Father, if we could learn that one habit of life to live to bless Your name, what we were created for, to see what it is, just to live in the knowledge of Your goodness, that would be our joy and our satisfaction that nothing and no one else would take the place of the affections You deserve, Lord. You’re good to us, especially when we are not good to You. You follow us all our days with goodness and we see that goodness in Your Son, Jesus. We say thank You. Lord, we pray You would take our tithe and offering which You ask us to give back, Lord, and You would take it and You would multiply it, Lord. We pray that we would have open hands and Lord, through our local church, You would continually, Lord, grow us. You would use us. Lord, it could be said that we gave all that we had to You and and our lives and our talents and our service, God. So we pray You would draw us up more and more now to be Your people in Christ as Your Word penetrates. And we pray that it would and Your Spirit would have His way with us, Lord. And we pray that in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Good morning, church. It’s good to be with you. We’re going to be in Matthew chapter 15 again. Matthew chapter 15, verse 21 to 28.

Matthew 15, 21 to 28.

And Matthew continues to write and says, And Jesus went away from there, and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. But He did not answer her word. And His disciples came and begged Him, saying, Send her away, for she is crying out after us. He answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But she came and knelt before Him, saying, Lord, help me. And He answered, It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. She said, Yes, Lord. Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table. Then Jesus answered her, O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly.

You know, it is funny. We all have high-definition cameras on our phones everywhere we go. Yet still, when the news stories pop up that someone’s seen Bigfoot, they’re grainy, aren’t they? They’re relentlessly grainy. And it’s blurry. Or Loch Ness Monster, it’s the same thing. If it’s so undeniable they exist, well, can we never get one good picture? There’s never one good picture. It’s always shadowy and blurry, right? There’s not an undeniable burden of proof. They exist, but we keep seeing these things that half convince us they’re at least amusing to see, aren’t they? On the flip side, with all the science we have, there are flat earthers out there. There are people that still believe the earth is flat. We have pictures of the earth from outer space. So, what is the undeniable burden of proof? I want to ask you this morning, what is the undeniable burden of proof that your faith is real?

What is it that you need to know? And what is it that Christ says, this is in someone in undeniable faith. Their faith in Me, their Christian walk. It’s not phony. They’re not hacks. But they’ve got a real faith. A real faith. This is probably the most important question for your soul and heart. Jesus deals with that very same thing this morning. An undeniable faith. An undeniable faith. Back at verse 21. It says, And Jesus went away from there and withdrew the district of Tyre and sighed. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. So remember where we ended off. Jesus has this back and forth with the ever-resisting Pharisee. And He leaves them and He goes very far away. He goes to a place that’s really surprising for Him to go. He goes to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And the reason why it’s surprising is He would go there. Remember, this is Matthew’s very Jewish gospel, Jewish Messiah. Tyre and Sidon are outside of the borders of Israel. These are Gentile districts. These are places in ancient times that were God’s, enemies, if you will. They were not sharing in the covenant promises.

They were excluded from the covenant that God made with the people. His promise of love, His promise of blessing at Mount Sinai. One Bible dictionary says, Tyre in Old Testament times, they carried a lucrative maritime trade and the Israelites knew them as heathen neighbors. And it was in fact the Tyrian family and the false god Baal that was introduced to Israel. So it’s strange Jesus would come here. Even consider back in chapter 10, Jesus strictly forbade His disciples on their first missionary journey from going to any Gentile people. He said, I’ve come only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And on top of that, this was not a small journey. As the crow flies, it was 30 miles to get here. So this was a very long and strenuous journey for Jesus to travel up north, west, all the way to Tyre and Sidon from Galilee.

But Matthew gives us His very famous behold, which is saying, hey, no small thing has happened here. Matthew says, behold,

a woman comes out. Perhaps He’s there to rest. Perhaps He’s there to hide out from the hostile religious leaders. But it seems that Christ has come to this strange place for this woman.

