Lord, Help Me

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Zac Lloyd; Matthew 15:21-28 Lord, Help Me

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You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. Good morning everyone.
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Go ahead and grab your Bibles and turn to Matthew chapter 15. That's where we're going to be spending our time this morning.
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My hope and prayer for us this morning is that we would see Jesus as he really is, human in God.
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I feel if we understand Jesus as he's revealed in scripture that will provoke us, if we understand him correctly, provoke us to worship and ultimately to trust in him with every part of our lives.
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I think it's pretty well established, at least my conclusion, that all humans have a desire to be loved, cared for unconditionally.
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And it's when those things aren't met, it's just natural, it's broken in this life that we're not cared for, we're not loved unconditionally.
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And we meet suffering and trials in this life. And I've noticed, and I'll just express my experience, as a
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Christian, I often will put a veneer on it, a sort of Christian veneer, that I know all things are working together for good.
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So when bad things happen, I can say I'll count it all joy when I meet trials of various kinds.
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And that's biblical. So when bad things happen, what good does it do to complain anyway?
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I'll just think about the things that are lovely and just. That's biblical as well. But what I found, and what
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I'm going to encourage us to do, is with all of it. Because with the brokenness comes pain and hurt.
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And sometimes I don't acknowledge that. And it creates a synthetic sort of a break in my relationship with God and with people around us if we don't admit what's really going on.
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Like for example, and it's a little bit soon, but many of you know my daughter Grace is going to go to Indonesia in July.
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July 1st she was going to fly out. And so what that looked like was this, for several months, planning and preparing, turning down opportunities.
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July 1st, Friday, drive her to O 'Hara Airport in Chicago. Before we left, put her luggage in the in the van.
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I had a checklist for her. Make sure she had everything in her carry -on. Does she have her tickets? Does she have her passport?
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Does she have her vaccination cards? Her mask? Everything that she needs to get on the plane. Pulls it all out of her bag, it's all there.
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Great. Let's go. So we drive. It was almost three hours to get to O 'Hara Airport in Chicago. Just as we're getting there, she's scurrying around, can't find something.
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It's her passport. Call home, her passport's back home. Right where I told her to pull it out of her bag.
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So that's July 1st. So we scramble to still make this trip happen. So we get her tickets to fly out Sunday night,
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July 3rd. Different itinerary. She's going to Jakarta, Chicago, this time through Seattle, through Taiwan, to Jakarta.
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I'd never been, as all the previous itinerary, I had done it personally. I was comfortable with sending my 18 -year -old daughter through these airports.
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To send her through Taiwan, I researched, like, is this like a third world? What kind of airport is Taiwan? And it seemed like it was a nice, safe airport.
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And so this time, Sunday night, again, drive her to Chicago. She flies to Seattle. Seattle spends the night in Seattle.
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4 a .m., boarding a flight to Jakarta to Taiwan. She's got everything she needs. They say, you can't board this flight without a negative
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PCR test. 4 a .m., July 4th. In a minute, that trip's done.
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You can't, there's nothing you can do at that time. And so immediately, I'm like, one,
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I'm not that sad that my daughter's not going to spend, you know, the next month overseas. I'm like, that's cool, in some sense.
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But also, like, well, God didn't want you there. Maybe, or maybe it's just that we were not diligent.
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We're dumb, and I'm sympathetic to that. We should have been more paying attention to how to fly international. What are you doing?
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You should know these things. Sympathetic. Maybe it wasn't God's will, one way or the other. But regardless, to put that silver lining as kind of my natural bent and ignore, look, there's a lot of hurt, a lot of pain there.
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And to not bring that to God, not trust Him with that. And so we're going to sing a song this morning that talks about speaking the name of God into the night.
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And I think that's, I can relate to that. It's sort of this desperation that no matter how many loving people, family, friends
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I got around me, there's part of me, my brokenness, that I don't want people to know about. That I don't even trust
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God with. And that's where this sort of, it's not an intimate relationship.
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And you feel it, even on a horizontal level. To the you don't share your life with somebody, you got it all clean and veneered up.
