GREAT FAITH

GREAT FAITH Matthew 15:21-28 January 29, 2006 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introduction Southwest Airlines birthed a classic series of commercials recently. Something totally embarrassing happens to someone, then the narrator’s voice breaks in, “’Want to get away?” “Getting away” is what we call it, and we can all identify with the periodic felt need to do just that. Whether it’s a vacation in the Florida Keys to unwind, a corporate retreat in the Rockies for a fresh perspective, or even a Sunday drive in the country, we often feel the need for a break from the routine, the relentless and the ruthless in our workaday worlds. Would it comfort you to know that Jesus also sought to “get away” on occasion? In our text today we find Jesus going north to escape the push of the crowds, potential arrest by Herod and the pressure of the Jewish religious leaders. Reading through the gospels, it’s easy to see that getting away now and then was also his way of finding some quiet time for personal instruction with his disciples. So for probably all these reasons, Jesus went north to the land of the Phoenicians, away from the crowds, beyond the jurisdiction of Herod and where the Jewish religious leaders wouldn’t go—into the land of the Gentiles. He came to rest and to tend to his disciples, but not to minister to multitudes of people. But as Mark 7:24 says, “…he could not keep his presence secret” Word gets around fast when Jesus comes to town. A local woman hears that the Jewish miracle-working rabbi is in the region, and she comes looking for him. Her daughter is possessed by demons and she wants her delivered. Read Matthew 15:21-28 We need to understand something about this woman. She is a Gentile, a Canaanite. She is not Jewish, but is from a people group looked down on by the proud Jews. Culturally she had no reason to expect a favor from Jesus. But she came. And as the story unfolds we are surprised to hear Jesus give this woman a compliment extraordinaire. He says she has great faith. Jesus paid that compliment to only one other person—another Gentile, ironically—the centurion who likewise came to Jesus seeking healing for his child. Let’s study this narrative for a few minutes together and see if we can discover what “Great Faith” is like. Great Faith is Self-Forgetful The first thing we notice about the woman is her need for mercy—more that than, her own recognition of her need for mercy and her willingness to ask for it – “Have mercy on me”. A sure mark of self-centeredness is the resistance to admitting any need. But self-forgetfulness refuses such pride, recognizing the need for mercy and asking for it. This requires repentance and proud people don’t easily repent. Great faith knows the need for repentance, and people of great faith are always willing to repent. In his book, All of Grace, Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Faith and repentance, like Siamese twins, are vitally joined together…two spokes in the same wheel, two handles of the same plow. Repentance of sin and faith in divine pardon are the warp and woof of the fabric of real conversion.” The Syro-Phoenician woman exercised both in great measure. The second evidence of her disregard for herself is her dedication to get help for her daughter, no matter what it cost her. She understands she is an undeserving Gentile, but she is so consumed with the need of her daughter that she presses on, risking potential embarrassment or outright rejection from Jesus and his entourage. In fact, rejection is precisely what she feels at first when Jesus gives her no response. Jesus did not answer a word. (15:23) But she was undeterred—she kept pressing the teacher for help. So focused was she on her daughter’s need, she was willing to humble herself to the point of embarrassment to get what she needed. Great faith frees us from ourselves and allows us to be humble. Self-centered, proud people don’t have great faith—they can’t. There’s too much of themselves in the way. During the zenith of his career Muhammed Ali was in a first class seat on a 747 when the flight attendant stopped just before take-off to remind him to fasten his seatbelt. He looked her in the eye and said, “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” Dauntless, she stared back and said, “Superman don’t need no airplane either! Click it, mister!” Without great faith, humility is hard. I believe the Lord would be greatly honored if His church were filled with people so obsessed with doing His will and meeting the needs of others in His name, that they just forgot themselves. What might he say to a church full of Christians like that? He might say, “You have great faith. Your requests are granted.” The Syro-Phoenician woman’s words, have mercy on me, verified to Jesus that she was a woman of great faith who was self-forgetful. But other words she spoke also confirmed her great faith because they indicated she honored God. Great Faith is God-Honoring One thing about people of faith—sooner or later what they say will evidence what they believe about God. 1 Corinthians 12:3 says, …no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus be cursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit. Notice the way the Canaanite woman addresses Jesus. She essentially says only three things to Jesus, and each time she honors him with titles of respect and worship. The first words our of her mouth are, Lord, Son of David, a recognition that he was the Messiah of