And this woman comes and she cries out continually, not once, but she says, Lord, have compassion, it means. Have pity. Have mercy. Over and over again. And in Mark’s account, it says she falls down on the ground at Christ’s feet. She says, my daughter is oppressed. And not even just oppressed, which I think if you’re a half-decent parent, you know, you carry the suffering of your children with you. She says severely oppressed. And that word actually means wickedly. She says, Jesus, my daughter is severely, wickedly oppressed by a demon. Was she mute? Was she blind? Was she deaf? Did the demon throw her into fires as we’ve seen? Did the demon do violent outbursts of rage? We don’t know, but here’s what I want us to see and what we can know is this mother is acutely aware of how severe, wickedly severe, her daughter’s suffering is. She knows how bad her daughter is oppressed by evil. She’s on the ground screaming, begging for mercy. She doesn’t have any misunderstandings about how bad her lot is. Nor does she have any illusions that she could possibly be of help to her daughter.

I want us to see this morning, friends, that if we are to have an undeniable faith, we will see, as only undeniable faith does see, the severity of our situation.

I want to say that Christ will never be the Savior that we need until we see our great need for Him. Until we see the severity of our situation, the very depths of our sin. What is an ailment you can get over quickly? You have a bad cold, you take some cough medicine, you’re fine, it’s aggravating. You know, you get an infection, well, there’s a cold, there’s an antibody, not a big deal, I can move on. But perhaps it’s frustrating. But when we consider accurately and honestly the sin problem, we realize just how far-reaching its effects are, how wickedly oppressed we are because of it. Sin breeds in us desires, it breeds in us desires that cause us by its governing power to do things that are not like God. In fact, because of our sin nature, it becomes plainly, plain to us, we are dreadfully different than how God made us to be. We are unlike what we are supposed to be. And as that demon-controlled poor little girl was perhaps thrown in a fits of rage, so we also are lost to our natural and good state that God intended. We are rather deformed. Deformed from loving what God loves. Namely, holiness and righteousness. And we are so deformed, we cannot be, be holy and righteous. And so if we saw that as we should see it, we would be with that woman, sick to our stomach, sick in our soul, realizing just how severe the situation is. We would long to be in even a better state than Adam was in, whereby he was susceptible to sin. What you and I need and should long for is some heavenly perfect state whereby sin cannot touch us any longer. Do we yearn and long for that kind of salvation? In the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress, as Christian reads the Bible for the very first time, it says he opened the book and as he read, he wept and trembled, unable to contain his emotion any longer. He broke out with a mournful cry, what shall I do? It’s the only appropriate response when you realize what great sin, how great sin is, what it has done to you. Our sad and sinful state, it keeps us from the happy end for which God created us. A joyous, blissful state where our souls and our bodies and our whole selves are satisfied in knowing the God of love and peace and joy and holiness and where we enjoy God’s creation perfectly and we enjoy the image of God in other people. But we cannot do that, can we? Because our marred and ruined hearts do not enjoy God. And even if we wanted to be near God, the holy God cannot abide with us for we are sinful in His presence. We would surely die.

And not only is that so bad, friends, but because of our maimedness, we have no place to go. There is no alternative country if you cannot be in God’s country. It is incumbent upon the holy God to judge those who are unlike Him. And who can argue with justice? Justice is a good thing. Where must God send the sin-loving man but hell?

So, if you have a cut, you bandage it on your arm and if your leg’s broken, you have a doctor set it. But those things dissolve and go on the ground at the end of our lives, don’t they? Should we not much more, I ask you, care for our souls that have no end? Does it seem like we hate our own souls by how little we care for the sin that dwells within? And I’m not talking about, in case you think I am, the not-yet-believer. Surely it’s, what a miracle of heaven when a sinner for the first time perceives themselves as God perceives them and sees just how wicked they are and the judgment they deserve. But I want to say this. A true and real faith, it doesn’t just realize its sinful state in the moment of conversion. A real faith, it goes on and on with a conscious understanding of how sinful it is and how bad it needs God. If our faith is real, we know what, what a poor state we’re in if we are apart from God. That’s an authentic Christian life that lives to know the depths of depravity so it can’t be exposed and forsaken. So you and I have a great need. And I wonder if you and I live with that great need. The woman, she came to Jesus and she didn’t come composed. She didn’t have a pretty speech. She didn’t use her inside voice. She didn’t mind to get her clothes dirty. She didn’t have any dignity. You know what she was? She was a woman who saw her great need.

