Surrender to the Story.

And some of you were like, that was really long. I was talking to another pastor this week and they're going through Acts and they're also been reading the full text they're teaching on. He read his church four chapters of Acts last Sunday. Okay. So I'm like, I never want to hear anybody complain about like, that was too long. All right. We can do more if you want. Watch.

No, just kidding. I'm not like that. Okay. But we are going to be reading the entire thing. We're just going to break it up a little bit.

If you are just kind of jumping in with us, we have a little Ruth cheat sheet that's at the welcome table. One of our desires here at New Culture is we really don't want to just be like, oh, we kind of sometimes read the text and we engage with it a little bit on Sundays, but we want to be people that we are constantly falling in love with God's word, recognizing when we read scripture, we're communing with God. We are not just like reading words and reading stories, although yes, there are words and it is a story, but we are hearing from a living, active God that wants to speak to us through his Holy Spirit.

So we want you to understand like what are you reading. So grab one of those and it kind of has every week we're saying let's read through a chapter of Ruth together so that we can kind of be on the same page of what we're learning. We're going to start by reading Ruth chapter 2 starting in verse one. It says:

Now Naomi had a relative on her husband's side from the clan of Elimelech, a man of standing whose name was Boaz. And Ruth, the Moabite, said to Naomi, let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor. Naomi said to her, go ahead, my daughter. So she went out and began to glean in the fields behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she found herself working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelech.

Just then, Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and greeted the harvesters. The Lord be with you. The Lord bless you, they called back. Boaz asked the foreman of his harvesters, whose young woman is that? The foreman replied, she is a Moabite who came from Moab with Naomi. She said, please let me glean and gather among the sheaves behind the harvesters. She went into the field and has worked steadily from morning till now, except for a short rest in the shelter.

So Boaz said to Ruth, my daughter, listen to me. Don't go and glean in another field and don't go away from here. Stay here with my servant girls. Watch the field where the men are harvesting and follow along after the girls. I have told the men not to touch you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.

At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She exclaimed, why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me, a foreigner? Boaz replied, I've been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother, your homeland, and came to live with a people you did not know before.

Ruth 2:1-11

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word that is alive and active. We thank you that today when we are reading this story and we're learning about what took place, it is so much more than just something for us to read about, but that you want to speak to us. And so even now, we just invite you, knowing that you're already moving, that you're already speaking, that you already have us all in this space for a reason today. We just say that we welcome your presence. We welcome your Holy Spirit. We want you to come and to speak to us, to transform us. So would you do that for these next few moments? We ask this in your son, Jesus' name. Amen.

Ruth's story of surrender

There's a lot happening in this text and in this story. We're teaching on Ruth in February, which some people are like, it's the month of love and it's Black History Month. And so you're like, what sermon series are you doing for that? This wasn't super intentional, but I think that this story is so much more than just romantic love that we're reading about. But we are reading so much about this story of redemption from beginning to end. There are so many different cliffhangers that you see and things that are happening here that cause us to pay close attention to be like, God, what are you doing in the story of this woman?

You see some of the language of even oppression and you get some of the context of what is happening. In that question where Boaz is asking, he's like, whose young woman is this? Because at that point, like as a woman, she would have had to belong to someone in order to be anyone. And so he's like, who does she belong to? What is happening here in this moment?

We're seeing here, this story was continuing of Ruth. If you remember in chapter one, she was faced with great devastation. Her husband had died, her brother-in-law had died, her father-in-law had died. And so now she's sitting here with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law. The mother-in-law is saying, you go back to your people. Do not come with me. Do not come with me. I'm going to go back to Israel.

And Ruth chooses to stay with her mother-in-law, where she says, your God will be my God. Your people will be my people. She's choosing in the midst of a place that she doesn't see what is about to happen. She doesn't see what is coming next. She chooses to stay with her mother-in-law and be faithful in that place.

So now she finds herself where it tells us we're picking up in Ruth chapter two, that she finds herself gleaning from these fields. I want to talk today about how this is all this story of surrender. Our now what for today is to surrender to the story. And our so what is continuing to remember that God is weaving together all the unseen and all the same things for a greater story.

