Joining God’s Global Family

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

So I want to start today with a story.

And um this is a story about me and my dad growing up.

When I was growing up, my dad would take me um to places I never really wanted to go.

Maybe you were that way too.

Your dad would put you in the car and he would tell you the adventure that you were about to go on.

And um, my dad would take me to strange places, but one of the things he loved to do is he would love to take me to the start of a river.

So, Oregon, where I grew up, it's full of rivers and wildlife and hikes and all that stuff.

And my dad would love to show me where the origins of specific rivers were.

We'd go on hikes or drives and things like that and say, this is where the Snake River begins, or this is where the Willamette River begins.

These are Oregon rivers, and I understand you who are living in California probably don't know these.

But one of the rivers that he took us to that he really was proud of showing us at one point was the start of the Columbia River.

The Columbia River is actually the river that divides Oregon and Washington.

And the Columbia River, it's this rushing, rushing river.

And many, many rivers, they start actually as lakes or they start as like mountain runoff, just slow drippings of fresh water from melted snow or little lakes that you wouldn't think were very big or much of anything.

But then all of a sudden, when they go down mountain ranges, they become these incredible bodies of water.

And the Columbia River is enormous.

I mean, people windsurf there and fish in the river, and it's it's massive.

It divides two states.

Well, what starts the Columbia River is called the Columbia Lake up in Canada.

And it's a decent size, but it's very placid and it's very still.

And this lake turns into this enormous river.

And that river turns into other rivers and other streams and tributaries and creeks.

And many of those streams and tributaries and creeks and rivers that come off of the Columbia, they end where the Columbia ends, which is in the Pacific Ocean.

And it's interesting that the way that God has designed this world is like what starts is this little headwater, which is called the headwater, the source of the river.

It turns into all this mess, wild mess and divisions of streams and different kinds of bodies of water.

But then it all also ends in the same place.

It ends in the Pacific Ocean, in this massive body of water.

And I'm thinking about rivers and streams and my father taking me on trips I didn't really want to go because I'm thinking about the church.

I'm thinking about the church because we've been talking a lot about the church.

And right now, I think Christians are in a lot of different streams.

They're in a lot of different divided places, different bodies of water.

And what I want to do today is actually kind of zoom out a little bit and see the landscape that God has painted, the landscape God has developed, uh, and to look back at the source and look at the destination and recognize that there are all these various streams and rivers and creeks, but we are all headed for the same great heavenly destination.

That the church, while it appears divided, actually has a similar origin and a similar destination.

And we get caught up in our own streams, our own place in history.

We get frustrated with what is happening and we miss the large picture.

And so today I want to actually zoom out a little bit.

You know, like on your phone, when you have your map open and you need to pinch the map to really zoom out to see where you are.

I kind of want to do that today.

I kind of want to just step back, zoom out, see what is God doing, what is God up to, and hopefully take a step forward so we can answer this really, really key question, which is what would it take for the church to come together right now?

It would take a lot.

And Ryan has talked about unity a lot in the last couple of weeks in the future church series.

And I don't even know if unity is the right word for this sermon today.

Um it's more about our collective history origin, like the Columbia has its original origin, and our collective destination as God's people.

Um, to just kind of step back and see that as a step towards unity.

Because, like I said, I think we get upset a lot at the stream that we're currently in.

You're a 21st century Christian, maybe, and just kind of frustrated with this one stream that you're in.

And we don't like the place God has put us, like our location of our little stream.

Or we don't like where we've come from, like we don't like the origin.

We think the origin might not be right, or even the people God has put us with, like the surrounding environment of our stream.

And maybe we're a little concerned about the direction.

We're like, where is this thing called the church going?

And we're gonna take a break from the book of Acts this week and just take one sermon to zoom out to see what is God doing in history.

And to do that, we're gonna look at a pretty unique story in the Gospel of Matthew, a unique story found in Matthew 15.

So if you have a Bible, I'd love for you to take that out, turn it on your phone, or open the physical Bible, and go to Matthew chapter 15, starting in verse 21.

Matthew 15 · chapter mention

We're gonna look at this strange story in Jesus' ministry and help hopefully help us see how it can bring us a step towards unity to come together a little bit more.

Matthew 15, 21, this is a story about Jesus.

