Knowing where we want to end up is easy; trusting that faithfulness will get us there is another matter—especially when the path looks like a dead end. Ruth 3–4 traces ordinary people facing exactly that tension, each called to let go of control at the moment it costs them most.

Study Questions

The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.

The pastor uses the ferry analogy to illustrate how God knows the “currents” of our lives while we often focus only on where we think we want to go. How have you experienced a situation where letting go of control and trusting God’s direction led to an unexpected but better outcome than what you had planned?
Naomi chooses selflessness by seeking rest for Ruth even at potential cost to her own security. What does her decision reveal about the difference between faithfulness and self-interest—and what makes that kind of selflessness so difficult in practice?
The sermon contrasts staying on the challenging “Route 66” of God’s path (with its apparent dead ends) versus taking the easy “interstate” of cultural self-advancement. Why are we drawn to the easier path, and what would help us choose faithfulness over comfort when the dead ends keep coming?
Compare the choices made by Boaz and the unnamed redeemer. What does each man’s decision reveal about his priorities, and what does the redeemer’s fate suggest about the cost of clinging to control?
Matthew 16:24 says “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” How does this principle apply to daily decisions you face, and what would it look like practically to “lose your life” for Christ in your current season?

Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.

So, that actually worked out perfectly, because I was going to talk about how we often overshoot things. And what I really had in mind was the ferry, but it comes to technology too, because one of the challenges with technology, and you’ll sometimes see us, if you’re online, you might be wondering, well, what’s going on there? There’s a lot of moving parts to doing a service like this, and trying to do it where it works, where we can share it online and in person, we can be this hybrid church family and make it all work, and be a little church. And so, there’s a lot of automation. Sometimes the automation works really well, sometimes it jumps ahead, and you’re trying to anticipate that, right? So, do I advance it? Don’t I advance it? Do I do this? Don’t I do this?

And sometimes things go on and off, and yet, the button just came off. Okay, so nothing else can go wrong. The emergency button has come off. And, you know, the thing is, doesn’t it feel like the button comes off in life a lot of times? And we think sometimes, well, I was trying to hold back because I thought God was working, and I just missed the turn. I wasn’t holding back. I was charging forward because I thought God said to go boldly, and I just went too boldly. And so, I was trying to figure that out. And so, back to overshooting.

Here’s what I was thinking as I was reflecting on what’s going on in Ruth chapter 3 and chapter 4, and how hard it is to do what happened in Ruth chapter 3 and chapter 4. Because we don’t know the rest of the story, and we don’t know how to trust God oftentimes.

And so, it reminded me of if you’ve ever taken the ferry over to Calhoun County, or maybe some other ferry of that size. Not a large ferry, but one of those little ferries that maybe holds a dozen cars or something like that, right? You pull onto that. I love going on the ferry over to Calhoun County. And you pull onto that ferry, and I’m really glad that my job is done when I pull onto it. I would not want to be the one trying to get the ferry to get to the other side successfully. I mean, I’m pretty certain, if you show me where the controls were, I could get across the river, but could I get across the river in a way that didn’t beach the ferry and destroy all the cars on it? Maybe not.

And one side of that is what happens when I am sitting there, watching the ferry. Maybe I’m sitting in my car, or walking around, and you see that ferry, and you see the dock at the other side. Have you ever noticed this? And the dock is approaching, and the ferry is going this way, and the dock is over here. And you think, you do realize that we’re supposed to go right there, right? And it feels like it’s really overshooting. Now, what’s the thing that the ferry captain knows? Well, he knows the currents of the river. He knows what speed the river is going. He knows how it’s going to pull on it. And so, he’s going to overshoot, and then at the last moment, slows down, and you watch the ferry, and what do you know? It glides right into place, and you pull off. It happens dozens of times every day, just here in our county. And you think about that. I think about that. I think, that’s really amazing.

But how often, when I’m trying to figure out, I know I want to get across the rivers of life. I want to get across those, and so what do I do? I start trying to figure out, well, do I overshoot? Do I undershoot? And all that happens to me is the button falls off.