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There's a lack of intimacy. And so my prayer is that as we see Jesus as a human that can relate to our brokenness and as God, that that's where the hope and real true intimacy can come from in that kind of relationship.
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And we're going to see in today's passage in Matthew 15, we're going to read verses 21 through 28. So I'm going to read that.
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I ask you to follow along. We're going to see an example of a woman, an outsider who is alone, and how she trusts in Jesus.
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And hopefully it will be an example. So follow along with me in Matthew chapter 15, 21 through 28.
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God's word for us this morning, recast. And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.
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And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, have mercy on me,
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O Lord, son of David, my daughter severely oppressed by a demon. But he did not answer her a word.
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His disciples came and begged him saying, send her away, she's crying out after us. He answered,
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I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But she came, knelt before him saying,
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Lord, help me. And he answered, it's not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
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She said, yeah, Lord. Yeah, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. And then
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Jesus answered her, O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire.
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And her daughter, her daughter was healed instantly. Let's pray. Our Father God in heaven,
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God, we come to you this morning broken in need of your help that only you can provide.
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God, I ask that you would give us ears to hear, eyes to see you, and faith to trust in you, to trust in you with all of our life, with all of our brokenness and our desires.
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God, we know you are a wonderful Savior. And God, as we enter into this time of worshiping you through song,
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God, I pray that it is through this lens of seeing you as our
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Savior and Redeemer that we're able to worship you in spirit and truth. In Christ's name we ask these things.
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Amen. Certainly thanks to everybody that's up here leading us every week. And, you know, it's a sacrifice.
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They're here early, their families have to, you know, pick up the slack at home, and there's people serving the kids.
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So just grateful for everybody. This church and the way we serve one another. But we're going to be in Matthew again, and we're going to have it up on the screen.
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I'm not going to come to you with a lot of fancy philosophies and theologies. Just hopefully we'll walk through the word of God verse by verse.
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So verse 21, we see Jesus there. It says, and he went away from there. So if you want to go to that verse, or if you guys want to look at 21,
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Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. So a couple observations.
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Jesus went away. Where did he go away from? He's been spending this portion of his ministry, his earthly ministry, has been solely in Galilee, in that Judea region.
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He's been ministering to the house of Israel, to the Jews. That's where his ministry has been. He went away from there.
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And it says he withdrew. Two different things he withdrew. Why would he withdraw? I offer to you that he went, he withdrew to rest.
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Why would Jesus, if he's God, need to rest? Because Jesus, as God, is human.
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He needed to rest. Because the ministry that he's been having with the
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Jews hasn't gone great. It hasn't been a lot of revival. In fact, it's been the opposite.
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Been a lot of hostility with the Jews in this ministry that he's been involved with. In fact, just above this,
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Matthew's account, he talks about, he just gets in and tells them what defiles them. And they're concerned about what
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I eat and how clean am I. That's what's defiling. And he's like, no, it's what's come out of your heart that defiles you.
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And in verse 12, his disciples come to him like, I don't know if you know it, Jesus, but they're offended by what you're saying.
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So they weren't receiving him all that great. And so he takes a season to recharge his batteries, to get away.
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And why would I say that recharge his batteries? What do we need to know about the district of Tyre and Sidon? I like what
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Don has. He's used Southwest Michigan as sort of a surrogate to describe that Palestine area.
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And so if you picture Kalamazoo as the Galilee area, where Jesus' home base of operation is,
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Tyre and Sidon would be like Holland, right along the coast. Because Holland's on the coast, so is Tyre and Sidon.
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It's a coastal city along the Mediterranean. It's a pagan land. So he says repeatedly in today's passage,
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Jesus, I'm about ministering to the lost house of Israel, to the sheep of Israel. He's focused on the
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Jews. There aren't Jews in Tyre and Sidon. He's still focused on that. He's not going there to minister.
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So he's going to that region. It's about 50 to 60 miles. And so if you're going to walk to Holland, it's going to take some effort.
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He's probably not going to get a lot of people just tagging along. I'll just see what this is about for a couple hours. People are actually going to want to go.
