Matthew 15, 21.
Then Jesus went out from there and departed
to the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And behold, a woman of Canaan came from
that region and cried out to him saying,
Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of
David.
My daughter is severely demon-possessed.
But he answered her not a word.
And his disciples came and urged him saying,
Send her away, for she cries out after
us.
But he answered and said, I was not
sent except to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel.
Then she came and worshipped him saying, Lord,
help me.
But he answered and said, It is not
good to take the children's bread and throw
it to the little dogs.
And she said, True Lord.
Yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs
which fall from their master's table.
Then Jesus answered and said to her, O
woman, great is your faith.
Let it be to you as you desire.
And her daughter was healed from that very
hour.
Matthew 15, verse 28, O woman, great is
thy faith.
Dear friends, we need the simplicity of true
saving faith as we have seen in the
life of Adam and Eve.
We need the submissiveness of true saving faith
as we have seen in the life of
the Shunammite woman.
But we also need great faith, growing faith,
mature faith, as we see in the life
of the Canaanite woman.
The subject before us this morning, growing in
faith, mature faith, great faith, is a very,
very important one.
And I believe the church needs this subject
more than ever before.
And I am burdened with it.
I'm burdened with it in my own life.
I'm burdened with it in my church and
for the worldwide kingdom of God.
I believe we have a major problem on
our hands.
We ask people how they became converted.
That's well and good.
It's wonderful to hear.
But too often the testimony stops after the
initial encounter with Jesus Christ.
And just as so many people take their
husbands and wives for granted, once they walk
back down the marriage church, once they walk
back down the aisle after they're married and
they live the way they want to live
in the married state, so far too many
Christians stop growing early on in their marriage
relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
When couples come to me for marital counseling,
one of the first questions I ask them
is, do you really want a better marriage?
And I ask them that question because many
people come for help who don't want help.
They come because they want self-vindication.
They come because they want to dump on
you all that is wrong with their marital
partner.
And so if they say, yes, I really
want a better marriage, I say to them,
how much better?
On a scale of one to ten, what
kind of a marriage do you want?
Do you want a five?
Do you want a seven?
Do you want a ten?
What are you aiming for?
And if they say, I want a ten.
I want an excellent marriage.
Then I say, I think we can work
together.
Let's work at it together.
And then I ask them, on a scale
of one to ten, what was the best
your marriage ever was?
And almost inevitably they'll say, well, it began
as a ten.
And I'll say, no matter how good it
was, if you really want a better marriage,
you can bring it back at least to
the point where it once was with God's
help.
So it is, friends, in spiritual life.
The great problem of most Christians today is
this horrible thing that God hates that we
call backsliding.
That we take God for granted.
That we grow stagnant.
We settle in our leaves and we don't
grow in grace.
And we don't fight the spiritual warfare.
And we come to conferences and sermons and
other events of the means of grace seeking
self-vindication rather than divine growth and divine
conviction.
And we are not truly desirous and yearning
to grow in the grace and knowledge of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
And we forget that there are more than
300 biblical imperatives commanding us to grow in
the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
What would you think of a child that
wasn't growing in maturity?
A child of two years of age that
doesn't want you, Mom, beyond her sight, is
a child you understand.
But if that child is 12 years old
and can't bear for you to leave their
presence, you would say something is wrong with
the growth of that child.
That child hasn't learned to trust Me.
And so it is in spiritual life.
We have to learn to walk by faith.
And we learn to grow in faith through
trials, through absences of God, through all the
ups and downs of His leading providentially in
our lives.
And the question I lay before you this
morning is, are you growing in faith?
But how?
How do you grow in faith?
Well, the Lord has to do that, of
course.
Yes, He does that by His Spirit, through
His Word.
But we must be using the Word.
We must be begging for the presence of
His Spirit.
And we must be yearning for lives that
grow and reflect mature faith.
Mature faith is such a blessing.
One mature Christian, an old minister used to
say in our congregations, is worth a hundred
immature Christians.
Because you see, their lives speak.
And they make others jealous of their spiritual
life.
And they set a higher tone, a higher
level of spirituality for the congregation and for
other believers to emulate.
And they also help save us from that
bane of easy-believism that permeates and infests
the church of our day.
And beside that, they also foster more fellowship
in the church, don't they?
When you see advanced, growing, mature Christians, they're
talking about Jesus Christ.
They're communing with one another.
They're growing in grace.
Iron is sharpening iron.
In our Dutch background, there was often in
days past what they called gezelschaps, fellowships.
God's people would meet together.
They'd talk together about the ways of God.
They'd help each other along in their spiritual
pilgrimage.
And the center of their conversation would be
Jesus Christ and Him crucified and Jesus Christ
and Him exalted.
And oh, how we need such people today.
And so this is my burden.
My burden is that I'm so grateful that
there are many newborn Christians.
But where are the Aquilas and Priscilla's that
are showing the newborns a better way?
The way to walk in Christ.
The way to live soli Deo gloria and
in Coram Deo.
Where are those fathers and mothers in Israel?
And I'm speaking not just of ministers or
of men, but also of women.
What great mothers in Israel there have been
in ages past.
Many of them have fed my soul greatly
with their spirituality.
Think only of the 19th century.
The wonderful books that some women produced.
Think of Ruth Bryan's letters or Sarah Hawkins
or Mary Winslow or Anne Dutton.
These women were renowned for their godliness, for
the maturity of their faith, for the profound
levels of communion with God they reached.
And their lives were contagious.
And we can say of them as we
can say of this Canaanite woman, O women,
great was thy faith.