And incidentally, we should give a round of applause to our new slide person, Rob, because he’s being a very good sport here. There’s so much that happens, and so I ran over the basics before the service, and he’s doing a great job here. He got the emergency button working until the keyboard fell apart.

But a lot of times, and this is why I’m going to come back to that, a lot of times we’re there, right? And we’ve gotten the basics. We feel like we’ve read God’s Word. We pray. We come to church. We think we know it. But then we get to a brand new situation, and it doesn’t matter if we’re doing a great job or a horrible job. We’re in trouble. Now, how do we decide what to do? I think that’s the challenge that Ruth is helping us to think through because when I think about how I want to get across that river, I think about, well, how do I want my life to advance here? How do I want it to move forward? What would make me happy? What would be good for me, right? That’s the human reflexive reaction.

Here’s the problem. When we’re doing that, when we’re chasing that, what happens? It’s just like if I were piloting that ferry and I go across the current of the river, and as I go across the current of the river, I’m just plowing forward exactly for where I think I want to be. Because we all want things to work out. We all want things to be happy, right? And so we charge after that, but because we’re so focused on what we want, we’re not paying attention to the currents. And sometimes those currents are the sinful broken world pushing us. Sometimes they’re actually helpful currents. God is moving us into place, but we’re so focused on where we think that we want that we can’t see what’s going to happen when we’re on a beach.

I believe that Ruth chapter 3 and chapter 4 is a picture of people who instead, as they listen to God and they listen to how he works, what are they doing? They are hearing his currents. And because of that, he’s steering the ship to right where they need to be. And let’s pray tonight that God would help us to steer our respective ships as well.

Will you join me in prayer? Father, thank you for this day, and thank you for your word. Lord, as we study your word, would you help us to see those places where we struggle to see how you’re working? Where we overshoot or undershoot? Lord, would you help us to instead be guided by your spirit that we might end up exactly where we need to be? Because we can’t just go and read about the rivers of life, Lord. We never know exactly how those currents are going, but you do. We pray that you would help us to get to exactly where we need to be. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Let’s go ahead and turn to Matthew chapter… Excuse me, Matthew. Ruth chapter 3, verse 1. Here’s what we read. Naomi, her mother-in-law, said to her, “My daughter, should I not seek rest for you that it may be well with you? Is not Boaz our relative with whose young women you were? See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. Wash, therefore, and anoint yourself, and put on your cloak and go down to the threshing floor. But do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. But when he lies down, observe the place where he lies. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down, and he will tell you what to do.” And she replied, “All that you say I will do.”

Now, here’s an interesting little tidbit. We already read this passage last week. And you might be thinking, That sounds awfully familiar. No, we did read that passage last week. Now, why are we reading the whole thing again? Well, last week we were talking about what Ruth does. Ruth is going to follow what Naomi instructs, right? Ruth is going to go and do this. And we talked a little bit about the custom, and it’s sort of unusual, and how do we make sense of this, and what does that exactly mean?

Let’s go back and think about Naomi for a moment. Let’s remember where Naomi is. Naomi is a widow who has come back to the land with nothing, she says. I went away full, I came back empty. That’s what she says in chapter one. The one thing that she sort of overlooked a little bit but is there is that Ruth has come along with her. Ruth has come along and been a support to her. Ruth is going out to the fields and reaping and bringing in food for them to eat. She’s keeping them alive.

Now, what is the self-interested thing for Naomi to do? Well, keep Ruth around, right? Because if Ruth isn’t there, what happens to Naomi? Naomi has no sons, no husband, and in other words, in that society, no future.

What does Naomi actually do? Well, for all her self-interest and for the fact that she doesn’t really even realize that Ruth is there along with her, being faithful to her in chapter one, what we see is by chapter three, Ruth and Naomi have been together going through this situation for some time now, and Naomi has recognized Ruth needs to be taken care of. Not taken care of in a bad way. She’s not trying to get rid of Ruth. She doesn’t want Ruth to go away. But what Naomi realizes is that Ruth is going to be in an even worse situation than Naomi at some point because at some point, Naomi is going to die. And then Ruth is a widow with no children to take care of her and no husband to take care of her and no faithful, incredibly amazing daughter-in-law that tags along to take care of her. She has nothing.

