrong.
It wasn't that I needed to know what right and wrong was.
I already knew. I chose to run from God.
I was an enemy of God and no amount of knowing the law, no
amount of knowing more moral things was going to fix my
problem. It wasn't a knowledge problem,
it was a heart problem. I knew what was right and didn't
want any part of it. I needed someone to lovingly
step into my life and fix the problem.
Not because they were legally obligated to do so, but because
they chose to. And that's the beauty of
Christmas. The one and only gift that can
save us would not be more laws. It would not be more social
programs. It would be an act of love so
radical and scandalous that we are still talking about it today
because it changed all of human history.
God's Son wrapped in flesh, willingly steps into our
hopeless predicament to redeem us, to make us His own, to
choose, to love us. That's the Christmas story.
It's no coincidence this this story is taking place 1100 years
before Christmas. And they're standing at a gate.
And if you actually look at where Jesus was born, it's a
couple 100 meters away, just a few 100 meters away from where
this redemption is taking place. There's going to be another
Redeemer who comes, and just like Boaz is an example of a
Redeemer, he's there to foreshadow the ultimate Redeemer
who will come for you and I. If you know Jesus Christ as your
king, that means that this season for us, this idea of
Christmas, we celebrate that we didn't deserve a single bit of
the grace and mercy that was extended toward us.
What do you, what do you do with that, with that truth?
I would submit to you that we, we, we should use it to remind
us that the only thing that makes U.S. special, the only
thing that makes us any morally different than a lost in a
broken world is that Jesus stepped into our situation.
And therefore we can use that truth to shape us and to
motivate us, to shape us and to motivate it, motivate us when it
comes to living this out in this world, shape us.
Here's what I mean by that we we should adopt A posture of
grateful, foreign, hopeless, orphan, adopted and saved by God
and motivate. We should wake up every day
excited to tell people where the bread of life is and what he did
for us and what he can do for them.
Shape means that this week when I'm tempted to to look down on
someone that that homeless guy outside Trader Joe's, the Co
worker with different politics, the member, the family member
you're going to, you're going to be meeting with over the
holidays that has very different choices than you would agree
with. We get to remember that without
Jesus, I am no better. I'm just saved.
And it should motivate us. Motivate, meaning sometime this
week or over the next few weeks as you as you press into people,
your family, your, your, your people in your carpools, your
cubicle, your cul-de-sac, who you're looking for, who's
hurting and who's searching. And instead of judging them or
trying to fix them, we simply ask, can I tell you about
someone that changed my life? That's Christmas and that's the
gospel. And maybe you've been a
Christian for years, decades, 30-40 years, and you've read
Ruth a dozen times. And my question for you is, have
you become a Joe Blow? So and so have you gotten so
comfortable in your inheritance that you've forgotten you were
once Ruth, an outsider, A foreigner with nothing to offer.
I told you earlier that the author intentionally left out
the name of this character and called them so and so, and there
was a reason. Here's the reason, I think
because legalism and self protection, right?
You out of God's story he chose security over sacrifice and
history forgot him. There's a movie I think it's
Troy. There's a movie where someone
they they go to the main character and they're like I
can't believe you're going to you're going to fight him and he
looks at me and goes and that's why no one will remember your
name when you choose your own preference and your own security
and your own comfort over obedience to Christ.
I don't what are we even doing this for.
Meanwhile, Ruth, Ruth the Moabite, Ruth the enemy of God,
Ruth the foreigner, Ruth the destitute widow with nothing to
author offer. That's Jesus, great, great,
great grandmama. I want you to consider that God
who ordained everything, who chose when Christ would come
before the foundations of the earth intentionally chose that
the grandmother, great great grandmother of Jesus would be an
enemy of God. Would be a foreigner, would be a
Moabite, would be destitute, would be a widow, would be
someone that everyone wanted to exclude.
So that you and I would look at this and have a realization that
this is what God does. He redeems the lost and he uses
them for his glory. Hey, God's not looking for
religious insiders who protect their inheritance.
He's looking for the desperate who will risk everything to
follow him. I had someone come in my office
for counsel this week and, and they were telling me about an
opportunity that they see where they believe God is leading
them. And it's radical.
It means quitting their job means taking financial risks.
