Saying “I Love You” Is Cheap

Preacher: Gareth Maggs
Bible Reading: Ruth 1
Date: 26 May 2021

We’re in the book of Ruth and this is my favourite Old Testament books and we’re in chapter 1.

The story starts off rather bleak from verses 1 – 5. This Jewish woman from Bethlem, Naomi, is living with her husband and 2 boys in Moab. She is hit by quite a hectic tragedy, she loses her husband and her 2 boys, they die. If you’ve lost 3 family members, you know how hectic this is, but this poor woman’s tragedies don’t end there. She is a woman living in a male dominated society. As a woman back then you could not own property, so what would happen is, if your husband died, a relative of your husband would marry you so that you could keep your house. But Naomi doesn’t have relatives in Moab, so not only has she lost her husband and her 2 boys, but she’s homeless and on top of that she has to look after the 2 wives of her dead sons. These women are Ruth and Orpah.

Naomi is at rock bottom in her life. And we know this because later in the story, this is how she describes herself: she says

20 She (Naomi) said to them, “Do not call me Naomi (Which means Sweet/pleasant);[a] call me Mara (Which means bitter),[b] for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. 21 I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me

I think many of us can identify with Naomi. We all know what it’s like to be in this situation, when your suffering is so bad… here’s how you feel= you feel empty. Like you are the shell of the person that you once were. If you are not going through this now, you might see it in a friend, they are not the same person they were a few weeks back. They’ve been emptied of something. Like Naomi, they were once ‘sweet’, but now they’ve become bitter, in other words they were once in a good place, now they seem to be living in darkness. They don’t laugh as much any more, or talk as much any more, or something is just different from the bright person that they were before. This is because of their situation, it’s been so tough that they can’t bare to stand under the weight of it, so they can only let it crush them and that crushes their spirit as well. They’ve got nothing left to give, and you might be feeling like that: empty.

So Naomi is not in a good state. She realizes she needs to do something about this, and so when she hears that the Lord has blessed her home country, Judah, with food (vs 6), she decides to head back. I’d imagine she thought that by heading home, maybe there is a chance she can sort her life out.

As she’s walking she has this realization, her daughter in-laws would be better off in their home town of Moab instead of coming with Naomi to Judah. Jewish people didn’t like Moabites and Ruth and Orpah were both Moabite woman, so, Noami suggests that Orpah and Ruth rather stay in Moab instead of coming to Judah. That makes sense right? Naomi is just looking after their safety? Oprah eventually listens to Naomi and she returns home, but Ruth is rather amazing, no matter how many times Naomi says ‘Go home Ruth’, Ruth chooses to stay, and no matter how hated she knows she’ll be in Judah, she still sticks to Naomi and the reason why is because she has a real love for Naomi. Not a romantic love, but a genuine mother daughter love. Look at what she says:

16 But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”

What an incredible verse. Imagine if someone said this to you. Imagine if someone was so other person centered that they said these words to you: “where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried”. They were so dedicated to loving you that they make an oath saying that, if I don’t love you like this, then may the Lord deal with me if, as verse 17 says, “if Anything but death parts me from you”.

One of the reasons I love these verses in the bible is because, in our culture we settle for ‘I Love You’. What do I mean by that? Well when you watch a movie, they always hype up to those moments where they lead characters look at eachother and the one says, ‘I love you’ and then violins start kicking in they kiss and some white girl in the back of the cinema goes ‘ahh’ he really loves her. It’s at those moments in the movie when I want to step into the movie and say, wait, wait, wait hold on Romeo, what do you mean by ‘I love you’. Are you saying that you are commited to this woman, or is it just emotions? Did some chemical reactions happen in your body that caused you to blurt out the words ‘I love you’ or will you be there when she has tubes coming out of her because she is in hospital, will you be there if it means you can’t do all the things that you love, because you are putting her first, will you be there, even if her personality changes and she’s not the same, will you be there. What do you mean by ‘I love you’, or are you just saying them because that’s how you feel right now.

