Friday, October 8, 2010

God Is At Work - The Story of Ruth Part III - A Strange Proposal, Part 19 of 31

TEXT: The book of Ruth

IDEA: God works in different ways to keep His promises to us.

PURPOSE: To help listeners be aware that God keeps His promises to us in different ways according to His own purposes.

The story of Ruth takes us to experiences that we would not expect to find in a Holy Book like the Bible.

Have you ever been shaken to find that your expectations of God and your experience of God turned out to be very different?

Does that create any problems for your faith?

I. Jerome Frank, the famous legal philosopher, talked about our “assumptive world.”

He reasoned that all of us make assumptions about life, about God, about relationships. When our assumptions are close to reality, then we live relatively healthy, positive lives. If, however, our assumptions are distant from reality, then we become angry and upset. Is he right?

Christians have many assumptions about God and how He will work, but when those assumptions are not met, what can that do to our faith?

Christians have the promises of God that they take with them in life. For example,

Psalm 91

Isaiah 40

II. Would you agree that disillusionment is often the child of illusion?

Do the promises of God necessarily reflect how He will keep them?

How does God keep His promises? How does the transcendent mystery of God break through into human affairs?

This is an enormous question for people of faith.