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We’ve all held something we couldn’t restore—a plan, a relationship, a season of life that’s gone dry—and kept clenching it anyway, as if sheer will might put flesh back on the bone. Naomi knew that feeling: she went away full and came back empty, and the Book of Ruth shows what God does with that kind of emptiness.
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This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
It’s been a journey going through the book of Ruth, seeing the graves that the story begins with. I’ve kept hinting, and if you’ve read the book before, and if you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to go and read all the way through Ruth, just straight through. Just sit down and read it in a single sitting, because it’s a short little book. But an awful lot of life happens in that short little book.
I’ve kept hinting as we’ve been going through it, but they don’t know the end of the story, but we do, and tonight we come to that end of the story, and we get to embrace it. But we’ve held off on that because in our own lives, in our own experience, we can’t just cut to the end of the book, can we? We find ourselves in those broken places. We don’t know what God’s going to do.
If you look in the pocket in front of you, in your chair, you’ll find a bone. Now, if you’re online, don’t reach into the pocket in front of whatever chair you’re sitting in front of, because I don’t have any there for you, but just imagine you’re holding a bone. I just want you to have this bone as we’re going through this service, because this is emblematic of what Ruth and Naomi feel like their lives are at the beginning of the book of Ruth.
I believe for a lot of us, a lot of the time, it feels like we’re holding onto a bone. Now, if we were having a church dinner like we had a few weeks ago, and you smelled everything cooking in the kitchen, I said, okay, it’s time we have our pre-dinner prayer, and we all line up as we do, and everyone’s excited, right, because we get excited. Ah, we’re having dinner together at the church. That’s a wonderful thing. We’re all excited, and we go up, and I take some tongs, and I place a bone on your plate.
How are you feeling about that? You might say, wow, I really just want to chew on a bone tonight. No bones about it. This is the best church dinner ever. Well, most of us aren’t going to say that, right? A lot of times it feels like that is what God’s serving us. We think God came up, became a Christian. I said I was going to follow Jesus. I’m ready to see what you’re doing in my life, and you feel like you’ve walked up to the heavenly buffet line, and God’s there, and he takes the tongs, and he places something on your plate, and it smells wonderful, and then you look down, and it’s this bone.
Now, if you have a bone as your dinner, can you add flesh to it? Can you take it from bone to a nice roast chicken? No. Can you take it back to a live chicken? Definitely no. We can’t do that. Yet, for some reason in our lives, we hold on to the bones in our lives, and we think, but I am going to add flesh back to this. This bone, I’m going to rattle by my own power, it’s going to come back, and it’s going to be great. So often that’s my problem. I think I’m going to make those bones of my life come back. They’re going to be great. I’m going to do this, and you know what? I’m still holding on to a bone.
I want you to hold on to this bone as we go through this message tonight, and see if you can add any flesh to it. I’m confident no one’s going to, but if you do, let me know. I want to hear about it. But if not, well, sort of expect it, isn’t it? But here’s the good news. God can. That’s where we began the service tonight, that prophecy from Ezekiel 37, that God can add flesh to bones. He can raise up the bones of Israel and bring them back to life, and he can raise up the bones of all of his people and bring them back to life. And if God can do that, he can do anything and everything that he says.
As we come to his word tonight, and we see exactly how that works in the lives of Ruth and Naomi tonight, let’s ask God to help us to understand what he’s doing to the bones in our lives as well. Will you join me in prayer?
