What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.

She knew that typically the man would make the first move. She knew that what she was doing would appear at least suspicious, perhaps scandalous. She knew what other people might say. She knew just how much she might lose (after all she had already lost). And yet there Ruth lay, in the dark — vulnerable, hopeful, trusting, courageous — waiting quietly at the feet of a man who might wake up at any moment.

Even in a more egalitarian age, the strange and brave step Ruth took that night can make many of us uncomfortable:

When Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain. Then she came softly and uncovered his feet and lay down. (Ruth 3:7)

Such was Ruth’s way of asking Boaz to take her as his wife. But why did she ask like that? Wasn’t there another way? Couldn’t her mother-in-law have put out some feelers with Boaz’s servants?

Maybe. But God, in his wisdom, decided to join this man and this woman in this unusual way. And when we stop to look closer, the strangeness of the scene actually enhances the beauty of their love. This potentially embarrassing moment highlights what makes Boaz a worthy husband — and what makes Ruth a worthy wife.

Worthy Woman

As scandalous as it may seem for Ruth to lie down next to Boaz while he was sleeping, it seems that, in God’s eyes, she acted honorably and in purity. For all the beautiful glimpses we get of Ruth in these four chapters, she is called a “worthy woman” just once, and it’s right here, at this most vulnerable moment. Boaz, recognizing her in the dark and receiving her humble and submissive initiative, says to her,

Now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you all that you ask, for all my fellow townsmen know that you are a worthy woman. (Ruth 3:11)

“A truly worthy woman is as worthy in secret as she is when others are watching.”

Worthy when her husband died, worthy when her mother-in-law was left alone, worthy in a foreign land, worthy while working long days in the fields, worthy even here, in the darkness, on the threshing-room floor, waiting at the feet of the man she desired. A truly worthy woman is as worthy in secret as she is when others are watching — and Ruth was just such a woman.

So, what sets Ruth apart as a worthy wife-to-be — yes, in the eyes of Boaz, but all the more in the eyes of God?

Loyal Woman

The story of Ruth’s worthiness begins with her surprising loyalty.

Her mother-in-law, Naomi, had lost her husband as well as her two sons, including Ruth’s husband. Naomi saw how bleak their future had become and tried to convince her two daughters-in-law to go back to their families. In response, “Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her” (Ruth 1:14). When Ruth had great reasons to leave and save herself, she stayed and cared for her mother-in-law instead. Listen to the intensity of her loyalty:

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. (Ruth 1:16–17)

Ruth could have walked away, but faith and love had bound her to Naomi. Staying meant suffering. Staying meant sacrifice and risk. Staying could have even meant death — especially in a period when the judges in Israel, though charged to care for the widow, “did what was right in [their] own eyes” (Judges 17:6). But nothing would make Ruth leave now.

As news spread, her future husband was especially drawn to this loyalty in her: “All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before” (Ruth 2:11).

Fearless Woman

Ruth could not have been loyal in these circumstances without also being courageous. You hear and feel her fearlessness in the vows she makes to Naomi:

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. (Ruth 1:17)

She was not naive about what they might suffer. Remember, she had already buried her husband and her brother-in-law (and likely had never even met her father-in-law). Death had become an intimate part of their family. She left with no guarantee that a widowed life in Israel would be any better than the trials they had known. And yet, when love met fear — real, serious, life-threatening fear — her love prevailed.

In this way, Ruth was a daughter of Sarah, that worthy wife before her, who hoped in God and clothed herself with the beauty of obedience. For, despite how fragile and daunting her life had become, Ruth “[did] good and [did] not fear anything that [was] frightening” (1 Peter 3:5–6) — because Sarah’s great God had become her God (Ruth 1:16). Women like Ruth are not easily deterred, because they have experienced a wise and sovereign love bigger than all they might fear.

Unwavering Woman

Ruth was not just fearless but determined, and her mother-in-law knew so. “When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more” (Ruth 1:18). Her love was a fierce, durable, stubborn love.

It’s not that Ruth wouldn’t hear and consider counsel (Ruth 2:22–23; 3:3–5), but she also wouldn’t retreat or give up easily. She kept loving when lesser women would have walked away. She kept working when lesser women would have quit. For instance, when she came to Boaz’s field, his servant reported, “She said, ‘Please let me glean and gather among the sheaves after the reapers.’ So she came, and she has continued from early morning until now, except for a short rest” (Ruth 2:7). Even the servants were surprised by this woman’s effort and endurance in the field.

