Conviction and a Different Ruth Story.
You may think you know where I’m going with my version of the story of Ruth, but you don’t.It’s a different Ruth, not the Biblical Ruth, and it’s a story about God working conviction in my heart and hers.
It took place long ago when I was a young woman, convinced I knew everything.
I attended a Bible study in Connecticut with a group of women from Bishop Seabury Episcopal Church. They were a wise and fun group that spanned the ages from me with small children to Jo, a great-grandmother.
Most of us were married and had children.
And then there was Ruth.
Glamorous, gorgeous Ruth.
Of whom we knew just a little: boyfriend with two small children, fantastic fashionable red glasses, a job at a local restaurant where she wore a cute uniform.
She also had a really wise mother whom she quoted often, particularly in tricky Bible passages.
We studied Scripture together for maybe a year or so. I saw her at church with the boyfriend’s children. I liked her. She was smart and she understood the Bible.
But one day she made a reference to her boyfriend, Dan, and slipped up. No one else caught the remark, but I was a trained journalist. I suddenly realized she lived with Dan and his children.
I was flabbergasted! (Remember, I thought I knew everything).
I went home and stewed for days. How could Ruth, wise, smart Ruth with the spiritually-deep mother not know living with her boyfriend without marriage was sin?
Someone needed to tell her!
I should call the pastor!
She needed to be confronted!
Even as I grumbled, my intelligence argued. Wait. You’ve studied the Bible with Ruth for over a year. You know she’s wise. She must know what she’s doing.
But she was sinning!
I had to ask myself a hard question: am I the Holy Spirit?
I knew she knew the truth. But that meant she was deliberately disobeying the Bible..jpg)
What should I do?
I decided to pray.
A month later Ruth disappeared.
Dan showed up at church the following Sunday with the children.
They came the next Sunday, and the next. He became a regular.
The Bible study ladies were confused, but someone had heard Ruth went home to her mother.
“Why?”
No one knew.
We continued on, as Bible studies do and another year passed.
Ruth showed up one Wednesday.
She had a wedding band on her finger and a story to tell.
“Once upon a time, my sexuality was the most important part of my life. I didn’t care what the Bible said, I wanted to be free to do whatever I wanted.”
Ruth looked directly at me.
At me!
“If someone had come to me and challenged me about the sin of living with Dan, I would have walked out the door of this church and never returned.”
I knew enough to remain silent and nod in acknowledgment of her words.
“I’d hoped I could convince Dan of the importance of coming to church. My mother did not approve of my living with him.”
We all nodded.
“One day I realized I needed to leave, for his sake as well as my own. When he went to work, I packed my things and wrote him a letter. I went home to my mother.”
Ruth’s letter broke Dan. He begged her to come back. She said no. He started attending church. He told Ruth he’d continue if she came back and he’d marry her.
Ruth decided to wait to see if the change in him was real.
After a year, she decided it was. They’d gotten married the week before her return.
We all welcomed her back.
I trembled as I drove home, realizing how close I had come to destroying a work of God in Ruth’s life.
Am I the Holy Spirit?
Of course not.
On that day long ago, God gave me insight into a sin in a respected Christian sister’s life. I see that, now, as having been drafted into God’s prayer army.
Ruth needed me to pray for her–that she would be convicted by the Bible she well knew.
She did not need me to judge her.
When God gives us insight into another’s sin, we need to keep our mouths shut and pray.
Conviction is the work of the Holy Spirit. Not me.
How have you handled the shock that someone you know and like is willfully choosing to sin?
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