Lord, we come before you as those who, we all carry different bones. We all carry different things that just aren’t quite right in our lives, and yet, Lord, we know that you are the one, you are the only one who can add the flesh back and reanimate them and give them life again. Would you help us to trust in you? Would you help us to see how you are working in our lives as we see how you work in the lives of Ruth and Naomi? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s go back to chapter 3 for a moment. I know I said we were going to get to the end. We will get there by the end of this message, I promise. But let’s just go back to a little recap. This is when Ruth returns after she’s met in the middle of the night with Boaz and uncovered his feet and asked him to redeem her, asked him, essentially, to marry her. That’s what the clear implication is. And she comes back, and it says…
Well, that’s nice, right? Naomi tells Ruth how to approach Boaz, how to explain that she wants him to be her kinsman redeemer, the one who will say, okay, you’re the widow of Naomi’s son. Her other son is dead. There’s no one in that immediate family to redeem you. I’m not quite the next of kin, but pretty close, and I’m going to redeem you. I’m going to take you as my wife. I’m going to provide for you.
Naomi’s explained how all that works, and then what happens next? Then what happens next is that Boaz sends her back with all this barley, something to eat, something to survive off of. And Boaz knows that Naomi’s instructed Ruth. Ruth would have known how this worked, because Ruth was from a different country. She didn’t know the customs of the land, and yet Boaz knows then, as she’s gone through these steps, that she’s listened to her mother-in-law, that her mother-in-law instructed her, and Boaz then sends back a gift for Ruth and Naomi. He doesn’t want Ruth to go back empty-handed.
And that sounds nice in itself. Boaz, oh, he’s grateful to Naomi. Naomi has ensured everything’s worked out. This is this wonderful arrangement. And so Boaz is just being really generous, but it’s more than that. If we go back even further, chapter 1, verse 21, listen to what Naomi said when she arrived back home.
She said, 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? When Naomi arrived back in her hometown, she’s lost her husband, she’s lost both of her sons. Here we are on Mother’s Day. Naomi, clearly, if they had celebrated Mother’s Day, would have hated it. Because every Mother’s Day was, she reminded of, her sons are dead. Her husband’s dead, her sons are dead. She feels hopeless.
And so when she returns to her hometown, what does she say? I went away full. I had two sons and a husband, and we were going away. We had a plan. Things were going to be successful. We went away, and guess what? God took it all away from me. I have nothing now. I have come back empty. Yes, Ruth is standing there. Naomi is thinking, though, my sons are dead, my husband’s dead. I have no hope. And if she thought a little bit more and had thought about the fact that Ruth was there, maybe she could have expanded that. We have no hope.
All the implications and the challenges and the reasons why this is a bitterly hopeless situation. There is no social safety net. There is no welfare system. She didn’t apply for Social Security and start getting a check that also covered… There wasn’t a pension that she could apply for on the death of her husband. There was nothing. She is destitute. Came back empty.
But as this process continues, Boaz has repeatedly done what? He sent Ruth back home, back to Naomi, full. Back with food for them to eat. Beyond what the basic protections for the poor of the day ever would have provided for. And then at this point, when Boaz says, okay, I’m going to become your redeemer. I am going to actually take you, Ruth, as my wife. And I am going to make good on the promises of this family. And I’m going to provide for you.
What does he say? Take this back so you don’t go back empty-handed to Naomi. And so this woman who came back bitterly destitute and hopeless now sees her daughter-in-law return with this bounty of food. The one who left full and came back empty sees her daughter-in-law come back full, not empty. Now you might say, that seems like a lot to put on that one little statement. But here’s the notable thing that commentators have picked up on that statement.
And it never struck me until preparing for this series. These are the last words Ruth speaks in this book. When God inspired the author of this book to write down the story of Ruth, the last words that he wanted us to hear from Ruth were that she had come back with his food, so she wasn’t coming back empty-handed. So I don’t think it’s making too much of it all.
God wanted us to hear, yes, by her own power, by her own ingenuity, by whatever she could figure, she was coming back empty-handed to the land. But by the grace of how God orchestrates things, by the way that God works his plan, Ruth wasn’t going to keep coming back empty, but coming back full. How often do we feel like we have a plan and things are going well and we come back empty-handed? We feel like we’re going out with a giant turkey for Thanksgiving and we realize we’re just holding on to a bone.