Ruth did what she could (even straining her capacity at times) to care for those God had given to her, even when the risks were great, even when her strength ran low, even when others would have understood if she stopped, because Ruth was a worthy woman.

Godward Woman

Lastly, Ruth was a worthy woman because she was a Godward woman.

Though Ruth had been a foreigner, a Moabite by blood, she was now also a God-fearer by heart. “Your people shall be my people,” she said to Naomi, “and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). She sounds like the apostle Peter when Jesus asked if the disciples wanted to leave with the others: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, and her fearlessness in leaving home, and her tireless determination, surely all blossomed from the garden of her newfound faith in God.

Faith tied Ruth to Naomi, and it also drew Boaz to Ruth. On the day he met her, he said,

All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me. . . . The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge! (Ruth 2:11–12)

“Do not be mistaken: worthy women are not proudly independent women.”

Yes, he admired how she cared for her mother-in-law, but he also saw how she had hidden herself in God, taking refuge under his wide and strong wings. She was not only a faithful woman, but a faith-filled woman. Do not be mistaken: worthy women are not proudly independent women. They know themselves to be needy, dependent, and vulnerable, and entrust themselves to the grace of God. They serve and sacrifice and risk with their eyes lifted above this earth to where their true hope lives.

When Boaz awoke and saw his future wife lying at his feet, he did not see the simple, fleeting beauty of a younger woman (though she was much younger); he saw the deeper, more complex, more durable beauty of a truly worthy wife.

Should She Move First?

What about single women today wondering if they should take a step toward their own Boaz? Should the man always act first, as the counsel so often goes? Was Ruth wrong to make the move and let her interest be known? Could she still be a model for women today who want to honor the man’s calling to take initiative? For my part, I believe Ruth is one wonderful example for single women today, and not just despite the unusual step she took, but even in it. I suspect some potential godly relationships may be prevented by an excessive fear that any initiative by women would undermine a man’s call to lead.

I do believe that God calls the man to bear a special burden of responsibility and take the greater initiative toward the woman. I believe the man should generally be the one risking rejection, protecting the woman by consistently putting himself forward in ways that require courage, great and small. I also believe that, should the couple marry, the man will uniquely bear the responsibility to lead, protect, provide, and shepherd her and their family — and I believe the tracks for that kind of healthy leadership are laid from (and even before) the first date. A godly woman should want a boyfriend, and eventually a husband, who consistently initiates and leads in their relationship.

Ruth, however, was in an unusual situation. Perhaps you are too. Boaz, being a worthy man (and a considerably older man, Ruth 3:10), might never have considered approaching Ruth. He also knew that he was not the next “redeemer” in line (Ruth 3:12), and so he may have not wanted to dishonor the other man by making the first move toward Ruth. Perhaps Ruth and Boaz never would have married if Ruth had not been willing to communicate her interest.

And as strange, even suggestive, as the scene may seem to us today, it very well may have been the most honorable way for Ruth to communicate that interest in her day. Even her bold step was discrete, and left the ultimate initiative in his hands, not hers. She found a way to communicate interest that upheld and encouraged his honor and leadership as a man.

So, yes, God calls men to take the initiative in Christian dating, but that doesn’t mean a godly woman never takes any steps of faith to communicate interest, especially in the context of a Christian community that can help her express that interest while shielding her from some of the pain of rejection. If there is a particular godly man you would like to pursue you, ask God if there are creative, humble, open-handed ways you might invite his initiative.

And as you do, it may not hurt, following that worthy example of Ruth, to ask an older woman in your life for counsel and help.

“I’m just not feeling it today.”

How often have you reached for that excuse? Many of us can be quick to cast ourselves as the victim of a sluggish heart.

Now, making peace with a pokey heart is a very strange phenomenon, even as it now is a widespread assumption and typically goes unquestioned. It may be no big deal if we’re talking about whether you want peanut butter on your breakfast toast. But far more is at stake when this becomes an excuse for neglecting God, whether in his word, prayer, or Christian fellowship.

Specifically, this excuse has served to undermine habits of spiritual health related to beginning each day with the voice of God in Scripture. Some of us are gaunt, frail Christians because we’ve learned, like our world, to cater to the whims of our own fickle hearts rather than direct them and determine to reshape them.

