This is the coming from chat. Lead pastor of foundry. He comes from our previous series called right. Let's pray together.
You call us to yourself. God, we know that you are around us. You're with us. We recognize that.
God, we also confess there are some times we don't realize that. God said we are in for your presence. As we continue in worship. God, we pray that our hearts will be tuned to your hearts and we'll be hearing your words and seeing your son.
Amen. Amen. Having a conversation about what it means to be right for the last three months. And we're going to continue that today.
Within thinking about what does it mean to be right with other people. I think that was part of this conversation that most folks were really interested in. What does it mean to be right with other people? But we're going to start that by thinking about how have people related to others throughout time.
I'm a big huge fan of movies. I'm a big fan of stories. I love to see a good story. Does anybody else binge watch on Netflix?
You know you're doing it. You go get ice cream and you sit there and Saturday goes away. My wife and I are about to finish Blue Bloods and I'm really sad. We have three episodes left.
I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't watch Blue Bloods anymore because I've been watching Blue Bloods for a month and a half. But there's the people there. There's actually historians that specialize in story and they've identified them to read them to you.
They've identified seven different story arcs that come across time. No matter if the story is four or five thousand years old or if it was written and told yesterday. Most stories will follow one of these seven arcs. This is the arm and reading to you on the screen behind me.
The story of overcoming the monster rags to riches. A story of a quest, a voyage in return, a comedy, a tragedy, and rebirth. Think about your favorite movies, your favorite books and think about how they would slide into one of those seven story arcs. I think that a big plot device that's used across stories are stories of people going beyond what's expected of them.
I found three movie examples. I think everyone in the room will be able to identify with one of these examples of stories of people who've gone far beyond what's expected. The first one is the 80s classic movie The Goonies. We're all familiar with The Goonies.
A ragtag bunch of kids on a rainy Saturday afternoon. They're bummed because their house is robbing vault by developer. In a wild goose chase, it sounds like they have a reputation for wild goose chases. They end up finding some felons that are on the lamb and finding hidden pirate treasure and saving the day and be able to buy their houses back and stop the development.
Things that they never thought they were to be expected of them. The second movie, and I can't believe I'm about to talk about this. This is not one of my favorite movies, but it's a great example of playing the long game. But it's the Nicholas Sparks movie, the notebook.
I will fully admit that I've watched the notebook at one time. I'll tell you what. It's like fifty first dates with a lot more crying. Because the story line is kind of similar.
He's playing the long game. He's chasing the girl. He finally gets the girl. There's a character in the movie that's even like an Ammon object.
It's this house. And in the end of the movie, you find out that the wife has Alzheimer's. He's changed his house that he's been renovating and working on his entire life to be a nursing home for her. Or he admits himself and every day has these conversations trying to get just a glimpse of the relationship back.
He's playing the long game. He's going far beyond what's expected of him. Another example is possibly one of my favorite series of movies of all time is the 80s. And now we can say 2015 classic Mad Max.
The story of a renegade of a loner who has a chance encounter with a group of people. And some simple transaction is made for him to get fuel or get supplies. And in the simple transaction, it ends up being a huge quest. And he has a tremendous amount of personal sacrifice for the sake of these random people he's met.
And in the movie he just walks away and goes back off by himself. Again, three movies to talk about people. And very different ways going beyond what's expected of them. Now I think the reason that we like these movies, these stories of people going beyond what's expected is so much the opposite of regular life.
Our experience is not people going beyond what's expected of them. Our experience is people doing significantly less than we expect. We're used to disappointment. We're used to frustration.
We're used to people that are willing to do whatever it takes for them to be right and for us to be wrong. Even there's a good story being told right now of a person who's willing to do whatever it takes to come out on top. Who else here's watching House of Cards Frank Underwood. Think about that.
Sky is the minority whip in the house and becomes president of the United States of America and has never even gone through an election. He's willing to do whatever it takes to be right. The climb to the top on the backs of other people. No matter what the cost.