We probably all have our own stories, and you’ve heard parts of mine as I reflect back on the ministry I’ve been blessed to do up to this point. You know, the interesting thing in doing ministry, I think an awful lot of the time it seems like you come back and you feel like you’re holding on to a bone. I was thinking, as you know, I was the chaplain over at Lindenwood University for a number of years before the ministry that ultimately led us to this place, Little Hills, took form. And things were going great. It felt like there was that giant Thanksgiving turkey. Ministry is happening. There’s all this stuff.
And then there’s organizational changes, and what you know next is all been shut down. It’s gone. Not because people weren’t coming, not because students weren’t excited, not because ministries weren’t thriving, but because there wasn’t the will of the university to do it any longer, and it’s just gone, and now what do you do? It’s like all that time, all that energy, the things that felt like, well, maybe I’m adding some flesh to this bone here. It’s growing, right? This is going to be great. And then you realize, well, wait a second. Now I’m just holding a bone.
Oh, this thing that I invested all this time in, this thing I invested so much effort and excitement and emotional energy and life into, I can’t even say, well, I had my time there, and now it’s going on, and you can go take a look at it. No, those things are gone. And I think probably all of us have had those experiences. And sometimes they’re in work. Sometimes they’re in our families. Certainly Naomi, she thinks about her sons and her husband and the life that they had together, and maybe what her and her husband thought they would do in the years to come as their sons got married and had kids and grandkids, and their family expanded, and they saw the generations worshiping the Lord, and things were going to be so great, and what do you know, all Naomi comes back to the land with is this bone.
We don’t know exactly what Boaz had been through. I suspect there’s a story there as well. I suspect he had had times where maybe he thought everything was coming together, and he’s holding onto a bone. We certainly know that Ruth did. She got married, her husband dies. Naomi, she got married, had two sons, invested in them, watched them grow up, watched them get married, and then they died.
I know that you’re holding onto some bones too, as all of us are. This is a broken world. As we’re holding onto these bones, we say, God, is there anything here? Why did you put me in this place? Why did you have me do this thing? Why did you have me use this energy and put in this hope and think that I saw you moving in this, and now I’m holding onto a bone? I fully imagine that there were times that all three of them asked that question to God.
We hear it more directly from Naomi. And in some ways we might say, at least from what we can tell, she’s been through the most. I think they all were asking. We couldn’t explain it in the moment any more than you and I can explain it in the moment. We see that God’s faithful. Take a look at verses 13-22 of chapter 4.
Now these are the generations of Perez. Perez fathered Herzran, and Herzran fathered David. Now, these are the generations of Perez. Perez fathered Herzran, and Herzran fathered David. And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name saying, a son has been born to Naomi. They named him Obed. Perez fathered Herzran, and Herzran fathered Ram, and Ram fathered Aminadab, and Aminadab fathered Nashan, and Nashan fathered Salman, and Salman fathered Boaz, and Boaz fathered Obed, and Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David.
Who would have thought that two widows of two generations coming back from a land condemned by the Lord, a land that had been found to be the very enemies of God’s people, coming back and finding Boaz well off in his farm but dealing with whatever he was dealing with in his own life? Who would have thought that these three people in their pursuit of God and pursuit of faithfulness would take their bones and add this particular flesh to them? That they would get to be a part of the story of not just raising up a king, but the eternal kingdom.
Because what we know that isn’t said in the book of Ruth, but we know because we have the rest of the Bible, what do we find in the rest of the Bible? Who is the ultimate descendant of King David? And so with these bones, God put unimaginably wonderful flesh on. And so we see the hope that comes for these three individuals wrestling with their bones.
It’s interesting what I think the women around Naomi say as they react to the way the events unfold. What do they say about Ruth and her relationship to Naomi? They say that Naomi’s daughter-in-law is worth seven sons. That’s symbolic. Seven is often representative of perfection in the Bible, and it’s thought that that’s exactly what we see here, that seven sons would be viewed as an ideal number of sons, a truly successful, blessed family with seven sons.