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So his disciples go with him. But he's doing that just to get away, to recharge. And we're going to come back to this humanity of Jesus and how that might be effective.
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But go to the next verse. In 22, Matthew says, Behold. And that's, Matthew uses that word often.
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It's check this out. This is an important part. Look at this. Behold. What happens? A Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying.
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So what can we observe about this woman? So she's not with her whole family. She appears to be alone.
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Where her husband is, we don't know if she's widowed. We don't know if she's divorced. He's not there.
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And she's had a bad situation with her daughter. She came out. Jesus didn't come to her door like, hey,
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I hear there's something bad going on here. She came out to him. And it's something. She's a Canaanite.
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She comes out to him, somebody of a different culture. And it's kind of hard for me to just picture going to another nationality, somebody, and just approaching them with your needs.
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That says something about her. That she's willing to go to him. And she cries out,
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Have mercy on me. Have mercy on me. What is the mercy that she wants?
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Her daughter's suffering. And in this text, it doesn't say, in Matthew's account,
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Mark gives another account. It doesn't say how old. This isn't a 50 -year -old woman and her 30 -year -old daughter.
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Mark's account says that it was a little girl. And just kind of picture all the humans, who is the most defenseless?
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I would picture a small girl being one of the most defenseless. I have no problem oppressing a little girl.
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And that's what is going on here. And she's asking for mercy. The mercy for her is for her child.
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And I don't know if you've experienced that, but having a loved one, particularly a mother to a child, that one seems to be particularly evoking.
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But you see them suffering, and you wouldn't do anything to take it from them, including take it on yourself.
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So severely oppressed by a demon. Matthew describes the woman as a
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Canaanite. So also in Mark's account, he describes, Mark describes this woman as a
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Syrophoenician woman. Why the different nationalities? Why would they have different opinions about her?
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And I'll just highlight, Mark's accurate. His is more appropriate. Alexander the Great has long conquered that Lebanon area.
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It used to be Canaan. For Matthew to call her Canaan, like nobody calls them that anymore.
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Why is he calling her a Canaanite? That's centuries ago. Why would he use that? One thing to note about Canaan is that was part of the promised land given to Israel.
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The house of Israel was given the promised land, and it was Lebanon up there. And there were Canaanites already there, and they were to get them out.
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They've been there the whole time. They've been a thorn in the side. It was given to the tribe of Asher, this Canaan region.
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They've been there and been a problem for Israel. And so why would Matthew highlight his audience?
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Matthew's audience is Jews. Why would he highlight that she's a Canaanite? For them, that means she's an outsider.
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Maybe enemy, but at least she's not of us. Different than a Syro -Phoenician woman. So his emphasis is she's an outsider, she's alone, and she's crying out for mercy.
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And look what she actually says. She says, Oh Lord. Addresses Jesus as Oh Lord.
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My initial reaction was, Oh wow, she's already calling him Lord and Savior. It's not that.
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Most scholars and commentators said that that's about just a reverence. Just good sir.
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Like not bro. Hey. It was a term of reverence. But she goes on to say,
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Son of David. This is a Canaanite woman raised in a pagan culture, not in the
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Jewish culture. David's a thousand years before her time. What does it say about her that she would call him son of David?
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She, as a pagan, is at least aware of the Jews, who
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David was, and who they think this guy Jesus is. Son of David. She's dialed in with the teachings there.
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And I'll highlight that her daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. And we get some notions in our head about demon oppression.
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I don't know if they're correct notions. I haven't had a lot of experience that I know of with demon oppression.
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But the fact that it says severely demon oppressed, I would offer that girl isn't here in this setting.
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I would guess because of the demon oppression. Can't just bring her around. She's suffering.
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And I'll just state it so that we don't get confused. Just broadly apply demon oppression. Something really bad has happened to this woman's daughter.
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Something she didn't ask for. Something she didn't deserve. And it's continuing to happen.
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And there's nothing anybody can do about it. And so you can apply that to different scenarios in your life.
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This is a bad situation. This is just ugly. Nobody wants this. We want it to be better.
