Lovingkindness: Lessons from the Book of Ruth

All right, we don't have to George Whitfield the sermon. That's good. Okay. Turn to the book of Ruth. We're not going to be there that long, but we will be there a little bit. As you know, we've been in a summer series through Ruth, on and off, and we just wrapped up Ruth chapter 4 last week, and that was a rich journey.

I was so enriched studying that book in so many ways. It's been such a blessing in my life just studying the scripture that way. And we've seen a lot from this book, especially those of you who've been here for all four chapters. But there was a lot that we couldn't cover.

You know, I felt kind of like a trail guide leading you through the mountains of this book. And I showed you kind of the great sites. We got to see a lot of stuff. But along the way, as we're moving through, I had to leave it behind a few streams, a few sites that we couldn't quite spend the time on that I would have liked.

And so now that we've got through the narrative, I have an opportunity tonight to stop at one of those sites. This afternoon, I... Three hours ago, actually, I came to the realization that no preacher wants to come to, and that is that the sermon I had prepared was not the one that I believe God wanted me to preach, nor was it helpful to God's people as it could have been.

It was long, it was academic, and it was dry. And this question hung over me all afternoon. If this was my last sermon, you know, if I go home and I, by God's providence, were to go into eternity in a car accident, and this were my last sermon that I preached, what would I want you to take away from the book of Ruth?

What would I want to leave you with? That was hanging over my head this afternoon. What would I want the body of Christ, all of us at Emmanuel, this evening, August 2nd, 2026? What do I want to be foremost in your mind from the book of Ruth? That's the question I was thinking about.

There are so many realities that I could pick out from Ruth to put in your mind, but for the sake of time, I had to just pick one tonight. One reality from Ruth to take just a closer look at. When we went through chapter one, I made the argument that the kind of self-sacrificial love that Ruth shows Naomi is actually God's ideal for all of us.

It's something that God expects from all followers of Jesus. That was my claim. What you should see when you go through Ruth is that God worked through that voluntary, self-sacrificial love of Ruth to give up her future to help this despairing woman, Naomi. That was what God used to accomplish his plans.

The author of Ruth in chapter 3, verse 10, you can look at that, describes this decision of Ruth as an act of kindness. That's the word he uses. That word appears actually three times in Ruth, and dozens and dozens of times throughout the Old Testament. It's a word in my Bible that's usually translated as loving-kindness.

So we're going to go with that definition tonight, and I'll explore more of that, why I chose that later. But through Ruth, God shows us that a life characterized by this kind of loving-kindness is something beautiful. It's something that is costly, it's painful, it's sacrificial, but it is beautiful.

It's God-glorifying and Jesus magnifying. If there's anything that the Bible emphasizes, it's this reality: that God wants his people to be a people of loving-kindness. He wants his people to be rightly related. Toward him and rightly related toward each other. So, in my heart for you tonight, the thing that, the one truth that we have time to look at and zoom in on is this.

This is my heart. I want you to see that God expects us and empowers us to live a life of this kind of loving kindness so we can glorify him. So, if you're taking notes, I just have two headings tonight. Heading number one: the kind of loving kindness we see in Ruth is expected by God.

It's the first heading. And number two, it's empowered by the gospel. So, let's start by number one. It's expected by God. Something you should know is that the author of Ruth never explicitly tells us that Ruth's sacrificial love is something we should emulate. He leaves that as something we should pick up between the lines.

And so, how do I know that this kind of loving kindness is something that God expects of us? Well, turn with me to the book of Hosea, Hosea 6:6. I want to take you to a text that Jesus quotes multiple times as kind of the center of his mission.

Something you should know about Hosea, and I encourage you to, if you want to learn more about this book, listen to John Davis's sermon. A little while ago, it's excellent. Hosea was a prophet to Israel, sent during a time of darkness, apostasy, unfaithfulness. Israel had, he likens Israel's rebellion against God to treachery and cheating on one's spouse.

And so look with me at Hosea 6:4. God says this: What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? For your loyalty is like a morning cloud and like the dew which goes away early. Therefore, I have hewn them in pieces by the prophets.