The women look at Naomi and they say, look at this daughter-in-law that you have here that has faithfully followed you, faithfully cared for you. She’s worth more than seven sons. Naomi thought she came back to Israel empty-handed, but before anything else happens, what does she have? She has this daughter-in-law who’s determined to love her mother-in-law and to put herself at jeopardy to do so. And what a beautiful, beautiful picture of love that we see in that. The sort of love that God calls each and every one of us to the people around us, that we are willing to sacrifice for others.
And keeping in mind that we don’t start with the end of the story, we can’t make a mistake here and think that Ruth thinks that this is getting her ahead. Ruth is explicitly sacrificing herself for Naomi here. She has no reason to think this is going to end well, even though it ultimately does. She simply sees this woman that she has committed to love and she says, I’m going to follow you. I’m going to take care of you. That’s where all of this comes out, and that’s where we see this beautiful connection between how God works and what he calls us to do.
Because Ruth couldn’t make this work out right. Ruth couldn’t say, I’m going to love my mother-in-law so well that I’m going to have a new husband, I’m going to have a son, and things are going to be great, and everything’s going to be good. She couldn’t take the bone and put flesh on it, but she could, as she held onto her own bone, say, I am going to pursue what God has put in front of me. I’m going to do it faithfully. And that’s where God works, in that intersection there, where we follow him, where we listen to his call, we listen to his spirit working in us, and we follow him even though it doesn’t necessarily make sense in the moment. That’s what Ruth does here.
And Naomi, even though she seems a little bit more of the complainer of the group, because she says it, what bothers her? What does she do that we talked about last week? She coaches her daughter-in-law, not for her own benefit. She doesn’t know as she’s holding onto her bone, and she’s telling Ruth, now here’s how it’s going to work out for you. You go and be redeemed by Boaz. She doesn’t know how that’s all going to factor in for herself. This is kind of playing in the margins here, because Ruth is her daughter-in-law. She’s not related to Naomi. It’s going to work.
All that Naomi knows here is now she’s going to love her daughter-in-law and send her to do what she knows is going to be good for her daughter-in-law. Go and have Boaz redeem you. Go and have Boaz marry you so that you’re not holding onto your bone anymore. So in the two women, we see them both taking their own bone and holding onto it, but saying, I see how God can work in the other’s life, and I’m going to be a part in that.
That’s that love that we talked about when we think about Paul as he’s writing his letters to the churches, sometimes to people he hadn’t ever even met. He says, I am seeking to do these things. I’m seeking to do this so I don’t lose hope. Paul wasn’t getting the direct benefit of day-to-day relationships with these people, but he said that God has called me to do this, and I’m going to do it. I want you to know that, not so you can praise me, but so that you can know that you are cared for, that there is love here, so you can keep running as you’re holding onto your bones.
As Boaz takes Ruth as his wife, he’s holding onto a bone, too, as we talked about a little bit last week. We saw that as he asked about the man who was a closer kinsman, the one who should have been given first opportunity to be the kinsman redeemer. Why did that man turn down the offer of marrying Ruth and buying the land even though he wanted the land, we’re told? He didn’t want to marry Ruth because he didn’t want it to be that his descendants were reckoned as Ruth’s dead husband’s children. He wanted his inheritance to be free and clear, his, for his descendants. He wanted his name, and he held onto that.
But Boaz, despite being a man who seems to be relatively well-off and would have a lot to pass down to the children that he had by whomever it was that he married, Boaz says, I’m not going to worry about that, I’m going to redeem you. And so in a sense there, Boaz is sort of hanging onto this bone too, especially in a culture like that where it’s really, really important to people that they know that their name is going to be passed down.
