But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” (Ruth 1:16 NIV)
After moving to Moab to avoid the famine in Bethlehem, Naomi lost her husband and both sons and was left with two Moabites daughters-in-law. Sometime later, Naomi heard that the famine in Bethlehem was over and decided to return home. She told Orpah and Ruth, her daughters-in-law, that they should stay in Moab with their mothers because she had no sons for them to marry in Bethlehem. Orpah agreed to stay, but nothing could make Ruth leave Naomi’s side. Ruth said she would even give up her gods for Naomi’s God.
We can do what is expected, like Orpah, or we can do the exceptional, like Ruth. The expected is our natural way of thinking, but the exceptional is to walk in faith. When we do the expected, we don’t get much as a result. But when we do the exceptional, God has the extraordinary waiting for us!
What extraordinary things did God have waiting for Ruth’s exceptional act? First of all, imagine God naming a book of the Bible after a woman! That’s extraordinary! There is only one other woman—Esther—whose name is a book.
What else did God do? Well, He made Naomi a grandmother, which she’d all but given up on when her husband and only two sons had died. And He gave Ruth a husband, Boaz, and a little boy, Obed; all three of whose names are included in the genealogy of Jesus (see Matthew 1:5).
God will do the extraordinary in our lives when we take a step beyond the expected and do the exceptional!
Jesus, I declare that I want to be a faith-filled person who does the exceptional so that God can come upon the scene and say, “Now I give you the extraordinary!”