It says that he went away from the place he was, and he withdrew to the district of Tyree and Sidon.

And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David.

My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.

But he did not answer her a word.

And his disciples came and begged him, saying, Send her away, for she is crying out after us.

This story in Matthew, and I've just read part of it, we're not done with it.

This story in Matthew is traditionally called Jesus and the Canaanite woman.

She's referred to as a Canaanite here.

Um this story is so interesting for many reasons, and we have to kind of set it up first.

This word Canaanite is important for understanding where we are in the story.

The word Canaanite is actually never used in the New Testament except for right here in this passage.

The word is used hundreds of times, though, in your Old Testament.

So if you were to just search this word in your Bible, you'd see none of it exists in the New Testament except for right here.

Um, but Matthew's main audience was Jewish people.

So when they saw that word, they would actually be hyperlinking to all of these Old Testament passages where that word was popping up.

They understood this word.

The word refers to a particular kind of people.

This woman is called a Canaanite woman.

And these were Israel's major enemies, the Canaanites.

They were above anything, they were seen as outside of the stream of what God was doing, right?

God has this river and he's working through Israel.

And the Israelites were pretty convinced that Canaanites, we don't know what they're doing, but they're not a part of the stream of what we're doing here, of what God's up to.

Sound familiar?

It's happening today, right?

Just seeing it other people in other streams and saying, that is not us.

Um, and this is the backdrop given to the woman with this name.

She was not a part of Israel.

And that's probably why in the story, as you read, the disciples sent her away.

They said, We don't want to deal with you because you are not a part of what Jesus is doing here.

It's also likely that Jesus was uh interacting with this woman because he was in a foreign land.

It says that he was in uh Tyree and Sidon.

This is a very pagan, non-Jewish, not believing in Yahweh and in God.

That whole area was in general not Jewish and not following God.

And they went to that region.

Uh, presumably, it says they withdrew to the region.

And they probably, a lot of scholars believe they were withdrawing because, well, chapters earlier, Jesus was facing persecution from his own people.

His own stream was rejecting him.

So he was getting outside of his stream and going to another place to just relax and withdraw.

And it's right here that he interacts with this Canaanite woman.

They came to withdraw.

That's why the disciples are probably sending away.

Jesus is kind of on a vacation here.

Chill out.

Um, they withdraw, but we're gonna see Jesus actually was here to engage with this woman.

Um, the disciples are missing something as this story moves on.

The disciples are missing that this Canaanite woman, while she is not a part of the Jewish family, she is a part of God's mission.

Why?

Well, she's not a part of the Hebrew family, but she's originally a part of God's global family.

And this is something zooming out does, you guys.

When we zoom out on the story of God and his people, it brings us one step closer to being unified together.

When we zoom out, we can see that it's not that different being in Tyree and Sidon than being in Jerusalem or being in the stream that we're used to to maybe a stream that we're not so used to.

I want to give you three thoughts on what a zoomed out perspective can kind of give us.

First, when we zoom out, we actually realize that every human being has a shared origin.

I was saying earlier about the ways rivers work, you know, there's this original headwater, this origin of the river.

And one important thing we do when we zoom out is we actually realize every human being is made in the image of God and has an original uh source, original headwater.

And again, this Canaanite woman, she was not seen as somebody that the disciples were connected to.

She was seen as an outsider and an enemy.

The strange thing is though, the Canaanites, when you read their history in the Bible, they were actually originally a part of God's people.

They were not entirely a separate body of water.

At one point, they were not even a separate stream.

They were a part of what God was doing.

It's because the Canaanites, they originally come from the family of Noah.

If you remember Noah, you'll remember two things about him, probably.

He was a good dude and he got on a boat when the world flooded, okay?

God used Noah as a righteous man, and one of his sons was named Ham, probably an unfortunate name, but in Hebrew it didn't mean like a meat, right?

And the the the his son Ham was divested from the family and excommunicated for wrongful and wicked and sinful behavior.

And since then, that became the Canaanites.

But at one point, he was just Noah's kid.

He was just Noah's son.

And actually, most of Israel's quote-unquote enemies that you meet in the Old Testament, most of their non-siblings, most of the people that were outside of the stream originally were a sibling at some point.

They were a part of the family.

At some point, they were a part of the stream God was doing.