Friend, do you see your great need for Christ?

You know one of the things that really deters people from learning the guitar isn’t so much learning the guitar, it’s the pain period the first couple of weeks of getting calloused on your fingertips. It really hurts. It really hurts bad because you’re running your sensitive skin, those nerves against these metal strings over and over and over and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts until you can feel nothing. There’s an older phrase we don’t quite use anymore but it’s a good one. Past feeling. Fear that your soul never becomes past feeling where you cannot feel anything anymore. You cannot feel conviction of sin. You’re calloused and you’ve got nothing. Dead. Lifeless. Cold.

Is Jesus a helper for you or is Jesus the help for every soul? Do you think Jesus is perhaps therapy to rehabilitate or is He life? Do you think He is help or do you think He is life? Do you think He is alone salvation to free a condemned soul?

Charles Spurgeon makes the point in this, the woman was really taught how to pray. Until we also know what we require, we are full of hopeful longings but we shall never plead prevailingly.

Plead prevailingly. When you come to God, do we have that same eager desire that God would hear me? Am I praying because I should pray or I’m praying because I know I need Christ? I need His forgiveness and Lord, I need Your grace to sustain me through all things. Lord, I need Your help today. I need You. Do you prevail with God as this woman is doing her best to prevail because she’s laid herself completely at the feet of Jesus? We’ve talked about the need, the desperate desire to be word saturated at the beginning of a new year. I want to say to you again, let us be like this woman in prayer. Let us be ever so dependent upon God daily. Is Christ your daily bread for food but is He also the one with whom you commune daily? Are you pleading with Him that you would be kept?

Look back at verse 22.

It says, And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. But he did not answer her word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, Send her away, for she is crying out after us. He answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But she came and knelt down before him, saying, Lord, help me. And he answered, It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. I want you to consider the titles that this woman uses for Jesus to start with. She does not use the very respectable teacher that a lot of Israelites use. She doesn’t even call Him a prophet. She gets right to the heart of who she believes Jesus to be. She says, Lord. And then she gives Him a title that was the highest possible title you could have given a Jew. She says, Son of David. That’s a title the Pharisees would have rather died than used to describe Jesus. Remember, our very, very first sermon in Matthew’s Gospel two years ago, we did chapter 1, verse 1. Jesus, Son of Abraham, Son of David. If you remember, Jesus being the Son of David means Christ would be the one sent from God to be their everlasting King, an everlasting kingdom of holiness and righteousness over God’s enemies. And that kingdom would never come to an end. Jesus would be salvation. So she is calling Jesus something, even His own people, are not willing to do.

She perceives by faith what God’s people cannot see. And she cannot unsee Him. Can’t unsee what you’ve seen. You ever seen like a pastel sky at night and it’s like the orange and the pink and the blues? Or you get to go on a special trip and you see like a beautiful mountain range? Or, you know, you go snorkeling and it’s just the coral reefs. And those things get burned on you and you can’t unsee them. They’re just always there and they’re just beautiful things. She can’t unsee what the eye of faith has seen.

Her pleading is not of interest to the disciples. And they don’t think it’s going to be of interest to Jesus. And you know, we come to this point and it’s awfully unsettling. It doesn’t seem like Jesus is too concerned with this woman. And we’ve never seen Jesus act this way before, have we? No. He’s quick to help. He’s quick to respond to someone in need. He’s silent. Jesus seems very numb to her request. These agitated disciples, send her away. That’s all they can come up with. And Jesus doesn’t say, fine, I’ll help her. He says, well, I was not sent to her kind. I was sent only through the law sheep of the house of Israel. And she responds. She will not stop. She kneels down and she says, Lord, help me.

And Jesus responds, you know, it’s not right for me to take the children’s bread and throw it to dogs. Dogs, if there was anything Jesus could say to deter this woman, shut her up, shut her out, it would have been this thing. Jesus just called a woman a dog. And dogs in their time are not like they are now. People hated dogs. They were outside things. They were agitating, dirty things to have around. You didn’t love having a dog up in your space like we do in 21st century America. And even so, being called a dog is not the nicest thing that you could call someone, is it? It’s an offensive thing to say. But understand more to the heart of what she’s saying or what he’s saying. Jesus is saying, your nationality as a cyborg, Syrophoenician woman, Mark tells us she was Syrophoenician, you as a Gentile, you are inferior to my children, the Israelites. Jesus said, you’re outside the covenant, lady. You are as a dog to the children of Israel.