Your Pliable Affections

In what may be his most insightful and deeply spiritual book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (2014), the late Tim Keller introduces us to a side of the great English theologian John Owen (1616–1683) that is especially out of step with modern assumptions. Owen, according to Keller, would not be so quick to grant the excuse, “I’m just not feeling it today.” In fact, he likely would respond forcefully — and many of us might be better for it.

Owen would at least challenge whether our initial feelings determined anything significant at all. He surely wouldn’t say to skip God’s word (or prayer or church) to cater to whatever unspiritual inclination you woke up feeling. Rather, he might say, as Keller summarizes, “Meditate to the point of delight.” Don’t give in to your heart’s first inclinations. Rather, take hold of them, and direct them. Open the Bible, and turn your attention to the one who is supremely worthy, and keep your nose in the Book, and your mind on Jesus, until your sluggish heart begins to respond like it should.

That’s striking counsel for a generation conditioned to “follow your heart” and, in time, presume to reshape our external, objective world based on the subjectivity and flightiness of our own desires.

How often do we hear even Christians concede, as a veiled excuse, to be “wired” a certain way? Indeed, God has wired us in certain ways. But how often do we resign ourselves to being hardwired in ways we’re actually far more pliable? And the world’s not helping us with this. Our society has come to feign plasticity in precisely the places we’re hardwired (like biological sex) and to pretend hard-wiring in the places we’re actually plastic (desires and delights).

Long before anyone talked about neuroplasticity, Owen believed in what we might call “affectional plasticity” — that is, your desires and delights are not hardwired. They are pliable. You can reshape and recondition them. You can retrain them. You may be unable to simply turn them with full effect in the moment to make yourself feel something, but you can reshape your heart over time. Oh, can you. Your desires, good and bad, are not simple givens. Stretched out over time, as the composite of countless decisions, they are wonderfully (and hauntingly) chosens.

Recondition Your Heart

In chapter 10 of Prayer, Keller adds his commentary to Owen’s premodern insights for a much-needed perspective on the wedding of God’s word with our prayers through meditation. It’s a perspective on forming and reforming our pliant hearts that will challenge readers today. It will frustrate many, but certainly inspire a few.

In general, we are far too easy on our minds and hearts. We grant we can train the body. In fact, you’re always training the body, whether for the better or the worse. And most will agree that you can train the mind — “the mind is a muscle,” so to speak. You can set it on a particular object and learn to keep it there. It will take practice. Such training is vital for engaging with God’s word as we ought, and few skills are more difficult or important to cultivate.

And far more controversial, you can train your heart— not just in sinful emotions to avoid but also in righteous emotions to entertain. With a Bible open in front of you, you can learn, as Keller summarizes Owen, to “meditate to the point of delight.”

Three Stages of Meditation

Some well-meaning Christians set out to read their Bibles, don’t feel much (if anything), move on swiftly to pray a few quick, shallow petitions, and then embark on their day. Owen would say, with C.S. Lewis, you are far too easily pleased — that is, if you’re even pleased at all. Rather, Owen would have us wrestle like Jacob across the Jabbok, until light dawns. Wrestle with your own sluggish soul. Direct it. Turn it. Grapple with it until it does what it’s supposed to do, and feels more like it’s supposed to feel about the wonders and horrors of the word of God. Say, in effect, to the God of the word, “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” and discipline your heart to receive the joy for which God made it.

Now, a few clarifications are in order to recover this lost art of meditation. Owen distinguished between study, meditation, and prayer. Meditation is the bridge between receiving God’s word (in reading and study) and responding back to him (in prayer). Meditation, says Owen,

is distinguished from the study of the word, wherein our principal aim is to learn the truth, or to declare it unto others; and so also from prayer, whereof God himself is the immediate object. But . . . meditation . . . is the affecting of our own hearts and minds with love, delight, and [humility]. (quoted in Keller, Prayer, 152)

Meditation, then — distinct from study and prayer, though overlapping with them — might be parsed into three sequential stages.

1) Fix Your Mind

Begin with Bible intake, through reading, and rereading — the slower the better. And as we encounter various knowledge gaps in what the passage says and means, we might turn briefly to some “study” to “learn the truth” or rightly understand the text. Beginners will have more questions and need to navigate how frequently to stop and study or just keep reading and pick up clues as they go. But the main point is that meditation begins with immersion in the words of God.

