W.I.G.I.M.I.

Introduction

Good morning.  My name is Ryan Hanson and I have the privilege of serving at TLC as volunteer staff facilitating the Local Groups.  Before we start today’s teaching, will you join me in taking a deep breath?  Breathe in…and out…  We made it.  This is the last week of 2018.  If 2018 was a great year for you, or if 2018 was the worst year you’ve had, it is over on Tuesday. Now this is a time when people typically reflect on how their year has gone.  It is the time of year when people commit or recommit to something that they think will make the next year better than the last year. So, I want to start with a question.  How many people plan to set a New Year’s resolution?  Apparently 68% of people set new year’s resolutions.  On the screen is the list of the most common set last year. 📷 Do you see something they all have in common?  They are all focus on self-improvement.  We see get healthier, exercise more, save money, read, make friends, get a new job, etc.  There’s nothing wrong with that, and I have set many of these myself over the years, but what I have found is that a goal set with the singular purpose of improving one’s self is not compelling enough for me to stick with throughout the year.  Every time I have set one of these self-motivated resolutions I have given up on before January is over. One year, a few years ago, I decided to try something different than setting another “self-improvement” resolution.  I was going to say “YES” whenever I felt God calling me to serve someone else.  I was going to pre-accept whatever God asked of me.  The problem was, I expected God to make a grand invitation, something like this. Take a look at this video. Operation Yellow Ribbon Video (entire video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_Ey5ph4wW8 Did you know about this?  I only found out a few months ago.  The sad thing is, this is what I expected God to do for me during the year.  I thought God’s invitation to serve would be as clear as 38 airplanes and 7,000 people unexpectedly showing up to my front door.  The reality was that nothing that grand happened.  The one thing that did happen was that God showed me a picture of what service typically looks like.  This is what I’d like to talk about today. If you will turn with me to the book of Ruth.  Ushers will be available to lend you a Bible if you need one.

How does God “typically” invite us to serve others?

To give a little background on the book of Ruth, the book is really the story of Naomi and her family.  Naomi was an Israelite who was married to Elimelek.  They had two sons, Mahlon and Kilion.  Israel was suffering from a famine and to feed his family Elimelek decided that he would move to Moab.  During the ten years they were there, both sons got married; one to Ruth and the other to Orpah.  Also, during those ten years Elimelek and both sons died, leaving Naomi with two daughters and no means of supporting them.  You see at that time, women did not have standing in society.  They could not enter into business transactions.  They were essentially helpless.  If a woman’s husband died and she had no sons, many widows were typically forced to sell themselves into slavery just to survive.  Naomi, hearing that the famine was over in Israel, decided to go back to see if she could find family that could help her.  Naomi encouraged both daughters to stay in Moab and re-marry.  Orpah agreed, but Ruth had other plans.  It is here we pick up the story.  Please turn with me to Ruth 1:16-18 Ruth 1:16-18 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. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her. Ruth had a choice to make.  She could stay in Moab, re-marry, have a family, and live a normal life.  Or…she could stay with Naomi, go to a land where she knew nobody, worship and serve a God she did not grow up with, and face a very uncertain future.  Ruth chose to stay with Naomi.  I like how Daniel Block, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois describes Ruth’s choice to stick with Naomi.  He writes, With radical self-sacrifice she abandons every base of security that any person, let alone a poor widow, in that cultural context would have clung to: her native homeland, her own people, even her own gods Daniel Block I love that phrase, “radical self-sacrifice”.  Through the rest of the book of Ruth we see how God honors that “radical self-sacrifice” to serve her mother-in-law.  He allows her to glean (which means pick up the scrap grain left over from harvest) in a field owned by a man named Boaz.  Boaz shows favor to her by helping her beyond what is expected.  Boaz ends up marrying her as the Kinsman Redeemer, which basically is a process outlined in Leviticus where a relative can buy-back the property sold when a relative runs into hard times.  Boaz and Ruth have a child named Obed and both Ruth and Naomi’s futures are secure. What strikes me about the story of Ruth is what we find in Matthew 1:5 in the genealogy of Jesus.  It states Matthew 1:5 Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth It was through the family tree of Ruth that Jesus was born.  Ruth’s selfless act to stick by Naomi when she had nothing to gain and everything to lose, created the branch in the family tree of Jesus.

