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  21^st April 2024

SundayReflection

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John Piper shares

Ruth: Strategic Righteousness

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This book is about to end on some amazingly sweet providences, but at the beginning it is bitter.

I think the whole point of the book is to try to help God's people realize in the darkest of times how life really flows and how life moves.

I've been at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota for 28 years as a pastor.
In 1993, I picked up a phone and heard a recorded message that sounded romantic, and it was not from one of our staff to his wife; it was from one of our staff to another one of our staff.

And I sat there, and asked, can this be what it sounds like?

And I was persuaded it was, there was no other explanation for the sound.
So I immediately went to them and brought them into my office with my colleague and they denied it, the man and the woman.

And for six weeks, it was hellish in our church because I would not back down.
I said, "That is romance. There is no other explanation for that tone of voice."
They denied it, and the church almost blew to pieces because I was being accused of finding fault with a staff member with whom I had worked for 10 years - a very serious thought.
I mean, there was no way to restore this.
Even if I was wrong, there was no way to restore this.

It was horrible.
God moved, as I believe he did and brought him late at night.
He called me on the phone and said,
"I have to meet you at church at 11 p.m."
So six of the elders were there with us and he confessed to seven years of adultery.

The upshot of that was that 230 people left our church.

Those were very dark days - days in which I couldn't preach because the people were so angry with me.
This never is clean.

You're never vindicated in a situation like this.
It is always ugly no matter whether you're right or not.
It doesn't really matter.
And so, 230 people left the church.
We didn't grow in our church for three years.

It was flat. It was sorrowful, and surviving was all we could do.
We just tried to keep our noses above the water.

Now those were days I would say like the days in Moab in which people died, as it were.
There were people who lost their faith through that.
They walked away from the Lord.

As I look back now, I would say the Lord's hand was on us for good.
It was horrible, but the Lord's hand was on us for good.
Lots of good came from it.

We are, as a church, three times the size we were in those days, though for three years, people were just walking away.
The Lord was humbling us.
He was, I believe, purifying us.
He was breaking us.
He was showing us that we had much to learn and that we couldn't do it on our own.

He was transforming our worship life entirely.
He was crafting a vision statement that is now the vision statement of my life and of our church:
I exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.
That mission statement was forged in the fires of that Moab experience.

You're going to go there, young people.
You will be there eventually if you haven't walked through the days yet.
You will have your chapter one of Ruth eventually.

These things are in the Bible to prepare you to know how to see the hidden hand of God when it looks like he is simply dealing you bitterness day after day.

That was chapter one.

John Piper
is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God:
Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy.

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