And so Naomi overshoots. Naomi wants to get to the other side of the river where she has food and she’s okay, but what does she say? Well, I can’t shoot for that because if I shoot for that, what am I going to do? I’m going to leave Ruth high and dry.

And so the first thing that Naomi does, and I think that we can just pass this up as we’re focusing on everything else, but we need to recognize Naomi is being incredibly selfless here. Because she’s saying, “Ruth, this is not going to be good for you. This will not end well for you. I don’t want that to be the case. Go and do this.” And that’s the context of all that stuff we talked about last week and how, I mean, yes, Ruth listens to Naomi and that’s praiseworthy. Yes, Ruth goes and faithfully does this and that’s praiseworthy. Yes, Ruth has been faithful to Naomi time and again and that’s praiseworthy. But a key thing here is that Naomi says, “Okay, you’ve been faithful to me. You’ve cared for me far more than anything could possibly demand. You’re not even my daughter. You’re my daughter-in-law. You were completely free and clear from me. You could have gone back to your family, found a new husband who would take care of you, and what have you done? You’ve stayed with me. Now it’s time for me to take care of you.”

What Naomi doesn’t know is whether that’s going to work out well for her. Because once Ruth’s gone, what happens to Naomi?

But Naomi realizes that part of faithfully navigating that river is not to focus on, “Here’s where I want to be,” but “Here is where faithfulness tells me I should be,” and I don’t know how I get from here to here. Is the current going to pull me? I don’t know. But I know that’s where I need to be.

That’s often how it looks when we’re following God and we’re seeking to follow what he’s called us to. It often looks like we’re shooting right for the shoreline and we’re going to crash.

Now, if you’re the ferry operator, you know you’re not going to. But more often than not in life, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. We don’t know when the keyboard is going to fall apart and the buttons are going to fall off and we can’t even get to what we need to do anymore.

Oftentimes we feel like we’re going to hit those points. But what does God do? What does he say? Keep being faithful.

When things start to fall apart, our temptation is, well, I’ll just walk away. It’ll be much easier that way. God says, keep being faithful. God says, keep being faithful.

God’s way often looks like a dead end. You may not have seen it yet, I posted a little video earlier today I’d taken a few weeks ago on Route 66. You can tell it’s a few weeks ago because there aren’t any leaves on the trees. But if you look at it, it’s a dead end. You think, here’s that great historic road that people travel, and in fact I reference that, people travel all over the world to see Route 66. But if you’re on this part of the actual historic road, there’s a bunch of barricades and a no trespassing sign because the bridge hasn’t been maintained, the bridge is starting to collapse, and it’s a dead end.

Now, there is an alternate route that’s not actually on Route 66. So if you’re saying, well, I am going to drive only over that roadbed that people for a century have driven over, then you’ve just hit the dead end, and you’re not going anywhere. And oftentimes it feels like as we’re hearing where God’s calling us, it feels like he is doing that to us. He’s saying, go down Route 66, and we get to that dead end, and we say, but God, you told me to go here.

That’s often how it feels like. I think that’s probably how it feels like a little bit for Naomi. Naomi thinks, well, at least I got this far. It could have been a lot worse. I could have died in a foreign land. I could have returned to my homeland but had no one to help me at all.

Yeah, now it’s bad and it’s scary, and I have no idea what’s coming next, but it’s time for me just to be faithful, and it may leave me on the dead end.

You might think, well, that’s an interesting illustration, Tim. I’ve heard you talk about Route 66 before and how much you love it, and now you’re telling me it’s just a bunch of dead ends. Why would I want to go on that? Well, if you go on it and you go through the challenge of navigating, you don’t just give up when you feel like you hit the dead end. You say, well, is there a way around that? Oh, yeah, they put in this new little road that goes around the historic bridge that’s shut down. I can go around that. I can keep going.

