Nurturing Faith: The Holy Spirit’s Role in Spiritual Growth

Joel Beeke explores the vital role of the Holy Spirit in bestowing and nurturing faith in believers. He elaborates on how this gift enriches the spiritual life, offering comfort and guidance through various challenges, and how it is central to understanding and living a Christian life based on trust and devotion to God.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

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We turn now to the gospel of Matthew, chapter 15, verses 21-28. Matthew 15:21-28:

²¹ Then Jesus went out from there and departed to the region of Tyre and Sidon. ²² And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region and cried out to Him, saying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.” ²³ But He answered her not a word. And His disciples came and urged Him, saying, “Send her away, for she cries out after us.” ²⁴ But He answered and said, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” ²⁵ Then she came and worshiped Him, saying, “Lord, help me!” ²⁶ But He answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.” ²⁷ And she said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” ²⁸ Then Jesus answered and said to her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour. (Matthew 15:21-28, NKJV)

Dear congregation, there is nothing so critical in the Christian life as to live by faith. And you often hear from this pulpit calls to faith and invitations to faith, and you hear about the contents of faith. But it’s good to pause and consider in a message all by itself, exactly what is faith, and what does faith do? And how do we experience faith so that we understand the work of the Spirit in giving the gift of faith?

So as we continue this series of messages on the work of the Spirit following the order of salvation, we’ve come to this element in salvation that we call saving faith. And with God’s help, we want to look at that this morning with you. We look at Matthew 15:28 and many other texts this morning. But Matthew 15:28 says,

²⁸ Then Jesus answered and said to her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour. (Matthew 15:28, NKJV)

What dost thou believe concerning the Holy Ghost? First, that he is true and co-eternal God with the Father and the Son. Secondly, that he’s also given me to make me by a true faith, partaker of Christ and all his benefits, that he may comfort me and abide with me forever.

And we might also read again question 21 of the catechism, Lord’s day seven, which gives us a definition of true faith.

True faith is not only a certain knowledge whereby I hold for a truth all that God has revealed to us in His word, but also an assured confidence which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel in my heart, not only to others, but to me also. Remission of sin, everlasting righteousness, and salvation are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits. A wonderful definition indeed.

Well, our theme then this morning is the spirit’s gift of faith. We want to look at it in four thoughts.

First, the expansiveness of faith. Second, the excellence of faith. Third, the elements of faith and fourth, the experience of faith, the spirit’s gift of faith, the expansiveness of it, the excellence of it, the elements of it, and the experience of it.

Sometimes when we’re young, we’re tempted to believe Satan’s bold lie, that to be a Christian is something that is somehow narrowing and stifling and restrictive, something that takes away from being able to live in an expansive way. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Perhaps I’ve told you this story before, but it bears repeating here to make my point. But when I left the army, one of my overseers came to me and said, I hope you can make it out there in the world. It’s a pretty evil, challenging world. And I said, well, God can help me. The man said, I’ve got Uncle Sam here to help me. He protects me in the army. But I said to him, sir, I’ve got something much larger than Uncle Sam. My God is the creator of the universe.

And you see, that’s the language of faith, that’s the essence of faith. That’s the heartbeat of faith, the expansiveness of faith. When you have Jesus Christ, who is the object of your faith as your savior, you don’t have just a little tiny life, a little tiny world that revolves around you, but your life is subject to him. And when it’s subject to him, you belong to him. And he owns a cattle upon a thousand hills. All things are yours. Ye are Christ and Christ is God.

And you are taken up into the universal reality of the Christian faith. There’s something wonderful about Christianity because when you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God, and all power is given to Christ in heaven and earth, the meek inherit the earth. Faith is incredibly expansive. Let me show you that in four ways.

First of all, faith is expansive because it involves our entire relationship to God. It lies at the very heart of that relationship. Listen to what Paul says to the Romans.

¹ Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ² through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. (Romans 5:1-2, NKJV)

So we stand before God in Christ by faith. That’s the heart of our relationship with God. Romans 1:17. Of course, the great classic reformation text simply puts it this way: the just shall live by faith.

¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:17, NKJV)

And again we read in Romans 11:20,

²⁰ Well said. Because of unbelief they were broken off, and you stand by faith. Do not be haughty, but fear. (Romans 11:20, NKJV)

You see, when you compile these texts, what Paul is saying is, the Christian gains and retains and lives access to God through Christ by faith. So the depth of faith is profound. Faith involves knowing, believing, trusting, living. Faith emanates from what scripture calls the heart. It means the very root, the very focal point of our human existence. In scripture, the heart really means the I, the personality, the core person who you are. That’s inherent in you, that makes you different from everyone else.

From the heart, from the core center of who you are, springs faith, faith that regulates your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions toward God. Therefore, the Bible says,

²³ Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23, NKJV)

Now, of course, in one sense, everyone has faith. Everyone believes in something. But the beauty you see of true Christianity is that we believe in the living God through a living savior, Jesus Christ, by means of the living spirit, who gives that gift of faith in our hearts.

So it’s really at the center of our relationship with all three persons of the Trinity. As one Puritan put it, by faith we are bottomed. What he meant today, we would say, centered or grounded in the living God of scripture, through Christ. And this is all you see, the gift of God, as you know very well, I’m sure, the classic text in Ephesians that Paul speaks of when he talks about faith, faith is the gift of God. It’s the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul.

We read in Ephesians 2,

⁸ For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, ⁹ not of works, lest anyone should boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9, NKJV)

So what the Holy Spirit does when he grants us faith is he immediately connects faith, like a pipeline, as it were, to God. And through Christ, we receive a wonderful relationship with God.

Someone compared faith to a straw. If you put a straw in a glass of water and you suck on the end of the straw, the water will go into your mouth.

Jesus Christ is the water of life. Faith is the straw. And the Spirit gives us a sucking reflex so that we can drink in the water of life. And through Christ, we have a real and vital relationship with the living God. So faith is expansive in that it brings us above and beyond ourselves, and it brings us into this wonderful world of a new relationship, a saving relationship with a triune God. That’s the first thing.

Now, the second way faith is expansive is that it’s actually the heart not only of our relationship to God, but of life itself. Life itself. We live by faith, says Paul. Faith is the focal point of my spiritual existence. It’s the root from which springs all the activity of the believer’s entire being. That is all that activity that pleases God. Without faith, it’s impossible to please him, but with faith, impossible not to please him. And so all my rightful activity springs from faith.

Faith is really the heart of my life, my relationship with God and man and my whole life. And so it’s so big, it’s so broad, it’s so expansive that none of my theological language can get my arms around the breath and the height and the depth of faith. Faith is like love. You can’t take it all in. It encompasses my whole life. It’s as broad as it is deep. It embraces the weighty matters of personal salvation, and it gets down to the nitty gritty details of daily living.

The smallest task, mothers, that you have to do—the most menial task at home, that you have to do. If you do it by faith, it pleases God. In fact, Paul says, “Whatsoever you do, do everything by faith to the glory of God, whether you eat or drink, even the smallest daily habits, if you do it by faith, it’s got meaning and value.” John Calvin does so much at pointing this out in his institutes; he actually says something like this: Faith is inseparable from everything in our lives. It’s inseparable from Christian liberty.

It’s inseparable, Calvin shows us from prayer. It’s inseparable from peace, from hope, from love, from repentance. It’s inseparable from self denial. Faith addresses, you see, every area of life. It addresses the hard questions of life. How can you understand affliction apart from faith? How can you cope with loneliness apart from faith? How can you be kept from despair apart from faith? Faith is the heartbeat of all the struggles we have in life, and faith gives credence and drive to mission and evangelism. It’s the presuppositional basis, you see, to our entire worldview and our life view.

Imagine Doctor de Vries going forward to South Africa without faith. If it all depended on him, he’d be the first to admit it would be hopeless. He might as well stay home. But he goes forward by faith, trusting in the Lord to do a great and mighty work.