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That's what's going on here with this little girl. She says, my daughter's severely oppressed by demon.
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And so now the next verse, we see Jesus' response. We picture Jesus, this compassionate Savior.
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Allow the little children to come for me. Don't prevent them. Let them come to me. I'm gentle and lowly.
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He's compassionate, loving. He desires that all men would be saved. Him, in the next verse, he says, he didn't answer a word.
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That's a tough one for us. We have to accept Scripture. This is what Jesus is doing. He appears to be ignoring her.
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He is ignoring her, but why? Why would Jesus ignore her? Now just pause for a minute.
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When we get around God, the why question isn't always that helpful. I'm not saying don't ask
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God why. You can get some real significant understanding to ask God why. But we might not always like the answer.
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And I'll use for analogy, like at 40 years old, I went to Indonesia to study the language there.
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And I needed to study Indonesian. And neurologists will say a 40 -year -old brain might not be optimized to acquire a language.
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And that was my experience. I was not, I didn't find it simple. It didn't just click. And so we would be going through different lessons, just conjugating verbs.
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And they give you this whole family. You just do this over and over and over and over again. I got it. And then I bring my own verb and I do the same thing with it.
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And they're like, no, it doesn't work that way. Like, he jumps over the line. Yesterday, he jumped over the line.
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He plays basketball. Yesterday, he played basketball. Oh, he buys milk. Yesterday, he bide milk.
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No, no, you can't say bide. And I would be like, oh, why not? Did I do it wrong? No, you just can't do it that way.
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What? I'm trying to learn the language. Why? I would be a little bit indignant, frustrated. How am
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I going to learn this if you don't explain why? And so there's an answer why the word buy becomes bought. It's going to take a lot of work to figure out why we do it that way.
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And English is way worse at it. But that answer isn't going to help you.
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It's not going to help you learn the language. And I'll be honest, not a shocker. God's more complicated than language. John Piper says it this way.
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He says, at any given moment, God is doing 10 ,000 things in your life. And you're aware of maybe three.
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I think he's probably low. I think it's millions of things. You just picture this experience that we're all having to get us all here in this room at this moment, right now, everything that had to happen, forgetting the metaphysical atoms, neutron stuff that he's in control of, everything else.
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To come to him and be like, why? Why are you doing that? I just encourage awe, reverence, respect.
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Because sometimes it seems like he's just ignoring. He's not ignoring. And if you picture from God's perspective, like he's doing all these things, and you're like, why?
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What is he? He's mute. Where do I start? How does he put it on our level so that we can understand what is he doing?
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Because all things are for him, and through him, and to him. And so we can always lean on that, that he's doing all things for his glory.
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These things are in our lives are just props to point us to Jesus, to point us to him.
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And a similar example, I think John states it really clear. In John chapter one, his disciples come to him and see this blind guy.
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He's been that way his whole life. And so their conclusion is he must have been, I think it's on the next slide, is John nine up there?
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He says, somebody had to have sinned. Was it his parents? Or did he sin? And John responds in verse three, neither.
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Neither have sinned. In John three, he says that the works, if you want to go to that slide, the next verse, that the works of God might be displayed in him.
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And so when it seems like Jesus isn't hearing us, he's doing something.
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At a minimum, trust that he's doing something for your good, that his works might be displayed.
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What he wants from us always is trust independence, complete trust independence with all of our circumstances.
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And so it seems like he's ignoring her. He is ignoring her, and he has a plan. So we'll go back to what the disciples do, because this woman's like, all right, if you're going to ignore me, she turns to the disciples like, you guys got to help.
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And she starts crying out after them. And so she comes to, or they come to Jesus, if you want to go to the next slide, and says to Jesus, look, send her away for she's crying out after us.
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Send her away. That's what they want. I'm like, what is wrong with the disciples? Can't they see her as a human?
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And I just want to highlight for you where they're coming from. In Matthew 10, this is before this, this is what the 12 apostles, these disciples that he's called, what they've been told.
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He said, and he called to him his 12 disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out.
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So she's coming to them, these disciples. She knows she's not off. They have the power to cast out demons and to heal every disease and every affliction.
