Now turn the service over to Grant Gregory. He's gonna tell you a little bit about himself, do the scripture reading and bring to us the message this morning. Thank you, Grant. Well, good morning. It is good to be with you this morning. Please turn with me in your Bibles to Ruth chapter four. Text this morning is gonna be Ruth four verses 13 to 17. While you're doing that, Just let me say it's a joy and privilege to be with you all this morning to share God's word and to worship our Lord together. My thanks go out to the elders for having me. It's a privilege to be here. By way of just brief introduction, my name's Grant Gregory. I'm a seminary student with Reformed Theological Seminary and a candidate for ministry with our denomination. I have lived in Philadelphia for about four years now. But I'm from Missouri originally, and as much as I try not to, my heart still calls that home. We'll see if I end up back there someday. But the last four years or so, I've lived mostly in Center City, Philadelphia. I served at 10th Presbyterian Church there with their young adults program for a while. It's one of our sister churches in the denomination. And then recently just stepped down that to finish out my last year or so of seminary. As I said, it's good to be with you. Would love to get to meet some of you after the service. Now, all that being said, before we turn to our text, let's ask the Lord's blessing and his help in this time. Lord God, Heavenly Father, we each have many cares that we bring this morning with us. And rather than trying to force them from our minds, or put them aside, we bring them to you, Lord. And we ask that even in our hurts, even in our joys, even in the cares of this week, that those things too would be a part of our worship, that they would be a part of our praise to you, for we know that you care about all the things in our life, that you have concern over them and that you are good father in your providence in these things. Lord, we ask that as we hear from your word, as I preach your word, that you would speak through me, that my words would be your words, and that they would be received as your words to your people, Lord. I pray that you would bless this reading, bless this preached word, to your glory and the good of your church. Amen. Now, turning our attention to Ruth 4, to the reading of God's word. So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went into her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may he be renowned in Israel. He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age. For your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him. Then Naomi took the child and lay him on her lap and became his nurse. And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name saying, a son has been born to Naomi. They named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David. This is the word of the Lord. Now, it's always a bit challenging for me when I come to a new church, come to a new context, and I'm trying to figure out what to preach, what passage to preach. When you're preaching in a church that you're regularly in, you know the people, you can stand up here and recognize faces, you know the place, the building, what the pulpit's gonna be like, you know what the sermon's been preached on recently. But when you come to a new church, you don't know any of that. So the last thing you wanna do is accidentally preached the same service or the same passage that somebody preached two weeks ago, or totally missed the congregation. So you're kind of coming into a new context. And you also have the context not only of the church and the context for you guys, but also the context of the passage. And the old seminary adage always comes up that a text without a context is a pretext. And so you're trying to figure out how to preach a passage in a new context with a new group of people without much time. And that's always a challenge. Some people just always start by preaching the same beginning verses of a book. They'll just start with like the first four verses of a book. Some will preach a psalm. By our scripture reading today, you can tell I did the opposite of that and jumped to the very end of a book. But I think I got the best of both worlds because our passage really closes out the book of Ruth as a whole. and carries most of the themes of Ruth and brings them into a concluding chapter. And we'll see that as we get to the end, we'll trace themes, we'll trace contexts that get to the end and tell us something about the providence and faithfulness of God. That's really what I wanna talk to us about today. That's really what I want us to receive from God. His word today is learning and hearing about the providence and faithfulness of God to his people. want us to savor this in a new way. For a lot of us that have grown up in the church or that have been in the church for a while, these things can feel like things that we're just really familiar with, that we're overly used to, and so want to grasp that in a new way. Now, to give some context to our passage, Ruth 1, the book of Ruth, Ruth 1 opens telling us in verse 1 that the book is taking place in the days when the judges ruled. It's sort of like on the news, where if you have a newscaster and they're talking maybe about the national interest rates or they're talking about crime rates in a city, and they'll be talking about a broader thing, and then they'll say, now to get more information about this, let's go talk to, and they'll talk to an individual person that represents the broader thing. So the Book of Judges is talking about Israel as a nation, it's talking about judges and rulers and wars that are being fought and sort of the overall status of the nation of Israel. And then Ruth is sort of that honing in, that narrowing down onto, let's, we've seen the crisis of the nation, let's see what an individual life looks like in Israel. Let's see what the family life of this faithful Israelite people looks like. And I've always loved what's implied in that connection, that the book of