My first congregation, there was an old woman
by the name of Mrs. de Bunt.
She lived to be in her upper 90s.
Any minister that came to town went to
see her.
She was so savory.
Everything that dropped from her lips seemed to
honor the Lord Jesus.
And when you were in her presence, you
felt you were in the presence of God.
She was a woman great in faith.
What a support she was for a minister
of the Gospel.
I'll never forget coming to her on a
Monday morning.
She said, how did it go for you
yesterday, Pastor?
And I said, well, it was the strangest
thing.
I said, when I began to preach, I
was sweating.
I couldn't do it.
It was all my own work.
And I said, halfway through the sermon, the
Lord came, took it over for me.
And I could hardly keep up with Him.
One sentence after another was pulled from my
mouth.
Oh, she said, I know.
I know.
She said, I heard you struggling.
She was at home.
She was listening over the church phone.
She was too old to come to church.
She said, I heard you struggling.
And I turned off the church phone and
I went into a side room.
And I spent the rest of the sermon
praying for you, that the Spirit might descend
upon you.
And she said, I knew He would come.
I had contact with God.
I knew He would answer my prayer.
Oh, woman, great is thy faith.
Now, we're not going to all be like
Mrs. DeBont.
But if you're a Christian, you want your
faith to grow, don't you?
Don't you want a ten relationship with the
Lord?
If you love Him, if you're married to
Him?
And why are we settling for such small
levels of faith?
Why are we taking our Lord for granted?
Why aren't we striving for greater faith, more
maturity, closer relationship with Him?
Why aren't we putting away this world's shallow,
miserable, rotten, stifling entertainment and taking up our
Bibles and searching for our Savior in the
Bible?
Search the Scriptures, for they are they which
testify of Me.
Oh, let us love our Savior.
Let us seek to know Him better.
And let us pray that we may be
men and women of faith whose lives may
be contagious, even if we are not great
ones in the earth.
Even if others will not look at us
and say, well, there's an unusually great person
in faith.
Surely, even if we bring forth fruit thirtyfold
rather than sixty or a hundredfold, surely we
ought to be growing.
Surely we ought to be striving to know
our Savior better.
Well, that's my burden.
And I want to share with you.
It's my burden for myself as well.
And I want to share with you how
God matures a person's faith from this biblical,
this third biblical portrait I set before you
this morning, the Canaanite woman and Jesus dealings
with her.
And so our theme really this morning is
the church's present need, the need for mature
faith.
And I want to look with you at
three ways in which the Lord Jesus matures
this woman's faith.
First, he does so by his apparent silence.
Verse 23, but the first, but he answered
her, not a word.
Secondly, he matures her faith by his apparent
rejection.
Verse 24, but second, but he answered and
said, I am not sent but unto the
lost sheep of the house of Israel.
And thirdly, he matures her faith through his
apparent insult.
Verse 26, but he answered and said, it
is not fitting to take the children's bread
and to cast it to dogs.
So the need for mature faith and we
will see that faith matured through apparent silence,
apparent rejection and apparent insult.
This is a remarkable story.
If you consider how this woman came to
Jesus by true faith, we'll see that momentarily.
To whom she came to Jesus himself, where
she came at his very feet, the urgency
of her coming.
She came crying out, Lord, son of David,
Lord, son of David.
Greek is in the in the in the
progressive tense, repetitive tense, son of David, son
of David, my daughter, my daughter's grievously vexed
with the devil over and over the streets,
ringing with her cries.
Surely the Lord Jesus is going to answer
this beggar right away.
Don't you think hadn't she heard in her
own land, in her own foreign land, that
he hears the cries of beggars, that he
heals all who are brought to him, that
he will gather little lambs in his arms
and carry them in his bosom and he
will answer before we call?
Surely Jesus will be ready to answer this
woman immediately and send her on her way
rejoicing.
But he answered her.
Not a word.
What a contrast.
A crying woman and a silent Jesus.
What an objection.
What fodder for doubt.
Didn't the people say to her before she
left home, no doubt, why are you going
to Jesus of Nazareth?
He's the Jewish Messiah.
He will have nothing to do with you,
the Canaanite, the foreigner, the Syrophoenician, the outcast.
She rejects that advice.
She comes to Jesus and he answers her.
Not a word.
Now you would think that this woman would
return home and say, it's of no use
for me to go to Jesus.
And maybe some of you have done just
that.
You've gone to him in prayer and you've
turned back.
But this woman doesn't turn back.
And why not?
Because true saving faith cannot turn back from
God.
True saving faith must have God.
God is its object.
Jesus Christ is the object and the subject.
Jesus Christ is the noun and the verb
and the adjective and the adjective and the
adverb of true saving faith and the direct
object as well.
He is everything and she cannot do without
him.
Even silence won't send her away.
You too have faced the silence of God,
haven't you?
Every true Christian who lives by faith knows
at least two things in their spiritual pilgrimage.
They know the presence of God, the joy
of communion with God, but they also know
the sorrow of a silent and an absent
God.
So often as Christians, we act like God
is always at our fingertips and we always
have communion with him.
But if you're honest and I'm honest, there
are many a time, aren't there, when we
feel the silence of God and what a
burden that silence can be.
Samuel Rutherford said, the silence of Jesus Christ
is the bitterest ingredient the Christian has to
drink in his cup of sorrow.
And elsewhere, Rutherford said, the silence of my
God is hell for my soul.
Do you know that burden of silence?
The burden of the bride.