We can look at that situation. We can see how bad that is but we know that's not us but really and truly. Every single one of us there's always willing to be right. We find ourselves thrust into situations.
We're willing to be right and for other people to be wrong. For us to be good and for them to be bad. For us to be smart and for them to not be smart. For us to be in power and for them to not have power.
It's part of humanity. It's a sad part of humanity. We all can think of those people. This really characterizes.
I know that you might be thinking of somebody you have interactions with on a daily basis that this reminds you of. But we're all that person at one point in time. We're all that person to other people. It's because we don't have trust.
Sometimes in our life we have learned that we can't trust somebody. We can't trust systems. We can't trust things. And whenever we're scared, whenever we get defensive, we start becoming a self-referenced version of ourselves.
What that means is that we become our own bearer of truth. We even have a word for it. Self-righteous. What is right is defined by who we are and what we believe.
Not about what anyone else tells us. It's a frustrating place to be personally on our own. When we're doing this, a frustrating thing. For when other people are doing this to us.
But inside of frustration, what we find is we find there's room for grace. We find opportunities for us to act gracious towards other people. When we find the holes in our heart where we realize that we need grace, that we have done something wrong, that we have other people's help. Inside of frustration, there's a room for grace.
And that's God's design for this world's net chaos. We live in a chaotic world. God's design for this world is beauty. And it's about relationships.
It's about people learning what does it mean to be right together. And not right another person. Wrong. We've looked in the Bible.
And we've been reading through the book of Judges as we have these conversations. But if we look just a couple of chapters back, there's these books in the Bible that everyone never wants to touch. They don't want to read like a book cycle of vidicists. Nobody knows what to do with vidicists.
We find all these rules have been given to God's people. But if we really look at the big part of these rules, what we find is God is creating beauty out of chaos. He's teaching people what it means to not be self-righteous, but to be selfless. What does it mean to be thinking about the good of the community?
Bible scholars even have a word for this. They call it piece of old community. God's design for his world and for his people is to be dependability, is to be respect. And that's what we're going to be looking at this morning in our story and thinking about what does it mean to be right with other people.
Because God's vision for relationships is bigger than our vision for relationships. What God wants us to interact with each other is significantly bigger and better than what we have come up with on our own. And God in the scripture takes a ragtag group of unorganized misfits. He pulls them out of slavery and the desert being formed into his people.
He gives them these rules for the sake of relationships, for the sake of knowing what does it mean to work with each other. What does it mean to share with each other? What does it mean to take care of each other? He takes this bunch of misfits and transforms them into a holy and mighty people.
And that's what he's still doing. So in our previous years we talked about right. We've talked about the first time that we talked about what does it mean to be right with God? We're right with God by being open to what he's doing.
The second thing is we weren't what does it mean to be right with ourselves? Because we have to know who we are. We have to be self aware, self aware of the things that we are trying to do and the mistakes that we are making. But this week we're going to talk about being right with other people because being right means responsible.
In scripture we don't find rights as a thing that we personally own but rights are things that we are given for the sake of other people. That we are giving rights so we can be responsible for people so folks can learn what it is like to live in a world where you can trust. And so we're actually going to jump out of the book of Judges. And we're going to read just the story of a woman named Ruth.
Now we've talked about Judges a lot and we've talked about how Judges is like the Game of Thrones of the Bible. They didn't judge us. There's all sorts of things you shouldn't let your kids read. There's murder.
There's human trafficking. There's slavery. There's an entire tribe of Israel is obliterated because the action of just a handful of people. There's a lot of bad things and judges are just a descent of humanity away from God's rules and God's order.
And leaders trying to pull Israel back up out of this. The book of Ruth is right after Judges. The book of Ruth opens with this verse and says, in the time of Judges there was a man named Olimalek. So the story of Ruth sits smack in the middle of this chaos.