Well, it’s not only evangelism and missiology over there in South Africa. It’s also when you approach your neighbor and talk to him. It’s when you evangelize your own children and talk to them. It’s faith that drives you. It’s faith that motivates you.

It’s faith that gives life, hope, and vitality to the whole enterprise. Faith encompasses all that we are. It leads us to that grand and glorious vision of the Christian life.

³⁶ For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen. (Romans 11:36, NKJV)

You can only say that. You can only live that by faith. You can’t believe that without faith; faith is the heart of the believer’s entire life.

Thirdly, faith is expansive, not only because it involves my entire relationship to God and it’s the heart of life itself, but it’s also the heart of all my theology. Without faith, I can’t make a break with sin, not from the heart. Without faith, I cannot understand the law and its demands and its spirituality and the joy of walking in the ways of God. Without faith, I can’t understand the gospel. Without faith, I can’t understand justification; I only receive it. By faith, I cannot be sanctified.

Without faith, nothing will work for good in my heart without believing in God. Without faith, I cannot go on rejoicing in the indwelling spirit. I cannot feel without faith the seal of that spirit on my inward being, witnessing with my spirit that I am a child of God, so that I can praise him and give him all the joy and rejoicing of my soul. Faith is the principle behind all truly good works. Faith, says Paul, works through love. Faith is a necessary condition of all the efficacy of grace. Grace is never efficacious.

Apart from faith, grace and faith are not competitors. They work together like two people riding on a tandem bike. Grace is the first rider. Faith is the second rider. They pedal together, grace and faith, a cooperative sola fide, sola gratia, walk hand in hand through all the pastures of the word of God, worshiping God, adoring God, glorifying God. Faith is strengthened by the word. It’s strengthened by the sacraments. What are the sacraments without faith? You see, the whole field of theology is faith.

Every section of theology is centered on faith to bring God the glory, even eschatology, even dying. You cannot die truly well without faith and going to be with the Lord forever. Some people say there’s no faith in heaven. They say hope and faith give way and all that’s left in heaven is love. Well, that’s not quite true. They say something like this. Well, Hebrews 11:1 tells us,

¹ Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1, NKJV)

And therefore, in heaven, since you’ll see everything, you won’t need faith anymore.

Well, that’s only one little part of faith. What really is the heartbeat of faith? The heartbeat of faith is trusting in Christ. That’s the main constituent element of faith. We’ll see that in a moment. But will you be trusting in Christ in heaven? Of course you will. You will live by faith in heaven as well. Not faith in things you haven’t seen, but faith in its core nature, trusting in Jesus.

And that’s why old theologians like William Perkins in the 16th century, when he made a chart of the whole order of salvation, and in the center of that chart, there were all these circles going down all the different aspects of Christ and his humiliation and his exaltation. Over to the left, he had a circle called faith, and there was an arrow from faith to every single aspect of Jesus. He was saying, you can’t think of anything that involves your salvation without having a link to faith.

And in the 20th century, all these volumes that GK Berkauer, GC Berkauer wrote on the various aspects of salvation. He wrote a book on perseverance. He wrote a book on sanctification. He wrote a book on justification. But what did he title all these books? He titled them this faith and justification, faith and sanctification, faith and perseverance, because he said, and rightly so, even though there’s much in Burkauer we don’t agree with. But here he’s very right. All the aspects of salvation are tied to faith. You can’t consider anything apart from faith.

So faith is very expansive because it expands itself through the whole field of theology. And finally, faith is expansive because it’s the heart of all the benefits of salvation. John 7:38 says, it’s the heart of receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit. John 1:12 says, it’s the heart of our acceptance as children of God. Acts 10:43 says, it’s the heart of remission of sins being experienced. Romans 3:25 says, it’s the heart of reconciliation with God. John 3:15-16 says, it’s the heart of life eternal.

Ephesians 3:17 says, it’s the heartbeat of Christ dwelling in our hearts. Ephesians 1:13 says, it’s inseparable from the sealing of our state of grace by the Holy Spirit. One Peter 1:5 says, faith is right at the heart of our being kept in the state of grace. Galatians 3:14 says, it’s at the heart of inheriting the promises of God. Hebrews 4:3 says it’s the heart of entering into the rest of God. You can’t think of one benefit of salvation divorced from faith. Faith restrictive. It’s almost a joke. It’s blasphemy. Faith is expansive.