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Let's skip through the names. We know who they are. Next verse. But listen to the instruction that Jesus gives his 12 disciples.
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The 12 he sent out instructing them, go nowhere among the Gentiles and don't enter the town of the
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Samaritans, but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. This is Jesus' instruction to his apostles. Go to the house of Israel only and proclaim as you go, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
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Look again, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. They have the authority. They have the power to do this.
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And so maybe the disciples are just super by the book. Maybe they're like, look, lady, it's tough.
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We get it. We're just, we got instructions. We can't, there's nothing we can do here.
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And is that what they do? They go to Jesus on her behalf and they're like, look, maybe you can make an exception for her.
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This seems to be a bad situation. Can you help her out? No. In fact, they do. They come to her and what is their heart?
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What is their attitude towards her? She's annoying them. She just keeps crying out. She is a problem.
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They're trying to get a little reprieve, trying to get a rest, going to the coast, trying to get away from it all. And this woman is there annoying them.
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Their heart is annoyed. They want comfort. They don't want her there. And so my thought for us is to make sure we don't put the disciples on a scale that we're not willing to put ourselves on and judge them that way.
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I find for myself personally that I can narrow my field of ministry pretty narrow.
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I'm responsible for my family, my spheres of influence, maybe recast, maybe my job, but the homeless, the drug addicted, the mentally ill,
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I got no answers. Stop hassling me. And I'm not saying that I do have the answers, but God does.
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And he's certainly not glorified by my attitude, like get away from me. Stop annoying me. So this isn't a message about go take care of the homeless.
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I don't know what he wants us to do with that. They're always going to be among us. But definitely compassion,
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I think, is missing in the disciples. Let's look ahead to see how Jesus responds to the disciples. He says,
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I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It just seems like Jesus is cold.
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I was sent only. He's continually focused again and again in this passage on the house of Israel.
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Maybe you might not be familiar. I'm just going to zoom out a million miles to see the grand scheme of things.
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Because in the beginning, when God created the heavens and earth and Adam and Eve, they fell in Genesis. Sin entered the world through Adam.
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God didn't immediately make a way and then everybody could trust in Jesus. For some reason, he has this grand plan.
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And the plan, he told Eve, was like, I'm going to give you, your son is going to crush Satan's head. And sure enough, that's what we see
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Jesus in Revelation. That's what happens. But in between, there is this sequence. God chooses
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Abraham. He says, I'm going to bless all the nations through you, Abraham. And Abraham has Isaac. And Isaac has
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Jacob. And Jacob wrestles with God and becomes Israel. And Israel has 12 sons. And they're the tribes of Israel.
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And they are God's people. And they inherit the land. They're given the promise. But through Israel comes
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David. We've been seeing his life, a man after God's own heart, but jacked up. And then we see
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Jesus come through the line of David. So Jesus redeems all men. So there is a sequence.
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And Paul writes his letter to the Romans. And 9 through 11 are really a lament about this, about how the gospel came to the
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Jews first and then to the Gentiles. And it's really clear in Romans 1 .16. It says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, for it's the power of salvation to everyone who believes.
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So it's to everyone. But in this point of time, in Jesus's ministry, it's to the Jew first and also to the
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Greek. So that's what's going on. We see just this narrow range. So to apply this, perhaps, that God only cares about Jews, is not seeing the full gamut of Scripture.
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So let's go on to the next verse to see how this woman reacts. And I taught this passage a few weeks ago to the middle school.
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And I was most impressed by this action by the woman.
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It says, she came and knelt before him. I think there's a lot for us to learn there in just her action.
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She's got this problem. She's not going through the neighborhood collecting funds for a cure for a disease.
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She's not looking for just whatever you can do can help. She's done all that. She's from this pagan area.
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I'm certain she's already gone to the pagan priest. She's prayed.
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She's made sacrifices, perhaps. She's tried the Mediterranean diet there on the Mediterranean.
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She's tried medication, tried counseling, tried therapy. Nothing has worked. This is her only option.