Judges is full of God's dealing with the nation, his providence that he's raising up Deborah and Gideon and Samson. These great men and women full of great acts, fighting against great wickedness. And then Ruth zooms in and you get to see otherwise what would be nameless people and what the Lord is doing in their lives. And so as a refresher to the story, the book starts out, there's a famine in the land of Israel. are here of a family of Naomi and Elimelech and their two sons, and they leave Israel because of the famine to go to a country called Moab. They're there for some time, and their sons end up marrying Moabite women. Over the course of 10 years, Elimelech, Naomi's husband, dies, her two sons die, and she's left in Moab with just her two foreign daughter-in-laws. This happens, they hear that the famine has been relieved in Israel, the Lord has visited the people, that there's food now, and Naomi decides to go back. Now, Naomi goes, she tries to leave her daughter-in-law's in Moab, one stays, and Ruth clings to her, and you get this great testimony of Ruth's faithfulness to Naomi, that where you go, I will go, where you live, I will live, your God will be my God, your people will be my people, and you get this great character of Ruth. So often the book hones in on some of these wonderful instances of the faithfulness of Ruth, the faithfulness of Boaz, of these different people. Ruth and Naomi return to Israel. They return to Israel and they are in need of food and so Ruth goes out to glean barley. It's harvest season. They don't have any land of their own. And so Ruth goes to basically pick up the leftover droppings of barley in somebody else's land. And she happens upon a field belonging to Boaz, who is kind to her, looks out for her, provides for her, gives her food that satisfies her, and then she has leftover, which she can take back to Naomi. Leftovers that Naomi can eat, and she even has leftovers. There's great prosperity that's happening. And through Ruth's acts of boldness and courage, Boaz ends up, sort of in the climax of our story, marrying Ruth. He is a relative of Naomi's and a kinsman redeemer. And so we see that he marries Ruth to provide an ongoing name for Alemlek, the husband who had passed away. And this is, when we come to our passage, the first point about the faithfulness and providence of God. And this might seem like a given, but the first point that I wanted us to look at is that the Lord is faithful, that he is provident in the story, that he's active in the story. Now, look with me in verse 13. Starting in the passage, it reads, so Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife and went into her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. Now, again, for us, We believe that the Lord is sovereign. We believe that he exercises providence over the world, that he cares for us. We have these passages like Matthew that say like, Castor cares about the Lord. If he cares for the sparrow, then how much more will he care for you? But when reading the book of Ruth, this is actually the second of only two times that the Lord acts in the book of Ruth. In chapter 121, the Lord is said to bring Naomi back. So the Lord acts in chapter one, and he doesn't act again until chapter four, when he allows Ruth to conceive. And so the whole rest of the book, the Lord is mentioned in discourses, people are talking about the Lord, they're praying to the Lord, but we don't actually see the Lord acting. He's behind the scenes. As one scholar comments, Ruth as a whole teaches us two things about how God works and his sovereignty. its hiddenness, we often don't see it, and its continuousness. That is, through Ruth and through much of our lives, we might believe that the Lord is sovereign, we might believe that he cares for us, we might think that he's involved in our lives, but we have to look for it sometimes. We don't actually see it that often in our lives. The other thing that it's important to keep in mind here is that this actually had to be a work of the Lord. We have to remember back in Ruth that Ruth had been married before, and had been married for almost 10 years before, but didn't have children from that marriage. Ruth was a barren woman. This isn't told explicitly, but again, she's married for 10 years and doesn't have children at the end of it. Her conceiving, having this child, was a miracle upon miracle. Not only did her and Naomi find a kinsman that was still alive, the relative that could redeem them in Israel, but he was also a godly man who was willing and able to marry her. Not only that, not only did he marry her and redeem the family lands and the property, but the Lord opened her womb and she was able to have a child as well. This is grace upon grace, miracle upon miracle. And as I was thinking through this passage the other night, I think there were a couple different, thoughts that I had about the faithfulness of the Lord. Some people, some Christians, I think, struggle with this idea that, is the Lord actually faithful? You're going through suffering, you're going through trial, and it's like, is the Lord faithful? I'm trying, I'm calling out to the Lord. I'm struggling with cancer. My best friend just died. My best friend just did some heinous sin against the Lord. Is the Lord actually faithful? Is the Lord actually caring for me? And then on the other hand, you also have people that say, I know the Lord is faithful, but his people aren't acting like it, or people aren't treating me that way. And so I know the Lord is faithful, but everything else around me isn't helping out with that. I know the Lord is faithful, but I haven't been able to talk to my family in years. They're distraught for me. I know the Lord is faithful, but my job just won't help me out. I know the Lord is faithful, but the world keeps going. down the drain. And I was reminded of this joke that David Foster Wallace, who's a novelist, made famous in a commencement speech in the mid-2000s. And he goes something like this. There's two young fish that are swimming upstream. And