Ruth 2:15,16

Let her glean even among the sheaves.

Spiritual gleaning

I. The God of the whole earth is a great husbandman. This is true in natural things. As a matter of fact all farm operations are carried on by His power and prudence. In spiritual matters God is a great Husbandman; and there, too, all His works are done for His children, that they may be fed upon the finest of the wheat. Permit me to speak of the wide gospel-fields which our heavenly Father farms for the good of His children. Every field which our heavenly Father tills yields a plentiful harvest, for there are no failures or famines with Him.

1. One part of His farm is called doctrine field. What full sheaves of finest wheat are to be found there! Gospel doctrine is always safe doctrine. You may feast upon it till you are full, and no harm will come of it. Be afraid of no revealed truth.

2. The great Husbandman has another field called promise field; of that I shall not need to speak, for I hope you often enter and glean from it. The whole field is your own, every ear of it; you may draw out from the sheaves themselves, and the more you take the more you may.

3. Then there is ordinance field; a great deal of good wheat grows in this field. In all the estate no field is to be found to rival this centre and crown of all the domain: this is the King’s acre. Gospel gleaner, abide in that field; glean in it on the first day of every week, and expect to see your Lord there; for it is written, “He was known of them in the breaking of bread.”

4. Fellowship and communion with Christ. This is the field for the Lord’s choicest ones to glean in.

II. a humble gleaner.

1. The believer is a favoured gleaner, for he may take home a whole sheaf, if he likes: he may bear away all that he can possibly carry, for all things are freely given him of the Lord. Alas, our faith is so little that we rather glean than reap; we are straitened in ourselves, not in our God. May you all outgrow the metaphor, and come home, bringing your sheaves with you.

2. Again, we may remark that the gleaner, in her business has to endure much toil and fatigue. I know a friend who walks five miles every Sunday to hear the gospel, and has the same distance to return. Another thinks little of a ten miles’ journey; and these are wise, for to hear the pure Word of God no labour is extravagant.

3. We remark, next, that every ear the gleaner gets she has to stoop for. We will go down on our knees in prayer, and stoop by self-humiliation and confession of ignorance, and so gather with the hand of faith the daily bread of our hungering souls.

4. Note, in the next place, that what a gleaner gets she wins ear by ear; occasionally she picks up a handful at once, but as a rule it is straw by straw. Now, where there are handfuls to be got at once, there is the place to go and glean; but if you cannot meet with such abundance, be glad to gather ear by ear, That is a sorry ministry which yields nothing. Go and glean where the Lord has opened the gate for you. Why the text alone is worth the journey; do not miss it.

5. Note, next, that what the gleaner picks up she keeps in her hand; she does not drop the corn as fast as she gathers it. Be attentive, but be retentive too. Gather the grain and tie it up in bundles for carrying away with you, and mind you do not lose it on the road home. Do not lose by trifling talk that which may make you rich to all eternity.

6. Then, again, the gleaner takes the wheat home and threshes it. It is a wise thing to thresh a sermon whoever may have been the preacher, for it is certain that there is a portion of straw and chaff about it. Many thresh the preacher by finding needless fault; but that is not half so good as threshing the sermon to get out of it the pure truth.

7. And then, in the last place, the good woman, after threshing the corn, no doubt winnowed it. Ruth did all this in the field; but you can scarcely do so. You must do some of the work at home. Separate between the precious and the vile, and let the worthless material go where it may; you have no use for it, and the sooner you are rid of it the better. Judge with care; reject false teaching with decision, and retain true doctrine with earnestness, so shall you practise the enriching art of heavenly gleaning.

III. a gracious permission given: “Let her glean among the sheaves, and reproach her not.” We have no right to any heavenly blessings of ourselves; our portion is due to free and sovereign grace. I tell you the reasons that moved Boaz’s heart to let Ruth go among the sheaves. The master motive was because he loved her. He would have her go there because he had conceived an affection for her, which he afterwards displayed in grander ways. So the Lord lets His people come and glean among the sheaves, because He loves them. There was another reason why Boaz allows Ruth to glean among the sheaves; it was because he was her relative. This is why our Lord gives us choice favours at times, and takes us into His banqueting house in so gracious a manner. He is our next of kin, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. Oh, child of God, never be afraid to glean! Have faith in God, and take the promises home to yourself. Jesus will rejoice to see you making free with His good things. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The benevolence of Boaz

