Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Series Review
Review of the Ruth story: 1) famine, death, bitterness, return 2) gleaning in the fields, working hard, noticed by Boaz, who is our guardian redeemer
When I was reading over this story and trying to put together a sermon, I remembered a story I read about ten years ago.
The title of the book was Your God is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control.
The book is about how small our visions can be, the low expectations we have of God, the feelings that God is absent or God is not working in our lives.
The expectation that if God is not making us feel secure and safe, then we really aren’t worshipping the God of Scripture.
Feb 19, 2009
The author tells a story of a woman who experienced tragedy and had lost hope: Her story begins with a hopeful future.
Her husband was an architect, and they would sit down in the evenings and plan out their dream home together.
This would be a home where they could raise their children together and grow old together.
One day her husband abruptly announced that he was in love with another woman, and wanted a divorce.
Her husband goes on to marry this other woman.
The reason this 3rd chapter of Ruth reminded me of this angry, devastated woman was not just that she had lost her husband.
It was also because of the real estate: what was supposed to be her home.
She and her kids never moved away, and her commute to work would take her by the house where ex husband and his new wife lived.
Built exactly like the one she had envisioned.
Chapter story is about Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, but behind these actors is something that is also importance: real estate.
Naomi had lost her husband and her children when she lived in Moab, but she also lost their land.
When Naomi and her husband left Israel because of the famine, they left behind land.
Their home.
When Naomi and her husband left Israel because of the famine, they left behind land.
Their home.
And since Naomi’s husband had died, and since she was a woman, Naomi couldn’t reclaim that land.
She couldn’t redeem that land.
So I imagine Naomi, having a visible reminder of her tragedy: land that was once her now belonging to someone else.
And since Naomi’s husband had died, and since she was a woman, Naomi couldn’t reclaim that land.
She couldn’t redeem that land.
She needed a redeemer.
Do you remember when I preached about redemption last November?
It means to buy back something that was lost.
It could mean personal freedom.
It could mean land.
This story, this sermon, is about how Naomi is intentional in making this happen.
The sermon is about how we can discover hope in asking God.
We can find hope in petition.
introduction to series: hopelessness…woman, unfaithful husband, house
Naomi is sorta like this woman - her husband was not unfaithful but he died
Sermon Introduction
I wonder how many of us in this worship space need something.
And by need I mean need, not want.
Sometimes we can’t tell the difference.
Sometimes what we want is something that God does not want for us.
But Jesus makes it clear that we need to ask God to supply our needs:
He makes it sound so simple.
Ask and you get.
Knock and the door opens.
God is a divine waiter and a restaurant waiting for us to place an order.
God is a butler who opens the door.
James in his letter seems to reinforce this idea.
You don’t have it?
It’s because you didn’t ask.
s
s
: You do not have because you do not ask God.
things starting to get better
Both of these Scriptures are true: God knows what we need and is waiting for us to ask.
God wants to make himself known to us and he’s waiting at the door.
But people get disillusioned when God leaves us waiting for our order to arrive or leaves us standing by the door waiting for someone to let us in.
This sermon is about asking.
It’s about petition.
All of the major players in the story: Naomi, Ruth and Boaz tell us something about how we need to ask God, and how through our asking we can find hope, even before our prayers of petition are answered.
We get disillusioned when God doesn’t ask swiftly, or give us what we know we need.
I want to make a distinction between 2 types of asking.
I see these in Scripture, and I see these in my life as a follower of Jesus Christ.
There is...
This series is about hope: the hope that God gives us.
We see this hope played out in the story of Ruth, someone whom by Hollywood’s standards would be a not so compelling character.
She is a foreigner.
She is a widow.
She is poor.
The Bible is a book of its times, so her being a woman makes her even less significant in the ancient world.
And she clings to her mother in law and goes to a foreign land with her.
And yet in this quiet, maybe even boring to some people, God shows his quiet, slow, providential, and transforming work.
And yet in this quiet, maybe even boring to some people, God shows his quiet, slow, providential, and transforming work.
story, this sermon is
Passive Asking v. Active Asking
Passive Asking means avoiding evil and waiting for God to answer.
Sometimes we use the phrase “Let go and let God.”
Sometimes we can get to that point.
Where we’ve done all we can at our end.
We’ve used all of our human efforts and human resources, and there’s nothing else we can do, so we just sit back, be still and know there is God.
But that should not be our default.
In fact, sometimes it can be just plain wrong.
Imagine my sitting in my lazy boy chair, feet propped up and asking my wife, “can you give me a refill?”
“Well....I could...”
Sometimes we ask God for more important things: we agonize over what theologians call “the problem of evil.”
Why, God, do you allow suffering?
Why, God, do you allow people to live in starvation?
Why, God, do allow homelessness?
Why, God, do you allow so much hatred in the world?
Why, God, do you let me hurt?
I wonder sometimes if God is asking us the same thing?
Remember last week I said that just because the biblical authors didn’t explicitly write, “God did this,” doesn’t mean God was silent and inactive.
The same is true of prayer.
Just because we don’t read about someone kneeling and saying a prayer doesn’t mean they weren’t praying and crying out to God for their needs.
Active Asking is actively seeking to obey God.
Praying about what God wants us to do.
Praying to God for what we need.
But just because ask God for something, doesn’t mean we just sit and do nothing.
Active asking is praying, while actively seeking God’s solution.
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