Israel. Despite her unfamiliarity with the Hebrew scriptures, she had heard enough to know that this man was more than just a miracle-worker. She knew in faith that there was purpose and significance to what he did. He was the Holy one from God, the promised one, and he was working out the will of God on earth. How diametrically different this was from the way the Pharisees irreverently approached Jesus, with scorn and trickery and malice. In Matthew 12:14, the religious leaders went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus. Here we find a religious outcast coming to worship him. Three times the woman calls Jesus Lord. Even when Jesus insists that he was sent only to Israel, she begs, Lord, help me! (15:25) That word, Lord, was crammed with significance. To call Jesus Lord, which she did three times, was to call him God. What drove her was this pure faith that knew, just knew that Jesus could help her. Deep inside her faith welled up, and I think she even knew he would help her. Great faith gains levels of assurance that are boundless. And that faith had to have staying power, because she faced nothing but discouragement from the things Jesus and his disciples said. “Send her away!” “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel!” “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs!” Even after that seemingly derogatory comment she says, Yes, Lord, and goes on to plead her case. From somewhere deep in her spirit, she found the capacity to trust Jesus in spite of apparent rejection. Great faith honors God and in that act of worship, finds the tenacity to hold on to His promises Now, I think it would be well to pause here and deal with the elephant in the room. That is, the obvious question Why was Jesus so indifferent, even almost hostile? We understand the disciples and their insensitivity—if not outright prejudice—against this Gentile woman, but Jesus? Why didn’t He treat her more mercifully? This behavior is so uncharacteristic of him. Let me tell you a story about an encounter I once had with Leo, the grocer. I was working in a Kroger supermarket during Bible College days to pay tuition and keep food on the table. I had a supervisor, a gruff Polish man named Leo. He was the kind of man you didn’t approach unless you had to. One week I noticed the large amount of bread products that were thrown out in the garbage everyday—perfectly good food, only one day out of date. Having ministered at the local projects in town and seen the needs of dozens of families, I thought of a great idea and decided to talk to Leo about it. So when I thought the time was right… I told him of the need and my observation of the terrible waste that went on with the bread products. He didn’t look up from the order sheet he was working on. So I pressed ahead to suggest that I could, on my own time, come by and pick up the items out of the trash bin, load them into my station wagon and deliver it all to the people who could use it. He still didn’t look up. He just said, “I didn’t hear you.” So I started to repeat shat I’d said. He interrupted with the words, “I didn’t hear you” again. The third time, I finally got the picture. He was indicating that I could do what I wanted to do, but he wanted nothing to do with it. It turns out, if he had said, “No.” that would have been the end of the idea. Not hearing me allowed me to proceed on my own. Jesus was clearly leading the disciples on. Make no mistake about it, Jesus is still very much engaged in his primary objective, which was unquestionably to train his disciples in the art and discipline of ministry to people. This isn’t the first time he used such a method. Do you remember the feeding of the 5,000 back in chapter 14? On that occasion, after a long teaching session, the disciples came to Jesus with a suggestion: This is a remote place, and it is already getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food. Do you recall Jesus’ response? He said, They don’t need to go away. You give them something to eat. (Matthew 14:15-16) This was instructional shock therapy for these students of ministry. Jesus knew they would never be able to feed such a crowd—at least not without His miraculous intervention. And now he knows they will not easily understand that his ministry—and theirs—must extend beyond the borders of Judaism. So, he applies a little shock therapy again. He ignores the pleas of the woman, hoping to stir up the ugly prejudice of his Jewish pupils. It worked. When they noticed that even Jesus ignored her, weird as that was, they chimed in and urged him to send her away (just like they urged him to send away the hungry crowd of 5,000, and just like they would soon try to shoo away the pesky children (chapter 19:13). The disciples were always sending away inconvenient people; Jesus always welcomed them. Trouble is—he doesn’t seem very welcoming or considerate here. (Careful, the story isn’t over yet!) Jesus deliberately ignored the woman, true, but he refused to tell her to leave—unlike his less-than-gracious followers. Instead of taking their advice to send her away, Jesus says something that he makes sure the woman hears, even though he speaks to the disciples: I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Again, that sounds ungracious. Actually, to me it sounds like Leo the grocer. What was happening in this event was not the obvious. It was true that the ministry of Jesus was to be primarily to the Jews, but it was not exclusively to the Jews. That’s just the way the