They just broke off as they rebelled or sinned against someone.

Many of the ites that you hear in the Bible, you hear the Zemurites or the Kenites or the Moabites.

They're actually founded by a descendant of someone who was originally seen as righteous, originally seen as part of God's family and not seen as the enemy, except after something they did, they were chastised and cursed and sent away from the people of God.

See, because we are created in the image of God, the radical Christian teaching is that at some level, you guys, every person you interact with is a potential sibling of yours.

Every person you interact with shares the headwater at some point, shares the death the original uh point that everything started with.

Just like the Columbia River started at Columbia Lake, God's people started as God's image.

And we all, whoever we interact with, we are interacting with somebody who has the imprint and mark of God.

And Jesus, his great work, was connecting all of us to our Creator.

Through his work on the cross, he's the one who provides us a way back to the original source, a way back to who God really is.

And at the very moments you're trying to maybe withdraw and separate yourself from another stream, you might actually be rejecting the very family that you share with God.

You know, in the New Testament, the dominant metaphor for the church is a family.

And the words brothers and sisters is used over 124 times to describe the church.

That's a lot of moments to be describing the church as a family.

Why?

Because it's trying to teach us we share a father, we share a headwater, we share a source.

And when we interact with people, we cannot see them as other first.

We must see them as the potential sibling they are, as the one who could actually bring us back to the source of God.

And to zoom out, we realize that we have a shared origin.

We also need to zoom out on the map and see this, the second zoomed-out perspective, that every human being shares a divine purpose.

So not only does every human being share the source and the headwater, but the purpose, the path of the various streams and rivers, the purpose of everything is shared in humankind.

God desires all human beings to know him and love one another and stand in his presence.

This purpose unites all people, whether we recognize it or not.

We share this direction and purpose together.

And the biblical story shows God's family increasingly uncomfortable with that very purpose.

Like God's people through the Old Testament are uncomfortable with the heritage they have, the headwater that they have with God, and the purpose.

They don't want to be a part of God's purposes and ways.

This is where all the factions and divisions happen that I mentioned earlier, all the ites, right?

It starts with Cain, who was Adam and Eve's son, who divides and murders his brother and goes his own way.

From there on, all the siblings of God divide, sin against each other, and move away from each other, constantly rejecting their heritage.

And this messy heritage is where this Canaanite woman really comes from.

But the remarkable thing is that she knew something about Jesus' mission.

And she knew something about this purpose that God had.

She calls Jesus in the passage I read earlier, the quote, son of David.

She calls him Lord, which is interesting because son of David is a Jewish terminology, which means she probably caught wind or understood about the fame of who Jesus was and his purpose.

She caught the divine purpose.

She caught something.

She was zoomed out on something the disciples were not zoomed out on.

And the Canaanite woman takes a risk in just addressing him.

This would have been problematic because really Jews and Canaanites, uh, Jewish people and the Canaanites, they didn't talk to each other.

And particularly, a man and a woman would not necessarily have this conversation.

But she says, Help me, my daughter needs you.

Now look at how Jesus comes back, Matthew 15, 24.

He says this after she requests for healing from her for her daughter.

I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

She came and she knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.

She comes to him again.

And he answered her, it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.

Two important interpretive things here.

That's a troubling little passage, is it not?

Two key and important uh interpretations to this section.

You know, first, is Jesus calling this woman or equating this woman to a dog?

Oftentimes this is seen as like a derogatory statement in scripture, some demeaning statement.

But this word, when he says, you know, is it right to give uh the children's bread and throw it to the dogs?

The Greek word is better translated puppy.

It's a domesticated animal.

There's another word for like wild dog that's more derogatory.

That is used in the New Testament, by the way.

It's just not used here.

The other thing is it's reference to a household where there's children eating and a dog under the table.

So a wild derogatory dog, that would be a demeaning term, would not be in the house.

This is more like a little puppy down there eating the scraps that the children are throwing off their um table.

This is all the more real to me as I both have a dog and a child.

But Jesus isn't insulting this woman.

Instead, he's challenging her, maybe testing her even.

Does she really know the divine purpose?

Does she really know the zoomed-out perspective that God has started with his people, where he's taking them, and where their destination would be?

And does she really want to know Jesus or does she just want something from Jesus?

Jesus, he challenged people all the time.