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And what impedes her from coming to Jesus? I don't know. But as a female coming to a man in that culture, different culture, he's got his 12 disciples around him at a minimum.
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To come before him probably took some insistence, probably took some desire, some gumption, some,
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I'm not going to be denied. I want to kneel before Jesus. And I would offer that to us as well.
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Like what's keeping you? What in this life is keeping you, preventing you, hindering from bringing your stuff, your hurt, your pain, your sin before Jesus?
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Because she's not hindered. And so she comes before him, kneels before him, addresses him again as Lord, and simply says, help me, help me.
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I think there's some real beauty and earnestness in that plea. We have a lot of different ways of praying.
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A lot of times we pray informing God of the situation, telling him stuff like this. I don't know if you know what's going on.
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We use different acronyms like ACTS, adore, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. That's helpful.
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There's a lot of them, and I'm not saying those are wrong. They can be really helpful in methods of prayer so that we are not just coming to God with our prayers in a rote sense.
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Those are helpful devices. But I appreciate the beauty, and sometimes you may see it in a new believer when they come to Christ.
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They pray in a fresh way. And I think that's what we see here. She's just saying, help me.
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I don't know how. I don't know what you can do. Help me. And so then we see Jesus again, his response.
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He says he answered her. It's not right to take the bread of the children, the children's bread, and throw it to the dogs.
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This is very similar to when he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. He oftentimes will,
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Jesus will talk in sort of a little bit of a riddle, not super tricky, but unless you have the
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Holy Spirit awakening your eyes, opening your ears, you're not going to get it. So he speaks in a way that only somebody that has the
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Holy Spirit guiding them would be able to understand. He says it's not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
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And what is he talking about? Children's bread, he's the bread of life. It's a common analogy. It's not lost on anybody.
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This is spiritual nourishment, and it's for who? It's for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. I'm bringing this sheep to Israel and to throw it to the dogs.
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A lot of theologians, and maybe us, were like, dogs? Why would he call her a dog?
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What is wrong with Jesus? And so they'll labor to say, well, the term that they use for dog is like a small dog.
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It's kind of a unique term. Like maybe he's calling her a puppy. Maybe. I like others that highlight the fact that Jews at that time would describe non -Jews,
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Gentiles, Greeks as animals. They'd call them fish, birds, dogs, swine.
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They highlight the fact that she's an outsider. She's not from them. This is to give God's blessing, the prayer, or the spiritual nourishment to an outsider.
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That's what he's saying. And I think the text supports that claim because she's not offended.
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She comes right back at him. Like, yeah, yeah, you're right. I feel like if it was offensive, she would have a different posture.
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And so look at what she says. And this is, as I've studied it, this seems to be the more compelling response of hers.
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So he keeps resisting her. And she says, yes, Lord. Yes, Lord.
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Like, I know these spiritual blessings are only for Israel. Yeah, I get it. She says, yeah, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.
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So unlike the Samaritan woman who's like, what is this water you're talking about went at the well? I'm talking about the one in John.
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Maybe you're familiar. What is this? I want this water that I'll never thirst again. He's talking about spiritually.
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The Samaritan woman is not tracking. This woman is. She's getting it.
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And she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. But even the crumbs. So what is she talking about? And I'm going to submit to you that Jesus learns.
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Like, how could God learn? Because God, Jesus is human.
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He grew in stature. He grew in understanding. He went and studied at the synagogues. He's learning something about this woman in this moment.
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And that speaks to his humanity. He's learning of her faith. And so if you study the region of Tyre and Sidon in Scripture, you'll see it referenced a few dozen times, maybe not a few,
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I don't know, 30 times, say. Nothing really big happens in Tyre and Sidon. But there is this one event that happens in 1
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Kings 17. And I didn't put it up there because it's a decent long passage. I encourage you guys to go read it. But what happens there is there's this man named
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Elijah. And so Elijah comes after David. He's like 900 years ago. And he's a legit man of God.