This benevolence of Boaz seems to me to have two lessons in it: one practical how we should do our benevolence; and one theological--how God does His benevolence. You will see, in the first place, that Boaz does not give her the wheat. Generous as he is, she earns what she gets. He does not send her back home and send the young men with sheaves after her; he lets her work for what she receives. To give something for nothing is always a dangerous piece of business. Sometimes we must do it, it is true, but it is not the ideal kind of benevolence. If you desire to do something for the poor that will endure, let them do something to earn that which they receive from you. And yet while Boaz thus allows her to earn what she receives, so that she is no pauper, no beggar, has no self-respect taken away from her, he does it largely and with a great, generous mood, not in a niggardly way. But, most of all, he gives her secretly. Boaz anticipated Christ. A great many years before Christ had said, “Let not your right hand know what your left hand does,” Boaz practised that maxim. He hid his benevolence from this woman, and Boaz enjoyed the benevolence all the more because she did not understand it. In our benevolence let us maintain the self-respect of those we aid; let us not make paupers of them; and strive how we can do the most good with the least possible display. That is not the ordinary rule, but it is a good one. But this story of the benevolence of Boaz is also a parable. It indicates the way in which God does His good works among men. Did you ever think how true it is that God also maintains our self-respect when He gives to us--how very little He gives unless we do something to get the gift? When we pray for bread for our need, He does not give us the bread; He gives us a piece of land, and a plough, and a hoe, and we must sweat for the bread. When we pray for clothing, He does not send the clothing; He gives us that out of which we can by our own industry make the clothing. It is certainly true in the material realm. It is true in the intellectual realm. The world is full of wisdom, full of the resources out of which wisdom is gathered; but we must gather it; we cannot get our wisdom ready-made. It is not handed to us. And this is equally true in the spiritual realm. God no more hands the bread of life ready-made than He hands the material bread ready-made. But how generously He gives to those who are willing to work for Him, and take that given in that spirit which preserves the self-respect while receiving the benevolence! We cut down the forests and find the coal-mine; we exhaust the ocean of its whales and find gas and electricity to take their place; and now the scientific men are discussing the problem whether they cannot find a way to utilise the seemingly wasted sunlight. Nature has reservoired them in the coal-fields--that is, God has reservoired them--and out of its reservoir we gather the light. But now men are beginning to say, “Can we not reservoir this sunlight, this heat that goes to Waste, and make it do the world’s work for us?” The world is full of God’s gifts. He only waits for us with pick and axe and hoe, with sweat of brain and sweat of body, to find a way to realise them. And as God sets us to work to get His gifts, and as God fills the world full with them, so God conceals Himself in the giving. I turn to my books of literature, and I find praises of Nature. Nature! What is Nature but a word for God? What is Nature but the minister and servant? What is Nature but the elements that are dropping the great sheaves of wheat in our path, and we do not know that Boaz is hiding behind the hedge smiling at our joy in our discovery. God conceals Himself. He ministers through others, and takes as to Himself the thanks we give to them. (Lyman Abbott, D. D.)

Combination of strength and gentleness in Boaz

There are persons to be met with in social life who, while possessing the more solid qualities of moral excellence, are singularly deficient in the more graceful. They have honesty, but they have no sensibility; they have truth, but they are strangely wanting in tenderness. You have the marble column, but you have not the polish or the delicate tracery on its surface; you have the rugged oak, but you miss the jasmine or the honeysuckle creeping gracefully around it from its roots. But the conduct of Boaz, as we stand and hear him giving those directions to his reapers, proves the compatibility of those two forms of excellence, and how the strong and the amiable may meet and harmonise in the same character. They do always meet in the highest forms of moral greatness. (A. Thomson. D. D.)

The refining art of doing good

I speak of the art of doing good because it deserves a place among the beautiful arts of earth and heaven. We speak “of the refinement of the arts.” Men may cultivate the beautiful and be no better at heart for it all. The beautiful has no ministry to those who reject the great Artist of the universe. He would have saved the world long ago by the ministry of the beautiful had it been possible. What pictures are like those He hangs before us every day? What sunsets represented on the canvas are like the real sunsets? When we love the great Artist out of whose mind has poured all the beauty there is in the world, then every leaf and every flower, every sunrise and every sunset, every vision of beauty in earth or sky or sea, has its tender, gentle, refining influence upon the adoring heart. This art of doing good refines the heart and life even more than the study of the beautiful (C. C. McCabe, D. D.)