And in fact, some commentators would acknowledge that this way that he's challenging this woman does not demean her, but actually honors her.

You see, most people uh in that time, men especially, the most common uh thing to do to a foreign woman would be to ignore her, to not say anything to her.

But Jesus engages with her, challenges her even.

And do you know Jesus challenged most every person he interacted with?

His closest disciples asked him, could we sit at your right and left hand?

And he said, I don't think you know what you're asking.

Jesus constantly challenged people, he challenged this rich young ruler who came to him and said, I've obeyed everything.

How do I enter the kingdom of God?

He says, Sell everything you have.

You know, when when Jairus comes to him and pleads for healing, this man who was of probably prominent society in the gospel time, he tells Jairus to wait as he ministers to a woman who needs his help.

And this man's daughter is suffering and dying, and he says, actually wait, trust me and wait.

See, Jesus was constantly challenging people, and so for him to challenge this Canaanite woman does not dishonor her, it actually honors her.

It puts her in a position of agency to say, what is it that you really want?

What is it that you really desire?

And that question is posed to maybe you and me as well.

Do we want Jesus in our life to give us the one thing we're asking for, the one prayer request we have?

Or do we really just want all of Jesus and his purpose?

Put in the context of my analogy about streams, right?

Do we want Jesus to join our stream and what we've got going on?

Or are we gonna join in the purpose and the stream and the river of God and his purposes?

This is actually a real interesting moment in this story.

And Jesus refers um to Israel here.

He says, I've come for Israel, and he kind of equates Israel to the children at the table.

He's like, that's the primary people I've come for.

And you might be thinking, well, why does he put primary focus on Israel?

Well, that has kind of been the story of Scripture.

Let me just give you three brief acts of Scripture that will help you set the context for what Jesus is really saying.

The story of God throughout the Old Testament is given through kind of these three acts.

The first act is that God chose to bless Israel as a way to bless all nations.

This is from the calling of Abraham, who started the family of God.

And the entire purpose, okay, the purpose of this whole stream that God has us moving in was to use one nation to bless all the nations.

You can see that at the end of in verse three.

Uh, the promise to Abraham is, I will bless you and your family, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Way back, this is the very first book of the Bible, the 12th chapter of the first book of the Bible.

God's purpose, the path he has set for his people and the various streams and rivers they will go on is this I will use this one river, Israel, to populate many rivers and bless many nations to head towards my ocean.

That's always been the plan.

And so when Jesus says, I came for Israel, it's not a shock.

It's actually exactly what he came to do because it's exactly what God has been up to.

The second act or the second moment in the whole scriptural story is that Israel and the rest of the nations, they actually chose to reject their headwater.

They chose to reject their origin, they chose to reject the ways of God.

And a simple, plain reading of Isaiah 1, which you could go do later, would see this: that the prophet denounces Israel and all nations for rejecting the ways of God.

God says, I want to use Israel to bless all nations, and Israel and all nations say, no, thank you.

We want to build our own kingdom, we want to do our own thing, and we do not want to sit under your wisdom.

It sounds familiar maybe to the first and second act of some of our stories, right?

Some of our stories, we interact with God at a young age, and then as we get older, we just want to reject, we want to move away from what God is doing.

You see, in the scriptural story, we find our story.

But you know the story's not over because the third act is that God chose to redeem Israel as a way to redeem all nations.

So he would start with Israel, as he says in Isaiah 1 18 Come now, let us reason together.

I will make your sins white as snow.

He was going to speak to Israel and use Israel to bless all nations.

And this is why Jesus shows up.

An Israelite.

He shows up as a Jewish rabbi.

He's celebrating feasts.

He's referencing Hebrew scripture.

He's in Jewish history.

Why?

Because God's plan was always to bless Israel in order to bless all nations.

And so redemption of all nations starts with Israel.

It starts with Jesus.

And this Canaanite woman finds herself meeting the true Israel.

Jesus who would take Israel's place as that which would offer blessing to all the nations.

You see, Jesus came not just as an example to Israel, but as Israel itself.

He came as the thing Israel was supposed to be.

And this Canaanite woman sees the son of David, the Lord, the Messiah, and she says, I think you can bring me healing.

I think you can bless even me, the Canaanite.

