Hope, Boldness, And Relationship With God

Yesterday we read Ruth 1: 1-18; Psalm 146; Mark 12: 28-34; and Hebrews 9: 11-28; 10: 19-39.

It has been quite a week since we last came together! Hurricane Sandy has brought death, destruction, and havoc to large portions of the USA, which meant millions of people were affected. More locally, we have received word that several children need our church to step up to the plate in a real and tangible way for Christmas. There's a lot of hopelessness and brokenness all around and within us.

Ruth knew hopelessness. When she, Naomi, and Orpah set off for Judah from Moab, they were three women with nothing but each other. No husbands, sons, or other male relatives they could count on for support. Traveling to a country only Naomi had ever lived in and it had been a while. No jobs, no visible means of support, nothing waiting for them in Judah. A God that only Naomi knew. Before entering Judah, Orpah, at Naomi's insistence, went back home. That left two women to face the unknown together. Ruth did not know God and Naomi thought God was angry with her, hence all the trouble she was experiencing.

But God knew Naomi and God knew Ruth. And God was at work, taking a very broken time for both of them, and working to bring much good not just to them, but to all of Judah, and later, the world. They could not see the big picture and would not have believed it if they could have seen it. Ruth would become the great-grandmother of King David. She couldn't have seen that one on the horizon at all when she eventually did have a son...Obed. But I bet David heard the family stories about Ruth and how she came from Moab, a widow, and married Boaz. I bet he reflects those family stories in some of his Psalms, like today's 146, when he talks about God's love of widows and the foreigners among us. None of them could have foreseen Jesus in their family tree, either.

Naomi and Ruth fearfully, yet boldly, entered Judah and God was with them in their boldness. God could handle what they faced. And God can handle what we face.

The world has always depended on putting "hope" in money, power, land/possessions. The world has always done that. In God's realm, though, we put hope in our relationship with God. God is where the real power is, anyway, and it is from His hand that we get our resources. The more we grow in relationship, the more hope we have, especially in our broken times. And the more we grow in relationship with God, the more we are able to look back and see how He has carried us through those times in the past and we grow in confidence that He will see us through those times we face today and will face in the future. And we can approach Him with boldness. Not only will we grow in boldness in our approaching His Throne, but we will grow in boldness in doing the right thing in troubling times. In God's realm, these three things go together: growing in relationship with God, hope, and boldness. That doesn't exclude other things in God's realm, but yesterday, we looked at these three as they related to the Scriptures listed above.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus was approached by someone full of boldness asking a question about what's the greatest commandment. Not only did Jesus answer his question in a way that fully satisfied the man, Jesus kept His honor (which the man was trying to diminish), and Jesus wasn't put off by the man's boldness. He actually, in an indirect way, commends him for it by telling him that's he's not far from the Kingdom of God. Which, btw, he really wasn't far from it...he was staring it in the face.

Jesus' response to the question of what's the greatest commandment? “The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord.  And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”

That's how we grow in relationship with God, how our hope increases, and how we become more bold...both in living in this world God's way and in approaching God's Throne of mercy and grace when we need His help and strength in our times of need. We learn to love Him with everything we have: our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Or as The Message puts it, "with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy." 

When we bring everything we have to the table, we find He's already there. We can, also, look back and see how God has already been at work in our lives, weaving people together in our journeys when we needed them or they needed us. We can see how He has used things in our past and even redeemed things in our pasts. We trust that He is doing the same thing now even though we can no more see it now than we could yesterday. God is at work. And just like Ruth never knew David or Jesus would be coming in her family tree, we don't know who or what God is bringing together, from us and our journey that will bring great good to a corner of the world or the world at large. We just don't. 

But we can trust that God is taking our brokenness and bringing good from it. We may never live to see it. We might be blessed with a tiny glimpse. But we can trust God is at work and our brokenness will never have the last word. That last Word always belongs to God and it is always a good Word. A healing Word. A bold Word of Hope.

As we each grow in relationship with God, may we hear His bold Word of Hope clearer and clearer in our lives and in our times of brokenness.

Amen and Amen!