What happens? Well, you see all kinds of neat, amazing things. You see basically the whole way that the country built up our transit system, and you see old signage that’s fascinating with neon, and you see old motels, sometimes in a decrepit state, but the different styles of architecture, and you see all kinds of neat things. You see beautiful nature as you get a little further off the interstate, and everything isn’t perfectly flat most of the time, and you actually get to really soak in what’s going on.

There’s a huge reward, but it’s a challenge because as you try to do it, you’re going to hit some dead ends. Am I going to stay faithful to that? Now, it’s not sinful to pull off Route 66, so it depends, well, how fast I need to get to where I’m going. Maybe I’ll pull off. I don’t have time.

Here’s the thing. When we’re going down God’s Highway, though, it also feels like it’d be faster to pull off and just give up and hop on the interstate highway of our culture and of sin because it doesn’t have any dead ends. Naomi only looks out for number one. It doesn’t feel like it has a dead end for her necessarily. If I only look out for myself, if you only look out for yourself, it doesn’t feel like in the moment that there’s a dead end, but what do we know? God’s Word says there is a dead end. We just don’t see it yet.

And if I was traveling across the country wanting to soak up how did our country really form the culture we have now? How do the things we take for granted as we travel start? And I wanted to experience that, and I say, but it’s too much trouble to risk those dead ends, and I’m just going to drive down the highway. I can get from one end of the country to another, and as long as all I do is ever get off the interstate at a predictable gas station brand that has the same kind of building everywhere in the country, and I go into that, and I get my gas, and I pull back on it, and I keep going, and I get from one end of the country to the other, and now I’ve experienced any of the things I said I wanted to experience. And in some sense, as I hit the coast on one side or the other, what have I done? I’ve hit a dead end. I can’t drive any further. The car won’t go.

And so it is with life. We travel down, and we keep going. We think, well, look, I’m going so much faster than those people trying to follow God’s faithful Word. I am advancing myself. I am advancing my interests. I can see the other side of that river of life, and I’m getting to it, and those losers are still back there trying to navigate all those nooks and crannies and dead ends. What’s wrong with them? But then you get to the coastline, and you think, but I didn’t see any of the stuff I actually set out to see. I didn’t actually accomplish my purpose.

And here in Chapter 3, we see Naomi wrestling with, well, what’s my purpose in this? And she rightly understands it. She doesn’t get to see her sons grow older. She doesn’t get to spend the rest of her life with her husband, but what does she do? She gets to take this daughter-in-law of hers and get her to where she needs to be, and that is what she’s going to do, and so she does it.

How did I fall away that seems to be working against me, though, in the moment? Because the temptation, that temptation to just give up when you keep hitting dead ends, it’s so much easier to go on the highway. It’s so much easier to just say, enough with this. I don’t want to hurt myself. Why would I do that?

What do we do? We turn and we start with Jesus. We’re not going to get through this if we don’t start with Jesus. Because when we start with Jesus and we say, well, what has Jesus done? Not what would Jesus do, but what has Jesus done? What do we find? We came onto this earth, took on flesh, humiliated himself, and suffered and died for us.

That looks like a dead end to me. And here’s something amazing, if you think about it. Because Jesus saves us, what happens? Well, we sing praises to him, but think about us. A bunch of sinful human beings, sometimes getting it right, sometimes not getting it right. God could have made a perfect angel choir. He could have raised up a new populace and completely wiped out humanity and come up with something else that would praise him. He didn’t need us to be glorified. In fact, if he’d never created anything, God would have been glorified in himself. He is sufficient in himself. He doesn’t need anything to give him glory. And yet, what did God do? He saved us because he loved us. And I think that’s the key thing we need to understand.

And if we keep our eyes on that, if that’s what I’m looking at as I’m going about, running into dead ends, the buttons are all falling off, I’m not just sort of overshooting. I am going headlong into a cliff. I’m not going to just beach the ferry. I’m going to sink the ferry. As I’m doing that, I’m not thinking out, but I want to be here. I think about, but God said I should be here.