I awake and sought my bridegroom and went
about the streets of the city saying, saw
you him whom my soul loveth.
I sought him, but could not find him.
I called him, but he gave me no
answer.
But the cry of Jeremiah, when I cry
and shout, the Lord shut out my prayer,
thou hast covered thyself with a cloud that
our prayers should not pass through.
God comes and he puts some affliction upon
you and you cry to him, but the
heavens are as copper and the earth is
as desert and you cannot reach him.
You cannot gain hold of him.
You cannot, as the old Scottish divines used
to say, pray until you pray through and
lay hold of God.
You try to obey him.
You try to obey his mandate in Isaiah
when he says, no man stirreth up himself
to take hold of me, but you can't
take hold of him.
You can't reach him.
You cry and you shout and you sigh
and you groan and you whisper, but you
can't get beyond the ceiling.
That's deafening silence.
Silence that multiplies the doubts within.
Silence that influences you to cry out with
a psalmist as we sing in our Psalter
in America, with anguish as from piercing sword,
reproach of bitter foes I hear, while day
by day with taunting word, where is thy
God?
The scoffer is sneer.
One day when Martin Luther left his home,
he said to his dear wife, Katie, God
is so silent to me, I think he's
dead.
And that night when he came back from
work, the shades were drawn and Luther hastened
his step and broke through the door and
said, Katie, who died?
She said, you said this morning, God died.
And God used that to break Luther's bondage
that particular moment.
But you see, don't you know times when
it seems that God is so silent that
the doubts are multiplied and you scarcely know
how to believe?
You scarcely know how to go on.
And you groan.
Groaning is unutterable.
But he seems to hold himself at bay
and you wonder why.
You think of days gone by.
He was so close.
He was so real.
He was more real than the chairs you're
sitting on.
And you could say the most real thing
in all the world is God.
But now, so far away, why does God
do that?
Why is God sometimes silent to His people?
That's a very good question.
And of course, we don't know all the
answers to that question, do we?
Because we're mere finite man.
God is the living, the sovereign God.
God, you see, looks at the entire puzzle,
the entire fabric of our lives at any
given moment.
He sees all the one thousand pieces of
the jigsaw puzzle that make up our lives.
We see only one or two pieces at
a time.
And so we never know all the reasons
why.
And that's all right, because God is God.
But there are two reasons, two big pieces
in that jigsaw puzzle that we do know.
Two reasons that are most consistent as to
why God is sometimes so strangely silent in
our lives.
For the first, let me turn you to
John 11, if you'll turn with me, please,
to John 11.
There we read that Jesus loved Martha and
Mary and Lazarus.
He delighted to stay in their home.
You know that, of course.
And Lazarus became very sick and they sent
a messenger to Jesus.
He said, Lord, verse three, John 11, behold,
he whom thou lovest is sick.
Now look at verse six.
When he heard, therefore, that Lazarus was sick,
Jesus abode two days still in the same
place where he was.
Does that strike you as strange?
If I got a call as soon as
I stepped off this podium that my wife
was sick unto death, I'd get on the
next plane and I'd say it was very
wonderful to be here, friends, but I have
to go right away.
My wife is sick unto death.
I love her and I want to be
with her.
And you would understand, wouldn't you?
How strange.
He loves her, loves Lazarus, and he stays
where he is two days.
Why?
Well, how would Jesus get more glory through
healing a sick Lazarus?
Or through raising a dead Lazarus?
And how does Jesus get more glory in
our lives?
Is it always by coming and answering our
prayers right away?
Or is it not sometimes by bringing us
to our own wit's end in our prayers
and even answering our prayers when they've been
reduced to ashes?
And from out of the ashes, he revives
the flame of hope and faith and love
and gives his answer when we least expect
it.
You see, Jesus waited to get glory.
That's what it says, verse 4.
This sickness is not unto death.
That's not the purpose of it.
That's not the end of it.
But for the glory of God, that the
Son of God might be glorified thereby.
And so God is often silent in our
lives, John is telling us, so that God
gets the glory.
Now think about it this way.
If God answered all your prayers right away,
who would you give the glory to?
We'd end in ourselves, wouldn't we?
We'd end in our prayerfulness.
But God knows how to train us.
He knows how to guide us.
He knows how to lead us in such
a way that him that glorieth shall glory
in the Lord.
And that often means silence.
And through those silences, God will teach us
many lessons.
And that brings me to the second reason.
The second reason God is often silent is
to mature and to refine and purify our
faith.
There was once a great 19th century musician
and he was asked why his playing of
his instrument was so popular and made so
much impression.
And he said, it's the pauses, it's the
silences.
Recently, we had a well-known minister in
our church who heard another minister preach.
He said to me afterward, the sermon was
all right.
He said, it was good, but there wasn't
enough white space on the page.
Have you ever picked up a book that
is written from end to end, no margin?
You've got to go like this to read
the center.
And it's just it's not attractive.
There's no white space.
You see, we function with white spaces when
we read.
We function with pauses in our lives.
We're wired in such a way that we
need pauses.
We need reflections.
We need times of silence.
And what God does with us in times
of silence, you see, is He gets us
to reflect and to meditate.
He brings us into dark tunnels where we
give pause and consider His ways.
And I can't explain how He does it.
But I do know what Peter says.
I do know that in dark times in
our lives of silence, what God is doing,
even as He seems to push me away
with one hand, He is drawing me, as
Peter says, silently with strength in the inner
soul with the other hand so that somehow
when I come out of that tunnel of
affliction and He speaks again with clarity and
power in my life, somehow my faith is
stronger than it was when I went into
the tunnel in the first place.