I think there’s still a sense of that today, but we need to understand that whatever sense there is of that today, it’s so much more then. You’re basically dead if you can’t pass down your name. You’re already dead. Never mind. And Boaz says, I’m going to do the right thing here. I’m going to love. Ruth, you’re amazing how you’ve shown love even when it didn’t seem to benefit you, and I want to respond as well.
But here’s the beautiful thing is God’s plan works. Naomi isn’t forgotten. Ruth isn’t forgotten. And Boaz isn’t forgotten. What do we see here in this genealogy? This genealogy has not reckoned the way we would think it would be. We see Boaz’s name there. We see Boaz’s family tree there.
Boaz couldn’t count on that. That’s not the way they did things, but God wants us to know that Boaz responded in faith, and here is one of that great cloud of witnesses we talk about who pursued the Lord. And so as he clenched that bone, thinking that maybe that was all he had, God added flesh to it. He added breath to it again. That bone had life.
As Ruth trusted and pursued this course as well, what do we see? She is provided for. She’s not put in the margins of society, a person who is outside the people of God by every standard of the day and certainly viewed even as an enemy of the people of God. Now she’s going to be a part of the very line of God’s people who restore all people.
And Naomi, the one who we know the bitterness that she experienced and the pain that she experienced most clearly, what do we see there? Well, the women of the village don’t say, well, Naomi, you’re not even related to that child. Yes, now Ruth is married. Isn’t that nice? You got her in a good situation. No, what do they see? They see exactly how God’s working in this spiritual family that he’s building.
Naomi may not be the genetic grandparent of this child, and yet she’s going to play a line, and what is she going to do? She’s going to take a part in raising up that child. She gets to pass that along. She gets to see the joy of God working in this.
I think that’s even something, every church, you may not realize this, if you haven’t been involved in the planning side of a church, you may not know this, but there’s a lot of hand-wringing that goes on every time we get to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. It’s just straightforward. This happens at every church, because how are we going to talk about this stuff? What if you just lost a parent? What if you just lost a child? What if you’d like to be a parent, but you can’t be? How do we address those things?
We kind of see all that in a ball here, all happening, and at different points, it kind of fits all of them. They’ve all suffered loss. It all looks hopeless. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be a continued line. But what do we see? Naomi hasn’t given back a biological descendant that she can say, yes, her sons are gone, and yet she’s allowed still to minister, still to be a part of this story, because Ruth is family to her. Ruth loves her, and then she gets to raise up a grandchild, even in this situation, and say, wow, look at the Lord work. She doesn’t need to be known as bitter any longer.
So as we wrestle with how are we going to talk about this at church, and sometimes we’ll say something, and it sounds like it’s just cliched. Well, maybe you don’t have any children, but you can still be a mother to someone in your life. Understand that’s exactly what we’re seeing described here with Naomi. They don’t even say, look, you can be a grandmother to this child. No, they say, look, Naomi has a child. They’re not just being flattering. They’re talking about that Naomi has a role in this story. Ruth has a role in this story. Boaz has a role in this story. God is working through each of them.
I think that says as clearly as anything that yes, God can work through each of us, too. If you are a parent, we’ve seen how Naomi takes care of her daughter-in-law. We’re reminded that there’s those opportunities, but we’re also reminded as Naomi cares for her adopted, so to speak, grandson, there’s those other opportunities. And maybe if you aren’t a parent and you’re thinking, I’d like to show care, it’s a reminder, yes, God presents these opportunities and we should be ready to respond.
Because Naomi could have been so bitter. She said, but I lost my sons. If God were going to work, I wanted Him to put flesh back on those bones before the resurrection and I wanted to see them again. I’m not saying she quit wishing, quit hurting. She also responded. She saw how God was working in that and she responded and God used her. Ruth was hurting, but she responded and God used her. Boaz was hurting, but he responded and God used him.