Sacrifice and faithful obedience

The first thing we're going to talk about is the sacrifice that took place. In the Old Testament, when you hear this word sacrifice, it would often be referred to the sacrifice of animals. You would slaughter your animals, offer them as burnt offerings, as a sacrifice unto the Lord, to pay the price for any of your sins or to just worship. You would lay down all of these sacrifices, the offerings to God. But essentially, to sum it up, sacrifice is giving up something valuable for the sake of something or someone else. So it's giving up something for someone or something else.

Ruth here we see that in chapter one she made the sacrifice where she's giving up the potential for her to have a future spouse, a future chance at a life. We talked about this last week. It's so much more than just like, oh, she's not going to be romantically in love again. It was more than that because a husband at that time was your protector, was your provider, was all of that.

And so without a husband, you might not know where shelter's coming from. You couldn't just go work for yourself and provide for yourself like we can today. So this was a big deal. And she sacrificed that to stay with Naomi.

Now, when are we usually willing to sacrifice? For your own life, like when are you willing to sacrifice something of value and give it up for someone else? Typically, it's when you know the outcome. It's when you know like it's going to be worth it or it's going to lead to something better. It's also typically when you love someone enough, right? The people that are closest to you, you're willing to do things for them in a way that you probably won't do for a stranger or someone you don't know.

You sacrifice for the people that are close to you. Now when is it hard to sacrifice? Typically when you don't know the outcome. When you're not quite sure about the person that you're sacrificing for, it makes it a little bit harder.

What I want us to notice here is that Ruth's life was marked by sacrifice. We see now that she is choosing to go work in the fields and glean from the fields. She is choosing to continue to sacrifice for Naomi, but this was not the first time that she has shown us that she's willing to sacrifice. Ruth chose to sacrifice something valuable for the sake of something and someone else.

Now, here's the good news for us: when we talk about sacrifice today, we are on the other side of the resurrection of Jesus. So we know that our sacrifice is worth it. We know that even the things that we think we're sacrificing, and sometimes we're under the illusion that they're valuable, we know that we can lay them down and we can offer that because there is something even more greater that we are giving it up for.

But what I love about this is this idea that Ruth started somewhere. We see this moment in her story in chapter one, where she's saying, I'm going to stay with you, Naomi. And then we see this beginning in Ruth chapter two, where she says, I'm going to go and I'm going to start working in the fields. I'm going to start going and finding any way that I can to work, to sacrifice, to provide. This doesn't just come out of anywhere. This is something that was deeply formed inside of her. This practice of saying, I am going to sacrifice. So when these big moments come up that we're looking and we're like, that was a big sacrifice she made. She's able to effortlessly do that because this was just coming out of who she was.

It was flowing from what had been deeply formed inside of her, a life of sacrifice.

One summer when I was growing up, my mom decided to watch, and we would do different things like this sometimes in the summer. She decided to watch two other kids. And so I already had three brothers and now there were two more boys added to the mix. So this summer it was me and the five boys.

It was one of those distinct moments, I remember even so young, where you start to realize like at some point you just can't hide the culture that been deeply formed inside of you. It really comes out when you get a bunch of kids around a lunch table. It comes out when you get a bunch of kids and the mac and cheese gets put down in the middle and you start to see the culture that has been deeply formed inside of people.

This is not parent shaming because sometimes you can do your best and your kid's just still going to be a kid, right? Things happen. But there was something so different in the culture between me and my brothers and how we were raised and these two boys.

Some of it was like my family didn't always have money for like all the expensive cool food and all of this stuff. And so whenever we got even like not, it wasn't. And now I recognize like how privileged this is where I'm like, I'd be mad when my mom would make us homemade mac and cheese. I'm like, give me the craft name brand mac and cheese, you know. And she's trying to be like healthy and save money, which is so kind and so grateful.

