Ruth: A Story

Ruth: A Story

Our new sermon series exploring the book of Ruth will be a pretty significant shift in the preaching texts. Not just because we're moving from the New Testament to the Old Testament, but because we'll be moving from didactic passages to narrative passages. Didactic passages are what we might call more straightforward teaching. The books of 1 & 2 Peter, which we've been studying since January, fit this description. For the most part, the teaching in Peter's letters is didactic/straightforward in the sense that they have a statement of fact, "Here's what's true"; followed or preceded by a call to respond, "Because X is true, do (or don't do) this." Narrative sections of Scripture are very different. While they are still given by God to encourage and instruct his people, and while there may be some didactic elements within the narrative, the overall teaching of narrative texts is much less straightforward. A narrative is a story and the story as a whole generally has one or more main themes, which may or may not be clear or explicit from a surface reading of the text. In particular, since the biblical narratives were written ages ago to cultures very different than ours, it can sometimes be hard for us to see what the story is all about. For instance (spoiler alert): The book of Ruth is often portrayed as a love story. But that's not quite right. Despite the fact that God never speaks or "shows up" in Ruth, the book is actually all about his providence and divine loving purposes. As I've spent the last couple of months studying and thinking about this book I've gotten more and more excited to dig into it with you all. In addition to preaching through it, we'll also be discussing the book of Ruth in all of our Community Groups this Fall. -Travis