And that’s the thing. We can’t do it on our own. We can’t have that flesh. When we start to follow the way of Jesus and we say, God, use me. I can’t do it, but I want to quit defending myself. I want to quit trying to make things work for myself, and I want to do what you call me to. Then God works in that.
We looked at the key transition in the Christian life in this passage last week. I want to take us back to it. Matthew 16, 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.
When I’m trying to save my own life or even the lives of others by my own strength, I’m holding on to these bones. And what Jesus is saying, you can hold on to that bone as much as you want of your life. Because here’s the thing, we sometimes think our lives have lots of flesh and blood and breath in them, and yet what if we were reminded all too painfully?
One of you was just sharing a story before the service today about someone who lost a parent unexpectedly. You think about that. We can think that everything is going really, really well, strongly, smoothly, and then all of a sudden it’s just gone. There’s nothing we can do about it.
That reminds us that really as we’re holding on trying to save our own lives, we’re clenching on to the bone and saying, I’m going to hold on to this. What does God do? We say, I don’t need to save my own life. We say, I don’t need to save my own life. In fact, I’m willing to give up my own life. I just want to follow Jesus. I just want to follow the true Redeemer because I’ve seen what the kinsman Redeemer Boaz did and I see how then there was a son given here. I just want to follow.
God’s the one that starts to add that flesh back to those bones. The only one who actually can save our lives. It’s hard in the moment. I imagine for each of these three individuals we’ve been meditating on these last weeks, it was hard in the moment at times because they didn’t know how it was going to work out. What do we do in those moments? That’s when we’re called to trust.
Even amazing fearsome power is the sort of thing we can’t even see and we can’t perceive in the moment. We’ve been following the solar storms. More than that, we’ve been really interested in whether we can see the northern lights or not. I think a few of you may have seen it. I haven’t been able to see it, but here’s what I know. Whether I can see northern lights or not here in St. Louis at a given moment, I know that there’s a fierce solar storm going on at the moment and it has an impact.
For example, in 2003, the last time we had a major one like this, what happened? Power was knocked out in significant portions of Sweden and the electrical grid was actually damaged in South Africa. Those are just two examples. I thought about that for a second. Here is something that I can’t see, that I can’t perceive. If I had been in South Africa at the time, destroying the power grid, I didn’t see anyone turning off the power plant in Sweden. You couldn’t see it, and yet it happened.
Why? Because of forces that weren’t even perceptible to our normal senses. That’s destructive power. But here’s the thing. Something far more powerful than that, but constructive, is happening all around us in every moment as the Holy Spirit works.
If the sun in a fit of a storm can damage our technology and remind us how feeble, how completely built of bones everything that we try to do is, how much more does that remind us that there are things that we can’t see that are powerful enough to rebuild what’s broken?
Paul writes in Ephesians 2, verse 1: And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. He saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the measurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.
God turns our dry bones into flesh. I think it’s so interesting when we think about the way, without knowing the full story yet, the women around Naomi were speaking so clearly about what God was doing. Ruth 4, verse 17, once again.
The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, A son has been born to Naomi, and they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
You might say, well, that’s nice. Obed, that’s a different name, right? Servant. As the women talk about this baby that they’ve named Obed, that they recognize will someday be a man that should have the name Servant, they refer to him as the one who will redeem Naomi.
Yes, Boaz is technically the kinsman-redeemer, but they see the actual hope, the actual line going forward in Obed. They say far more than they can even know in that moment as they say that. Because they say, here is a redeemer, here is a servant.
Guess what, they’re talking about the ancestor of the suffering servant, Jesus, who is the true redeemer.
As they talked about him, and we don’t know a great deal about Obed and what his character was like, we know that he was a part of the story of the best servant, the only true servant, the servant who laid down his life for us to save us and to actually take our bones and put genuine life-giving flesh back on them. That servant came from his line.