He refines and purifies faith through silence.
I believe that I have learned more about
God in my life in times of His
silence than I have in the times when
He hasn't been silent.
In times of silence, I've learned more about
His sovereignty, His holiness, His majesty.
Yes, His grace too.
In times of silence, I learned the wonder
that I'm not destroyed.
In times of silence, I reflect on God
and I reflect on myself.
You see, our text doesn't say this morning,
Jesus didn't hear a word.
It said He didn't answer a word.
And our problem when God is silent is
we think He doesn't hear us.
But He hears us.
But He's waiting to be gracious.
And He's guiding even our silences to our
spiritual maturation and to His own glory.
And so Jesus begins to teach this woman.
You see, the problem with this woman was
she came to Jesus about her daughter.
Have you ever noticed in the Gospels when
someone came to Jesus with one of their
children, Jesus always had a way of kind
of arresting that person's attention, be it the
father of the demoniac or be it this
woman or others as well, and dealing with
the parent.
You see, and when Jesus is silent, she
says, my daughter is demon possessed.
Help my daughter, Lord.
And Jesus is silent.
He's beginning to work with the woman, the
mother.
That's so important.
I've often thought that one reason why the
Lord gives us children is to deal with
us, because where is the parent who can?
Thank God we may not have demon possessed
children, but where is the parent who can
raise a child rightly?
Have you ever met a single parent who
says, I know how to do it?
The only parent who knows how to do
it is the one who's never had a
child yet.
And so God empties us of ourselves in
our parenting.
And he gives us times of silence, even
in our parenting, that we begin to reflect
on who we are when we see the
sins of our children, mirroring our own weaknesses
and infirmities and sins.
We learn in those silences, don't we?
A great deal.
So God begins to deal with this woman.
See, she comes with true saving faith, doesn't
she?
She says, O Lord, not Jesus of Nazareth,
as she no doubt had been told that
he was.
But O Lord, Son of David.
She comes with a Messiah title, Son of
David on her lips.
She has some knowledge.
The Holy Spirit has taught her something of
the Lord Jesus Christ and who he is.
It's wonderful.
But Jesus says, I want to deal with
you now, woman.
I want your faith to grow and I
will begin to to mature your faith through
this reflective.
But then Jesus goes on.
And surprisingly.
Matures are further through, secondly, apparent rejection.
Look at verse 23b, his disciples came and
besought him, saying, send her away, for she
cries after us.
What miserable disciples they were in this case,
terrible pastors, selfish.
Proud.
Not discerning.
First of all, she wasn't she wasn't crying
after the disciples.
She was crying after Jesus.
They were so self-centered, they thought she
was crying after them.
How dreadful as ministers, how dreadfully easily we
can become self-centered and forget who people
are really crying after when they come to
us for help.
But what a poor example of indifference.
Well, you can argue, of course, on behalf
of the disciples that Jesus and the disciples
had just come from near Jerusalem, where Jesus
life had been threatened.
He had managed to escape.
And now they were in the northern border
of Israel.
And here this woman is letting the streets
be filled with the noise of her crying.
And they are afraid that they're going to
be arrested and the ministry is going to
be curtailed and shut down.
Well, I suppose that's possible.
But the bottom line, you see, is this,
that these men are being selfish and indifferent
and they don't care for this woman's soul.
But my question is, why would Jesus let
his own disciples treat this woman this way?
She's just a poor little babe in grace.
And here she gets this rigorous treatment of
rejection.
I'll tell you why.
At least I know one piece of this
jigsaw puzzle.
God has to teach this woman to lose
all dependency on men, even ministers, so that
she may learn to live out of Jesus
alone.
That's growth in grace, isn't it?
Isn't that growth in faith?
When I was converted, I woke my dad
up in the middle of the night, three
o'clock in the morning to tell him
what happened.
I told him the whole thing.
I told him with tears flowing and my
whole heart, I unveiled everything to him.
I made myself totally vulnerable to him.
And my dad responded.
He said, I only know of a few
people in the whole church that have experiences
like that, and they're much older than you
are.
It was like a cold shower.
He didn't believe me.
My own dad.
You think that was hard?
For two weeks, I was in great confusion
of mind.
And then I read a statement in some
old divine that said, when we are converted
off and those closest to us reject us
so that we learn to lean on God
alone.
And I had my answer.
And I've had to learn that lesson a
thousand times in my life.
You see, this woman is being taught even
through the rejection of the disciples.
While you say that, that's quite obvious.
I understand that.
But why does Jesus, verse 24, why does
Jesus go on and seem to reject her?
But second, but now he answered and said,
I am not sent.
I am not sent, but unto the lost
sheep of the house of Israel.
Isn't that mysterious?
Here's a woman crying, begging, and Jesus seems
to push her away.
I'm only sent to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel.
You're lost.
You've got that.
You've got at least one qualification, but you're
not a sheep and you're not of the
house of Israel.
Well, how do we understand this?
I think Calvin has it right.
Calvin basically says something like this.
Christ's priestly work as promised seed and Savior
in whom all nations would be blessed must
be distinguished from his prophetical work during his
own personal ministry, during his sojourn on earth,
which was primarily confined to the Jews.
The day would come, of course, when he
would suffer and die and be raised again
and ascended to heaven and send forth his
spirit to break down the middle wall of
partition between Jew and Gentile.
And Peter and the apostles would bring the
prophetical message of Jesus to all men.