Now, I’d like to say, and then you go there, and it always turns out that God turns the ferry and it goes right to where I wanted to be after all. And in fact, that’s what we’re going to see as we go next week and we wrap up this series. It works out incredibly well for Naomi. But that’s not God’s promise. Not in this life. Yes, in eternity, God will redeem his people. He’s not going to leave us beached and sunk and dead-ended to all eternity. He is going to bring us into his presence, the ultimate non-dead end.

But in the moment, it may not happen. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But if we’re going to be faithful, if our desire, if our route that we’re really seeking after isn’t just, I want to be momentarily happy, but I want to actually go and be where God wants me to be, I have to start turning and aiming for where he’s called me to. And I do that by looking to Jesus who did that for me. And I stay with Jesus.

Because here’s the reason I think I struggle with this. I believe what I just said. I still wonder, if I don’t watch out for what’s happening to myself, who’s going to? How am I going to get to where I still need to be? Satan loves to kind of play with that in us a little bit, doesn’t he? I still need to win somehow, right? I still need to get there somehow.

What we need to understand is that the ultimate destination we’re heading to is indeed that one that Jesus has already won for us. So, I don’t need to be busy striving to get to where I want to be myself. I simply go where God has called me to. I’m not trying to achieve getting to the place I want to be, so I don’t need to keep striving to do it. And I especially don’t need to keep striving to do it when that striving is telling me, very clearly, pull off and get on the interstate because it’s so much easier because you’re never going to get there this way.

Because by earthly standards we aren’t ever going to get there. And this would be a lot better message if I said, yes, and you’re going to do this and it really will work out. Everybody can be a Naomi. Be a Naomi Christian and within weeks everything’s going to work out. It’s going to be great. You’re going to know exactly what God wants in your life and he’s going to give it to you.

Been looking for a new job? You’re going to get that job. You’ve been looking for a new home? Guess what? There’s going to be one. It’s going to be marked down in the price of market value with no flaws. Or less. You’re just going to win it. It’s just going to be given to you.

That would be what we’d like to hear, right? But that’s not what God promises. So it’s scary. It’s scary because I don’t know necessarily where I’m going to end up in the next moment.

There are so many times in life we are going to be in the place that Naomi is here. Not in chapter four, but right here where our question marks are a lot greater than our periods. There are a lot more reasons to wonder where in the world am I going? Am I going anywhere? Am I just going to sit here and rot and die at this dead end? Or am I actually going somewhere?

And that’s the scary moment. Because here’s the other thing that we know about the faithful goal. It’s not really like the ferry like I’ve been saying because the ferry isn’t really out of control. It feels out of control but the ferry captain isn’t out of control in that moment. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

It really is more like when the buttons all fall off because it’s totally out of our control at times. And that’s what we see as we go on. Ruth has put her hands herself in Boaz’s hands. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. And then Boaz is going to have to do the same because he’s going to respect the law that’s been given to God’s people. And he’s not necessarily entitled to marry Ruth and redeem her.

There’s someone else who gets first claim on that because of the way the inheritance laws work. And so then Boaz is going to present this and it says, then Boaz said, “The day, this is to the other redeemer who has the better claim, the day you buy the field from the hand of Naomi you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead, in order to perpetuate the name of the dead and his inheritance.” And the redeemer said, “I cannot redeem it for myself lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself for I cannot redeem it.”

So if we rewind to chapter three, Boaz says, “I’m going to take care of this the next day.” That’s what he says to Ruth. But now Ruth is totally out of control at two levels. One, what’s Boaz going to do and how’s he going to handle it? Is it going to work out well? Now she’s gone from the certainty and the comfort in some sense of what she has going on to something that’s out of control.

Naomi is totally out of control. If this all works, Naomi, what happens to her? And then you have Boaz. And well, but Boaz has everything under control, right? Well no, he doesn’t have everything under control either because he’s going to respect the way things are supposed to happen enough. He’s going to do what’s good and decent.