It means all of this stuff, walking away from the
comfortable and the safe. And, and, and so they finish
telling me all this and they look at me with tears in their
eyes, and they say I'm ready. And I started to, I started to
cry, I'm listening to this and I'm like, because I don't even
know exactly how God is going to use that person.
But here's what I do know. I know that when your posture
looks like that toward God, he does great things.
He does great things, He moves. So I want to encourage you push
into that Christian as God begins to lead you into those
moments. I call them high dive moments.
You ever stood on one of the big high dives at the end and put
your toes over and went, I may have made it, made a bad
decision and you're, you're genuinely thinking like, is it
going to be worse to jump or or have the crawl of shame back
down the ladder? And I just want to encourage
you, when the Lord is leading you to something radical, jump
in. The water's fine.
You're going to love it. Why would you want to live this
life any other way than radically going hard after
Christ? What does that leap look like
for you, Christian? What does that leap of faith
look like in your life right now?
Is it forgiving someone who you haven't forgiven?
Is it addressing an addiction or, or an ongoing sin that
you've just been tolerating and hiding?
Is it some radical act of, of generosity or obedience that God
is calling you into? Perhaps, perhaps today your leap
of faith is a little different. Perhaps today you're you're here
joining us for this Christmas service or you're watching
online and you don't yet know Jesus Christ as your king.
Maybe you've heard about him, but you don't know Him.
And so as we wrap this service up for just just a moment, give
me your attention. Maybe you came here today or
you're watching online and you don't know Jesus as the Savior
of your life. And I want to tell you, He came
to offer you a new life, a new land, a new family to redeem
you. You don't need more advice, you
need a Redeemer and love fixes where the law fails.
No amount of morality is going to fix the problem.
If you look around our world and and the life that we live, all
of human history points to the story of of evil and chaos and
suffering and points to the need for someone to supernaturally
step into this moment and intervene.
It points to the need for a Redeemer because the world is
broken. You and I were born broken into
a fallen world, into sin, and at the first chance we had, we
rebelled against God, choosing our own will over His.
But God, being rich in kindness, has planned since before the
creation of the world, to fix this problem.
He sent his one and only Son in Jesus, born in flesh to live a
perfect life. We couldn't live to die a brutal
death on a cross that we should have died and to rise again
three days later, conquering death, making a way for you and
I to be saved and for our relationship with God to be
restored. And so if you would like to
accept the work of Christ on the cross, Romans 10 says this is
what it looks like, that if you will confess with your mouth
that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised
him from the dead, you will be saved.
For with the heart 1 believes and is justified, and with the
mouth 1 confesses and is saved. And so if you'd like to
surrender your life to God today, I want to give you that
chance here at Christmas. Will you all please bow your
heads and close your eyes and we'll wrap this service up.
But I just want you to to focus on this for just a moment.
If you're willing to ask a God for forgiveness and salvation
with every eye closed and every head bowed, I just want you to
to quietly or silently say this prayer with me.
Jesus, I know I'm lost and I need to be saved.
I want you to redeem me. I surrender everything to you
and I receive your promise of redemption.
Be my Lord. Please, Jesus, if you said that
prayer for the very first time right now, would you be brave
and raise your hand for me to see?
Thank you, thank you. Put your hands down, Thank you
in Jesus name, Amen. All right, real quick, Jesus
loves you more than you actually can imagine or comprehend.
And if you gave your life to Christ moments ago or recently,
welcome to the family. In just a moment, we're going to
sing some songs and we're going to respond to this sermon.
And as we do, you have an opportunity.
If you've given your life to Christ recently and not told
anyone about it, we want you to go to the back where it says I
raised my hand on either side. We would love to celebrate with
you. We have a gift for you.
We'd love to talk about what it looks like to follow Jesus.
Will you stand? Our prayer team is going to come
up. We're going to be on the sides
today because we got a full band.
So just look left or right. You'll find prayer members
everywhere. We love praying with you and for
you for any reason I want, I want to remind you that God
loves you tremendously. And whatever it is that you're
going through in this moment, you are not doing it alone.
And so as we sing, you move as the Lord leads you.
We would love to pray with you and for you.
We love you church. Merry Christmas.