Message: In Ruth 2 Ruth decides to go to a field and harvest grain behind the workers. There were laws about leaving behind pieces in the field for the poor and the foreign to eat. This was necessary for their survival, but it was also very risky because a woman out in the field with the workers was vulnerable for being raped. The man that owned the field not only allowed her to harvest, but he instructed his workers to leave her more than just pieces and he protected her by sending her to harvest with his female servants and commanding the workers not to touch her. She was overwhelmed by his kindness and he told her that all of the good she had done for her mother in law had been reported to him. This is what stood out to me in this story. Ruth was not doing these things to be noticed. She was doing what she felt was right and God was blessing her through Boaz. She had no idea who he was and that he had the ability to change her whole situation. Boaz was like the ‘undercover CEO” who caught her working hard and being honorable when she thought she was only among field workers. I think this is the most beautiful part because she was just hard at work doing what needed to be done without any ulterior motives and God aligned her circumstances. This reminds me that when we do what is right we often feel unnoticed, but God sees what we do in secret and the bible says that he rewards us openly. We shouldn’t do these things with a motive of being rewarded. We should do them because it’s right, but the encouragement here is that God rewards what seems to be unseen by anyone else. He knows every sacrifice we have made and every act of obedience that we have chosen and even though it may not change our current situation, we know that God is faithful, just and loves to show kindness to those who obey him. This is a reminder to me that we are not working to be noticed by people. When we are more concerned about what God sees, our actions often have a way of being rewarded by people. This story reminds me of Galatians 6:9 ”Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” This is a New Testament encouragement that reinforces this character and I thought it was really cool that it also referenced the reward as “reaping a harvest” since this is literally what Ruth was doing in this story.