But that time was not yet, you see.
Calvin says this.
It is as if Jesus warns her that
she is acting out of turn by trying
to raid the table in the middle of
the supper.
I am not sent, but into the lost
sheep of the house of Israel.
To be rejected by people is hard.
But if you're a true Christian, to be
rejected by the Lord is harder.
To be set outside is a tremendous problem.
You remember how Rahab was set outside in
Joshua chapter 6.
When they came to deliver her, we read
in Joshua 6.23 that she was left
outside of the camp of Israel.
What a difficult problem.
But then, two days later, two verses later,
it says, she was brought in.
She dwelleth in Israel even to this day.
But that experience of being unworthy to be
in God's presence, of being fit to be
cast away, of feeling rejected.
God can use that, you see, to mature
faith also, so that faith casts itself in
dependency upon the Lord alone.
That's what happens to this woman.
Look at verse 25.
You would think now she would go home.
Well, she's not of the house of Israel.
It's as plain as day.
Woman, return to your home.
No.
Then, when she's rejected, then came she and
worshipped Him saying, Lord, help me.
Then she comes.
She falls at His feet.
This is the nature of faith, friends.
Faith falls unconditionally at God's feet.
Faith prays on and pleads on when it
seems there is no answer and no solution.
And when faith wrestles with God, it usually
uses the most simple of prayers.
Sometimes our shortest and simplest prayers are our
very best.
Lord, help me.
A two-year-old can pray that prayer.
And yet, everything is in it.
Notice the difference between her first prayer and
her second prayer.
Oh Lord, Thou Son of David, my daughter
is grievously vexed with the devil.
Lord, help me.
Something's going on, isn't it?
Not one word about her daughter in the
second prayer.
Did she care less about her daughter?
Of course not.
But now God is dealing with her, you
see.
And when God deals with us, friends, if
we're worshipping with 1,200 people, it seems
to us that God is speaking to me
alone.
And I learn to cry even in the
midst of a crowd.
Lord, help me.
I notice the Son of David is dropped.
The Messiah title.
Now she appeals to Him as Lord of
Heaven and Earth.
As that great high priest over all nations.
Oh Lord.
She doesn't understand all that theology, but the
principle is there nonetheless.
Lord, art thou not Lord of Heaven and
Earth?
Art thou not Lord beyond the boundaries of
Israel?
Help me.
I like to compare this little prayer to
a golden necklace.
You know, in a necklace, of course, how
one link interlinks with another link.
Well, here you've got a three-linked, three
-word linkage prayer.
You've got that little word, Lord, reaching up
into the heavens.
The Lord of lords and the King of
kings reflected in Jesus.
And you've got that word, me, dropping down
into the hell of my own unworthiness.
And the word, help, has as a top
part of its link, it links into the
Lord.
Because the Lord is our helper in the
Lord Jesus Christ.
And it reaches down.
Thinking of Samuel Rutherford again, he said, my
Lord is my helper who reaches down into
the very bottom of hell.
And from the very bottom dregs of hell,
He links into my soul and lifts me
up.
His name is help.
Bunyan put it so beautifully.
You remember when Christian was lifted out of
the slough of Despond by a character named
Help.
He's brought out of the slough.
Bunyan says in the margin, Help is Jesus.
Lord, help me.
I cannot let Thee go, Lord.
I need Thee.
I must have Thee.
I cannot do without Thee.
You know what it means to pray like
that.
Lord, help me.
Personal, me.
Real, urgent, short, but with all your heart.
Lord, help me.
We know it was with all her heart
because it says, she worshipped Him.
She worshipped Him.
Saying, Lord, help me.
I'm sure many of you know what a
beautiful word the word worship is.
Proskuneo.
Proskuneo comes from two words.
Prosk means toward.
And kuneo means to kiss.
To kiss towards.
The idea, of course, is that to worship
God means that all my mind and all
my affections are merged together and go out
towards the object of my worship.
Her whole being is centered on Jesus.
The Jesus who seems to reject her.
She worships Him in the face of rejection.
Lord, help me.
It's as if she says, Lord, I'd rather
die worshipping at Thy feet than live being
away from Thee.
Give me Jesus, else I die.
You understand that language?
Lord, take anything away from me, but don't
take Jesus away.
I need Him.
He's my Savior.
He's my Lord.
He's my friend.
He's my kinsman.
He's my elder brother.
Well, there's 280 titles and names of Christ
in the Bible.
And He's all of them to a believer.
She worships Him.
Lord, help me.
See, she's growing.
She's growing in faith.
Well, now you're going to say, of course,
the Lord is going to help her now.
But, no, there's one more test.
One more sifting.
One more purifying process as He matures her
in faith.
But, one more but, 26, He answered and
said, It is not meat, not fitting, not
proper, to take the children's bread and to
cast it to dogs.
Well, you say, this is worst of all.
Because you know, of course, that in Bible
times, most dogs were wild.
And a wild dog was considered like, in
America, it would be anyway, to call someone
a dog is like calling someone a pig.
Pig is a term of reproach in America.
I don't know what animal might be used
here, but it's a very unchristian thing to
do, isn't it?
To call someone a pig or some other
beast.
And Jesus?
Is this our Savior saying to this woman,
It is not meat to take the children's
bread and to cast it to dogs?
Whatever is Jesus doing here?
Well, this woman had already faced and confronted
and accepted her unworthiness.
But now He's dealing with her uncleanness.
He's maturing her faith.
You see, when God matures our faith, one
thing that faith does is it shows us
that there's nothing in us.