Jewish disciples wanted it to be in their selfish immaturity, The whole purpose of bringing the gospel to the world was to offer it to everyone, even those beyond the borders of Israel. The church of Jesus would take over that awesome responsibility of making disciples of all people groups. When a horse gets too used to its own stable and begins to refuse being ridden or exercised, that horse is said to be “barn shy.” To overcome their prejudice and barn-shyness, the disciples needed a dramatic lesson. They needed to unlearn their stodgy self-centeredness, so they could go out with the good news to other nations. Jesus wasn’t being mean. He clearly intended to grant the request of this foreigner, but playing the role of Jewish prejudice was a trick, a diversion! He was furtively drawing out of the disciples the attitudes that had to be dealt with. Through this charade the apostles would clearly understand their own sinful tendencies to stay in the barn of Judaism. By means of this stratagem of Jesus, they would hopefully begin to deal with their myopic prejudice. It took something from the playbook of Leo the grocer to get them to recognize it and begin to deal with it. For years I would come at this text and think to myself, I’m probably not supposed to think like this, but I’m not sure I like Jesus’ attitude here! Of course we don’t like this attitude—we’re not supposed to! Jesus is mocking the wrong attitude of the disciples and holding a mirror up to them. What a shock it must have been to these proud Jewish disciples, when at the end of this crafty lesson Jesus says to the woman, Woman, you have great faith—something he’d never said to any of them! So the whole ignore-the-woman-and-act-inconsiderate thing was only a ruse! No wonder it sounded so wrong to hear Jesus refer to the Gentiles as dogs like the snobby Jewish leaders did! No wonder his exclusivity seems so out of place. It was his teaching method, his pedagogy! And, do you know what? I think the Canaanite woman picked up on the program! She saw right away what Jesus was doing. It probably came to her when Jesus deliberately did not act on the advice to send her away. Maybe it was in the way he said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” (wink) Clearly that was only partly true! Great Faith is Persevering Jonas Salk attempted 200 unsuccessful vaccines for polio before he came up with one that worked. Somebody asked him one time, "How did it feel to fail 200 times trying to invent a vaccine for polio?" This was his response: "I never failed 200 times at anything in my life. My family taught me never to use that word. I simply discovered 200 ways how not to make a vaccine for polio." In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins -- not through strength but by perseverance. When Jesus played the trump card in verse 26 by implying that the woman was just another Gentile dog, he was using the ugly metaphor used often by proud Jews. The woman intercepts the theme, and now she and Jesus are dialoguing in this synchronized soliloquy. She takes the cue and pushes harder with her request. Even the dogs (the actual word is “puppies”) eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table. Around our house, Little Bear knows the rules. Never, under any circumstances, does he get fed from the table. We determined we would never train him to expect such, and thereby would never have him hounding us and jumping up on us to get some of our supper. It worked! But we could never train him not to sniff out the crumbs on the floor—nor did we try. It’s always been true, hasn’t it—the puppies eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. And I’m sure if he could talk, Little Bear would complain to you that we are not messy enough when we eat! Of course, he loves it when the grandchildren come over for dinner! It was right after this part of the encounter, when the woman played her trump card that Jesus paid her the high compliment: Woman, you have great faith! Her persevering faith went beyond anything we could imagine—it evoked a compliment from the Lord of the universe! Great faith is self-forgetful, God-honoring and persevering. Conclusion: the reward of great faith The most important thing the woman wanted was that her daughter be healed, delivered of the demons. Verse 28 tells us that is exactly what she received. The reward of great faith. As I considered how to apply this message, it came to me that most, if not all, in this room have come to faith in Christ. That means we are already the beneficiaries of believing in Christ. We are saved and know the peace of God. This clearly comes through faith – trusting in Christ and the salvation he purchased for us at the cross. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith (Ephesians 2:8) And therefore we have peace with God. Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:1) But might there be an application for us concerning great faith—faith that moves beyond trusting him for our salvation? A great faith that, like the Syro-Phoenician woman’s, grows in self-forgetfulness, honors God in deeper ways and perseveres despite all obstacles? The kind of faith that comprehends God’s ways more perfectly, trusts Him at ever-deeper levels, and experiences even more accurate and frequent answers to prayer? I believe that kind of great faith is alluded to in John 15, where Jesus says to us His followers, If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given to you. (John 15:7)   [Back to Top]