New Life New Hope
April 22, 2018 Ruth 1:6-18 John 21:1-14
Have you ever started something that you were real excited about doing but something came up and it distracted you from what you were hoping to complete so that you never quite got around to finishing the project that you started. You may have wanted to lose 15 lbs to fit back into that suit or that dress, but then somebody invited you Red Lobster or Golden Corral and offered to pay for the meal, and you didn’t want to hurt their feelings. You may have started to paint a room and almost got done, but you needed a special kind of a ladder to reach that last areas, so it never got painted.
When I was in the ninth grade, God had created me to be a sprinter, but I didn’t know it. We were having an away track meet in Georgia. This was in 1971 with the Black Power Movement in full swing. I believed that if you were Black, you were naturally faster than white guys were. There was a race coming up with nothing but white boys in it. I told my friend, let’s get in this race, I know we can beat these white boys. My friend reluctantly agreed and we got in the race.
There were people saying, “look at them brothers. I know they are going to win.” My head beamed with pride with my afro sticking out. Did I tell you, I was a sprinter, and didn’t know it? Well it just so happened my friend and I had jumped into the mile race which was four times around the track. A sprinter is built for a race that lasts a ½ of a lap or less.
There must have been about 15 to 20 people in that race. For lap one, I was in the front of the pack. For lap 2, I was in the back of the pack. For lap 3 everything was becoming blury, I couldn’t even see the back of the pack. For lap 4 I was so humiliated at being so far behind that I ran to the locker room without finishing the race.
The only person left on the track was my friend who still had enough courage to finish the race despite the boos. I remember somebody telling us, you guys are disgrace to the race. I never believed the false myth of racial athletic superiority again.
I could have made one of two critical mistakes. 1) I could have quit track and never ran again or I could have made up my mind to work harder at being able to run a mile. If I had done either, I would not have discovered God created me to be a sprinter, somebody who could run fast for short distances. I began to excel, when I placed myself in God’s will and design for me. We have all been created in a way to glorify God.
There was a young lady who was very attractive and a very hard worker. Somehow she had caught the eye of this foreign immigrant who had come to her country. At first she was a little hesitant of him because they had a different religion and way of doing things. She might not have given him the time of day but her friend had married his brother and things seemed to be working out for her. Well with time the wedding took place and she and her husband, her friend and her husband and her mother in law all lived together.
For ten years, thing went along great. Naomi was happy, because even though her husband had died, her sons Mahlon and Killion had married to wonderful ladies in Ruth and Orpah. The more she talked with Ruth about her God, the more Ruth wanted to know who her God was. Her future was secure, because her sons could take care of her until she died.
But then came that virus that hit the village, and both of her sons got it and before she knew it, they had buried both of them. For Naomi, not only was there the pain of losing two sons that she loved, along with her loss came the words, your social security payments, your pension and your 401k plans have all been terminated. You are on your own. This was true not only for Naomi, but Ruth and Orpah found themselves unexpected widows with no source of income.
What do you do when everything is going along well and then the bottom of life drops out on you. Jesus knows what we’re feeling because He’s been there. When Jesus was on the cross, paying the penalty for your sin and for mine, he cried out those painful words of hurt and desperation, saying, “My My God, Why Have you forsaken me. One of the easiest lies for us to believe is that God has forgotten about us or that God does not care about our situation or that God has left us on our own.
Anybody watching the soldiers take Jesus’s dead body down from the cross, may have concluded, based on the facts of the situation. Jesus has been forsaken, and God has abandoned him. But the truth is, the story was not over. In three days, Jesus would be raised from the dead and would be more alive than He had ever been. But if there had not have been a death and a burial, there would never have been a resurrection. We sometimes let our current circumstances attempt to write a story with an ending, that’s not God’s will for our lives.