William Grinnell put it this way, Faith is
a two-handed thing.
With one hand, it takes everything of what
I am and it wipes it out of
the way.
And with the other hand, it reaches out
and takes everything that Christ is and draws
it to the soul.
And that's what faith is doing here for
this woman.
The Lord Jesus is stripping her down.
She's unworthy.
She's a Syrophoenician.
She has no natural rights.
She has no religious rights.
She's a Gentile.
She has no citizenship rights.
She's a Canaanite.
She's unworthy.
But now the Lord wants to teach her
that she's an unclean and vile unworthy one.
She's a sinner, a wretched sinner.
The Lord wants to teach her that she
is in herself but a filthy dog.
He's not aiming at cruelty here.
He's maturing her faith.
And how will she respond?
Will she respond like Abner in the Old
Testament?
Am I a dog's head and angrily walk
away?
Truth, Lord.
I'm a dog.
Luther said, she gave Christ a master stroke,
ensnaring Him in His own words.
But He was willing to be ensnared.
Truth, Lord.
But give me then, if I'm a dog,
a dog's portion.
I don't ask for the children's bread to
sit around the table and have a whole
loaf.
A few crumbs will do, Lord.
And if an earthly master will slip a
few crumbs off of his table, a few
of the leftovers to the dogs that dwell
below, certainly thou, who art a loving master,
will have a little room in thyself to
slip a few crumbs over the edge of
the Israelitish table into this Canaanitish heart from
thy own heart.
Truth, Lord, yet.
Oh, what a beautiful, beautiful stretch of faith
this woman here exercises.
And this is the way, my friends, to
wrestle with God.
She's a New Testament Jacob saying, I will
not let thee go except thou bless me.
Truth, Lord, yet.
I say it with utmost reverence.
But this woman here is engaging in holy
argumentation with the Savior.
And there is such a thing as a
holy argument with God.
Job came to that place, didn't he, when
the Lord was maturing his faith through his
troubles.
I think you find it in chapter 23,
if I'm not mistaken, where he says, Oh,
that I knew where I might find him.
And then he adds behind that, yes, verse
4, I would order my cause before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
This is a holy wrestling with the Lord,
you see.
And we need to know more of that
today.
We need more of that maturity.
We need more to say like Asaph, truth,
Lord, I am as a beast before thee,
but wilt thou not have mercy upon me?
Truth, Lord, with Paul, I am the chief
of sinners, but wilt thou not have mercy
upon me?
So how do you do it?
You take God at his own word.
That's what this woman did.
She took Jesus at his own word.
Because you notice in the first translation that
was read, the word little dogs, that's a
good translation.
Little dogs was used.
And you see what was happening in New
Testament times for the very first time, Old
Testament times, all dogs were wild dogs.
But in New Testament times, people were beginning
to bring in the smaller dogs as pets
into their home.
And those dogs would sit under the table.
And when Jesus said, it is not fit
to take the children's bread to cast it
to little dogs, she takes up that word,
little dogs, she sticks her beggar's foot in
the door, and she says, Lord, you have
called me a little dog.
Well, let me be a little dog under
thy table and give me the portion of
goods that falls to me.
Let me take thee at thy word.
So how do you do that today?
Well, William Grinnell said, you take the promises
of God and in prayer you turn them
inside out and bring them back to God
again.
You take the promise and you turn it
into a petition.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want.
O Lord, art thou not my shepherd?
Lord, fill me with everything I need.
He leadeth me beside green pastures.
Lord, lead me into thy Word.
You see, you turn His promises, you turn
His beautiful Word back to Him again.
God is tender of His own handwriting, said
another Puritan.
He loves to read His own letters to
you.
Show Him His handwriting.
You know, in those old books of prayers
of ministers of ages past, I've often noticed
that really all those prayers are almost just
nothing but a string of texts of Scripture
put together in a new order, but it's
just text after text after text.
They're bringing God His own Word.
That's the way to argue with God.
Truth, Lord, I am blind, but hast thou
not eyes set for the blind?
Truth, Lord, I am poor, but wast thou
who art rich?
Didst thou not become poor that poor sinners
may be made rich in thee?
Truth, Lord, I am weak, but art thou
not the strong one?
Truth, Lord, I am unrighteous, but art thou
not the Lord our righteousness?
Truth, Lord, I am a dog, but dost
thou not have crumbs for dogs?
When my dad was nine years old, a
beggar came to the door one day.
And my grandparents were very poor.
They lived in a very little home, just
a two-room home.
Very small, very poor.
They ate mostly from the garden.
Grandfather was an immigrant.
The beggar said to my dad, can I
have a sandwich?
My dad went to my grandmother and said,
there's a beggar in the door.
He wants a sandwich.
My grandmother says, you go back and tell
the beggar that we're just as poor as
he is.
So my dad went back and he said
to the beggar, we're just as poor as
you are.
We can't give you a sandwich.
And he went to close the door, but
that beggar, he stuck his foot in the
door.
My dad tried to shut the door.
He wouldn't go.
He looked up at the beggar.
The beggar looked down at him.
He said, one slice
of
bread.
Oh, said my grandmother, he's a real beggar.
Give him a whole sandwich.
That's what God does with spiritual beggars.
He tests our authenticity.
In my first congregation, I had a beggar
on my door also.
And I began to question what he would
do with the money.
I was prepared to give him money.
I said, what will you do with the
money?
And he said, what is your business?
What I do with that money?
And he turned around and walked away.
How much did he get?
Nothing, of course.