I have slain them by the words of my mouth. And the judgments on you are like the light that goes forth. For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. So the word loyalty that you see twice there, you can circle that.

That is the same word in Ruth 3.10, the same word that's used to describe Ruth's life of loving kindness. So God delights in this. That's one implication we should see right away. This kind of loving kindness is something God delights in. It's fundamental to his character. The word carries this idea of covenant faithfulness.

God always acts in loving kindness to his people. By keeping his promises. And some of you might be thinking of Exodus 34. God says, the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth. Why does God delight in loving kindness?

It's because it's who he is. It's this idea that God, when he enters into a covenant with a people, he keeps that covenant. He keeps his obligations, but he doesn't just show loving kindness to people because he has to. You see, God shows loving kindness, this kind of faithfulness, even to those who've broken his covenant.

David in Psalm 51, when he commits that great sin, you see the opening line of the Psalm, Have mercy on me according to your loving kindness. So God, and God forgave David. We see that in 1 Samuel. And so God shows favor sometimes, even when there's no obligation for him to do so, because he's a merciful God.

He sees imperfections and sins in us and ways that we violate his holiness, but he doesn't destroy us right away. He's merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. That's his character. And so God delights in this. It's implication number one from Hosea 6. Implication two is that God expects this kind of loving kindness from his people.

So Hosea 6 is a charge against Israel that they are not behaving this way. God expected Israel to imitate his character, but they were not. The verse is a charge against them. God is saying, Your sacrifices and offerings are worthless if they're not accompanied by a heart of devotion and faithfulness toward me.

What's interesting, if you look at verse 7, verses 7 through 9, the first examples that God goes to for how Israel's lack of loving kindness toward him is demonstrated are relational examples. Verse 8, you see this. Gilead is a city of wrongdoers, tracked with bloody footprints. Verse 9, and as raiders wait for a man, so a band of priests murder on the way to Shechem.

So again, we see this idea that Israel's lack of loving kindness toward the Lord is showing itself in their relationships. There's murder, verse 8. The priests were committing atrocities. Verse 9. If you look at the next chapter, chapter 7, verse 3, you see lying and deception. Adultery, chapter 7, verse 4.

So Israel is not even fulfilling the basic definition of this word, loving kindness, let alone that extraordinary kind that we see in Ruth. In Hosea 6, 7, God calls this treachery. They have dealt treacherously against me. So what we see here from Ruth and from Hosea is that you can't separate your relationship with God.

from your relationship with other people. How you treat others is a manifestation of that relationship with God. There are distinctions between those, but you can't separate them. God is telling his people, you're not being faithful toward me or my covenant, and that is playing itself out horizontally in your society and relationships.

You can't say, on the one hand, that you love God and then have evil in your heart against somebody else. Something's going wrong. Alarm bells should be going off. And so God expects loving kindness from his people. And in Hosea, he's actually angry because it's not there. This is really summed up in Leviticus 19, 18.

And this is the fundamental ethic of the Old Testament relationally. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. So God expected this from Israel under the Mosaic law. And it reflects this universal reality that he expects it universally among humanity. Because of Adam's sin, though, one of the tendencies of our hearts is towards selfishness.

Have you ever woken up in the morning, your eyes shoot open, and this rush of excitement hits you, and the first thing you think is, wow, I'm so excited to put the needs of others before my own today. Well, I can tell you, I don't wake up that way.

That's the reality of our hearts. We are self-absorbed naturally. And even as Christians, we can be totally unaware of the fact, of this fact, that our hearts tend toward this selfishness and not toward the loving kindness of Ruth. And we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we have the extraordinary loving kindness of Ruth when in reality we're just the ordinary orpa of chapter one.

Sin is so deceitful that that same kind of unfaithfulness of Israel in Isaiah 6, it sneaks in. Coltripp says this well. He says this, sin turns me in on myself. Sin shrinks my life to the size of my life. Sin makes me obsessed with my wants, my needs.