Every story that you are living right now has a number of possible endings. There is something that’s going to happen that’s going to give you a sign of new life that’s going to lead to a new hope for a new beginning. But sometimes you have to put yourself in a place where you will be open to something new. In our New Testament reading, the disciples had already previously seen the resurrected Jesus. They knew he was alive. He had told them to go to Galilee and wait for him there. In John 21, they were in Galilee waiting once again for Jesus to arrive.
Some of the most dangerous moments for us as believers is the in between moments with God. We get to where we think God wants us, and then God doesn’t seem to do anything. The temptation is for us to try to go back to old ways of doing things to make our lives work. Even as a church, when we get stuck, the first thing we want to do is to think, if we just go back to the old ways of doing things, it will change everything and we can move forward again. The reality is, the world is changing and the old ways of doing things aren’t going to work for us today, except when the things we are doing are the things God actually tells us to do.
Naomi and her husband had originally came to Ruth’s country because there had been a famine in the land and they were running away from starvation. But now Naomi sees a possibility for new life when she hears that God has provided food for his people in her own country. She thinks I can just go back home and pick up where I left off. How many of you know, when you’ve been gone for fifteen years, you can’t go back home to the same life you left.
Even though she loves and accepts Ruth and Oprah, back in Naomi’s homeland these ladies would be considered foreigners and face prejudice against them. She knew their chances of getting a husband with her people were slim to none because of marriage laws. She felt God has put her in a very bad position and her only option was to send her daughter in laws away and go back home alone. She was restless inside. What do you turn to when you get restless?
Peter just couldn’t keep just waiting for Jesus to show up. What If Jesus wasn’t coming back? What if Jesus had wanted to choose the women to lead the movement, after all, Jesus had appeared to them first. What if he had disqualified himself from being a leader in the big three with his three denials of Jesus?
Peter looked at the other guys, and told them “I don’t know about you guys, but I am going to go fishing. The other guys said they would go with him. Seven of the eleven disciples are going to try to make it on their own. Now they were in the place Jesus called them to be, but they were trying to use methods that Jesus had called them away from.
Peter, James and John were professional fisherman. This is what they had done for a living. They thought it would be an easy thing to just move in and pick up where they left off. They were going to start putting some money in their pockets and they were going to eat a real good meal and life would be stable again. No more of having to do this stuff just relying on faith. They would take care of themselves. Just like Naomi, they discovered that going back to old things and old ways of doing things is not that easy and sometimes, its just not going to work.
Naomi tried going back home alone to give herself and the two women what she thought was going to be their best shot at a new life. She laid out her arguments with the pros and the cons. She was certain they would understand it was in their best interest to go back to the life they had known before she met them.
Oprah saw the wisdom in her words and she left. Ruth however, could not get beyond the God that Naomi had introduced her to. She didn’t want to go back, she wanted to go forward with a hope that if this God is all that Naomi has told me about, I want to go see what He might be able to do for me. Even after Oprah turned and walked away, Ruth told Naomi, Ruth 1:16-18 (NIV2011)
16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.
17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”
18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.
Sometimes we don’t know when to stop even when things aren’t working. Peter and the disciples had gotten into that boat and had fished all night long. The last time they had gone fishing, they had caught two boat loads of fish that almost sunk the boats. They had spent all night fishing that time as well. They had lowered their nets just like before. They had chosen a good spot just like before. They had done all the good things a fisherman would do just like before.
The only difference between then and now is that then they were doing what Jesus told them to do, but now they are doing what they wanted to do. Then they were trusting that God was going to provide, but now they were going to make something happen.
Have you ever tried to just make something happen and it didn’t go as you planne? Sometimes we have to allow the Lord to lead us into place where God can do what God wants to do. You know there are times when you can be in a bad situation, but you just don’t want to admit, you made a mistake. If you had been Peter, and the sun was coming up, how would you say to the guys, “fellows let’s call it quits and count it off as a total loss of money.”
But before he has to say anything, “ he hears this voice, “Friends, haven’t you caught any fish.” They don’t know it, but it’s the voice of Jesus coming from the shore. The first thing Jesus wants from them is an admission of where they really are in life. It is so easy to pretend that we are doing so much better than we really are.