John Bunyan writes in his list of sins,
you know, that famous list where he confesses
his shortcomings before God.
High on that list.
He said, my problem is I knock at
the door of grace, but once or twice
and then leave the Lord alone.
How do you feel when you have a
salesman come to your door and you go
answer the door and he's halfway through the
neighborhood by the time you get to the
door, you don't call after him, do you?
You say, well, he didn't want me very
bad.
He just knocked once.
A beggar sticks his foot in the door.
You've got an unconverted child.
You've got a wandering prodigal.
You've been praying for 22 years.
Keep your foot in the door.
God is maturing your faith through that beggary.
You know what would happen to you if
all your children were just beautiful, wonderful, strong,
Christian, stalwart sons and daughters of Jesus Christ
in the faith?
You'd be a proud dad.
God's maturing you through your children.
Keep that beggar's foot in the door.
Show him his promises.
Show him his covenant faithfulness.
Truth, Lord, my son is wandering far away.
Truth, Lord, I can't reach him.
Truth, Lord, I don't deserve him.
He's converted.
I was a bad father.
Truth, Lord, I made so many mistakes.
But art thou not the God of the
covenant?
Bring back this child, Lord.
Bring back this child.
I come from a Pato Baptist tradition, and
I'm not trying to push infant baptism here,
but I want to tell you a quick
story.
My father and my mother had a very
difficult time with one of my sisters for
a little while.
She was 17 years old.
She left home.
They didn't know where she was for three
weeks.
No idea where she was.
You can imagine how they prayed.
And one day my dad went by the
church.
He was elder for many years, and he
had the key to the church.
He went in the church.
He went in the very spot.
You may say it's mystical.
It sounds mystical, but he didn't do it
mystically.
He went to the very spot where she
was baptized as a baby, and he fell
on his face at that point.
He said, O God of the covenant, God
who has promised to take from her seed
and her seed seed and to draw them
to thyself, O God, hear our cry.
Truth, Lord, I'm an unworthy father, but have
mercy upon her child.
Is she not named with thy name?
She was baptized.
Didst thou not say, I baptize thee in
the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Ghost?
O God, confirm thy own name.
So he wrestled.
When he got home, my mother met him
at the door weeping.
She said, our daughter just called.
He said, when?
The very moment he was wrestling on that
church floor.
He called her up.
She said, I want to come home, dad.
Am I still welcome?
It's the beginning of her conversion.
You see, God can use the greatest obstacles,
the greatest burdens.
God used this demon possessed daughter to cause
the mother to grow in grace.
And every problem you have, my dear Christian
friend, whether it's with a child or whatever
it is in your life, with a sickness
or whatever it is in your life, God
is designing every single affliction in your life
to mature you in the faith so that
you become a wrestler with God and a
beggar who sticks your foot in the door
at the throne of grace.
You keep your foot there.
God is maturing you through every single.
So what do we see in this woman?
We see what we began with a few
mornings ago.
The three great acts of faith.
She had saving knowledge, O Lord, son of
David.
She had saving assent.
She agreed with who she was and who
the Lord was.
Truth, Lord, I'm a dog.
Yet the dogs eat of the crumbs that
fall from the master's table.
Thou art my master, my Lord.
And she had trust.
Then came she in worship.
She put all her marbles in one basket.
Lord, help me, Lord, it is either thee
or I perish.
That's trust.
Now, this woman, friends, puts us all to
shame.
Just like Adam and Eve, you remember, they
heard so little about Jesus and they believed
she heard so little about Jesus.
She was a foreigner.
She wasn't in church every week.
And yet she believed and she trusted and
she persevered and she gained the victory.
Finally, Jesus answers her, verse 28, O woman,
great is thy faith.
Do you notice how he calls it thy
faith?
It was really the faith he had given
to her.
He did all this exercising the faith within
her.
But what he gives, you see, he gives
away.
Thy faith, it's like it's like when I
have a birthday, I give money to my
wife to give money to my child to
go out and get a present for me
and the child comes and the child comes
to give us a present to me and
I say, thank you for your gift.
You see, so you see, we bring back
to God what he what he gives to
us.
And God has such a delight in his
own work in his own people that he
says, it's really yours.
Whatever I give to you, I give away
to you.
God is no Indian giver.
God gives everything.
He gives the best he had his son
for the worst he could find sinners like
you and me.
He gives it all.
So he gives to this woman, may I
say it this way, two loaves of bread,
not crumbs.
He sends her away to her daughter and
her daughters may hold from that very hour,
the very moment Jesus spoke.
Imagine she meets her daughter in her right
mind, free of demon possession.
And the first thing they talk about, of
course, Jesus, the wonderful Savior healed, wondrously healed.
It's as if Jesus says to her, woman,
here are the keys.
Here are the keys to my storehouse.
You can go and you can have what
you want.
The text says, O woman, great is thy
faith, be it unto thee even as thou
wilt.
How did he trust her?
How did he trust her to take anything
she wanted?
Well, because it was his work in her.
And he knew that the thing she wanted
most of all was himself.
And when we want Jesus himself most of
all, the Lord gives everything to us at
his time and in his way.
Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.
My friend, if you wait on God, you
will never, never be disappointed.
Young people, Satan, I know Satan is trying
to whisper in your hearts that it's not
worthwhile to serve the Lord.
And I say to you this morning, it
is only worthwhile to serve the Lord.
It is never worthwhile to serve this poor,
perishing, wicked world.
This morning as I was meditating on the
promenade on a bench, an old gentleman met
me, 90 years old.