I think your mighty river is connected to my stream down here as a Canaanite.

And the great irony of this passage is that the disciples forget this whole story and they send this woman away while this Canaanite woman is the one who remembers this story.

She's the one who gets it.

The disciples are the ones trying to ignore it.

And this Canaanite woman, she sees Jesus not just as a hope for Israel, but as a hope for her, the whole world, even her as a Canaanite.

And I know this because of her calling him the son of David.

When she says son of David, it would link you as a reader of the book of Matthew, maybe right back to the beginning of that book.

If you're in Matthew 15, you could flip back to Matthew 1.

It's literally the first page of the New Testament.

And in the first page, you're just going to see a list of names and your eyes are going to glaze over.

But it's really Jesus' 23 in me.

It's his ancestry.com.

Right here, we see the origin of Jesus.

Where'd he come from?

What is his family?

And the 23 of me in me of Jesus, this genealogy he has, uh, it's got a lot of names of dudes and men, but there's four women mentioned.

Well, five if you include Mary, the mother of Jesus.

And these women are important to notice in the genealogy story because it connects to the divine purpose God has us on.

The four women that are mentioned are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

And you'll notice about all of these women that they are not perfect, if you know their story from the Old Testament.

But the most important thing to recognize here is none of them are Jewish, none of them are Hebrews, none of them are Israelites, right?

Ruth is a Moabite.

Rahab was from Jericho.

Bathsheba by marriage was a Hittite.

These are all foreign nations, other streams, not the main, they were not Israelites.

And look at Tamar.

Found her story is found in Genesis 38.

She sinned against in a terrible way.

And she's a part of the lineage of the Messiah.

She's a part of the Son of David.

And look at where she comes from.

She comes as a Canaanite.

And so the book of Matthew begins by showing us this.

God has always used all nations to move his plan forward.

God has always used all nations to move his plan forward.

And this Canaanite woman understood that.

She said, I know I'm not a part of the mainstream, but I know you could use me.

I know you could bless me because you blessed Tamar, because you used Ruth, this Moabite woman who moved from far away into Bethlehem, married Boaz, and she became the great grandmother of King David.

This is how God has always worked.

And it's so important for our implication today because God is always using all nations to form his plan.

And we are not the full body of Christ without the full nations that God has created.

We are not the full body of Jesus without all of the Jesus image bearers that we have in our country and in our world.

We are not the complete picture without all of us.

We are a body, a global body.

And if this is how God has worked in his history through scripture, it's how he's working right now.

We all want to think that the stream we are in is pure.

And we all want to think that we can find a pure stream of Christianity.

We spend our whole life looking for the right church that represents the purest form of our beliefs, the single community that represents Jesus with perfection.

We want a church that says the right things at the right times, with the right motives, with the right person, in the right emotional place.

We want a church that is in our image and that is designed based off of our own tribe.

We want a chlorinated pool.

But Jesus has created a rushing river with various streams, tributaries, and creeks that is headed in a direction.

God does not start these divisions necessarily, but God uses the disorder and the division to bring about that most people would know him and would go the direction he wants them to go.

See, God's purpose, it's not to maintain this pure little stream.

It's actually to work through the various wild streams for his ultimate good.

You see, God doesn't work to maintain purity as much as he purifies us as we move forward.

Like a mighty rushing river from its headwater and source all the way to the ocean, the water will certainly not be the same from the headwater to the ocean.

It goes through a massive transformation as it heads towards the delta, heads towards the ocean.

But there, at the mouth of the river, into the mighty ocean, the once pure mountain runoff is completely different water, transformed by its journey, purified through its process, but ultimately ending in its mean.

And likewise, the journey of the Christian life, man, the Christian church, the journey of the church, and yes, the American church too.

The journey is not one that keeps us remaining in one clean purity.

It's one that experiences the purity of God through our journey together.

Now make no mistake, make no mistake here.

There are rivers that lead to nowhere.

There are streams that start pure and they get polluted and they lead to nowhere.

They dry up, they're disgusting and they're polluted with sin, abuse, racism, disgusting things that do not lead to the purposes of God.

There are streams that are filled not with God's purposes, but the enemy's purposes.

Abuse, false teaching, and racism.

And this might be why Jesus tested this woman, why he responded the way that she did.

He said, Do you really know what you're a part of?

