Mivoden Thursday Morning

Choices, choices. Wow. Dawson made some bad choices.

Maybe the word we need for today is Commitment.

Commitment means that we are dedicated to a cause or activity or a person. A commitment engages us and obligates us—and, it restricts our activity. When I commit myself to my wife, I obligate myself to her and limit my freedom to pursue other relationships. That’s part of my marriage vows—leaving all others and binding myself to one, lovely, wonderful person for the rest of my life.

Commitment is the difference between excellence and mediocrity. Anyone can swing a golf club and hit a ball down the fairway, but it takes commitment to hone your skills and become a golf pro.

Anyone can knock and arrow and let it fly towards a target, but it takes commitment and determined effort to learn how to make a bow and true an arrow and send it down to the bullseye time after time or hit a moving target.

Anyone can get up on skis as long as they’re given 59 tries, but it takes commitment to learn how to jump the wake and ski backwards and slalom and do those pyramid things.

Commitment in relationship means that you stick with someone even when its hard. It means you try and try and try again.

Our world is naturally loose with commitment. We seek comfort and pleasure over long-term commitment.

We start a job only looking for the next opportunity and bigger pay check.

We date someone with our eyes out for the next one. And then when we get married we face some struggles and we’re like, “I knew this marriage thing wasn’t for me.” It takes commitment to stick with it and learn how to be great at a relationship.

Let me tell you a short story about commitment that comes from the book of Ruth.

The story starts when Naomi and her husband and two sons abandon their farm in Bethlehem and immigrate to the nearby country of Moab where Naomi’s husband died. Both sons ended up marrying, but neither of them had kids before both of them died. We aren’t told how they died, just that all three of the men in that family died. The women were left to mourn, alone. One of the wives saw her chance and went back to her father’s house, hoping she would be able to marry someone else. But Ruth showed commitment to her mother-in-law, Naomi. When Naomi suggested that she go home to her family, Ruth insisted that Naomi was her family. She said, “your people are my people, your God is my God, and wherever you die, there will I be buried.”

That’s commitment!

They traveled together, in poverty, back to the town that Naomi had abandoned so many years ago. The Bible doesn’t tell us what the neighbors thought, but you better believe they were talking. It wasn’t cool to leave when things were difficult. And it was against the law of God to go to another land and marry their women. I bet Ruth was getting the side-eye all the time.

Well, in spite of her likely rude treatment, Ruth was determined to provide for the aging Naomi. In Israel refugees and the poor were allowed to glean in the fields and pick up what the harvesters dropped on the ground, and to glean in the corners and edges where they didn’t harvest all the grain. So, Ruth found herself in the field of a man named Boaz, who happened to be a relative of Naomi and apparently in need of a wife.

Boaz looked kindly on Ruth, and even told his harvesters to intentionally drop grain for her to pick up. He fed her at meal times, and made sure she had water and was never treated badly by his workers.

In Israelite culture, if you didn’t have a son to inherit your land, the land would be passed on to the nearest relative. This would have left Naomi with no income, and no family to provide a home or resources to survive. And so, a close relative could become what they called a “kinsman redeemer” and marry the widow who had no son. The first son born to them would inherit the land of his mother’s first husband, but the kinsman redeemer would continue to provide for the woman and her son. It was a gift of love, not an addition to his own property.

When Boaz realized the situation that Ruth and Naomi were in, he chose to marry Ruth, the foreigner, and provide for Naomi. In fact, when they had a son, Obed, the Bible says that it was Naomi’s heir. The end of the story says “Naomi took the baby and cuddled him close to her and she cared for him as if he were her own. The neighbors said, ‘Now at last Naomi has a son again!’”

Even though Naomi and her family didn’t have commitment for their homeland, this story is full of commitment. Ruth was committed to Naomi and Boaz became committed to both Ruth and Naomi.

Commitment isn’t easy, nor is it necessarily rewarding. Commitment finds its root and nourishment in love. And as we’ve seen this week, love is its own reward.

Jesus is our Kinsman Redeemer. He is the one who was committed to us at the cost of his own life. There is nothing He wouldn’t do to draw our hearts to Him.

The question we are left with this week is, will we respond with the same kind of commitment? Will we say, “I’m in love with Jesus and I’ll stick with Him, no matter the cost?”

Let’s pray