So as Judges is descending into the sub-humanity almost and Ruth would find stories of selflessness. We find stories of people going beyond what's expected. We find stories of people understanding that to be right means that you have to be responsible. And so Ruth opens up with Olimalek and his wife.
And there's a famine in Israel. And they move to a neighboring land called Moab and they have two sons and they find food. Everything's good. And the sons find wives and they live there for ten years and everything's great.
Everything is wonderful. And then Olimalek dies. But that's all right because Naomi, his wife, has her two sons to take care of her. And then her two sons die.
So here's Naomi with two widow-daughter-in-laws and no children, no heir. They're in the middle of a chaotic situation. And she realizes that she has to take care of them. And the best thing for her to do is to send them back home to their father's house.
And you see in scripture what we find is that God actually has this system set up for protection. If we stretch out the big long Jewish word, the Hebrew word that if I say I'll pronounce wrong, I'll probably spit on you. It means Father's house. It's a system of security.
It's a system of being safe. And so she wants her daughter-in-laws to go back to their father's house where they'll be safe and secure. And so one of her daughter-in-laws does just that. But she has another daughter-in-law whose name is Ruth.
And Ruth tells Naomi something that we're all from there with. We hear this verse a lot of times in weddings when it says, where you go, I'll go. And your land will be my land and your people will be my people and your God will be my God. And she says, I'm a link to you.
So Ruth and Naomi, they go back and they go to the town where Olimalek's ancestors lived. It's a town called Bethlehem. And Bethlehem's kind of a familiar place in the story of God and his people. And so they go back to Bethlehem and Ruth goes to find food for them.
And there's a system that God set up. It's called a gleaning. And it's in this where if people have problems finding food, there are rules for farmers that when it comes time for harvest, they're not allowed to harvest their whole field. They have to leave the corners unharvested.
They're not allowed to go back through their field and pick up what might have been dropped. It talks about how if they have olive trees or they have vineyards with grapes, they're not supposed to shake the tree branches twice. They're supposed to leave stuff there. It's supposed to leave food there for the people who do not have food so they can take care of themselves.
So Ruth begins to glean in a field. And the man who owns this whole farm comes up to her and says, who are you? Ruth applies. I'm Naomi's daughter-in-law.
I'm a widow. And this man's name is Boaz. And he knows exactly who Ruth is because Ruth's reputation has been proceeding herself. Because Ruth has been consistently going beyond what's expected and taking care of her mother-in-law.
She did not have to come back to Bethlehem, but she did. So Boaz tells her, listen, I want you to come drink water from the whale where we pull the water up. And I want you to come eat lunch with my workers. And I want you to stay behind my women in the field so that you won't be taking advantage of it as a single woman.
She was very vulnerable. He said, I want you to stay with my worker so you will be safe and secure. A situation of Boaz going far beyond what's expected and how he's supposed to take care of her. He understands it being right, means being responsible.
And then he goes to his workers and goes to step beyond that. He tells his workers, he says, listen, I want you to leave food for her. I want you to pull stalks of grain out of the bunches and drop them so she can't pick them up. I want you to do everything you can so she can gather as much food as possible.
So at the end of the day, Ruth has a full basket full of grain, much more than she expected to have. And so she goes back home. And she tells Ruth, she tells Naomi, she sees all of this. And Naomi's like, who is this man who's been so nice to you?
And Ruth's reply was, what's his name is Boaz? And Naomi has this look of just amazement. Because Boaz is the person that's the relative in their family that's supposed to take care of them if bad things happen. The system that God has set up for protection, that the buck stops with Boaz.
Their needs will be provided for. So all harvest season long, Ruth continues to harvest with Boaz. And with his people. And at the end of harvest season, she's getting enough food where her and Naomi are able not just to have the food to eat.
That's what the system was designed for, was just so you can have enough food to eat every day. They have enough food. They can sell it. They can completely provide.