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Like, God does some amazing thing. Like, he's one of the guys that show up on the Mount of Transfiguration in the
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Gospels. Him and Moses, Elijah's legit. So Elijah's there in 1
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Kings 17. God comes to Elijah in sort of an interesting story. He comes to him and says,
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I want you to go to Zarephath. There's going to be a woman there that will feed you. And sure enough,
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Elijah does that. Goes to Zarephath. And what you need to know is Zarephath, as 1 Kings says it, is in Sidon, is in Sidon.
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So he sends Elijah to this pagan land. He says, go there and there's going to be a woman there that she's going to feed you.
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And sure enough, Elijah does exactly that. Goes to the gates and he sees a woman there. And this widow is gathering up sticks.
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And he says, go, get me a morsel of bread and some water and feed me. She's like, look,
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I'm gathering up these sticks. I've only got a little bit of flour, a little bit of oil. I'm going to make some bread for me and my son.
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And then we're going to die. They're at the end of their rope here. This is the last effort.
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They don't have anything you're not going to take from them. Elijah says, don't worry about it. What I want you to do, go make me some cakes.
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Go make me some bread. And you guys can have the leftovers. And he says, bring me a morsel of bread.
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You can look at that Hebrew just in the blue letter Bible that I did and how that's translated. It can be translated morsel, fragment, or crumb.
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So here we have this story where Elijah goes and stays with them. And it's a miracle at that time because he eats with them.
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And it's a text says in first Kings 17, for many days, they live on this little bit of bread.
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Even though there's a little bit to start with, it just keeps going on. But more miraculously than that is this woman's son does die.
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And Elijah prays over the son, her sick child, three times and asks
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God to raise him from the dead. And he does. There's not a lot of resurrections in the Old Testament. This would stand out.
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Raises her son from the dead. So here's an example. This woman highlights. She said, yes, but even the crumbs that fall from the master's table, the dogs get to eat those.
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The outsiders get that. And there might be, I'm not promising you that there's an illusion to the
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Elijah story. This woman's from the same region that happens in that Elijah in this old, this other story of this woman bringing her sick son, getting healed and living on crumbs.
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So that Jesus, when he hears this woman alluding to that story, and again, you don't have to trust that. The point is that this woman has faith and she reveals it to God, to Jesus.
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So she reveals her faith in how she responds. And you would think that when she pleads for him, like, please help me or cries out for mercy, that Jesus would see her faith and how earnest she is.
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But it's only after she says this, that Jesus is like, great is your faith. I would submit to you that this woman has faith that's been informed by hearing.
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That's where faith comes, by hearing the works of God. I'm convinced that she knows of this story that has happened in her region centuries before, because she's aware of David.
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And David exists before Elijah. She knows of him, knows of his lineage, knows that there are people of God casting out demons, and it's been done before that they can even raise children from the dead.
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She's coming to him expecting, and the disciples expecting something to be done. So where does our faith come from?
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It comes by hearing. And just to highlight, we can go to the next verse to see how, yeah there it is, how
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Jesus responds. He says, great is your faith, be it done for as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly.
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Just one point to highlight and to encourage us in prayer, where do we see the daughter in this story?
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Do you see her encounter with Jesus? How she met Jesus? Part of me knows she never even meets
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Jesus. This mother prays for her daughter and the daughter is healed.
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And I would offer that all of us have had our lives changed because somebody else prayed for us.
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May not even know about it. And so that should incite some gratitude to those, to God and those that have prayed for us.
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But also encourage us, motivate us, that we can change somebody's life permanently, eternally by prayer.
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If we go to God on their behalf, we see here this woman, this daughter never meets
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Jesus and she's healed instantly. But also notice that he says, great is her faith.
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So I think Jesus learned something. And why is it important that Jesus learned something? Why is it important that we know that Jesus is human?
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Because sometimes I think we can think of Jesus as God with just like a human costume. And that's not him.
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And we want to swing the pendulum from he's human, he's God. And the problem, the mistake that we make is that we bring the pendulum period.
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He's 100 % God. He's 100 % human. And the value, the impact for us as humans is that he was tempted in all points like us.
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He knows what it's like to experience hurt, pain, brokenness of this life. We have a dog.
