rspec/serverspec service test always fails

I believe this issue probably a duplicate of serverspec service test returns incorrect failure, but I include a bit more information of my execution environment.

I have a bunch of successful serverspec tests executing against a RHEL6 VM on AWS.

However any "service" test seems to fail with the matchers be_enabled and be_running.

I have the following in my spec_helper.rb:

set :os, :family => 'redhat', :release => '6', :arch => 'x86_64'

I tried both serverspec and rspec syntax for the tests and both fail as they run the same commands:

describe service('ntpd') do
    it { should be_enabled }
    it { should be_running }
end

it "is running ntpd" do
    expect(service("ntpd")).to be_enabled
    expect(service("ntpd")).to be_running
end


Failure/Error: it { should be_enabled }
    expected Service "ntpd" to be enabled
    sudo -p 'Password: ' /bin/sh -c chkconfig\ --list\ ntpd\ \|\ grep\ 3:on

Failure/Error: it { should be_running }
    expected Service "ntpd" to be running
    sudo -p 'Password: ' /bin/sh -c service\ ntpd\ status

However, running them locally on the server succeeds:

$ sudo -p 'Password: ' /bin/sh -c chkconfig\ --list\ ntpd\ \|\ grep\ 3:on
ntpd            0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off
$ echo $?
0

$ sudo -p 'Password: ' /bin/sh -c service\ ntpd\ status
ntpd (pid  1101) is running...
$ echo $?
0

I tried looking into setting up some debugging with pry-byebug but that looks not-so-straightforward, so I kind of gave up on that for now.

I'm running ruby 2.0, serverspec 2.24, rspec 3.3

Can anyone help point me in the right direction?