Thank you. You'll often hear people talk about a chance encounter or a happy coincidence, but is that really what the events of life are?

Today on Truth for Life, we'll see how a seemingly fortunate event in the life

of Ruth shows the presence and providential care of Almighty God. Alistair Begg is teaching from

Ruth Chapter 2.

We're picking things up essentially in the fourth verse with the arrival of Boas.

And as I reread this passage again this week and thought about the nature of Ruth as a servant,

I found my mind going to Paul's word to the Thessalonians when in encouraging them,

he says to them, make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business,

and to work with your hands so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders. It's a very practical word from Paul to these

people in Thessalonica. And sometimes I think we're tempted to feel that the way in which we will

make an impact on outsiders is as a result of perhaps our talk or perhaps our desire to pressure them in some way. And certainly

there is a time to be silent. There is a time to speak. But Paul here is suggesting that the quietness

of a life, the minding of your own business, which is the opposite of nosiness, the working with

your hands, which is an expression of endeavor, all in all, a daily

life that causes outsiders to say, I wonder what it is about that fellow or I wonder what

it is about that girl. Those of us who've been tracking with these studies know already that

Ruth was a widow by this time. She was a

foreigner, this is mentioned again, and although she had had her life transplanted from all that was

familiar to her, although she was in the company of her mother-in-law, who by dint of age would

perhaps be the one that she might have anticipated would be able to be providing for her.

We discover that Ruth does not sit around waiting for someone to care for her or to enter into her circumstances,

nor does she wait for some kind of dramatic intervention.

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