And he said to me, I was saved
when I was 20, 70 years ago.
He said, I just can't understand what anyone
can see in this world.
He said, I love the Bible.
I devour the Bible.
I just love that expression.
I devour the Bible after 70 years.
I taught myself Hebrew and Greek, he said,
when I was 50 years old.
And I love the Bible and I search
it every day.
Dear young people, to serve the Lord is
the most exciting thing of all.
You won't get crumbs when you serve the
Lord.
You'll get full loaves of bread.
The world will give you crumbs.
Filthy, polluted, dirty crumbs.
Poisonous crumbs that will spoil you and make
you sick and bring you to hell.
Don't follow this world.
It's so empty, so terribly empty.
Follow the Lord.
Perhaps you heard that wonderful story about Richard
Cecil, contemporary of John Newton.
Richard Cecil was very discouraged.
Let me just give you this illustration and
then one closing application.
Very discouraged because he was preaching and preaching
and preaching and like every preacher experiences, people
didn't follow what he was saying.
One day he sat in his study window
discouraged.
He looked out the window and he saw
a pig farmer going to market.
And lo and behold, all the pigs were
following the pig farmer like faithful disciples walking
right behind him to the slaughterhouse.
And he followed the pig farmer.
He wanted to know how the pig farmer
did it.
The pig farmer came out of the slaughterhouse.
He said, how do you get pigs to
follow you to their own death when I
can't get people to follow me to their
eternal life?
Oh, the pig farmer said, didn't you see
what I had in my pockets?
Didn't you see that as I walked along,
I just dropped a few crumbs now and
then of this pig food.
And the pigs are so hungry, even for
a few crumbs, they'll follow me right to
their slaughter.
My friend, I don't ask you just if
you're young, I ask you whoever you are,
young and old, will you destroy your life
for the poor pig food of the prodigal
son?
For a few drops of it, a few
crumbs of it, will you follow it?
Will you follow Satan who drops it in
your pathway, even to the slaughterhouse of everlasting
dereliction and hell?
Will you not turn from your evil ways
and repent and live and believe the gospel
and become a beggar?
Oh, there's greater joy in being a non
-possessing beggar at the feet of the throne
of grace than there is in being a
possessive whirlwind with the whole world at your
feet.
What shall it profit a man if he
gained the whole world and lose his own
soul?
You're going to eternity, my friend.
You've got one soul to gain or lose.
I keep quoting Rutherford this morning.
Let me do it one more time.
He said, if you had a thousand souls,
you couldn't afford to give up one of
them to the world.
He said, I would want my Savior to
have all one thousand of them.
Don't risk your one soul.
But maybe you have one closing question for
me.
This woman was unworthy.
This woman was a sinner.
How could Jesus bestow all these wonderful things
upon her when she was this heathen, Canaanite
-ish woman?
Well, the answer, my friends, is Christ himself.
How did Christ teach her through his apparent
silence?
Because Christ faced the real silence before his
own father.
He faced the closed heaven.
He was pushed away not just with one
hand and drawn with the other, but pushed
away with both hands.
And he cried out in the most awesome,
deafening silence the world has ever known, My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
He cried that out so that you as
a believer may never face anything more than
apparent silence.
You may face the shadow of silence at
times, but he endured the substance of it
for your sake.
And so he shall not be silent forever.
David's prayer will be answered.
Be not silent unto me, lest if thou
be silent unto me, I become like them
that go down into the pit.
It will never happen, because Jesus Christ went
down into the pit under the silent hand
of a heavenly Father.
He faced the real silence.
And he faced the real rejection.
He was thrust away by his Father in
Heaven.
Thrust away by his disciples.
Thrust away by the very realm of nature.
The sun won't shine upon him.
Thrust away by the demons of hell hanging
between earth and heaven.
Rejected by all.
No friendly eye to look upon him and
have mercy upon him.
Total rejection so that you would never be
forsaken of God.
And that all the rejection you face would
be but the shadow to follow in his
footsteps, he who endured the substance.
And he was insulted like no man ever
was.
He was called something worse than a dog.
He was called Beelzebub, the prince of the
devils.
He was mocked.
He was spat upon.
If you're the Christ, come down from the
cross and save yourself and us.
And he could have come down in a
moment.
He could have vindicated himself.
He could have destroyed all those around the
cross.
He could have shown his power.
But he stayed on that cross to go
on being insulted so that he could take
your place.
So that all your insults could only be
shadows.
And that he would bear the substance for
you.
And so what does he do?
You notice my three points at the beginning
were apparent silence, apparent rejection, apparent insult.
He is really never silent to his people
ultimately.
And he never rejects them and he never
insults them.
But he uses these apparent things to lead
you to himself.
And to mature your faith that you would
grow in communion with him with whom you
are in union by faith.
Lord, increase our faith.
Amen.
Let us pray.
Oh, great God of heaven, forgive us for
settling at such a low ebb in our
life of faith.
Forgive us for responding so wrongly to thy
silences, thy seeming rejections and insults.
Forgive us, Lord, for not pressing on after
thee.
For not worshiping thee and crying out, Lord,
help me.
Forgive us for taking for granted the gospel.
Oh, God, don't don't allow us to become
gospel hardened and heaven hardened and law hardened
and hell hardened.
Well, let the great truths of eternity and
of thy son and of thy gospel bind
themselves upon us.
Save us from ourselves and save us unto
thee and cause us to grow in the
grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Oh, God, help me.
Help us and have mercy upon us.
In Jesus name.
Amen.