Faith is rich, glorious, and beautiful. Faith is the only way to live. Dear people, dear young people, the just shall live by faith. Are you living by spirit-worked faith? Is that your life?

Secondly, the expansiveness of faith begins to unveil for us the excellence of faith. The excellence of faith. And I want to show you the excellence of faith from two things. First, from the original words for faith. They’re really quite beautiful. They’re excellent. There are three words in Hebrew that are used for faith.

The first word actually means to confirm or to support something, to give it a good foundation. Sometimes it’s used of people that support you. Or you can say it this way, by implication, to trust or believe in someone. That’s the word Abraham used of Abraham in the classic text for faith. Abraham’s faith in Genesis 15:6,

⁶ And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness. (Genesis 15:6, NKJV)

A second old Hebrew word for faith actually means to confide in or to lean upon someone, and your weight is sustained, and you trust in that person in that way. An example of that text, that usage can be found in Psalm 25: “Oh, my God, I trust in thee. Let me not be put to shame.”

Third word means to seek refuge in the object of faith. To seek refuge. An example of that is Psalm 57:1:

¹ And in the shadow of Your wings I will make my refuge, Until these calamities have passed by. (Psalm 57:1, NKJV)

How do you combine these three words? Aren’t they beautiful? To confirm, to lean on, to take refuge in. And all of them have this element of trusting. Trusting. I think you combine them all in the simple word to lean on. You remember the story I told you once of John Paton, who went to New Hebrides and he couldn’t find a word for faith. He didn’t know how to explain the gospel to the natives. They didn’t have a word for faith. You just can’t make up words that have no meaning.

One day, he’s following a couple of the natives, and they’re walking along, and they came to a very narrow bridge, boys and girls. It looked like a swinging bridge over a large chasm. It looked quite dangerous. But the first native just got on the bridge and he walked straight across, straight across, then tried to tiptoe across. The second native was looking at the bridge, and he was thinking about trying to tiptoe across a little bit and hesitant, and the first native called out from the other side, “Lean on the bridge.”

Peyton said, there’s my word for faith: Lean on. Throw all your dead weight straight on the bridge. Don’t hesitate. Don’t tiptoe. Christianity is not for tiptoe. It’s for people who put their entire being, their entire trust. Faith means I put all my marbles in one basket. I put all my trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. It means total commitment of the total person to the total Christ. That’s the excellence of faith. It’s an all or nothing proposition. You either believe or you don’t believe.

You can’t have a Christianity that says 80% trust in Jesus, 20% in me. That’s the problem, you see, with so many forms of Christianity today, not only Roman Catholicism, but lots of other forms of Christianity today, where you’ve got to do something and God’s got to do something, and you add it together and you get 100%. But in all those forms of Christianity, you see, you don’t have anything solid, because even if you had to do 1%, you’re a sinner, you can fail. There’s no assurance if you have to contribute something to it.

But if all the water of life is Jesus Christ and faith is a straw, and he is 100% your sustenance, 100% your refuge, and you drink of him, and all your salvation is in Christ, and you place all your trust in him, then you know the excellence of faith. Then you have a religion that’s rock solid, because Jesus Christ is my rock and my salvation. Now, the New Testament word, a very well known word.

I’m sure you’ve heard it in Greek, pistis or pistibo, which is used much more than all these three Old Testament words combined in. It’s really the New Testament word. The word pistus, or faith in its noun form, is used 243 times in the New Testament. And the verb form to believe, pistuo, is used also 243 times in the New Testament. And faithful, as it did, form pistol, is used 67 times. You add that together 553 times, more than twice as much as all the New Testament usages for the word hope and the word love.