Personal Story

Ruth couldn’t have known that her decision to serve Naomi would eventually lead to Jesus, the promised Messiah, our savior, being born.  In reality, God rarely gives us the clear, instant results for our deeds like he gave those in Gander.  I definitely have not received that clarity in my life.  The story of how I got to stand here on this stage in front of you is one of many small “Yesses” that I said to mostly inconvenient requests of my time.  Back in 2000 I was sitting in the back row of a massive church, attending, but not engaging.  I was a renter, not an owner.  The pastor came on stage one day and said that they had to turn kids away from the kid’s programs because they didn’t have enough people to serve.  He challenged us to wake up earlier, serve at one service, and attend the other.  Being that I was 19 or 20 at the time I did not want to deal with little kids, but I did say “Yes” to volunteering with middle schoolers.  It was inconvenient to wake up earlier, but I was single and had nothing else better to do.  I had a youth group of 8-10 guys that I journeyed with.  One day a student called me and said he could no longer attend because he didn’t have a ride.  He didn’t directly ask, but it was clear he wanted me to drive him.  He lived quite a few miles out of the way and I could have easily said “no”, but in a moment of uncommon kindness I said “yes”.  For the next few years, I drove him to church every Sunday.  We attended the adult service together and went to the middle school program.  When the middle school program was moved to Tuesdays, we signed up together to serve in the 1st grade room on Sunday morning.  I would regularly take him to lunch after church, we’d talk about life, and he would invite me to random stuff like auto shows.  More than a year into this he shared that he was struggling.  His dad went to Iraq to weld armor plating on Humvees and never came back.  His mom was working multiple jobs to make ends meet.  Both of his siblings came out as Gay.  He didn’t know what to make of any of it.  Being 19-20 years old, I didn’t know anything either.  I accidently stumbled into a mentorship role with this student, except I felt like I had nothing to offer other than a consistent presence.  It was at least another year into this cadence before God showed me what He was doing.  We were at a 5k together volunteering as road marshals.  My youth group did this every year at the Alger Heights Halloween 5k.  We would get the t-shirt so people thought we had run, but do nothing more than eat donuts and stand on the corner with arrows showing people where to go acting as self-appointed judges to our informal costume contest.  It was during this race, that this student told me in passing that his dad was in town.  I asked him if he was going to do anything with him.  He said “no”.  He said his dad was only in town for that one day and he would rather come to the race with me and the youth group.  I all but lost it.  For years, I felt mildly agitated that I was driving so far out of my way to drive him to church, the mom never wanted to meet me even thought I tried multiple times, there was no HUGE spiritual breakthrough on the student’s part.  I felt like I was making no impact on his life.  This relationship was easily described as inconvenient, but in that one moment, God gave me the gift of seeing that somehow I was making a difference and that God was working through my consistent presence.  This student is now married with a child, and I could not be prouder of him. I could have never imagined throughout this entire story that God was working as He was.  Through this story and others like it, God used my “Yesses” to bring me here speaking to you now.  I said “yes” to volunteering.  I said “yes” to taking this student to church.  I said “yes” to going to Israel on my honeymoon.  I said “yes” to joining the middle school teaching team.  I said “yes” to leading the student ministry at the satellite campus.  I said “yes” to seminary.  I said “yes” to Brad Gray who introduced me to Toran, which led to the “yes” to join TLC.  Each opportunity in and of itself I could have easily said “no”, but God used every “yes” to shape me and get me ready to where I am now.  The reality is, I know that I am not where God wants me long term and I have many more “yesses” before I realize God’s plan for my life. As I understand it now, this is how God “typically” works.  He gives us an opportunity to join Him, with no vision or promise of results.  The opportunity typically feels like more of an inconvenient request than a God ordained opportunity to do Kingdom work.  When I look back on the other times I have said “yes” I think of how easily it would have been to have said “no”.