Every time we do it, we forfeit the grace and the mercy that God wants to pour into our lives. If God were to ask us today, how much do you really want to no Me, or how is it that you are really doing in life, in your marriage, with your kids, in school, toward your parents, in the church, would we be brutally honest with God or not.
Can you imagine, if the disciples had of responded, “We’re good, every things going great, we have plenty of fish.” What’s the hardest area for you to be honest about with others. Pastors have a hard time being honest with how things are going at the church. No pastor wants to say, “we’re not even close to loving one another as Jesus told us to do. We find it much easier to not speak to each other and to talk about others behind their back.”
I’m so glad that disciples were honest and they said, “no, we haven’t caught a thing. I’m glad that when Naomi finally made it back to her home with Ruth, that she didn’t tried to pretend she was some big shot and better off than she really was. She said “ I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. “ When we recognize we have nothing in our own strength. Then God can begin to do something.
So many people think they have something to offer to God before they get saved, and that God should be grateful that they give him a little attention every now and then. It is not until we recognize that we don’t have anything to give to God, that Jesus can begin to become real in our lives. We do not have a single act of goodness that contributed to our salvation. It was by God and by God alone that we have been saved from our sin.
When the disciples admitted their failure, that Jesus said for them to “throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” Sometimes we want to argue with what God has said to do or wait to long to do what God told us to do, and by time we lower our nets, the fish have swam back out to sea. Our chance for a new life with a new hope slips right past us. These guys decided to give it a try. What did they have to lose?
Well the net was full of 153 of the largest fish they had seen in a long time. Seeing all those fish in the boat started a flashback. The disciple John, looked at the fish, looked at the guy on the land, and yelled out, “It Is the Lord.” The disciple Peter, forgot about the fish, jumped into the water and decided, this time I’m going to be the first to get to Jesus.
They were thinking that Jesus had forgotten all about them. Yet Jesus had been on the shore cooking them some bread and fish. He was preparing for them all along. He knew what they were going to need, and He involved himself in the process. Even as the resurrected Lord he still chooses to be a servant. It didn’t say, he asked them to start cooking some of the fish they had caught. He said bring them so that he could add them to what he was already cooking. What was that like to watch the resurrected Jesus cook breakfast. It has to be good because he knows just what you like.
Sometimes we think we need so many different things in order to do God’s will in our lives. We can even think in our church, you know if we just had such and a such then we could really do God’s will. That’s really our excuse for just being lazy. For Hebrews 13:20-21 (NIV2011) 20 Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, 21 equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
When Naomi got back to her home country, she was telling people, stop calling me Naomi which means pleasant. Instead call me Mara, which means bitter because the Lord has dealt bitterly with me. While she was doing all this complaining, standing right next to her is Ruth, whom God is positioning to provide Naomi a future she never could have imagined in a very wealthy home.
This person she thinks is just her insignificant daughter in law, God is shaping to become the great-great grandmother of King David who stretches his lineage all the way down to Jesus the Christ. I want you to know, you don’t know what God is going to bring out of your situation to give you a new life and a new hope. The person that’s sitting next to you just might spark a revival in this church and in this city.
It was when the disciples were tired and worn out, doing something they probably should not have been doing, that Jesus showed up and blessed them and gave them an invitation to come and have breakfast with me. It was out of that breakfast with Jesus that Peter was eventually equipped to become the great preacher, evangelist, leader, and scripture writer he became.
Jesus doesn’t wait for us to have perfect obedient lives to get involved with us, if he did, none of us would ever be invited to come and eat with him. We all come to Jesus as sinners without hope in need of a savior, or we don’t we come at all. God has been preparing us in our situation and many times we fail to see God’s hand.
Not seeing it doesn’t mean it’s not there. There is a meal being prepared in heaven, for all those who are willing to come and eat. But if you don’t choose to eat with Jesus today, then you won’t be seated at the meal in heaven. Where ever Jesus comes, he offers both new life and new hope.