But, you know, we're like, get me the store bought. So when the store bought Kraft mac and cheese name brand is on the table, we're like, this is a luxury. Like, oh my gosh. And we were taught like to share things. And the way that our family worked is that we didn't just like dig in. We waited until everybody had their portion of food and then we would eat it. And then we would divvy up the leftovers and make sure we all had enough to eat.

That was not what these boys did. It was like before the pot was even set down on the table, they're just digging in, they're piling it on their plates and they're piling it in their mouths, eating as fast as they can, trying to get more of it before everybody is even served. And this is how their family worked. Like, it was just like, you eat fast, you eat as much as you can and you hope that there's some left for other people, maybe.

We were to the point where even, you know the cosmic brownies? They're like split in half, right? There was four of us growing up. We would like cut them. If there was one leftover in the box, it was not like rock, paper, scissors, who gets it? It was like, we're going to cut it into four equal pieces to make sure that we all have enough.

But the point of this is, is like, there's just some things that depending on how you grew up, depending on how you were raised or how you were trained or not trained, there's things that have been formed inside of you that at some point they're going to come out. Ruth did not just wake up one day and was ready to make this big sacrifice. But there was something that was formed in her life where she was willing and ready in this moment where it shows that she had been practicing sacrifice. So when this moment came, she was ready.

We talk about often how the things that we do, they do something to us and everything that we do is forming us and that is going to flow out of us. And so if we want to be people of sacrifice, it's going to start by us every single day to say, what are small ways that I cannot just think of myself, but think of other people? What are small ways that I can start to sacrifice? What are small ways that I can give up something of value for someone else and ultimately for Jesus? What does that look like?

Sacrifice and generosity

The next thing I want to talk about is this setup that's happening. When I'm like, we're talking about Ruth and Boaz, I'm not talking about them like setting up to be with each other. Although, spoiler, they get married in the end. But there's some setups that are happening in this text that I think are really profound for us to know.

Starting in verse 8, I'm going to read that part again:

Boaz said to Ruth, my daughter, listen to me. Don't go and glean in another field and don't go away from here. Stay with my servant girls. Watch the field where the men are harvesting and follow along after the girls. I have told the men not to touch you and whenever you are thirsty, go and drink from the water jars the men have filled.

Ruth 2:8-12

At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She exclaimed, why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me, a foreigner? Boaz replied, I've been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother, your homeland, and came to live with a people you did not know before.

I love this so much here where he's noticing her sacrifice, right? He's referencing like what she did and he's noticing what she did for her mother-in-law, for her family, all of that. Then verse 14 goes on to say: At the meantime, Boaz said to her, come over here, have some bread, dip it in the wine vinegar. When she sat down with the harvesters, he offered her some roasted grain. She ate all that she wanted and had some leftover. As she got up to glean, Boaz gave orders to his men. Let her gather among the sheaves and don't reprimand her. Even pull out some stocks for her from the bundles and leave them for her to pick up. Don't rebuke her.

So we see here, Ruth has this step of faith that she's taking. She enters the fields of Boaz, a man that she does not know. This is an unseen moment where she's taking this step of faith and she's like, I cannot see the outcome. She does not know that Boaz is going to marry her, going to provide for her, going to provide for her family. She doesn't know the outcome at this point. She's just being faithful to where she's at.

And there's a lot of setups that are happening here in this moment. So who's setting up who? Ruth, she's setting herself up. Ruth was willing to do the hard thing no matter what the cost. She right away was like, okay, we're in a new place and I'm going to be faithful and I'm going to get working. Her waiting was not just sitting still, but it was going and serving wherever God had her.

You see, we get it backwards when we start to focus all of our energy on trying to figure out, God, what are you doing? Like, why me? What's happening? This, that. Where are you sending me next? Where am I going from here? What do you have for me? When we get so caught up on the future thinking, we miss the invitation that God has for us right here with the people that he has us with and the place that he has placed us.

And we forget that God wants to provide and he wants to fulfill promises right here in this present moment, not just in the future that he has promised for us. Ruth, she could have just been spending her days going, okay, what's next? What's next? What's next? But instead she said, I am going to be faithful to this place. I'm going to be faithful to these people. I am going to work and I am going to trust God is going to fulfill every promise and he's going to provide.