And the way that that worked in this time period is if a man died, his widow was supposed to be married by the next closest of kin to continue the line. And Boaz looks and there isn’t, it’s not like there’s a brother because both brothers died. So Boaz looks at the situation of the moment and he says, “Well, I would like to do this. This is what we should do, but I’m not actually the one that’s most closely related and that’s most eligible to do this.”

And so when Boaz goes to this redeemer, he can’t say, “You better give Ruth to me. You better do this.” No, Boaz realizes if he’s going to actually do what’s right, he has to let go of control himself. He has to present the case and just hope that it’s going to work out. And that’s exactly what Boaz does.

The other redeemer has to decide is he going to be out of control or not as well. That other man, he doesn’t end up factoring into the story beyond this point so we don’t even know his name. And that’s telling, I think. Because I believe here’s what he does. He hears this and he would like the land until he realizes there’s a widow attached to it.

Because you have, again, to kind of put the context in place, the reason the two come together is that as God had proportioned out the land to the people of Israel, he’d given inheritances to each tribe and to each clan and to each family. And so the goal was to keep that land passed down from generation to generation. If you sold it, if you reverted back after a period of time and so on, it wasn’t supposed to go away.

And so there’s these two pieces here. You need a descendant that can carry on the name and take the land, and you have the land itself. Well, I believe when this redeemer first hears about the problem, he’s not thinking about Ruth and he just says, “Well, yeah, I could use a little more land, and even if it’s only for a period of time and someday someone gets it back, it’s going to be great for my crops in this moment.”

But Ruth comes with that too. And he has a challenge here because he knows what he would like with his life. He would like, what? Have a nice piece of property, nice farm, and then he’d like to marry someone who the children are officially, legally, in every way, deeded, as it were, descended from him so that his name gets passed on.

So that his name is the one that’s remembered. And he wants the control to know that’s what’s going to happen. If he marries Ruth, he loses that. Because her descendants are reckoned, legally, to her dead husband to carry on the family name. He says, “I don’t want to lose that control. I don’t want to mess up my inheritance,” is what he says. He says, “I don’t, I need the control.”

And I think about that for a moment. Because if you’ve read ahead or you’re familiar with the story of Ruth, you know where this is going. This is going someplace great because we’re seeing the family line of the Messiah here. And here’s a man who had the opportunity to be part of that story. Here’s a man who could be in the line of the Messiah, but he said, “I don’t want to let go of control because I see what’s going to bring happiness to me, which is to know that my name’s going to be passed down, that my inheritance goes to my children who everyone says, yes, we recognize that these are your descendants,” and so what does he do? He says, “You go ahead, Boaz. I don’t want this.”

And in that moment, I wonder what he would have said if he’d known what he was turning down. But he doesn’t know.

We like control, don’t we? We already talked last week about some things that if you really think about are further examples of loss of control for Ruth and Boaz. Ruth, because she’s a Moabitess, she doesn’t need to follow the customs of the land. She could have stayed back in her own land and married someone there who was closer to her age, who was closer to her customs. It would have been more comfortable and more controlled for her.

And for Boaz, he’s taking a risk by marrying a Moabite. What’s that going to do to his name? Not only is he someone who seems relatively well-off, and yet he’s willing to take on this situation where his descendants won’t really be recognized as his descendants, but on top of that he’s going to be recognized as someone who married one of those enemy tribes. And what’s that going to do for him? He doesn’t know.

And so we see with both Ruth and Boaz that they say, you know what? But this is what faithfulness is calling us to. I want faithfulness, not control.

I believe God calls each of us to come to that point. Because we like control. I like control. I want control. And all of us are going to face those points where the question is, am I willing to let go of control so I can do faithfulness? Am I willing to say, my destination isn’t going to be no matter what it takes, I’m going to plow my way to happiness? I want faithfulness. I want faithfulness.