Bones belong in a tomb. As we’ve gone through the series, there ain’t no grave. What? Can’t that grave do? Hold his body down and our bodies down, right? And that’s exactly what we see as we look at that passage in Ephesians. What do we see? That Jesus, as the one who was raised, Paul speaks of it as having happened because he already knows that greater power is in the physical world, the Son of God instead.
His work was already complete. His work was already in full effect. There was nothing that could stop it, even as we feel like we’re staring at bones. Whatever bones we’re holding onto, we can know that God’s righteous and good and gracious and loving plan is so sure and so secure that even as it feels like we’re holding onto a bone we can’t do anything on this.
God’s already brought it back to life because we trust in him. I’m willing to take my darkest places and put them before God. Am I willing to take whatever this bone represents to me and put it before God? Are you willing to take this bone and you think about it, what is the bone in my life and are you willing to take that and genuinely say I don’t know how this is going to work but I know I can’t fix it? I trust you with it, God.
Maybe it is trying to sort out your job situation. Maybe it’s an addiction you’re struggling with. Maybe it’s broken relationships in your life or a fear that you just can’t get under control. I’m willing to take this and say, I can’t put flesh on this bone but it’s here for you because you, Lord, take graves and turn them into gardens. You, Lord, take what looks dead and is dead and bring it to life.
Am I willing to take those things and place them before God? Am I willing to risk the appearance of failure as I do? Again, I’m not going to read through the list again but as you think about this genealogy, Boaz probably could have pictured the genealogy in his head as he took Ruth as his wife and imagined how his name wouldn’t be there. Yet there it is. And there’s the promise in David.
I can’t see the northern lights at the moment. It’s daytime. And so far, even at night, I have not been able to see them. I’m just enjoying it vicariously as people post pictures on social media. But the power is there. And so often God’s good grace and power feels as obscure as the northern lights typically are for us here in St. Louis. His power is there. His work is there.
It is Mother’s Day today, and we have a little tradition here at Little Hills. And I’m going to ask Ellie if she would help me out with this. We have a little tradition of giving out flowers on Mother’s Day. So the ladies here, whether you are a mother, like you have children, or you’re just a spiritual mother that’s caring for people around you, you need to have one of these flowers.
And as I thought about how the series came together and Mother’s Day, it struck me that now for the ladies, guys, you’re just going to have to imagine this because you’re not getting a flower, but for the ladies, as you hold on to a bone and you hold on to a flower, here’s what I want you to be thinking about.
We see a bone, and we don’t put together a vase full of bones, right? Or you don’t go to the store and say, I have some dead flowers to put in my vase because we can’t restore them. But as you hold on to that bone and you hold on to that flower, it’s a reminder of what we see right now and what God’s going to do.
All the bones will be given the beauty of life. As you look at that flower, be reminded that’s exactly what God’s doing with those bones in your life and what God’s using you to do.
Here’s our other challenge. If I can trust God, and I can, to lay my bones before Him, then what can I do? As I selflessly serve Him, as I recognize that I can’t fight to put flesh on this bone, I can help other people start to experience the restoration that God has. Sometimes I’m tending other people’s gardens. Sometimes I’m letting other people see the flowers come up, and I can’t.
But here’s the help we have. That in God’s grace, if we trust in Him, all the bones we collect someday will be flowers. Will you pray with me, please?
When we all hold on to the bones, I wonder how you’re working. I want to see the flowers, Lord. I want to see how it all comes together. It can be hard to let go of that control, but Lord, would you help us to? Help us to let go of the control where we’re trying to fix things for ourselves. Help us to let go of the control where we’re so busy holding on to our own bones that we can’t serve those around us and help them to see the flowers you’re raising.
We can’t do it on our own, but we know that your Spirit is working, even though in the moment we often can’t see Him at work. Lord, would you help us to trust and believe that the power beyond all imagination is right here, and He is not just a power, but He is our loving God working in us and through us. Help us to trust. Help us to trust.
Help us to be a people who say, yes, I have bones, but I know that my God is restoring them to life.
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