We have a choice of whether or not we are going to live like wanderers who are always wondering what is next? Or will we stay and will we remain and will we dwell in the place that God is providing for us if we just open our eyes to see?

It says she went out. She entered a field and began to glean behind the harvesters. She started to be faithful right where she was at and God provided through her faithful obedience. God set this up. Ruth set herself up by being obedient to the place that she was in and staying and working. And God set this up. So there's this word here, kinsman redeemer, that isn't in the NIV translation, but it talks about Elimelech's relative, Boaz, and there was a close relation.

Essentially, what would happen, this Hebrew word, kinsman redeemer, which again isn't in the NIV, but other translations, if you have it, we'll use that, is this Hebrew word goel, which means the one who delivers or the one who rescues. And so in the Bible, this kind of concept of a kinsman redeemer was outlined first in the Levitical laws. And it was basically this: a close relative of a family member, if somebody were to die, a close relative of that family member would have the opportunity to take on their land and to take on their debt, and usually it was for a really good price. But then with that, they would also take on their wife, or they would also take on any other women in their family that would have been left.

And so in this story of Ruth, Boaz is going to, we're going to read and talk about it more next week, fulfill this role of the Kinsman Redeemer when he marries Ruth. This role of providing for her, for protecting her, for rescuing her from what otherwise her fate would be to always be wandering, always be without a home, always be without a husband. So Boaz is going to do that. He's going to rescue Ruth and Naomi, but Ruth was also a part of setting up in her being faithful to where she was. So Ruth sets this up. God sets this up. It's no coincidence that she just is in his field. And then we see how Boaz sets this up.

Boaz was prepared. Boaz was proactive in the way that he was living his life.

The law of gleaning

Now I want to talk about what this gleaning is all about. Gleaning, it was a really common, but I think a really profound practice that took place in the Old Testament. In this time in Israel, in the Old Testament, what would happen was if you were a person that you had wealth and you had land and you had fields with all this harvest and all this produce and all this fruit, you would go through and what they would call it is you would go through the fields one time to essentially grab like the harvest and to pick the fruit or produce, you know, the crops. You would go through one time. That's it. And then you would intentionally leave some of it behind for then the widows, the orphans, the poor, the oppressed people would come through the fields after and glean.

This wasn't just Boaz that did this, but this was a common practice. But what I think is profound about this is that it wasn't just like a little bit that they left over. Most people would leave 25 percent of their crops behind for people to come after them and glean. So what we see here is that gleaning was this intentional generosity. Gleaning was setting up people to be able to have provision, to be able to have food that otherwise might not have it.

Gleaning was sacrificial. It was giving up something of value for other people who were of value also made in God's image. And so this was a common practice, but I think it's so profound for us to recognize like this didn't have to happen. And I feel like there could be so many excuses of why people would say we just going to keep everything for ourselves. But instead it was common practice that they would leave behind 25 percent for people to come behind them and glean.

We struggle sometimes to tithe just even 10 percent to the church because we're so scared of will we have enough. They lived with this abundance mindset, but it was also intentional to provide for the people that were coming behind them. And so I, even as I read this, I think like, what would this look like for us as a church to live this type of way with this intentional, proactive generosity?

I recognize that even when I say this, like it's hard. It is hard for us. Even right now, there's some of us that it's like, you're living paycheck to paycheck. Maybe even this month, it's like, I don't know how to pay my bills. What does this look like? God had set in place systems so that people always had enough. And today he has set in place us as the church to be that for each other, to continue to come and to provide for one another.

I wonder that even now, like we talk about Ruth, like it was the small, probably daily sacrifices that led her to this greater moment where she was able to have this like quote unquote big sacrifice, which I think they're all big and profound, even if we don't know it. What does it look like for us with the little even that we have to say, how can I proactively be generous and intentional? How can I proactively be preparing to feed other people and not just myself? Even if right now it feels like this is barely anything that I am giving, how do we live like that and continue to steward the little that we do have and constantly are thinking not just about ourselves, but the people around us to just make way and prepare them for God to do incredible things in the way that he was using Boaz in this moment?