My feelings. I can tell you that's true in my life. I deal with that every day. And so, this is what you see in Hosea 6: Israel's following their natural impulses, and it's leading to the breakdown of society and of relationships. Look again at verse 7. Do you ever view relational sin as treachery against God?

That makes it heavy, puts a weight on that. The book of Ruth shows us the opposite of Israel in Hosea 6. It shows us that the kind of loving kindness shows us what the kind of loving kindness that God delights in looks like in practice. We know that when we read Ruth, there's something right about what we see there, about what she does.

There's just a rightness that we feel, like, this is right. I want this in my life. The kind of loving kindness of Ruth is other-oriented. You just see that in chapter 1 of Ruth. It puts the needs of others before itself. It sees other people. It sees needs and finds ways to meet those needs.

It says, there's somebody hurting. I want to find a way to meet that need. I'm going to step forward. I'm not going to wait for somebody else to take care of this. There's a rightness about that that God's encoded into us to feel. The question for us is: do we want that kind of loving-kindness in our lives?

So, God delights in loving-kindness because it reflects his nature, and he expects it from us. Now, if you're a believer, your heart should be kind of resonating with that truth from Hosea. You know that loving-kindness is something expected by God. He's put that desire in your heart. If you know Christ, if you're like me, you know that you need help.

This kind of loving-kindness has to be empowered by the gospel. Empowered by the gospel. Turn with me to another text, Matthew chapter 9. Matthew chapter 9. This is a famous scene in the Gospels. Look with me at Matthew 9:10. We read three verses. Then it happened that as Jesus was reclining at the table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were dining with Jesus and his disciples.

When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, Why is your teacher eating? With tax collectors and sinners. But when Jesus heard this, he said, it is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means.

I desire compassion and not sacrifice, for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. So we have this scene in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus has just called Matthew the tax collector, and he's enjoying a meal in a house with other tax collectors and sinners. Those are the terms that Matthew uses.

And the Pharisees see this. They see Jesus with these people, and they're surprised, maybe a little shocked even, that this rabbi would associate with these kinds of people, this horrible strata of society. It was shocking to them. It was shocking that a Messiah would never associate with these kinds of people, certainly not a simple rabbi like Jesus.

But Jesus, you know what passage he quotes at the end of that, verse 13? He quotes Hosea 6, verse 6. I desire mercy and not sacrifice. And Jesus roots his mission in that statement. For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. He roots his fundamental mission in Hosea 6:6.

So he's not just making this up, he's quoting the Old Testament to show that one of his essential purposes in life was to show that kind of loving kindness to sinners. God can't work with people like the Pharisees who think they're righteous, but he can work with people who know they're sinners.

Those are the people that Jesus came for. He sees Hosea 6, that kind of loving kindness, as a paradigm of his mission. Jesus showed that loving kindness throughout his ministry, the culmination being his bearing God's wrath against sinners on the cross so that they could receive forgiveness. Jesus would rise again, ascend to the Father's right hand to create a people progressively characterized by that same kind of loving kindness that we see in him, we see in Hosea 6, and that we see in Ruth.

When God saves you and the Holy Spirit gives you a new heart and new desires, you want to live that way. And in the church, Jesus is creating a people that glorify God by relating rightly to him and rightly to each other. Church, our loving kindness, our love for each other is a gospel witness to the lost.

That Ruth lifestyle. Jesus says in John 13, 35, By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Our walking in loving kindness toward each other is one of the ways that people who don't know Jesus are drawn toward him.

But it works the opposite way, too. When we're not rightly related to each other, when we're not engaging in the type of loving kindness that we see in the book of Ruth, it drives people away from Christ. Not every accusation of church hurt, many can, but not every one can be written off as the work of false converts.

God calls us, his people, to a life of loving kindness. The expectation of Jesus in John 13, 35 is that the apostles, and by extension, those who would believe through the apostles, us, would be so profoundly gripped by the way that Jesus loved them, the way that they did not deserve to be loved or forgiven, that they would go and show that same kind of loving kindness horizontally.