You know 1 Corinthians 13. Faith, hope, and love. Faith is used more than twice as much as hope and love combined. Faith really outweighs hope and love in constitutive importance, though not in excellence, because Paul says, “I will show you yet a more excellent way.” The most excellent way, ultimately, is through faith coming to love. But still, this is an excellent word. This is an excellent concept. And this word simply means to trust, to put all my confidence in.

So it’s the same idea, really, to lean on and trust and surrender completely my entire being to the object of faith. So the excellence of faith lies precisely in this, that the object of that faith is so excellent that it is good for this life and for the life to come, and it gives us everything we need. Well, what is that object then? Well, the object really is, it’s going to sound like it’s twofold when I say it, but it’s really one fold. The object is nothing other than what our Hutenberg catechism says so beautifully.

What is your only comfort in life and death? Where do you put all your trust? My only comfort in life and death is that I don’t belong to myself, but I belong to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ, who made satisfaction for my sins, delivers me from the power of the devil, and so on. It’s all in Christ.

The person and the work of Jesus Christ is the object of faith. But here, too, faith is so excellent because it’s so manifold and so expansive and so glorious in Jesus, precisely because Christ is so many-sided.

Faith itself is so many-sided. He is very God of very God. So we bow the knee in adoration and worship before him. Wherever there is such worship, there is faith. But he is also prophet, priest, and king. And faith bows before him in each of his offices, or rather his threefold office. It bows before him to be my teacher. We become willing students before the Lord Jesus Christ, because the scripture says, “Because Jesus says, the scripture shall not be broken, cannot be broken.”

We believe that the whole word of God is an unveiling, an exegesis of who Jesus is. And so we study its pages to feed our faith with content, the content of Jesus Christ and him crucified and Jesus Christ and him exalted. And so when we have faith in Christ, we submit our minds to Jesus as prophet, and we make teachable, willing students. But also this faith is so excellent in the object of faith, Jesus, because he’s high priest. And so we submit our hearts and our lives to him to wash away all our sins.

We submit our poor prayers to him to sanctify those prayers and to pray that he will pray for us and his intercessions. And we trust he will, and he does every moment. Because we cannot bless ourselves, we come to him for blessing. And so, as high priests, you see, we look to him in his sacrifice, in his intercession, in his blessing, all three aspects. We need all three. We need this high priest completely. And Faith puts all its trust in him as high priest. And then how we need him as king. Oh, we’re so foolish.

We can’t govern ourselves. We don’t know what direction to go. We need him as our wise governor. We need him as our loving governor. We need him as our firm governor. We need him as our directing governor. We need him in every way. We need to trust him. We need to submit to him. We need to give him the reins of our lives. So the object of faith is excellent, because faith in the prophet means that my mind submits to him. Faith in the king means that I obey and trust him.

And faith in Christ as sacrifice means that I bring to him all my sins and find satisfaction in his cross and in his death, so he meets my every need. That’s the excellence of faith. But if you open old theology books, you’ll find that they say not only is Christ the object of faith, they’ll say also the word and the promises are the objects of faith. The Bible, we believe the Bible is the word of God. What an excellent object of faith the Bible is. The Bible gives us commandments. The Bible gives us threatenings.

The Bible gives us doctrines. The Bible gives us promises. And faith responds to all of these things in different ways, doesn’t it? It responds to commandments with obedience, responds to threatening with holy trembling, responds to great doctrines with belief and conviction. And it responds to promises with joy and rejoicing, and it turns those promises into prayers. But what are all these things? What is the word of God ultimately? And what are the promises ultimately, but things that are yea and amen in Christ Jesus?

So the excellency of the word in all its dimensions is actually excellent only in the relationship to the person of Jesus Christ. The written word reflects the person of the living word. So faith has this grand and glorious excellent object, Jesus Christ and him crucified, revealed to us through the scriptures by the spirit, to our soul.

Are you beginning to get the feeling how wonderful faith is, so expansive, tang has your arms around it? So excellent, because through it I receive the Lord Jesus Christ by means of his word, who meets my every need.