I love this, that we do have an example of this in scripture in Acts, in the early church. I want to read kind of a longer passage here in Acts, because I think that it all kind of flows together. We read here that in Acts 4, in verse 23, in my Bible, it was titled, The Believer's Prayer. This is the early church. This is kind of like the first people, like after Jesus died on the cross, he was raised back to life. He empowers his disciples. The day of Pentecost takes place in Acts. Holy Spirit ascends on everybody and they're like, okay, we're going out. We're going to preach the gospel and we start planting churches all over the place.

On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. Sovereign Lord, they said, You have made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David. Why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed one.

Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in the city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant, Jesus.

After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. Then it says all the believers were one heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own but they shared everything they had with great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and God's grace was so powerfully at work in them that there was no needy person among them.

But from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet. I want you to notice even as there's a few more verses here just the intentionality with the generosity. If there was a need, they're going and they're selling things that they have to make sure the people that in their church and the people around them are taken care of. And it says one apostle called Barnabas sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles' feet.

Acts 4:23-37

There was this culture of this intentional sacrifice, this intentional setting people up to be provided for, setting people up to walk in the fullness of what God had for them.

I want you to notice a few things that we're noticing here in this passage. It was talking about the nations are rising up against, you know, and so they're referencing this, which kind of leads us to assume that they're in a time that is also relating to like the nations raging up against one another. They're using that scripture from the Old Testament. It's in Psalms, I think it was Psalms 2, that they're quoting there. They're using this in their prayer, right?

So they're praying scripture together. So that kind of leads us to believe like something was happening that they're also feeling like there's some tension going on here. There's some unseen, unpredictable things that are happening. There's maybe some situations around us that feel a little bit impossible. And then they start to pray the scriptures. Then they are filled with the Holy Spirit and they start proclaiming the good news of Jesus boldly.

That shows us again, like we need the power of the Holy Spirit to continue to fall upon us because like, we're not going to be able to do it on our own. Thankfully we don't have to because Jesus left with us his Holy Spirit. So we don't have to try and always come up with the strategy, but we can trust the Holy Spirit for that. And then they responded proactively. They didn't just ask, seek, and knock, but they heard and they listened and they obeyed. They started to say, okay, here's what we know. The Holy Spirit has empowered us. So now we're going to follow the examples of Jesus and we're going to make sure that the people around us are provided for, that the people around us are walking in the fullness of God's presence and his promises to not just us. They were preparing. They were setting people up. They were making way.

And it is going so much back to what we see Boaz doing in this. Boaz was also showing us this proactive obedience, this proactive generosity, sacrifice, and surrender. When Boaz was setting up things for the gleaners in the field, he wasn't just giving the leftover fruits, but instead they left over fruit intentionally to make sure people were provided for. He couldn't always see who was going to benefit from it, but he did it anyways. There is a difference between just leaving leftovers and intentionally leaving leftovers for people.

Surrender and staying faithful

Ruth, she chose to stay. She chose to stay with her mother-in-law Naomi, which did then lead her physically to a new place, right? Sometimes staying where God has us may actually physically move us as well. So then she physically goes to Israel, but then she chose to stay in the field that she found favor in.

It says Ruth stayed close to the servant girls of Boaz to glean until the barley and wheat harvest were finished. And she lived with her mother-in-law. She chose to stay. Surrender often means staying when you don't know what's next. Ruth's story was not fast-tracked. She did not immediately become wealthy, become married to Boaz. This wasn't an immediate thing. But this was slow instead. She chose to continue though to stay over and over again trusting that God was going to fulfill his promise in due time.

How can we be people that choose to stay even when we can't see what's coming? That choose to stay and trust God with our situations? That choose to stay even when other people are leaving? We go back to her sister-in-law in chapter one, but continue to stay and to trust that God is bringing provision as we stay present to what he's doing and the story that he's writing.

