Thursday, September 25, 2014

When You Look At Your Heart What Do You Find?

A few years ago I fell in love with the Book of Ruth.  I mean I N  L O V E!  I tore it apart and chewed on it for months.  I couldn't get enough of Ruth's unwavering faith and of Boaz's all around amazingness!  I was so smitten with the two that I popped Ruth right on into my two year old daughters name...Lila Ruth...and I pray often for her "Boaz".  I wonder where he lives.....please God Texas!  What his family life is like.  Are his parents raising him to know the Lord?  Will he save himself and his heart for our precious girl? If you are thinking that I am crazy for thinking about my two year olds husband already I am just not.  God has given me a love for that boy already.  He is out there.  He is gonna have his hands full.  That boy needs my prayers!

All this thinking about my two year olds future husband  made me start thinking about the Boaz in the bible and where he came from.  Who were his parents?  What kind of people were they?  They raised such a loyal man of God that I had to know more about these people who had succeeded in the parenting world.  I had painted a picture in my mind of who they would be but what I found was so much more glorious.  I mean God just plays things out in ways that you would never in a million years dream up.  He uses people that you turn your head away from to do His work.  I mean at one point in your life you have deemed someone so beneath you that you straight up went out of your way to not look at them.  That person....that person is the one God uses.  So it shouldn't have shocked me that Boaz's mother was a prostitute, but it did and she totally was!

Good ole Rahab.  I've heard her story a million times.  The walls of Jericho falling down is sort of a big deal story. If you don't know it check out the book of Joshua.  There inside those walls sat a women who by anyone else would be deemed unworthy, but God saw her heart and found a way to rescue her!  Those spies didn't need to be sent inside the walls...God ends up serving those Jerichonians up on a silver platter.  Those spies went in because God knew that one of His own was inside and needed a way out.

I can close my eyes and for a moment just imagine being Rahab.  I am standing there with my family looking upon my city as it burns to the ground.  The walls have crumbled and there is rock everywhere.  Smoke is covering the sky and the stench of burning flesh has filled my lungs.  My people are screaming as they are being destroyed.  I am just broken over the loss of all the people who have died because they put their trust in the man made walls rather then in the living God.  I am so grateful to God for saving myself and my family but as I open my eyes I realize that I am still a harlot from Jericho in the eyes of the Israelites.

I don't know how it happens and I don't know when but an Israelite named Salmon marries Rahab and she is grafted into God's people.  What does that feel like?  What does it feel like to be a woman who is used night after night?  A woman who is looked down upon because she is unclean?  A woman who dreams of love but only sees lust in mans eyes?  What does it feel like to go from that to a wife?  I mean I just can't!  I literally have no words for what Rahab must have felt when Salmon saw not that she was unworthy but that she was a woman of God.  I'm just saying that God gave Salmon those eyes!  Salmon just wouldn't have seen that on his own!

Boaz totally makes sense to me now!  A manly man who is loyal, ethical, who loves the Lord and who comes to love Ruth would TOTALLY be the son of Rahab and Salmon.  In case you aren't aware

Rahab and Salmon had a son, Boaz.
Boaz was the father of Obed;
Obed, the father of Jesse;
Jesse, the father of King David.
And from the line of King David of the tribe of Judah
came the promised Messiah,
Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord.

God uses the unworthy.  He uses the people that we don't even waste a second looking at.  He doesn't judge people the way that we do.  He looks at the heart.  No wonder I like Boaz so much!  Homeboy has a heart that God looks upon and goes...yep....looks good to me!

"He said to them, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts.  What people value highly is detestable in God's sight." Luke 16:15








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