I’m tempted here to alleviate our distress and say, but look, we could find places in the Scripture where it’s very evident, obvious, way back in Genesis, in Genesis it says that Jesus has come to be a light to the nations and that though the son of David is over the Jews, he loves everybody. You talk about Paul and Barnabas and them saying, hey, God has sent us to the Gentiles because the Jews don’t want the gospel. We could go there, but I want you to understand it’s very secondary to what’s happening in this text. It’s very secondary.

Jesus is doing in this woman right now, please hear me say it, what he will often do in us, who really believe in him. He is seeming to be unconcerned for her. He is even seeming to be an enemy against her so as to draw out saving faith and increase it all the more.

He is silent. She says, help. He says, I don’t come for your kind. She falls down and says, help. He says, yes, but you are a dog. She says, fine. Dogs get scraps. Dogs get scraps. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what Jesus says because her eye of faith has seen what it has seen and she cannot unsee what she has seen about Jesus. She will not be denied. So hear me say it to you. Christ will not deny her. He says, woman, great is your faith. Great is your faith. Jesus wasn’t suffocating it. He was stoking the fire into her faith. It appears to his disciples and to us as a flaming fire reaching up to heaven.

It’s a precious truth for us to behold, friends. Christ cannot turn us away when we come with sincere, undeniable faith.

And he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to. Romans 3, verse 28. Romans 3, verse 28. For we hold that one is justified by… faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? He is not the God of Gentiles also. Yes, of Gentiles also. Since God is one who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Friend, the work of believing is the only work for us to do. It is a work of believing Jesus is enough. His cross. His cross is sufficient. His blood is sufficient. His power is enough. His mercy is unlimited. His kindness is overwhelming. And he draws you and I to him. And he’s going to draw you and I to him until we get to that place that we see and we believe no matter what our ears hear, no matter what our minds think. Jesus, you are my salvation.

For faith to be faith, you need… You need all your pride to be drowned and you need all your wisdom to be drowned and you need all your dignity squelched out and you need all your scheming to stop and you need all your merits to seem as silly things until you’re on the ground like this woman holding on to Jesus’ ankles saying, I’m not letting go, Jesus, until you touch me because you can do it. You’re the only one that can do it. Like Jacob wrestling until the morning with God saying, I’m not going to stop until you bless me. I’m not going to stop until you bless me. Surely no one suffered as Job suffered. Yet Job says in 13 and 15, though he slayed me, I will hope in him. Yet I will argue my ways to his face, Job says. So hear me say this and I say this sometimes in sermons. There are things that we preach and we come across in the scriptures and they are never in place. X-level discipleship. Okay? This is one of them. God will in life appear to you to be an enemy so that you will grasp Him all the more as a dear friend.

And that’s squarely true what we’re talking about this morning. It is something only by faith you can really grasp and see how God works.

But to address the secondary issue, friends, it doesn’t ultimately matter who is Jew by blood or Canaanite by blood. The question is, do you have Canaan in your heart? Because God looks on the heart. And what will God find in your heart? Will He find a waffling person? Well, I don’t know. I believe in Jesus, but this stuff’s happened and I have these thoughts and feelings and maybe God’s not as good as I thought He was. Let it not be so. Let it not be so.