God is weaving the seen and the unseen together for glory, for his glory and also for our good. When we read the story of Ruth as a whole and we know how it ends and we know where it leads, but there's also all these moments in between. If you just pick it up and you read that verse and think what would it have been like to be there in that moment, she did not know in this moment when she is showing up and it's saying sunrise to sunset she's gleaning the fields that was not easy work.

She had to work for it. So yes someone was proactively providing and saying, we're really going to leave 25 percent for all these people to come and get. And then she was satisfied. And Boaz even had this moment where he invited her to come and to eat with her. It says she was full and more was left over. So God was providing for her, but she was working hard for this day in and day out, not knowing what was going to come from this moment.

Not knowing that eventually she was going to give birth to the grandparent of David and Jesus was going to come from the line of David. She didn't know this in this moment that God was using her story and weaving it all together for his glory and our good.

And the same is true for us today. Wherever you find yourself in your story, know that God is weaving every single moment together, the seen, the unseen, the significant, the ones that seem insignificant in the moment. He has a redemptive plan for it all.

So now what do we do with it? We surrender to the story. We surrender in the way that we sacrifice. We surrender in the way that we set up. We surrender in the way that we stay present with God and where he has us in the place and the people that he has before us.

Before Ruth we have the book of Judges and Judges ends essentially by saying that nothing is going to work out until we have a king. Nothing is going to work out until we have a king. And then Ruth ends with a way for a king, which would be Jesus.

23 times in the book of Ruth, the word redeemed shows up. 23 times. Redeemed, redeemed, redeemed. Ruth is pointing to Jesus, the one that had been prophesied to come. Isaiah 49:26 says, all mankind will know that I, the Lord, am your savior, your redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob. Romans 11:26 through 27 says, the deliverer will come from Zion. He will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.

Jesus is our redeemer and wants to redeem our stories. But here's something that I want us to notice is that God used Ruth to bring redemption and her story was redeemed in the process. That God used Ruth to work and he was working in her life through the process. He used Ruth to provide for her mother-in-law, and he was providing for her in the process. As Ruth was picking up the leftovers, God was making sure there was more than enough left over for her to where she was full and then had some.

You see, God wants to use you today to play a role and to play a part in his story, to continue to bring provision and to bring hope and to usher in his kingdom. And in that, he's going to continue to give you hope and to give you provision and to give you everything that you need. He has not forgotten about you in his story.

But there is redemption for you as we make way to bring redemption. But one of the things that we have to be so mindful of is that sometimes we can get so hung up in these things of like, okay, well, what does this look like? Like I'm tired and does God like, does he only want to use me? And how do we get out of these situations? And all of that is real.

There are moments where it's like, we are just so worn out and it's like, I don't know how to keep going. And what we have to be mindful of is in Genesis 3, when we see the introduction of the enemy in the form of the serpent, that one of the things that it says is that the serpent is crafty. Genesis 3:1 says this:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say this?

Genesis 3:1

This first question, this first story where we see where then Eve eats from the forbidden fruit and sin enters the world and Adam and Eve, they eat of this fruit. Sin enters the world. When we see this happen, it starts with this note: the enemy is more crafty than any wild animal.

See God wants to use us to be people of sacrifice, people of surrender, people that are constantly not just thinking about ourselves but are thinking about others, people that are willing to stay in hard situations. The enemy is constantly going to try to get us to question God's character, to question, did God really say that? To question, does God really have good things for me? Because maybe right now it doesn't feel good.

But the goodness in that is that God's goodness and character is not based on our current situation or how we're feeling about it. I remind us of this today because I think that for some of us, maybe we're in that place where you're kind of like Ruth, where you're like, I feel like these things that I thought were going well, like, you know, she's married and she has her life kind of settled. And then now her husband dies and now she's alone and doesn't know where to go. And maybe you're in that part of the story and you're like, I just don't know.

Like, I thought that things were good and I felt like things are taken from me. And this is hard. And it can be easy to be like, well, is God really good then if things don't feel good in this moment? Maybe you're in that part where then you're like, okay, like, I feel like God told me to be faithful and to stay. And now like there's still not provision and I find myself like I'm working so hard like day in and day out and I am just tired and I'm worn out.