Unlike Eastern “meditation,” which seeks to empty the mind, biblical meditation requires the filling of the mind with the truth of God’s self-revelation in his Son and Scripture. We don’t just up and meditate — not in the deliberate sense. We begin with Bible, fixing our thoughts on God and his Son through the content of his word.

2) Incline Your Heart

Fixing our thoughts can be difficult enough, but inclining the heart is imponderable for many. Not because it can’t be done, but because we have been socialized to assume it can’t. So, this is where Owen (and Keller) seems forceful, and surprising. But Owen counsels us, having fixed our minds on God’s word, to “persist in spiritual thoughts unto your refreshment” (Works of John Owen, volume 7, 393). That is, meditate until you begin to feel the word. Preach to yourself until you begin to feel more like you ought. Does the word declare God’s majesty? Feel awe. Does it warn sinners? Feel fear. Does it announce good news? Feel joy.

The goal is not to meditate for a particular duration of time, but to meditate until the point of delight, to persist “unto your refreshment.” The apostle Peter speaks of the present, not merely the future — of joy the Christian experiences now, in this age, not only in the one to come — when he says, “Though you do not now see [Jesus with your physical eyes], you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8). Inexpressible, glorified joy is offered even now, and by no better means than fixing our minds on the word of God himself and meditating until he smiles on us, and warms our souls, with some real measure of delight.

Owen offers hope for those who think this is impossible: “Constancy in [this] duty will give ability for it. Those who conscientiously abide in its performance shall increase in light, wisdom, and experience until they are able to manage it with great success.” Keller then comments, leaning on Psalm 1, “Trees don’t grow overnight. Meditation is a sustained process like a tree growing its roots down toward the water source. The effects are cumulative. You must stick with it. We must meditate ‘day and night’ — regularly, steadily” (161–162).

Questions arise not only because of our sin but our humanity. Owen knew this every bit as much as we do, if not far better. Anticipating our objection, Keller writes,

Owen is quite realistic. He admits that sometimes, no matter what we do, we simply cannot concentrate, or we find our thoughts do not become big and affecting, but rather we feel bored, hard, and distracted. Then, Owen says, simply turn to God and make brief, intense appeals for help. Sometimes that is all you will do the rest of your scheduled time, and sometimes the very cries for help serve to concentrate the mind and soften the heart. (Prayer, 161)

A huge difference lies between occasional realism and a daily pattern of resignation. There’s a world of difference between a lazy beginner and the wise veteran, who has learned the lost art and come to experience the third stage with regularity, despite the “sometimes” of dryness and distraction.

3) Enjoy Your God

In the final stage, we give vent, or give space, to the enjoyment (or crying out) begun in the second. We fan the flame of fitting affection for the truth in view. This is the high point of meditation — enjoying God in Christ — which fills our souls with “an answering response.” As Keller comments, we “listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds” (55, emphasis added) — which leads us to prayer. According to Keller,

meditation before prayer consists of thinking, then inclining, and, finally, either enjoying the presence or admitting the absence and asking for his mercy and help. Meditation is thinking a truth out and then thinking a truth in until its ideas become “big” and “sweet,” moving and affecting, and until the reality of God is sensed upon the heart. (162)

And this “sensing of God on the heart,” through meditating on his word, issues in our response of prayer.

Without immersion in God’s words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality. We may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish God and life to be like. Indeed, if left to themselves our hearts will tend to create a God who doesn’t exist. . . . Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves. (62)

So, we want our prayers to be prompted by and tethered to the intake of God’s word. “We would never produce the full range of biblical prayer if we were initiating prayer according to our own inner needs and psychology. It can only be produced if we are responding in prayer according to who God is as revealed in the Scripture” (60).

Not Just Truth but Jesus

Keller ends this blessed tenth chapter with Jesus himself as the chief focus of our meditation. Not only did the God-man delight in the word of God like the happy man of Psalm 1, but he himself is “the one to whom all the Scripture points” (163). As Christians, we learn to meditate both with him and on him.

In our reading and rereading and study and lingering over Scripture, we persist to know and enjoy not just truth but the Truth himself. For Christians, the final focus of our meditation is personal, and both perfectly human and fully divine in the person of Jesus Christ.