Ruth in this passage doesn’t just say I love you, she doesn’t settle for cheap words. She says what she trully means and what she means is she’ll give her life for Naomi. Boys, don’t just say ‘I love you’ to a woman, those are cheap words, show her how you love her. If you can say this to a woman, it’s better than chocolates. But don’t be cheap and don’t get chocolates. You always got to get chocolates. But Ruth shows real love here.

Anyway, I’ve digressed from the story. The most important part is what happens at the end of the chapter. Naomi finally enters the town and when the women of the town greet her, she says what we looked earlier, which is ‘Don’t call me Naomi, call me Mara’

Now when you get to this part of the story, you totally get Naomi’s words where she blames God for her struggles, she says in vs 20 that the ‘almighty has dealt bitterly with her’ and in vs 21 she says ‘The Lord has brought me back empty’ and the Lord has testified against me and bought calamity upon me’.

You and I do this when we go through intense suffering. We shout at God and blame him. But something you’ve got to do when you read chapter 1 of Ruth, is you need to ask why did the author place this speech that Ruth gives in the middle where Ruth declares her total service to Naomi? The answer is, to show us that although God allowed Naomi to go through suffering, he never left her. Though she might be empty, God never left her completely empty, he was looking after her for he gave her Ruth to look after her.

See Naomi, when she told the woman to call her Mara, had forgotten or just didn’t think about Ruth. When we are suffering, we can tend to become blind to what God is doing. We can tend to not see the good things in our lives. We can shout at God like Naomi saying, ‘God you made me this way, you have made me bitter! I am empty and you are the one who is tesitifying against me’ and we don’t see the Ruth that he is put in our lives. For example, you might be going through intense suffering right now and you don’t see the friend that’s been by your side the entire time. You shout at God saying nothing is good in my life, but you don’t remember that friend. You don’t. You shout at God and you don’t see the roof over your head, the breath in your lungs, the fact that you still go home to a bed. You might be shouting at God saying I’m a failure at school, but you don’t remember all the other achievements he’s given you at school. You might be shouting “Nobody gets me, but you forget the few people who have actually tried to get you”.

We suffer we become blind, and the thing that we become the most blind to is God himself. Because we shout ‘God you don’t love me’, how can you if I’m going through this. But you’ll find when you read the New Testament that the same love Ruth showed for Naomi, is the same love Jesus shows for us. For like Ruth left Moab to enter Judah where people didn’t like her, so Jesus entered a world for us that would eventually put him on the cross. Like Ruth gave up her people to join Naomi’s people, so Jesus left heaven to become part of our people. Like Ruth committed to go wherever Naomi went, so Jesus walks our road with us. He does it in 2 ways, he did it litterrally by coming to earth and experiencing the same experiences we do, and he still walks with us now through his holy spirit, which means we can pray to him about any experience, because he is there with us in the experience and he knows our pain because he’s experienced it. Lastly, Ruth says vs 17 ‘Where you die I will die, and where you are buried, there I will be buried’ – Jesus died where we should have died and he was buried where we should have been buried.

My friends to say Jesus doesn’t love you, means you are blind. He loves you just like Ruth loved Naomi and he is offering to stick with you through thick and thin.

When I was in high school I didn’t have it easy. Exams to me felt like hell, because I suffered from severe anxiety. I the midst of my deepest struggles in high school I had something awesome, I always had my Jesus. I’d pray to him all the time, and I wasn’t a perfect Christian, not by a long shot, but I didn’t need to be, because like Ruth, my Jesus promised to never leave or forsake me. When my parents were going through a rough patch my Jesus would never leave or forsake me, when I felt abandoned by my friends, my Jesus never left. When I felt alone, inadequate, stupid, insignificant, confused my Jesus was always there and he always has been.

If you are not a Christian here today, you are missing out, so hear my words: Forget about religion, laws and things like that are not the main focus of Christianity, just come to him, because he is calling you and it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, who you are he accepts you. If you don’t know how to give your life to Jesus speak to your teachers, or even speak to me and I’ll help you do that.

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