They would overflow in that same kind of love toward each other. This kind of life comes to church to give more than to get. It thinks more about others than self. It learns to find joy in others' joy. It struggles when it sees other people struggling. It's thinking of practical ways to encourage and to build up.

It seeks ways to edify brothers and sisters. And it searches through the Bible for anything that will help others in their walk with Jesus. The kind of life that God calls us to that most glorifies Him is this other-oriented life that we see in Ruth. When Ruth totally abandons her future to take care of an old, despairing widow, Naomi, it's not because she was kind of overcome with this rush of sentimentalism.

It's because she felt, and maybe because she knew the character of Israel's God, that this was the most loving thing she could do for Naomi. Her life became others-focused. You see that in chapter two when she goes out to try to take care and gather grain for Naomi.

You see that in her heart toward Boaz. Question for all of us from Ruth. Is your life inward focused or outward focused? Are you the center of your world? In your relationships, is the fundamental posture of your heart to get, to take, or to give? Are you looking for ways throughout the week to show others the same kind of loving kindness that God has shown you?

Do you recognize and point out evidences of God's grace at work in others' lives? Are you bearing others' burdens and letting others bear your burdens? Do you always go to the same people on Sunday? Do your conversations always stay on the surface level, or are you willing to give up a little bit of comfort to see, brother, how are you actually doing?

Sister, how are you doing? If you struggle with this, and everyone in this room, if you're a believer, you know this is hard. Ask God to help you. This kind of life, it has to be empowered by the gospel. You need the example of Christ to empower you to do this.

That's the energy that sustains this kind of other-oriented life, the gospel. And so often when we see an ethical exhortation given in Scripture, we see the ground. For that, get of that exhortation rooted in something that Jesus did. Because the more you truly consider and grasp what Jesus has done for you and in your life through his crosswork, through his saving you in the gospel, the more energy you'll have to live this kind of life that glorifies him.

Jesus sums this up in Luke 7:47. He who is forgiven little loves little. The opposite, of course, is true. He who knows he's forgiven much loves much. So the same gospel that saved you, the same Holy Spirit that gave you a new heart, is the one that will help begin to reprogram our desires to go outward, to seek out hurting people, to help them, to show kindness.

And God is so kind to us. He didn't just command this, but he shows us what it looks like in his word. We see it in Ruth. We see it supremely in God's Son. Just consider the life of Jesus, how he came to show that loving kindness to sinners and tax collectors, the worst of society.

And to die on the cross for their sins when he had no obligation to do so. It was voluntary. And he came, you know, Philippians 2, he emptied himself, taking on the form of a bondservant, to wash the feet of sinners, to show us what this kind of life looks like, and to pioneer that for us so that we could follow in his footsteps.

We realize how much we've been forgiven in Christ, how much he loves us. You know, one of the jobs of any communicator of God's word is to convince you so much of Christ's love for you, if you're a believer, so that you will realize that and share that with others.

This is the energy for the Christian life. We see it in Christ. We see it in Ruth. And so, if you approach God humbly and ask Him to change your heart, He will meet you there. And He'll begin to reprogram you. He'll reprogram you to live this life of loving kindness for His glory.

It's a life that He not only expects, but also empowers for His glory. Let's pray. Father, Lord, I know that those of us here who know you and are believers, we want to live this way. Lord, we want to emulate that life of Ruth that is so other-oriented, that finds its joy in others' joy and helping and in coming alongside.

Lord, we know that we struggle with this. I struggle with this, perhaps more than many. Father, we need help. I need help. Help us to know that mercy you've shown us in the gospel, Lord, and to seek ways to show that horizontally. Father, I pray you cause us to know the gospel beyond just a collection of facts, but realities that we apprehend on a heart level.

And that, Lord, you would give us that resolve, that humility, that teachability to say, Lord, however difficult this is, however much my personality type gets in the way, Father, I want to follow. I want to be more like Christ. I want to take what you've shown me in Ruth and follow you.

Lord, I know I want that. And I believe that's the heart of your people. And I pray you'd help us to live a life that glorifies you. In Jesus' name, amen.