Richard Sibbes, and I referenced Richard Sibbes several, I think it was months ago, but I want to reread him because what he says here is so relevant and it’s so good. He says, Christ may act the part of an enemy a little while, as Joseph did to his brothers, but it is to make way for Him to act mercy of His own part in a more seizable time. He cannot restrain His bowels of mercy long. He seems to wrestle with us, as with Jacob, but He supplies us with hidden strength to prevail at length. Faith pulls off the mask from His face and sees a loving heart under contrary appearances. Faith pulls off the mask from His face and sees a loving heart under contrary appearances. In such cases, whatever Christ’s present bearing seems to be towards us, let us oppose it with His nature and His office. My mind tells me that God’s against me. My mind tells me I’ve sinned too much. My mind tells me God’s done with me. I feel so distant from God. Yes, but Christ’s Word says He’s a faithful high priest. And we see that a few weeks ago. His Word says that His mercies are new every morning. His Word says He forgives 70 times 7. His Word tells me He is the better faithful Jesus than my mind can imagine Him to be. And my mind imagines a lot of things and my heart is easily deceived. So I must by faith see the Jesus who is there, not the Jesus that He presents Himself to be at times, who I wrongly assume Him to be. But by faith can I see the Jesus who is.

I think if we can unsee Christ,

I wonder if we’ve really seen Him in the first place.

If Christ can be unseeable, if He can be forgettable, if Christ seems to be someone that, yes, I had Him for a while and perhaps I’ll come back, but right now I’m not so taken with Him. But friend, today we haven’t seen Christ. Because once we see the pastel colored sky, we cannot unsee it. Stormy days come. Cloudy days come. Black skies come. But we still see that pastel colored sky and we long to see it again and we know it will come back around.

So let us pray, Lord, increase my faith. Increase my faith until You bring it to perfection and glory someday. Amen.

I pray for you and for me and for our church that through the many difficult seasons that we will experience, all the suffering and hardship and ailments and seasons of doubt and worry and trial, our faith would be strong and by grace we will be kept to know Christ is enough and Christ will bring us home to the end.

Verse 28, Jesus said, O woman, great, this is your faith. Great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire.

And her daughter was healed instantly. Instantly. There’s no waiting list with Jesus. You might be on a waiting list for a vaccine, but let me tell you something. When you turn to Jesus, He swoops you up instantly. When you turn to Christ in faith, you will see His face and you will see it as beautiful and you will see it as good and you will see it, as enough. So I want to say to us this morning, an undeniable faith sees an undeniable Savior. And that’s why our faith is so great. Not because our faith is great, because the object of our faith is undeniably wonderful. Get a vision of Christ and you will see all your soul needs to see for every season of life and to keep you to the very end. Our situation, friends, is severe, but Christ is sufficient. He’s sufficient to save. Do you believe that?

An old hymn says, Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take. The clouds ye so much dread are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust Him for His grace. Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face. He hides a smiling face. He hides a smiling face. Let’s pray.

Lord, many are the times when we doubt

the goodness, the sureness, the certainty, of Your promises.

Lord, many times life takes us by surprise. Lord, our emotions and our thoughts, they spin around within us. Rather than run to You, we think that we ought to run away and we think we ought to look inward. But Lord, let us learn from this woman of faith who by grace came to Christ and wouldn’t leave until He touched her,

until He would heal, her daughter. Lord, let us see how great our condition is, but how much greater Your grace and power to save and sustain is, Lord.

And Lord, it’s not a faith that we can produce in ourselves. It’s not a goodness we have. Lord, we have no good thing. But Lord, we open our hands and we believe that You are the good God. And Jesus, You mean it when we say if we come, You will not cast us out.

You’ll keep us. For the day of Your returning, You will keep us for glory, Lord.

So let us now, Lord, fix our eyes and our minds on that great end. And now in the moment, run the race, Lord. Believing and knowing You’re sufficient. You’re sufficient for yesterday. Jesus, You’re sufficient for today. You’re sufficient for tomorrow.

Grace is enough. God, Your grace is enough.

Lord, let us be vessels that aren’t just filled with that wonderful truth. Let us be vessels that pour out that wonderful truth to the world that Jesus saves. That Christ is our remedy. That Christ is our help.

Lord, You are what the world needs. So let us be a city on a hill. Let us be salt of the earth. Let us be faithful to go and fulfill a great commission that will be fulfilled. Preach as the gospel of a sufficient Savior.

We just bless Your name and we just worship You in this moment. And I just pray You just work those truths deep down in our hearts and every crevice of our heart, Lord. Oh, Lord, how we don’t even know how bad we need You, Lord. But I just pray that that Word would grow us up further. We just pray it in Christ’s name. Amen.