They can have a good life with just what Ruth has been allowed to glean with Boaz. But Naomi tells Ruth to listen, I appreciate what you've done for me, but it's time for you to get married. It's time for you to go remarry. It's time for you to have a safe and a secure structure underneath you.
So they can talk to plan. It's rather unorthodox. And one night Ruth goes to Boaz and Ruth proposes to Boaz. Boaz accepts her proposal, but tells her there's a problem.
I'm not actually your closest relative. There's a man who is closer to you than I am, but I'm going to talk to him tomorrow and I'm going to take care of this for you. Boaz is continuing to go far beyond what's expected. He understands what it means to be responsible for other people.
So we're going to open up Ruth, Chapter 4. We're going to read just a couple of verses and we're going to see how this all plays out. So the words will be on the screen behind me or you can use your phone if you want to, but Ruth, Chapter 4. So Boaz went to the town gate and took a seat there.
And just as then the family redeemer he mentioned came by, so Boaz called out to him. Come over here and sit down. Friend, I want to talk with you so they sat down together and Boaz called 10 leaders from the town and asked him to sit as witnesses. So Boaz is setting up a legal transaction right here.
He wants to make sure this is done completely right where no one can argue with it. And Boaz said to the family redeemer, you know Naomi who came back from Moab. She's selling the land that belonged to our relative, a limbic. I thought I should speak with you about it so you can redeem it if you wish.
If you want to land and invite here in the presence of these witnesses, but if you don't want it, let me know right away because I'm next in line to redeem it after you. The man replied, I'll write, I'll redeem it. And then Boaz told him, of course your purchase of the land from Naomi also requires that you marry Ruth, the Moabic widow. That way she can have children who will carry on her husband's name and keep the land in the family.
Then I can't redeem with the family reply because this might endanger my own estate. You redeem the land. I cannot do it. See, there's a couple different things going on here.
At one point in time, a limbic probably sold his family's land. It was most likely during this famine to have enough money to take care of his kids. But when God gave the land to his people, it was non-transferable. They would always have access and rights back to this land.
You couldn't sell a piece of land and never see it again. And so what Naomi needed the money for was to buy back to the rights to this land. And the family redeemer, he liked the idea at first because he had no relatives. She had no offspring.
She had no heirs. And that meant that that family line would die and he would have access to that land from this time until now. It would be his in perpetuity. Regardless of that family's ties to it, he would have access in the land right usage.
It was like a rite of fresh refusal. But Boass is playing the long game. He's realizing what's actually going on here. Because there's a system set up that if a man died and he did not have any offspring, that his brother or his next relative had to marry his wife.
And if they had a son, that son would be allowed to carry on that family name. So Boass brings up this issue with Ruth and says, well Naomi has no relatives. This is the one who left. They only see well for childbirth.
You're gonna have to marry Ruth. And the man resends because he realizes that if he marries Ruth and if Ruth has a son, then all this money he just used to buy back this land, he loses it. It would be a bad investment. Now at first we're probably looking at this and thinking this family redeemer is gonna be a jerk.
He's doing things sneaky. No, he's doing exactly what he's allowed to do. This is completely an illegal bound. I mean, this is, he's being good.
But Boass is going beyond what's expected. And he says, we have to take responsibility for this family. Because they have nothing. So Boass marries Ruth.
And they have a child. And we'll get back to that in just a second. But think about this. I know it's at first, right?
This is a weird story chat. What does this mean about being right with other people? What does this show us? You all, we live in a world that's very chaotic.
And it seems like in the last few months our world has grown increasingly chaotic. And the chaos hit close to home this week. And at times like these, it's very easy for people to completely go back into their own hearts. And their own minds become self-righteous and become defensive.
But God doesn't desire chaos. God desires beauty. And imagine what can happen. I'm not gonna give you four things to do this or five things to think about.
I want us just to imagine for a moment together. To imagine what it would be like if we were aware of what drove people. Of what influenced them. Of what made them act the way they did.
