God's Secret Weapon: The Beauty and Power of Grace

Today’s message is based on Ruth 2:1-16 and is titled “God’s Secret Weapon: The Beauty and Power of Grace.”

One of the things that is striking about the book of Ruth is that something tremendous is happening, something bigger than life, in a sense, in that we know, as we know when we step back from it, we know the end of the book that what God is doing is restoring a family line and continuing the movement of history toward the coming of his Son. Although we don't realize it at the beginning, where we are in the story, we find a woman who is bereft of her husband and her two sons and this family line is about to be extinguished.

The Lord is going to work in a miraculous way to make her life transformed so that she has fullness but the bigger picture is, and the surprise ending in chapter 4, that this woman's problem, this woman's predicament and God's answer to her need was actually the Lord fulfilling his promise of giving the Messiah because this woman, Naomi, is the ancestor of David.