What Do You Do When Your Life Doesn’t Fit Your “Hopes”?

Hope Has a Name
What Do You Do When Your Life Doesn’t Fit Your “Hopes”?

I. Introduction

A. Life is a series of “hope .”

1. How do you adjust your to fit your ?

B. Ruth 1:11-14 (NAS) ¹¹But Naomi said, “Return, my daughters. Why should you go with me? Have I yet sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands? ¹²Return, my daughters! Go, for I am too old to have a husband. If I said I have hope, if I should even have a husband tonight and also bear sons, ¹³would you therefore wait until they were grown? Would you therefore refrain from marrying? No, my daughters; for it is harder for me than for you, for the hand of the Lord has gone forth against me.” ¹⁴And they lifted up their voices and wept again; and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.

C. Ruth 1:16-17 (NAS) ¹⁶But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or turn back 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. ¹⁷Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus may the Lord do to me, and worse, if anything but death parts you and me.”

1. Ruth commits herself to an old woman who has at all.

2. The most daring act of and devotion in the entire Old Testament is done by a

penniless–childless–uncalled–pagan– widow!

D. Ruth only did what an person would do!

1. Ruth was betting the farm on !

E. Ruth 1:20-21 (NAS) ²⁰She said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. ²¹I went out full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has witnessed against me and the Almighty has afflicted me?”

F. Naomi is with God!

1. Maybe for you, your “hope adjustment” means that you just need to name .

2. Hope has to start where you , not where you think you be.

3. Naomi doesn’t see her life completely .

G. Ruth 1:22 (NAS) So Naomi returned, and with her Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, who returned from the land of Moab. And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest.

1. We all tend to see life through our own .

2. God has given all of us way than we know!

H. Ruth 2:2 (NAS) And Ruth the Moabitess said to Naomi, “Please let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain after one in whose sight I may find favor.” And she said to her, “Go, my daughter.”

1. Ruth is also a . She’s a Gentile.

I. “Hoping,” as opposed to “wishing,” has a very strong bias toward !

1. And when Ruth takes , things begin to happen!

J. Ruth 2:5 (NAS) Then Boaz said to his servant who was in charge of the reapers, “Whose young woman is this?”

1. In the ancient world, your identity as a woman was dependent upon your relationship to a .

K. Ruth 3:10 (NAS) “May you be blessed of the Lord, my daughter. You have shown your last kindness to be better than the first by not going after young men, whether poor or rich.”

L. Ruth 4:14-15 (NAS) ¹⁴“Blessed is the Lord who has not left you without a redeemer today, and may his name become famous in Israel. ¹⁵May he also be to you a restorer of life and a sustainer of your old age; for your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons, has given birth to him.”

1. And David would grow up and become the of , even though David was 1/8^th Moabite!

2. And is in the genealogy of Jesus! And that means that there’s a little in Jesus, too!

3. Bring your hurt to right now!

M. “Who might bring to this week?”

II. Conclusion