Do you really know where you're headed and what you're doing?

Do you know the story I'm a part of?

And do you understand the path that I am taking?

When we meet Jesus, we have to meet him like this Canaanite woman, understanding this.

It does not matter who you are when you meet Jesus.

It matters how you respond.

So you can come from any stream, you can come from any place, you can come from any culture, any background, any addiction, any sin and any struggle.

But what Jesus is going to challenge you and I on is how we respond.

He will not shame us for who we are, he will not put us down for the person we are, but he will challenge us about where we're going.

And this is the response of the woman.

Jesus says, I came here for Israel.

Now you have that whole context in your mind.

And he said, It's not right for me necessarily to give bread to the dogs while the puppy under the table while the children are sitting here.

Now look at this woman's response after she's challenged.

Remarkable.

Verse 27.

She said, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.

Then Jesus answered her, O woman, great is your faith.

Be it done to you for you as you desire.

And her daughter was healed instantly.

Great is your faith.

The last thing we get in a zoomed out perspective is this that every human being is offered a heavenly destination.

Every human being is offered a heavenly destination.

So not only does every human being share its origin, image of God, not only does every human being share the divine purpose, that God is heading in a direction with the human race, but there is a destination that is offered to all people.

This woman recognizes what God is doing in Jesus.

She sees that through him, not only Israel will eat the food, not only Israel will receive the blessing of God, but all people will receive the blessing of God, even the Canaanites.

And she believes this and trusts Jesus for this, that in his character, there's something about him that would let even a puppy eat at the table.

And this thing that she has in her, Jesus names faith.

He looks at her and he says, Great is your faith.

And by the way, think about this.

There are Israelite disciples sitting next to him.

There are people who are well versed in the story, who know the entire plan, and he sees someone who is outside of the family, so to speak.

And he says, That's what I'm looking for.

That's the faith that I'm looking for.

Great is your faith.

In faith, the woman says this.

I know I'm not at the table.

I know I'm not a part of the mainstream, but it doesn't mean I'm missing out on the destination.

Just because I'm not a part of the meal doesn't mean I don't get some.

Because you are that good of a God and you're working that much will through Israel that even the Canaanites can eat the living bread, the bread of life.

This is the great promise.

As a non-Israelite, she says, I am not the main part of the story, but I still get to eat.

I'm still a part of the destination.

I'm still a part of the journey.

I am a part of what God is doing because God is that good, God is that expansive, God is that welcoming, God is that gracious through Jesus.

And what we realize is that in God's kingdom, it actually does not matter primarily where we come from, of who we are.

What's more important is who God is.

It's not important to think of, see, in this story, we get caught up.

Who is the puppy and who are the children?

The point of Jesus' metaphor is who gets to eat?

Everyone gets to eat in God's kingdom.

Everyone gets the bread of life.

Everyone gets to join, if they so choose, in the river of God and what he is working for.

And the thing he's looking for is this thing called faith.

Through faith, we can eat and receive what Jesus is offering.

Faith is the Greek word pistis.

And we often say faith in English all sorts of ways.

But it misses some of the real original meaning of the Greek language.

I got this from this incredible scholar, Indian American scholar named Nijay Gupta.

And he says that the word faith in the original language, it actually speaks to a broad range of like submission and trust and surrender to God.

Faith is the thing that we saw in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and also in those four women that we saw in Jesus' 23 in me in his genealogy.

Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba, all of them, they didn't necessarily have the right theological opinions, but they trusted God.

They said, we believe in the divine purpose of God.

You see, here's the thing: there's a difference between faith and belief and beliefs.

Beliefs are the things that you and I have opinions about.

So many of us, we focus on the stream that we're in.

We think it's defined by our beliefs.

Everything needs to, everybody needs to think the same things in my stream.

And that's what makes me on the path, headed towards heaven, where God is going.

But this is because we continually think that what we think intellectually is the most important thing about our relationship with God.

But faith, while it's not opposed to what we think, it is separate.

Faith is trusting God.

That which you cannot do for yourself, you believe God will do for you.

She says, I believe I'm a puppy.

I can't get to the table, but I believe you, by your power, could give me what you have because you're that good and that generous.

That's faith.

Jesus names it as faith.

It's not to say that beliefs are unimportant.