I was thinking about if you go into one of those amusement parks or arcades or something, I’m sure some place still has a grabber machine, right? You know, the big machine, maybe a truck stop. You have that big machine, big flashing lights, some really neat stuff inside. And this thing, this claw, right? The claw can come down and it can grab onto something, right? And then next to that, there’s like vending machines. There’s soda and gum and whatever. And you go in there with a dollar, say, or two dollars, or whatever it is nowadays. Probably two dollars now.

So you go in there with your two dollars and you have a question that faces you. Are you going to go for the claw machine and try to use that grabber and using the grabber, grab onto that PlayStation 5 or that beautiful gold ring or that really fantastic stuff bunny? Or are you going to give me a soda? Because that Coke is going to cost you the same two dollars.

Well, if you don’t know any better, you’ll say, well, I have control over my situation now and I can take this dead end of soda or gum or whatever, or maybe there’s a snack machine. Well, you know, potato chips. Well, maybe that isn’t such a dead end. But, you know, I can go after that or I know how to use a joystick. You know, even if I don’t want that PlayStation 5, you realize that thing’s worth 400, 500 bucks, I’m going to sell it on eBay and buy what I really want. But I can’t sell a soda for that. I’m the master of my own destiny now.

And then you actually try to use the claw. You start moving that joystick and that grabber comes down and you say, okay, I’m going to move over, but you realize, wait a second, it’s not quite going where I want and it just went past that. Oh, well, maybe I can get this gold ring. That’s still worth a couple hundred dollars. Okay, I’m going for that. Nope. A little plastic mouse. I just spent two dollars and picked up a plastic mouse.

Friends, that’s the problem with when we set the destination ourselves. We see what the kingdom of heaven promises us in this moment it looks like the vending machine. It’s not going to get us anything on eBay. It doesn’t look like it’s of great value.

We want to take that grabber and grab what we really, really, really want. The problem is, it’s just like the claw machine doesn’t necessarily go where you want it to and that’s the only way it can operate the way it does.

The reason, the problem is that’s exactly when we pursue our own goals what happens. We bring that grabber down and we’re clawing our way down trying to claw onto happiness, trying to claw onto success, trying to claw onto the things that our society tells us are going to be marks of success, and we go all the way down until we get the little junk plastic thing.

That redeemer that turned down the land because he didn’t want to marry Ruth. He thought he could take that claw and claw onto something better. He could claw onto something that was totally his and in total control, and it would build him up and his name up and what he wanted was to have generations later people talk about his name.

We don’t even know his name. Boaz didn’t worry about it. Ruth didn’t worry about that. And we’re talking about that. We’re talking about that. We’re talking about that. We’re talking about that. Where are we aiming?

Matthew 16 verse 24: Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

You see the real dead end is when we lose our sight and what we think is going to make everything right and running for it because when we do that we get to the coast and we realize we’ve missed it all.

Worse than that, we don’t get to the coast. Our true prize is God and the true prize is being in his kingdom and the true prize is that someday everything will be made right, there won’t be any striving because we will be in a world that has been remade, that sin has been made, that everything will be good and we can rest in the very presence of our God, and he will be our light and wipe away every tear.

That is the real prize. In the moment it seems illogical. It’s right there behind him. We experience what he achieved. That’s what we’re going to wrap up next week and as we think about what they achieved.

Friends, that’s what’s true for each and every one of us because any one of you, any one and me, all of us, we trust in Jesus, that’s all we have.

Father, we just all come as those in need and those yearning and those hoping, but as we do those things we look to you and it looks like there’s something so much better if we just go our own way in this moment.

Lord, we want you to help us to do it. Would you give us the guidance from your spirit to do it? We cannot do it on our own, but would you help us to look towards your son, our Savior Jesus, and to follow him?

I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Tags: Faithfulness, Self-denial, Trust, Obedience, Providence, Redemption, Discipleship

Also Filed Under: Home: Messages: Sunday Messages: When Faithfulness Feels Like a Dead End (May 5, 2024)\n\t\t\tHome: Sunday Services: Ain't No Grave: Death, Destruction and Hope: When Faithfulness Feels Like a Dead End (May 5, 2024)