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?

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?