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I really like our dog. Whatever I'm into, he's into. Just follows me around the house.
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If I want, it's time to go to sleep. Cool, let's go to sleep. Go throw the ball. Yeah, let's go throw the ball around. Whatever, he's up for it.
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Just really appreciate him. I have affection for him. We have cats, it's different. They don't care. And it'd be a stretch to say,
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I love our dog, but I really care about him. I'd feel sad if he died. Might sound harsh, but if we can,
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I don't know what his experience is like. I'm not a dog. When he barks, when he's hungry, what does it feel like to be a dog that's hungry?
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That somebody walks by, the squirrel walks by, like, what is he feeling? I don't know. I care about him. I don't know what his life's like.
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I think it's that way with God. He knows exactly what our lives are like. And so when I started off by saying that we have these brokenness that we don't want to share with him, that maybe we don't want to concern him with, the hurt, the anxiety, the death of a dream, the financial impact, the lost, the children that are making poor decisions, whatever it is in your life, and you can trust in God.
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I know that these are working, these are good things. You're working them all out for God, but to not admit how you feel about them,
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I think there is some value in he, because he understands that. He understands our hurt. He's been a human.
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And the best news is, unlike all of us, we care for one another. We want to encourage one another, but we can't do anything outside of prayer.
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Dismissing prayer, definitely do that. But here, Jesus is God, and he can do something.
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She comes to him, please help, and does what only God can do. Not even seeing the girl, with the word of his mouth, the daughter's healed instantly.
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So what can God do? He can solve it. Whatever your problem is, he can take care of it.
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It's not too big for him. He can do it like that. Now, like Dave said early on, it's not that this is a genie in the bottle.
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What he wants from us is utter dependence on him. And to have an open, honest, real relationship, if we're sad, what this feels like, and not this synthetic, but at least come to him with our hurts.
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He's big enough for it, and he can do something about it. And so here's what is amazing.
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He lived this whole life, Jesus Christ did, as a human, and he didn't sin. And that's good news for us.
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Why is that good news for us? Because we were in an impossible situation. We had sin.
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We couldn't even get started to atone for our sin. Jesus became that perfect sacrifice for us.
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The only way we could get out of our sin debt was that it had to be paid for. He loves us, with all our brokenness.
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He doesn't love the sin. He died for that sin. He gets it, so we can bring it to him. But he did the best thing, is that he had victory over death and sin, and that he rose to life again.
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And so when we have this brokenness in our life, we have eternity to look forward to, that we might not see all the millions of things that are going down right now, but eventually, we are going to see it.
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The mirror will be revealed, and we'll see what God's been doing for his glory in eternity. And all this, every tear will be dried from our eyes.
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We'll put on immortality. We have a future in heaven, with God on the new earth, to look forward to.
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And that's the good news. And so we're going to close our time with communion. Communion at Recast, we do it every week.
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And I mentioned last week, the hazard is that we just go through this exercise.
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But my hope and prayer again, this morning, is that we would see Jesus and recognize what he did for us.
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We have it set up, if you're new, set up in the front and in the back. Dave's going to come and play some music.
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During that time, there'll be an opportunity. And what I encourage us to do is to reflect, to bring that stuff to him and reflect on what he did for you, that he paid for your sin.
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Not only that, but he guaranteed your eternity in his presence without any more of this brokenness, so that the juice is given to reflect his, to remember his blood, that sacrifice that he paid, and the cracker, his body that was given for us.
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So I'm going to pray, Dave's going to come, and I invite you guys to trust in Jesus, to remember what he's done for you.
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Our Heavenly Father, we love you. We know that you are a loving
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God. And even though this text highlights some aspects of your son, Jesus, that are difficult for us to understand.
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But God, I pray that we see that humanity, that it would be encouraging to us to know that you know exactly what we're going through.
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You're not outside of our situation. And though you seem quiet, you hear us.
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And God, that each of us would be dependent on you, that we would bring our hurts to you, because we know that you can help.
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And as we celebrate what was done for us on the cross, God, I do ask that you would give us joy in our hearts to reflect on how good you've been to us.