they pass an older fish on the other side of the stream. And as the older fish is going down, he says, how's the water today, boys? And the two fish keep swimming on. And after a while, one turns to the other and says, what's water? And sometimes I think that that can actually be how Christians think about the faithfulness of the Lord, is that we talk about the faithfulness of the Lord, and maybe we all have that assumed in our minds, but we don't actually see how it works in our lives. We're not actually aware of it. We might be able to look back over the years and be like, yeah, the Lord has been really faithful. That's a great benefit that I think older saints can have for younger saints, that when I was working 10th with lots of 20s and 30s, there was always lots of questions about faithfulness. Is the Lord faithful? I'm trying to get this job. I just got out of school. Young people are a little bit angsty about some of those things. And it was always really helpful to be like, let's talk with an older person who has been through this and can be like, yes, the Lord is faithful, and there are these periods of that. But that through the day-to-day process, we can look back over decades and say, the Lord is faithful, but is he faithful today? in the water that we're swimming in now. What is the water? The faithfulness of the Lord is the water. And so, although that the Lord is faithful, we can affirm that, we also wanna see how the Lord is faithful and who the Lord is faithful to. And that comes to the second point. Look with me now at verses 14 and 15. The text reads, then the women said to Naomi, blessed be the Lord who has not left you this day without a redeemer. May his name be renowned in Israel. He shall be a restorer of life and nourish your old age. For your daughter-in-law loves you, who has more than seven sons and has given birth to you." Notice the women are praising the Lord for something that Ruth has done, right? This reflects much of the story. Again, we said the Lord's only active twice, but the whole story is a story of faithfulness. And so throughout the story, what we actually see is that this word faithfulness, or as was prayed earlier, this loving kindness or loyalty, the same word is used to describe Ruth's actions as is described the Lord's actions. And so the Ruth is actually regularly faithful to Naomi, or exercising loving kindness to Naomi. Similarly, Boaz is faithful to Ruth and exercising loving kindness to Ruth. The Lord is loyal, the Lord is faithful, so is Ruth. And it's through much of Ruth's faithful actions that the Lord is faithful to Naomi. Verses 14 and 15 end up being a closing bracket on something that's opened in chapter one. There we also see a scene where Naomi is speaking with the women of the village, right? So in the end of chapter one, Naomi and Ruth come back from Moab, they come into Bethlehem and the women of the town come and say, is this Naomi? And she says, don't call me Naomi, call me Mara, for the Lord is still bitterly with me. She rejects this. And in verse 21, she says, I went away full and the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Almighty has brought calamity on me. In verse, she talks about fullness. When she's leaving in a time of drought, like there's not enough food for her family to live in Bethlehem. And so she's leaving the country. She's an immigrant. And at the same time, she's able to say like, I was full. She has this mindset that like, as long as my husband and sons are with me, I am full and the Lord has provided with me. The women don't really have much of a response in chapter one. Come back to chapter four, the women respond and say, at the end of the book, say, look at Ruth. You left in chapter one full, you came back empty. Ruth is better than seven sons because of how faithful she has been and how loyal she has been to you. The Lord has been faithful to you because of Ruth. The Lord has been faithful and blessed you because of Ruth. And again, the Lord does this not necessarily through dramatic and grand gestures. Ruth isn't, Her faithfulness doesn't just consist of her leaving Moab and coming to Israel. Her faithfulness consists of going and working and picking barley in the fields and caring for her in the day-in and day-out process of their relationship. Ruth's faithfulness isn't in the grand gestures that we hear in the book of Judges. Ruth's faithfulness is the quiet, day-to-day faithfulness of caring for a mother-in-law. Similarly, Boaz, as I said, Boaz exercises this faithfulness, he's faithful to Ruth, and doesn't do this in dramatic, crazy ways. He follows the law of Israel, he redeems his neighbor's land, he cares for his neighbors. And I think something that's important for Christians and for us to realize is, right, so there's two daughter-in-laws originally, there's Ruth, and Orpah. Orpah doesn't come back to Israel. Orpah does the socially expected thing. She stays in Moab. She worships in Moabite God. She stays there. That's what's expected. That's what Naomi tells her to do. That's not wrong, but it's not this faithful, loving kindness that comes from a relationship with the Lord. Similarly with Boaz. Boaz actually isn't the first Redeemer, there's another Redeemer that's in line. And he starts, he's willing to buy the land, but when he realizes he has to marry Ruth, he says no, he doesn't want to. That's not wrong. It's only required that if he wants to buy it, he can. But Boaz goes above and beyond the rule, the law, the regulation in this loyal, faithful, loving kindness to their family. This is how the Lord often works. in the Westminster Confession of Faith, when it's talking about providence, it says that in the ordinary means that the Lord works in life, he ordains things through second causes. Basically that the Lord is the one that's doing it, but he does it through us. He does it through how one another relate to each other. So the Lord gives Naomi a new family, a new birthright, a new chance at life, but he does it through Ruth. He does it through Boaz. And so when we question