
10 Sep Discussion Guide: Friendship Can Save the World: The Power of Clinging
Before We Get Started
For our discussion today, we will be using the sermon series discussion guides. If you would like to follow along you can access this discussion guide on the website at mosaicchurchaustin.com and then select “community group resources” in the menu options.
Prayer
Because the primary goal of our time together is to establish relationships and learn how to walk with one another in all that God has called us to be and do, we’d like to begin by praying for one another. So, does anyone have anything you’d like us to pray for or anything to share regarding how you’ve seen God moving in your life that we can celebrate together?
This Week’s Topic
Today, we begin our series titled Friendship Can Save the World, in which we will explore how God uses diverse friendships to fulfill his miraculous will in the world. In an increasingly polarized world, our collective ability to navigate friendships with people whose backgrounds, experiences, and views differ from our own has diminished. Along the way, valuing diversity has come to be seen by many Christians as a secular pursuit. However, we love and serve a diverse God (being three unique persons himself) who taught us to love those we tend to have a hard time loving: outsiders, enemies, foreigners, the poor, and the weak. We hope this series inspires you to love and be loved more courageously as we forge a path together into a more redemptive future.
Today’s Topic
The Power of Clinging
An important note about the format for this series
We have provided two discussion group formats for our Friendship Can Save the World Series. For groups with access to a computer or television, our video discussion guide offers a vibrant exploration of the concepts each week. All you have to do is press play (and pause for about five minutes for each discussion question)! The same content has been rearranged and included in the discussion guide below for our groups that meet in noisy, public spaces or who don’t have access to a computer or television. All you have to do is read aloud, as usual!
Please choose either the video or the written format, given what works best for your group.
Ruth & Naomi
The Hebrew narrative of Ruth tells the tale of the friendship of two women: a young pagan immigrant and an aging Jewish matriarch, who forge an unbreakable bond against all odds. Their story shows us how friendship and faith can sweep people up into the grand narrative of God’s great story. It shows us how clinging to people dramatically different than ourselves can bring about unforeseen redemption. It reveals the imperative need in the world for healthy, grace-filled communities centered on mutual honor and sacrificial love.
Ruth gives us all this—and much, much more. In short, through the power of the book of Ruth, we see that friendship can save the world because Ruth and Naomi’s friendship did just that. Their multiethnic, multigenerational friendship literally saved the world, and we think it just might be able to save ours, too. How can oour friendships save the world, exactly?
Let’s revisit the story of Ruth and Naomi from Ruth Chapter 1.
After their husbands’ deaths, Naomi and her two daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, leave Moab to return to Naomi’s home city of Bethlehem. Naomi and her husband, Elimelek, had left Bethlehem many years before to escape a famine. Without husbands to provide for them, these three widows faced destitution in Moab, and since the famine in Bethlehem had ended, Naomi decided to return home and hope to find a way to eke out a life. Along the way, Naomi considered the difficult life Ruth and Orpah would face as foreigners in Bethlehem and urged both women to return to their parents in Moab and try to find husbands back home:
Ruth 1:11-17
But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons— 13 would you wait until they grew up?Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord’s hand has turned against me!”
At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.
“Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.”
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. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”
Question 1
Both daughters-in-law wept when Naomi told them to leave her, but while Orpah went back, however Ruth and Naomi stayed together in relationship through the power of clinging. How do you think Ruth found the courage to leave her life in Moab behind and cling to Noami, promising lifelong fidelity?
The Choice to Cling
At the bottom of choices that move heaven and earth are not feelings, but an allegiance to relational connection above all else. Ruth made a covenant relationship with Naomi when she declared they would walk together no matter what, and she promised that the only thing that could separate them was death itself. Those were big, powerful, and sort of scary words when you consider their weightiness. However, those are the kind of covenant words that move God’s kingdom forward. Especially in generationally, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse relationships and friendships, those are the kind of words God uses to complete his greatest work.
Question 2
How might we benefit from navigating the challenges we encounter in our efforts to cling to our friends, even when the choice to cling is costly or difficult?
Gospel Friendship
As we’ll come to see in the Ruth narrative, after her historic declaration of fidelity and friendship, Naomi’s people became Ruth’s people. Naomi’s God became Ruth’s God. Even if others saw Ruth as an outsider, she would never allow herself to be separated from her mother-in-law. Ruth’s commitment to Naomi cost her a great deal, but in a world that offered Naomi anything but a just and loving set of circumstances, Ruth chose to try to even the scales by laying her life down to love her mother-in-law.
In Ruth’s sacrificial love we see a shadow of the love and devotion Jesus would one day offer the world as our most faithful friend.
1 John 4:9-12
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
Ruth, who had little in common with Naomi, went to Bethlehem and became the pivotal piece of Naomi’s salvation just as Jesus, who had nothing in common with us, came to earth to be the pivotal piece of ours. Salvific friendships are not flowers that grow and bloom haphazardly without any effort or sacrifice. Instead, when our intentional choice to cling to one another stems from God’s covenantal love as Ruth’s did, a better future awaits us despite the storm battering us today. But we can only get there together.
Question 3
Take some time to recall a meaningful friendship you’ve experienced with someone culturally, ethnically, generationally, or politically different from you. How did you remain connected with one another despite (or perhaps because of) your differences?
Life Application
Friendship Can Save the World, Carrie & Morgan Stephens
Unity, belonging, and diverse friendships are not flowers that grow and bloom haphazardly without any effort or sacrifice. Instead, when our intentional choice to cling to one another stems from God’s covenantal love as Ruth’s did, a better future awaits us despite the storm battering us today. But we can only get there together.
Just as Ruth’s intentional choice to cling to Naomi involved faith and sacrifice, this month we will sow our own faithful acts of friendship into the lives of the people around us in two ways.
First, consider your literal neighbors and coworkers. Choose one person you know who could use a friend, then think of a sacrificial and generous act of friendship you could offer to remind them that they are seen, loved, and valued. This act of friendship could be delivering a coffee to them at their desk, offering to babysit or mow their lawn, leaving a plant and a funny card on their doorstep, or inviting them to dinner one night. Be creative and have fun with it, then watch to see how God’s goodness blooms because of it.
Secondly, take the last few minutes of your time today to choose one person in the group to pray for this week, making sure everyone has someone praying for them. Then, switch it up the next week! Share any specific needs or prayer requests with the person “clinging” to you in prayer. Check in once this week to share what you’ve been praying for and any additional hopes, needs, or worries that might arise.
Let’s go and be good friends in the world, and watch what God will do.