That last one is perhaps the most significant choice you will ever make. What will I believe about the world around me? Which God will I follow? Where will I send my soul after I die?
In the old testament, there is one woman who exemplifies this choice: Ruth.
Her story begins with Naomi. Naomi was a Jewish woman who lived in Judah with her family, but there was a drought in the land, so she and her family moved to a foreign land. In that land, Naomi's sons married local women, and they assimilated as a family. Then things got worse and Naomi's husband and sons died. All of them. That left Naomi and her daughters in law without anyone to support them. Ruth and Orpah were the daughters in law. At that moment, Naomi didn't think she could support these other women, so she told her daughters in law to go home to their own families to find new husbands.
That was when Ruth made her decision.
Ruth 1:16-17 16 But Ruth replied, "Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me."
Ruth was a Moabite, a people that the Israelites had conquered when they left Egypt. She had no reason to love the God of the Israelites. However, she had lived with Naomi and her family for some time and had learned to love them, and through them learned to love their God.
She chose when Naomi told her to go home to her own people that she would now be one of God's children. "Your people will be my people and your God my God." She did not ask God, she did not offer a sacrifice or try to perform any rituals, she simply decided that she would follow God and that he would be her God.
Some people would call her arrogant, audacious, bold... but God honored her. She went home to Judah with Naomi, married a wealthy man, and became one of the ancestors of King David and Jesus Christ. This Moabite, a race God had ordered the Israelite army to crush, was honored above so many and made a part of God's chosen line of Kings. All because she chose to follow God and didn't give anyone else an option about it.
Now, how does this apply to our modern life?
Well, we each have to choose if we will follow God or if we will go back to living our lives outside of his will. God is not going to make us come and join his family, we have to choose to do so. We have to say "I want to follow you, I want you in my life, and I don't want to go back to what I had before."
When we pray that, and ask Jesus to be our Lord and Savior, we are taken back into God's family. We are adopted as sons and daughters of God, made joint heirs with Christ.
It is that simple, really.
No comments:
Post a Comment