The Power of “I Will”
The Power of “I Will”
Ruth 1:16-17
But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”
I’ve been a longtime admirer of the unique feminine voice in poetry and prose, moved by the gritty moralizing of Flannery O’Conner’s short stories and the rhyming mastery of Fanny Crosby’s hymns and the romantic depths of Jane Austen’s novels, yet I’m not sure that even these queens of English verse could’ve matched the inspired succinctness of this Moabite widow named Ruth. You won’t find Ruths’ devotional thoughts on Substack or her musings at Christian bookstores or her autobiography in an award-winning docuseries, but her “I will” statements here belong with the best of them.
We have a pharisaical tendency to condense the life of faith down to outward expressions, don’t we? We fall into the trap of thinking that our virtue is best measured by not speaking certain words or by not wearing certain clothing or by not watching certain movies or by not drinking certain drinks or by not listening to certain music; yet, while the raiment of our testimony is a crucial expression of it, such additions and subtractions, such dietary restrictions and behavioral modifications, such circumcisions of our habits can just as easily be signs of our farness from God as our nearness to Him. Oh, how easy it is for us to kiss the Son and lavish Him with outward displays of our fealty, all while keeping one eye fixed on Moab behind us.
Ruth’s unwavering allegiance is painfully convicting. She isn’t a method actor playing a role. She isn’t changing her wardrobe to try to fit in for a while because she has no other prospects. No—she’s expressing her true identity that Naomi has no power to alter. “Naomi,” she effectively says; “I am your daughter, and I am a Jewinside, and Jehovah is my LORD, and the Promised Land is my home too. There’s nothing left for me in Moab, because there’s nothing left of me there.”