But perhaps you say, “Well, faith is expansive; that’s wonderful. Faith is excellent in its objects; that’s wonderful. But you still haven’t told me what it really is. What are the elements of faith? What’s really involved in faith?” Well, our forefathers studied the word at great length, settled on three so-called acts of faith, or elements of faith, early on in the Reformation. Some of them said there were seven; some of them. One German pietist said there were nine, enlisted nine of them.

But eventually, they settled on the idea that you could really put all the different aspects of faith into three important elements. The first element is knowledge. Faith is not content. Less faith has substance. Faith has propositional. Truth is what theologians say. In other words, you don’t just believe something in thin air. Faith has an object. And that object is, of course, as we’ve seen, God, Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God. And John 1:18 says this very beautifully:

¹⁸ No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. (John 1:18, NKJV)

So you see, just as Jesus is the exegesis of Scripture, so Jesus is the exegesis of His Father. That’s really what the Greek word here, declared, means. Jesus exegetes who His Father is. So when we see Jesus, we see the Father, as He said to. Was it Philip or Thomas in John 14? He who has seen Me has seen the Father.

And so what happens when the Holy Spirit gives us true faith is that through Jesus we have access to God. And the revelation of the Father by the Son through faith brings to us, then, this knowledge of God, so that we really know God, not just intellectually, but that content penetrates our mind, our heart, and affects our hands and our feet. So saving knowledge, the element of saving knowledge in saving faith is an intimate knowledge. In fact, in Greek and Hebrew, the word used to know is actually an intimate term.

And that’s why, even of the intimacy of marriage, the Bible can simply say, Adam knew his wife Eve, and they conceived and had a son. Eve conceived and had a son. In English, it doesn’t work, unfortunately. The word “know” we use for all kinds of things. I know this is a church pew. I know you as a person. I know God. I know there’s a tree out there. We use the same word for everything, even cold, static things like a church pew.

But you see, when it comes to faith, you’ve got to think of this word knowledge, not as something cold and dry, but something warm and breathing and vibrant and alive. Faith is knowing Jesus, drinking in Jesus, tasting Jesus, loving Jesus. The second element of faith is called assent. Assent, or we would say today, probably agreement. And it simply means this: that when you have true faith, you agree from the heart with everything the Bible tells you. You agree with who you are, nothing but a sinner; you agree with who Christ is, glorious savior.

You agree with all the attributes of God, even though maybe you can’t. Maybe some professor who’s an unbeliever in some college, young people can run circles around you still. You have the witness of the Spirit in your soul. You know the word is true. And though you can’t argue back, tit for tat, you know, and you agree with what is written in this book, not just up here, but you agree with it here. You agree with it with all your heart. Westminster divines call it a whole hearted assent to all the truths of scripture.

That’s the second element of faith. And the third element of faith is often called the constitutive element, the basic, the foundational element, which is, of course, trust. Some theologians call it confidence. Trust or confidence. And this element of faith means not only that Jesus Christ is trustworthy, but that you actually trust your life into his hands, your eternity into his hands, your soul into his hands.

One time I was in an airport standing beside someone, and there was an old, old airplane there that was kind of coughing and sputtering and smoke was going out the back end, and it was kind of rusty. And the guy looked at me and said, you think that thing will fly? I said, well, yeah, I believe it will. I mean, how would they be running if it was not going to fly? But then when they called us to go out, you know, what happened? We had to go on that particular plane.

Then it was another thing to say, I believe it will fly, because then I was putting my own life at stake, you see? And that’s what faith does. It’s not just a trust. Oh, yes. Oh, you want to believe in Jesus. Admit you’re a sinner. I’m a sinner. You believe in Jesus. I believe in Jesus. Oh, you’re saved. No, no, no. Faith is much more than that. Faith is surrendering my entire life on the Lord Jesus Christ, trusting in him with my whole being. Faith says, give me Christ or I will perish forever.

Now, this is the kind of faith the Canaanite woman had in Matthew 15. Let me walk you through that, just very briefly. Verses 21 through 28. Isn’t this exactly what’s happening? She comes, you notice, she comes from a far country. She meets Jesus and she says, have mercy on me, O Lord of Nazareth. Despised. No, no. Thou son of David. That’s the Messiah title. How did she know that, coming from a far country? Well, the Holy Spirit was teaching her.