the Lord's faithfulness, when we question how the Lord is doing this, the Lord is often being faithful and answering our prayers through the saints that are sitting around us, through the saints that are sitting next to us in the pews. And this, going back to that David Foster Wallace thing, he's talking about what is water. The speech is interesting. His main point is actually just a commendation of liberal arts education, and that liberal arts education gives you a perspective, and that when you're driving down the highway, you can either think of the guy that cut you off as being a really mean person who's in a hurry and doesn't have anything right, or you can think, oh, maybe his kid's hurt in the car and needs help, and he's trying to get him to the hospital, and that that perspective changes how you think of that. It's an interesting thought. I think it ends up coming short. C.S. Lewis has something similar to that, though, in his book where he's talking about temptation and spirituality in the church. And he says one of the best things that Satan can do in our lives is when we go to church, to be thinking about the coffee smell on our husband or wife's breath, to be thinking about the traffic that we came into. to be thinking about all the dishes that were left in the sink by our kids. That the more that we can think about those things, the more distracted we are from the worship of God in corporate worship. And that the perspective change has to come that the Lord is actually being faithful to us. The Lord is exercising his love and kindness to us through the people that we're sitting next to. When we question, we're trying to see what the faithfulness of the Lord looks like, what his loyalty and loving kindness to us looks like on a day-to-day basis. It often looks like other people meeting our needs on a day-to-day basis. So we see that the Lord is faithful. He is working in the story and he's working in our lives. We see that how he does it, he does it through other people, through secondary causes and things that we don't often attribute to the Lord, that he's behind those. And finally, who does the Lord exercise faithfulness to? Who is the Lord actually concerned about? We read the book of Judges, often be thinking, oh, the Lord is concerned about nations. He's playing a giant game of risk and he's mapping all of these different things out. Ruth hones that in and tells us also who the Lord is concerned about. And what we see here is that while the name of the book is Ruth, the story is actually about Naomi the entire time. Naomi is the main character of the book of Ruth. Glancing at two quick verses, we see that in verse 14, Ruth has born a son, and the women turn and speak to Naomi. Again, in verse 17, with more clear implications, the text reads, and the women of the neighborhood gave him a name. That's interesting, women normally in this culture wouldn't have named the children. This book is honing in on the, relationship of these two women and their friendship and the community that comes around them. So the women of the neighborhood give him a name and say, a son has been born to Naomi. Ruth is the mom. Ruth is the one that just gave birth, but a son is born to Naomi. The Lord's care, the Lord's concern, the Lord's providence is for restoring all of this that Naomi lost. She leaves Israel in famine. And by the end of the book is restored, not just to satisfaction, but to fullness, to overbounding. She's given, like Job, more than what she lost. She's restored to this full boundingness that comes through Ruth. The Lord is concerned, not just with nations, but with individuals, with your life, with my life, with our concerns. And what ends up the plot twist at the end that's beautiful in Ruth is that going back to our original context, the geopolitical nature of Israel and everything that's happening there, we find that actually the Lord's concern for the individual Naomi is his answer to the geopolitical context later on, that David ends up being her great-great-grandson. And so that the little actions, the little moments of faithfulness that Ruth extends to Naomi are the Lord's faithfulness to her and also his faithfulness to his covenant promises to Israel as a whole. The Lord remained faithful to Naomi through the daily loyalties of her family and friends and brought her from famine to fullness. Put differently, taking this text in its context and making it our text, we're told that the Lord will be faithful to you, that it might not be obvious how or when he's working, but through the daily loyalties of our brothers and sisters in Christ, the humble acts of faithfulness that we extend to one another. He's bringing us each from life, from death to life. He is bringing us to streams of living water that come from knowing him. He's faithful and he remains faithful and he often does so through our brothers and sisters in Christ. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we praise you for your love and kindness, for your faithfulness and goodness to us. We confess that we are often blind to this, that we often miss your workings in our life, whether it's because we're too busy, whether it's because we have succumbed to too many distractions in the world around us, or whether it's because we're hard-hearted because of our sins, Lord, we confess this and ask that you would help us to see your faithfulness more and more, that we would relish it daily, and that we would praise your name for it. Lord, we also ask that in seeking that we would cherish the faithful loyalties of brothers and sisters in Christ, that these times together of singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, of offering encouragements and words, would be the most cherished parts of our week because this would be where we tangibly see you exercising your faithfulness to us. Lord, we look forward to that day when we see this and we see you by sight and we ask that you would indeed come, Lord, quickly. We pray this in Christ's name, amen. Please stand for our closing hymn, number 348. you