We did a whole series back in October called We Believe Doctrine and Beliefs and those things.

We have to have those correct and we have to understand what we believe.

But at the end of the day, what unites you with another person in the body of Jesus is not your beliefs.

It's your faith.

It's your trust in Jesus.

It's the primary vision that Jesus has for your life.

We're free to disagree with each other.

And hey, at awakening, we're going to disagree on a lot of things.

A lot of you believe different things than what I believe about politics or parenting, education, or ethics.

We're going to disagree on very important things, even some theological things.

We're going to disagree, right?

But all of us who are part of the body of Jesus, what unites us is faith.

You see, our beliefs about issues do not unify us.

Faith in Jesus does.

And the best way I can illustrate this is actually through an illustration that I got from that scholar I was talking about, Nij Gupta.

But I'm going to apply it to my life, okay?

It's about an airport and it's about a little kid.

Okay, I've traveled with my son Jude.

He's about a year and a half now.

Before COVID, we traveled a couple times.

We're probably going to travel here in the near future, Lord willing.

And my son runs around everywhere.

And he, you know, can't even use the bathroom by himself.

Okay.

He needs me for everything.

But especially in the airport, all of airport security and every official at the airport only sees my son as connected to me.

In fact, if he were to get lost in the airport, they wouldn't know who he was because he doesn't have driver's license or a passport.

Jude, my son, the only way he can make it through airport security and onto the plane to go to his destination is because of my identification, because of my driver's license and my passport.

His trusting relationship with me and his connection to me is the thing that gets him from point A to point B, nothing else.

As far as the airport is concerned, he is nobody unless he's connected to me or to my wife, right?

This is what faith is.

Faith is the clinging on to Jesus through the airport of life, where we cling to him and we say, I am not identified based off of me.

I am identified based off of you.

And the only thing that will get me through security, and the only thing that will get me on the plane, and the only thing that will get me through life is if I hold on to you.

Without you, I can't get through anywhere.

Without you, no one knows who I am.

Without you, I cannot move forward.

Without you, I cannot go to the destinations I want to go to.

You see, faith in Jesus is about placing our entire identity, the weight of it all, onto Jesus and receiving from him his identification, his driver's license, his passport to get us from point A to point B.

Faith in Jesus unifies us and directs us towards our common heavenly destination.

And that's what faith is.

You see, Jude isn't with me because he believes the right things.

Jude is with me because he is my son.

And Jude is with me because he identifies with me.

And you and I, we do not join with Jesus' great mission because we think of the right things.

We don't join with Jesus' mission because we have all our beliefs set up.

This woman was far from Hebrew scripture and the Bible story, Jewish festivals.

But she looked at Jesus and she said, I will not be defined by who I am.

I will be defined and identified by who you are.

You are that good, you are that great, and I will submit myself to you and your ways, believing you will allow me to eat.

And Jesus looked at her and said, Oh, great is your faith.

And so, friends, may we zoom out today and look at who we are and ask ourselves this really, really key question, right?

Like, do I have faith in Jesus in that way?

See, because some of you might believe good things, but are you trusting Jesus in that way?

And for some of us, we have to ask the question, God, am I looking at other people the way that maybe the disciples were looking at the Canaanite woman?

Am I seeing other people as outsiders below the table, far from the ways of God and impossible to join the stream?

Am I forgetting that we actually share a common origin and we share faith, even though we have different beliefs?

And might we be the church that heads towards the heavenly direction, trusting as we follow Jesus, we will be purified, that we will follow the mighty stream of God and end in the heavenly ocean where we will be transformed.

Friends, I want to encourage you today, if you have faith in Jesus, that you are unified with so many, many people.

And if you do not have faith in Jesus, I want to encourage you to place your trust in him.

You will figure out and form beliefs as you go.

We are here to help you, to disciple you, to walk with you.

The starting point is to cling to Jesus as you walk through life with him.

Let me pray for you.

Jesus, we do pray for faith.

God, for those that need faith right now, would you grant them faith?

God, would you use this story to enliven hearts to cling to you?

Could we be identified with you today, God?

And might we, if we are Christians and claim faith in you, see other people today as our brothers and sisters, not because of what we believe, but because of who we trust.

You, Jesus.

Help us with this.

In Christ's name I pray.

Amen.

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