We can't see in this moment that God is using all of that to provide for us and that he is fulfilling his promises through us. So may we not be stuck on where the enemy wants us to believe that God's not good, that he's not providing. But may we see that he's in every single moment and that he wants to use it all and that he is providing as we continue to walk in faithfulness and in obedience. How we feel about a situation is not always how God sees it.

So then what do we do in those moments? I think again going back to right away in Ruth chapter 1 where we see that Ruth is saying that she's not going to leave Naomi but she's going to stay committed, that she's going to stay committed to her. You see, I think part of us seeing God fulfill his promises and walking closely with him and that invitation for us is to go beyond just being involved with God and being near God and doing things with God when it's convenient, but to continue to lean into this commitment of saying, I'm going to stay and I'm going to sacrifice because I do know how the story ends. And I do know that this present moment is not my promised hope and future and that there's more to this story. And so I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay.

I want to invite you to stand today. I just have a few questions that I want us to process. The first one is this: what do you need to sacrifice? What are things in your life that maybe God has been calling you to lay down? I think sometimes we think of sacrifice and it could be where you're like, yeah, like it is sacrifice in the sense of an offering or, you know, I need, I have these things I need to give up. But it could even be little things of like negativity or like complaining about my situation. Like what are those things that you're like, this? You might not feel like it's valuable, but when you think about it, you're like, this consumes so much of my life right now.

What are things that you need to sacrifice and to lay down? The next is like, who do you need to set up? Even pray and be like, are there ways that I need to be more intentional about the way that I live, about how I am preparing, about how I am setting other people up? And then where do you need to stay?

Maybe you're in a season where you feel like you've been waiting for a long time, but just know that waiting is never wasted. Maybe God is just inviting you to say, would you just continue to stay? Would you continue to work? Would you continue to do the heavy lifting and trust that I'm doing something with all of it?

And ultimately, this leads us all to just this place of surrender. This place of surrender that just says, like, God, like, I trust you with all of it. The significant, the insignificant, the seen, the unseen, every present moment of my current reality. I trust you. I just want to invite us to kind of close with some of those questions in mind.

We're just going to end again in a time of worship as a way to just surrender, to say, God, like even now, maybe there's things that have come up as I'm reading your word. And it's just like, I don't want to think about that or that's hard to face, but like I surrender it anyways. I just want to invite you to close your eyes if you're comfortable across this place and just position yourself now, just even in a posture of surrender. Often for me, it's just placing my hands out in front of me and saying, God, like, I trust you.

And so, God, right now, I thank you for every single person in this room. I thank you for the way that your Spirit continues to guide us, continues to remind us of our hope that is found in your son, Jesus. I thank you that we stand right now on this side of the resurrection, knowing that the price has been paid, that we have been redeemed, that Jesus not only was promised to come, but he came, that he took on the highest sacrifice and paid the highest price for our sins so that we can live with you for all of eternity.

And God, we know today that we are in the middle of your story. We are in the middle of our stories. And whatever moment we find ourselves in, God, I just pray right now, would we feel your nearness? And would you just impart on us just greater boldness?

Would you impart on us just greater just surrender and sacrifice and willingness to trust you even in the things that right now it's like, I cannot see how you're weaving this together. Would your word continue to be the lamp unto our feet? And would you show us just what we need to know? And would you help us to surrender the things that we don't know for the situations that are so uncertain and so unpredictable that it's like, God, I don't know. Would you help us to surrender not knowing and trust that you're in that too.

And to trust that you are making way as we continue to sacrifice, as we continue to be people that are constantly working to prepare and people that stay faithful and present to you even when we don't understand. And so God, as we enter into just this time of prayer and worship and we sing these words to you, Lord. Would you receive them as our offering? As our sacrifice of saying that we hold things right now in our lives that feel valuable and we're laying them down in this moment as we worship you, as we honor you because we trust you, God.

So we just welcome your presence in this place as we continue to just worship and pray and surrender.