Welcome to the Mariners Church Life Group leader podcast. This weekly conversation is designed to equip and resource youth to build a healthy life group community that studies God's word, practices spiritual rhythms and changes the world together. Welcome back to the Life of leader podcast. We are excited about starting a new series.
We are going to be looking at the book of Ruth found in the Old Testament. And this is a beautiful love story. And so we've actually titled this series Return to Love. And I believe that in our life groups, we are going to have conversations about not only the concept of love, but we're gonna look at this beautiful picture of Jesus in the Old Testament and what that means for us living beyond the time of the New Testament, we get to actually see how not only is Jesus relevant today, but also how the Old Testament in this beautiful story is still relevant to us living in the year 2022.
And so joined with me today is Jeremy. Hope you're doing well, my friend. Why don't you give us an overview of this series? Yeah, so this little mini series is gonna be great.
Like you said, looking at the story of Ruth. And so this first week, we actually hit the first three chapters and then we have some that we're gonna come back and focus on a really popular phrase. A lot of our leaders and people in our groups may have even had these verses in their wedding ceremonies, the real popular for weddings, although we'll see that the context is not marriage, where we see these verses, but very popular verses. So we're gonna really take the first three chapters, this first week and see God's loyalty and love for his people and also this picture of loyal love between Ruth and Naomi and the rest of her family as the story unfolds, a more distant family.
And then next week, we see how this concept of redeemer that we're so familiar with that idea of redeemer when referring to Christ, but seeing where that imagery really comes from, this cultural context of ancient Hebrew people and what the picture of redeemer was very literally in the story of Ruth and how it ultimately points us to Jesus. And then finally, we're gonna see how God works in unexpected ways in our lives and someone who felt so hopeless, perhaps at the beginning of the story by the end of the story, we see that her story, the story of Ruth and Naomi, ultimately was just a piece that not only pointed kind of with imagery towards who Jesus was going to be the Messiah, but ultimately the actual lineage that led to King David and ultimately Jesus' own family, that Ruth was actually a part of that lineage. So we don't wanna skip ahead as we get into that, but that's where we're headed. And it's pretty exciting and a great way to lead into the season of Lent as we prepare for Easter to kind of see this backstory of Jesus' actual family.
I love when we do not only books of the Bible, but narrative stories. And this is going to be a conversation that I think we're gonna have to be a little bit aware that it's a short story and because it is a narrative, and similarly, if you were to sit down with your friends and you had a book club or you watched a movie together, that it would be hard to not talk about the entirety of the story every single week. But instead, we're wanting to make sure as groups that we parse out the topics of one, two and three, which Jeremy, you kind of overlapped, or outlined for us there already. Do you have anything specific for us to just ensure that in maybe this first week's conversation, we don't tread into week two and then same thing for two and three, what advice do you have for our leaders to try to help us stay really tight to the topics of each week?
So the first thing I would recommend is that it's a short book, it's only four chapters and those chapters aren't long either. So you'll see that even this first week, we're gonna read the first three, have people read the story as a group before coming back to focus. So I would encourage leaders first to read through the book of Ruth so that you are familiar with the whole story and you'll know kind of how not to get ahead of yourselves. And then for this week in particular, avoid going into the theme of Redeemer too heavily because week two we're going to look at how Jesus is the ultimate Redeemer.
So we're not gonna get in, try to steer conversation away from Redeemer and avoid getting into the idea of King as well, that how ultimately this points to Jesus is King. That shouldn't come up this week, but Redeemer and King are gonna be things we wanna look at in weeks two or three. Okay, that's really helpful. And I think the reason I'm bringing it up is while the guide is really clear and the questions are gonna lend us to talking about the relationship between Ruth and Naomi and it will keep us under this idea of loyal love.
For those of us who are familiar with the story, it's gonna be an exercise and restraint to bring up where the story is going because I think what you've done here is really designed a great conversation for us that separates out those themes that show up throughout the story. And so, Jeremy, are there any things that our leaders should be doing in preparation for this week? I would imagine reading the whole story is probably a good thing, but it's also gonna be a challenging thing because again, we want you to stay focused on topic for this week, but anything else you'd add to that? With this week's conversation, one of the ways we really want to help people get into really relate to it, both kind of mentally put themselves in the place of Ruth and Naomi, both actually this week, but also emotionally and just kind of practically.
A lot of the questions this week in order to set us up for the rest of the story or trying to identify with both Ruth and Naomi in this beginning of the story, before we start to see how we get hints and we get little pieces of how God is gonna provide for them and fulfill promises and show his faithfulness. But this first week, if we could really identify with and so as leaders, maybe think about times in your own life where maybe you felt hopeless or helpless, maybe you were even bitter about the way your circumstances were turning out, you kind of thought it would be best to do one thing and that sort of fell apart and blew up in your face and maybe you've been at the point and maybe people are in your groups who are at the point where either currently or not too long ago, especially with all that's been going on just culturally and in our families, extended families, where you get to the point where you're just kind of fed up and you're like, no, nothing's getting better, things just seem to be getting worse and worse and worse. I'm mad about my circumstances, I might even be mad at God if I'm honest, like why would he just keep letting everything pile up on me like this? How could anything good possibly come from this situation?
