A Story Of Redemption Series

A Story Of Redemption

(The Faith Of A Foreign Woman)

The Story – Chapter nine

OKAY… SO MGCC – are you ready to dig into some God-breathed, living and active, sharper than a double edged sword words from the Creator of The Universe.

Awesome! Me too…

TODAY – we continue in our journey through The Story…

A 31 week journey in and through the Word of God.

A JOURNEY – we started back in January that we will not finish until September.

A JOURNEY – to know better the God we worship and the Word He breathed.

A JOURNEY – where we are seeing re-enforced again and again and again… the same truths we saw in the very beginning… in Chapter one, that our…

God is great!

Our God is Good…

And Our God is gooder than we could ever imagine…

A JOURNEY, A STORY – that really could be summed up in these

words, ‘God’s passionate pursuit of a rebellious and prodigal people.’

NOW – another thing that we have seen played out each week as we have journeyed through Story… is the concept of an upper story and lower story…

The Lower Story is what happens in our day-today life. The lower story is the one that is being written and told from a six foot perspective. IN - the lower story we’re dealing with the things that, we all deal with day in and day out. It’s paying bills. It’s crying babies. It’s dealing with grief. It’s trying to get over the flu. It’s dealing with break ups and conflict.

It’s…

• Being throw into a pit by your brothers

• Living as fugitive in the desert for 40 years

• Wandering in the wilderness

• Being oppressed by an enemy

It’s just life. It’s just kind of what happens. That’s our lower story.

AND – the truth is sometimes our lower story, ain’t so pretty… is it? BUT – the good news is that the lower story is not the only story in town…

The Upper Story is how God is moving in and through those ‘lower story’ events to restore the world to the way it was meant to be.

It is about how God can take any circumstance in the narrative of anyone’s life and make it work out for good.

THIS MORNING – we are in Chapter 9 of The Story, ‘The Faith Of A Foreign Woman’ in a conversation that I am calling, ‘A Story Of Redemption…’

NOW – I gotta be honest after the last few conversations…

• Deliverance

• Rules Of Engagement

• Are We There Yet?

• The Battle Begins, and

• Breaking The Cycle

At first I was not all that excited about chapter 9, ‘The Faith Of A Foreign Woman…’ I was like… how awesome can it be without swords, shields, battles, thundering mountains, parting seas, crumbling walls and powerful visible acts of God… I mean – where’s the action…

This week I posted this question on my facebook wall… what are your 3 all time favorite movies… and I listed mine… 1) Braveheart 2) Gladiator 3) Count of Monte Cristo…

There were no clear winners…

A lot of different movies (60+ ladies, 40+ guys)

But for the most part, there was a common theme…

Action verses chick flick

The Story

Act One: “Famine and Return”

Chapter 9 of The Story opens up with these words… (page 121, Ruth 1:1)

In the days when the judges ruled…

(Now, those 7 words say a lot about the environment where this story of redemption takes place...) As we said last week the period of Judges was a 330 year period dominated by violence, sexual immorality, greed, pride, fear, sin and evil… A time where God’s people were stuck in a very vicious cycle..

UNDERSTAND - Chapter 9 of The Story takes place in an environment that God himself describes with these words…

In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. – Judges 21:25

Okay, back to Chapter 9…

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land…

Of course there was… and it was not just a lack of food…

So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. 2 The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there. – Ruth 1:1,2

Not too far of a move geographically, but it was a big move in many other ways…

YOU SEE - the Moabites were enemies of God’s people, and descendant from Moab who was the son of an incestual relationship between Lot and his eldest daughter. They oppressed Israel for 18 years during the period of Judges.