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marriage, faith, facing the future, losing loved ones, selfishness
and old age.

The Book of Ruth is a sociological masterpiece. Anyone who
ever writes a book on human behavior should study the Book
of Ruth. It is brilliant the way God has given us the solution to
all of these problems. God wants us to become like Ruth, an
oasis in the desert where everything around us is all messed up
and cold and indifferent, and people are failing, and lives are
dry and fruitless and defeated, and hearts are broken.

The first step, the first spiritual event, if we are going to become
an oasis in the desert, is returning to the place of fullness,
coming back to Bethlehem, coming back to where we were
when we first got saved. That is how the book of Ruth begins –
in the place of fullness. You can never be an oasis until you
begin there. Moab just represents everything outside of Christ.
It can be good, it can be bad and it can sound quite spiritual.
Anything except Jesus is Moab.

Bethlehem, “The House of Bread”, is a picture of our Lord
Jesus Christ. Fullness is not a goal; fullness is the starting point.
In this book, fruit is the goal. We are moving toward the
production of the Lord Jesus Christ and giving Him to the
world, but it all starts in fullness. There are a thousand and one
reasons we leave fullness and go to Moab. Maybe we try to
find fullness in spiritual gifts or in Christian service or in
Christian fellowship or in education or in the world. We leave
fullness and all we find is emptiness. But once we come back,
that is the beginning of the oasis in the desert.

Elimelech and Naomi and their two sons Mahlon and Chilion
left the place of fullness because of a famine, because they said
there was no bread in the House of Bread. They did not
understand fullness and they went off to Moab, and they spent
ten years in Moab and shed a lot of tears in the land of Moab.
Naomi loses her husband, and she loses her two sons. Then,
God finally opened Naomi’s eyes and she heard that the Lord