How many of you have ever had a friend come to you and I can complain about somebody else that you know. And then you end up saying, listen, do you know about this? I don't think there's something going on that you might not be aware of. I'm keeping my hand raised.
We do this. You don't know the whole situation. And think back to the person that is in your life that just brings drama with them everywhere. Think of how powerful and how life-changing it can be when we develop an awareness of what is causing that drama in that person's life.
What's causing them to react in that way? What's causing them to always insist that they are being right? Where's the brokenness that is in their heart that we can help men that we can help fix? Where's the brokenness in our own heart when we act like that?
Because we all act like it. I'm stubborn. I'm really stubborn. Imagine how powerful it could be if we were to develop an awareness of those that we were around.
Especially the people that are difficult. Imagine what it would be like if we were able to walk alongside them. To be willing to live in their mess with them. To be responsible for them.
I can think of people in my life that have done that for me. In amazing ways. We don't have the time to even go into it this morning. The deepest depths to absolute bottom of my life I've had people that have willingly stepped into it and said, I'm going to stand here with you and we're going to climb out of this hole together.
And imagine what it could be like for you to teach that person what does it mean to be responsible for other people. For not only for their own eyes to be open in their hearts to be healed, for them to become healers themselves and to go out and to walk alongside people in their mess. Imagine how much that could change things. Being right means being responsible.
Responsible for other people. So I'll tell you a little bit about Ruth's son. And we will read this in Ruth chapter four verse 16 and 17. So Naomi took the baby and cuddled with him.
And she cared for him as if he were her own. And the neighbor woman said, now it lasts Naomi has a son again. And they named him Obed. And he became the father of Jesse and the grandfather of David.
Now there's some familiar names in there and we're actually going to jump to the beginning of Matthew, the first chapter in the New Testament. And we're going to read a little bit different of a version of the same family line. So Matthew chapter one is on the screen behind you. I should have marked it in my Bible.
This is what it says. Solomon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth. Obed was the father of Jesse.
And Jesse was the father of King David. King David the man who's called the person after God's own heart. Who came and did bring peaceful community. It's the nation of Israel.
If we read further and further in Matthew, there's a lot of names. I'm not going to pronounce them in front of you because I'll get them wrong no matter how I'll get them wrong. We'll jump to verse 16 and we'll continue the family line of Ruth and Boaz. This is what it says.
So Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. And Mary gave birth to Jesus, who was called a Messiah. The actions of Boaz being responsible for a random stranger. Every single one of us in this room have been affected.
We serve a God who models responsibility for us. What it means to be responsible for other people. What does it mean to be aware of what's going on? What does it mean to go down to the bottom of their life and to pull them back up again?
Where trust never existed before, to instill trust, to give trust, to show graciousness. That's what our God gives us. So Jesus, in a life of being responsible for other people, suffered, died, and rose again. And the ultimate act of responsibility ever.
And for those of us who called Jesus Lord, what we realize is that as He was responsible for us, we then get the privilege and the beauty of being responsible to other people. And being part of their story changing. And being right means being responsible. Let's pray together.
Father, you've come to us. God in many different ways and many different stories and ways that we can explain and articulate in ways that we can't explain and articulate. God, where we once did not trust, we now do trust. We trust because of your son, Jesus, we trust because of other people who have taken responsibility for us in the past.
God, we've been thrown into a process of healing that is messy but also as beautiful as you. Take the chaos in our life and turn it into beauty. And so God, as we continue in worship, what we pray for is for you to show us what this responsibility means. God, for our hearts to be touched and loved because we know that you are, you love us.
And the God that our hearts also be encouraged and drawn towards the people that we can now walk alongside of in their own journey. It's now your son, Jesus, and pray. If you enjoyed Foundry, make sure to share with friends and family on social media. Use hashtag WeAreFoundry and review and write on iTunes.