So without leaving people in a state of kind of hopelessness or just venting and complaining to really try to identify and be honest about those times where you have kind of felt those, experience those thoughts, those emotions, maybe you've even said things in just frustration or anger or bitterness in order to put yourself in that place where we can really receive and appreciate how good the good news of redemption and provision and God's loyal love really is when we kind of feel like we're in those places where it's got actually going to show up as he actually care. When we identify with that, he can recognize how much greater his redemption, his kingship as Messiah and Lord really is. You're hitting at something that has been so important in my own devotional and study life, which is before I can try to understand God as he shows up in the story, however God is going to deliver, save, rescue, whatever depending on the passage, right? Before I can fully understand the God I'm about to experience from a particular story, I need to put myself in the same emotional state as the person within the story.
So the, you know, Ruth or Naomi in this example, or whether it's Jesus and his disciples, like before anything that I can grasp the character or the nature of God, I need to relate to the experience that these people are having so that I can almost, like just like these questions you're saying, you know, where do you see emotional relational needs, where have you felt bitter or where have you felt alone? Things like that in your life by identifying those areas in our life, it actually puts us in the place where we're going to receive God in a similar way as we'll see him in the scripture as we get to that part of the story. And so you're really actually helping us to not take God out of context, but instead to experience God within a context that we have shared with the biblical characters that we're studying here. So with that in mind, you know, you've got a lot of great questions here.
And one of the things that I would probably re-emphasize here, and I think Jeremy, you've done a great job, you've already said it here today, is that we want to find ourselves to identify those areas of bitterness or isolation, loneliness, a place of hopelessness. We don't want to leave ourselves there. And we also don't want to make that the only point of the conversation because we also want to look at the other side and you know, you have this lookout section, where do you see emotional, relational, and material needs in the circles that we influence? And where else do we see those needs?
Where else are those things? So meaning we get to see ourselves in both positions here, a place where I was in need, but also identifying areas of need outside of my own life. And that's so important. I think the natural, surely the natural posture that we desire to be in is the one who helps others, right?
Like everyone wants to have it together and it'd be nice if we could just have that reminder of, okay, don't forget in all your, you know, in all the ways that God has blessed you to be generous and to be thoughtful and mindful of the people around you, but to truly experience that reciprocal nature of relationship where sometimes it takes as much or more humility to receive help, whether that's just an encouraging word or that's actual like tangible help. We see both in the story of Ruth and Naomi, how they are helped both very practically and tangibly with physical needs, but also how emotional and relational needs are met. And so to think about who has encouraged me, who has God used to kind of provide for those various needs in my own life and recognize those people and thank God for how he used them in your own life, but then to not forget, okay, and how can I continue to be that sort of encouragement or the way God provides for someone else's need as well? Cause he does both.
Yeah, without a doubt. The last thought I had kind of for this episode, and Jeremy if you've anything else for us, please share. But I like that you've included in here, what other insights from the weekend message we're especially timely for you. It just as a reminder, I think that sometimes we can almost compartmentalize our weekend messages from our life group discussions, even though we're trying to provide a resource that is able to bridge the several days, perhaps that are between the two.
And it's always welcome that you bring into the discussion as a leader or you foster a conversation from within the group of perhaps anything that did happen within our weekend teaching that might be pertinent to this conversation. And so as Jeremy's preparing for this, it's hard to provide all the commentary and the color that our weekend teachers are gonna provide because they're studying at different times and under different circumstances. And so just like your Peter's last reminder for me, right is that you can incorporate some of the learnings, the bullet points that you captured from the weekend, perhaps an illustration that was very timely, bring that into your discussions, because I think that's only gonna help us understand that what we're trying to do here is follow Jesus every day of our life. And so we worship together on the weekend and we may have our life group on Tuesday night or whatever it is and we have these discussions.
But really the church is that the gathering of believers anytime we're together and having a relationship with God is something that happens every single day. So with that, Jeremy, any other final thoughts for this week? Yeah, just that I'm excited about this little mini series and tying together, like you just said, how has God used maybe the weekend experience and the teaching there to kind of speak into our lives in relation to this text? And then how can we look at just the text itself and bring those two things together as we learn to study and discuss God's word, kind of in community and share what he's saying to the church at large.
It's just an exciting time. And again, as we prepare for Lent and head into that Easter season to see how God's always at work in people's ordinary daily lives to lead to his ultimate, redemptive purposes. So as they kind of put themselves in the place of the different people in this story this week, we get to prepare for next week and looking at redemption. And then ultimately how God would use all of this to bring about the story and life of Christ is just an exciting way to prepare for this season.
Amazing. Well, I'm looking forward to that second conversation and life your leaders. We are praying for you. I hope that while this is a short series, I hope that this first week's discussion gets you set in a direction that's gonna make for the next couple really fruitful and beneficial for the people in your group.
And so we're grateful for you. We're praying for you and have a great rest of your week. Take care.