It was great to be together today to worship God, and celebrate his unchanging faithfulness towards us in Christ!
We began a sub-series of our “Christ in the Old Testament” preaching series, called “Redeeming Ruth”
Today’s sermon entitled, “Grace at the Bottom of the Barrel” from Ruth 1:1-22 is available to listen to or download from here, or via our iTunes podcast feed.
Today’s quotes are here:
Ian Duguid:
“Perhaps Naomi simply assumed that Orpah and Ruth wouldn’t be interested in Israel’s God. They were Moabites, after all; they had their god and she had hers. Who was she to impose her own understanding of God on her neighbours? The vision of reaching out to her neighbours and incorporating them into the covenant community was lost on her, even when the opportunity leapt up and struck her in the face. Few were looking for opportunities to make converts to the covenant community from those around them. But in light of Matthew 28:19, where Jesus told us to go and make disciples of all nations, what is our excuse? Who are the Moabites we see day after day, the people around us who we so quickly assume are not going to be interested in the gospel? Perhaps if we sought to testify to them of God’s goodness to us in Jesus Christ, we might discover more interest in the gospel than we ever imagined. Our problem is that all too often we have as little real care for our friends and neighbours as Naomi had for hers.”
John Piper:
“Seeing is a precious gift. And bitterness is a powerful blindness… Naomi is so weary with the night of adversity that she can’t see the dawn of rejoicing… What would Naomi say if she could see only a fraction of the thousand things God was doing in the bitter providences of her life? What if she knew that part of what God was doing was shaping a genealogy for the Messiah that would humble the world? If she had trusted God, she may have said, with William Cowper, ‘Judge no the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face.’ Who would have imagined that in the worst of all times – the period of the judges — God was quietly moving in the tragedies of a single family to prepare the way for the greatest king of Israel.”
We continued our summer preaching series, “Christ in the Old Testament“. You can check out details of the entire series 