Failure to say “yes”

On a few occasions, I have said “no”.  God reminded me of this clearly the other day when this picture came across my FaceBook feed. This picture is not in any way vulgar, but it could be disturbing to some.  If you don’t personally want to see or don’t want your children to see, please look away for the next few seconds.  It was a picture taken during the 1993 Sudan Famine, was run on the cover of Time Magazine, and won a Pulitzer Prize.  Please show the picture. 📷 Thanks, please take it down. The picture depicts a starving girl trying to crawl to the UN Food camp a mile away while a vulture looks on waiting for her to die.  The photographer stood watching this young girl try to crawl for 20 minutes.  He thought the picture would be better if the vulture had its wings open.  After 20 minutes, he scared the vulture away, lit a cigarette, prayed for the girl, and walked away, never helping her get to the food line.  Having to deal with the weight of his choices, this photographer never recovered from the guilt of saying “no” to this opportunity to help this girl.  He wrote “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain.” Now, this picture stood out to me, because it reminded me of two pictures I took while in Africa.  I was touring the Kibera Slum in Kenya, home to roughly 1,000,000 people.  As we toured the slum a certain child stood out.  The girl was in a “child sponsorship” school and stood out because she looked so sad even though she was getting her needs met.  Her face is blurred to respect her identity. 📷 I clearly remember thinking that this is the type of picture people would want to see in my photo book of Africa.  A sad child living in the slum.  I took the picture, even edited the colors to emphasize the girl, and did nothing to help. The second picture was taken in the Masai Mara, the African plains, in a mud hut village of a girl who was sitting there with flies on her face, not even trying to swat them away.  Again the face is blurred to respect her identity. 📷 Again, I clearly remember, that this is another picture people would want to see in my photobook.  I took a picture and did nothing to help. There was realistically not much I could do, but I could have walked up to them, I could have spoken to them, maybe I could have done something or said something that could have brought a smile to their faces.  It wouldn’t have taken much.  Here is another picture I took in the same slum. 📷 This was a group of kids who we entertained for over a half an hour doing nothing more than showing them pictures of themselves in the preview screen of our cameras.  As you can see, they loved it. I have never regretted the times I have said “yes” to God’s prompting to serve others, but I have regretted every time I have said “no”

Conclusion / Application

So this year, I am going to do two things.  My prayer is that you join me.  I am going to set a New Year’s resolution and adopt a word for the year.  In 1 Corinthians 9:24 Paul writes, 1 Corinthians 9:24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. I want to be able to say at the end of 2019 that I ran the race God gave me to win.  To do that, I commit to the following two things.  First my New Year’s resolution will be to: New Year’s Resolution: Look at the inconvenient requests that people make of me and ask God if it is an opportunity He is providing me to serve I will also adopt a word for the year.  In my job (for me that’s sales) I am continually told that the first thing that comes to people’s mind when confronted with a request is W.I.I.F.M. Which stands for W.I.I.F.M. What’s In It For Me My word for this year will be W.I.G.I.M.I. You may not be familiar with this word, because I made it up.  It stands for W.I.G.I.M.I. What Is God Inviting Me Into Every time an inconvenient request presents itself in 2019, I am going to ask myself how God might be using it as an opportunity to invite me into the work He is already doing, calling me into a larger role in His kingdom.  I for one do not want to pass up on anything God has panned for me. Imagine what God could do through the 300 or so of us if we decided right now to say “yes” to the opportunities to serve others even when it is inconvenient, or we don’t see the benefit that might come from it. I ask you to join me in 2019 to saying “yes” now to every inconvenient request that you feel the Spirit leading you accept.

Prayer

Please join me in prayer. God, I thank you for 2018.  I thank you for the good things that you gifted us with.  I also thank you for the tough things that you used to challenge us and grow us into the people that we are today.  I pray that in 2019 you give us the radical self-sacrifice of Ruth.  Help us to run the race you give us in 2019 to win.  Help us to look at every inconvenient request as a potential invitation to join You in growing Your Kingdom.  Soften our hearts, and help us say “YES” to You now.  We love you and we cannot wait to see what you have planned for TLC over the next year.  Amen.