When she heard things about Jesus, she was convicted in her soul that Jesus was the messiah. She embraced that. She came already, even though her faith was small. She came convinced that Jesus was the messiah. In her deepest soul, she had a saving knowledge here of Jesus. And then she has saving ascent, doesn’t she? Look down at verses 26 to 27, “It’s not meat. Not fitting to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs.” Jesus said, as she said, “Truth, Lord. Truth, Lord. I’m a dog. I agree. I agree with who I am.”

²⁶ But He answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.” ²⁷ And she said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” (Matthew 15:26-27, NKJV)

I’m just a filthy beast. A dog was considered an unclean creature. It was like calling someone a pig. Today, Jesus was testing her, of course, showing her her vileness. She said, “I agree.” And you see, when you have true faith, you agree with your own sinfulness, your own unworthiness, your own beast likeness. You say with Asaph, “I was as a beast before thee.” And you agree with who God is, and you worship him. And that’s just what she does. Notice verse 25.

²⁵ Then she came and worshiped Him, saying, “Lord, help me!” (Matthew 15:25, NKJV)

She agrees with who Christ is. She agrees with who she is. And she puts all her trust in Christ, doesn’t she? Truth, Lord. Yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table. Lord, if an earthly master won’t forbear letting a few crumbs slip off his table for his dogs, I trust that thou wilt not let me go away hungry, for thou art the best master in all the world. And I trust thee, Lord. She trusts him. First, he was silent to her. Verse 23, he answered not a word.

Then he seemed to reject her. Verse 24,

²³ But He answered her not a word. And His disciples came and urged Him, saying, “Send her away, for she cries out after us.” ²⁴ But He answered and said, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15:23-24, NKJV)

But verse 25 says, “Then came she.” You see, faith never turns its back on Jesus. Faith keeps looking to Jesus. Faith keeps trusting Jesus. Now when our faith goes out of exercise, we turn our back on Jesus. But faith itself never turns us back on Jesus. Faith keeps trusting, even when it seems to be rejected. Even when the answer seems to be impossible. Faith presses on. Then came she.

After she faced silence and rejection, she kept on trusting. This is saving faith. And Jesus says it was great, old woman. Verse 28. Great in the original Greek. You could translate that. Mature. Mature is thy faith. He was maturing her through these three tests, wasn’t he? Through the test of silence, through the test of rejection, and then through the test of insult. It’s only for dogs. And so God uses testings in our lives sometimes silence. When we don’t get an answer to prayer right away, sometimes rejection.

When he seems to push us away, things go from bad to worse, sometimes even insult. When we see our vileness, he’s testing us. To do what? To mature our faith so that we learn to trust him all the more. And how is that possible? How is it possible that when you get rejected and get the silent treatment and get insulted, that your faith can grow? Well, it’s because when he seems to push us away with one hand, the Holy Spirit is drawing us with the other.

As Peter puts it, he’s silently working with inner strength in our soul so that when we go through the tunnels of affliction, the dark times of our lives, and we think God has abandoned us somehow, when we break out through the tunnel back into the sunshine of his grace and we look back, our faith is stronger than ever before. That is the gift of the Holy Spirit. He’s the one who plants it. He’s the one who strengthens it. He’s the one who preserves it. And we are active in the exercise of it, to be sure.

But without the Holy Spirit, we couldn’t keep it one day. What a beautiful thing this is. Knowledge, scent, and trust all work together so that we grow stronger and stronger in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now then, how do we actually experience these elements? What exactly happens when a person believes? How does faith become experiential? That’s the closing question I want to consider with you this morning. I’ve got just four things to say. First of all, faith is self-emptying.

You never, never, never get any credit to yourself for the faith you exercise; it empties you of everything. Faith is whole, centered. You don’t take a drink of something, enjoy the drink, and then take out the straw and say, what a wonderful straw. Faith is wonderful. But you don’t focus on faith for faith’s sake. You focus on faith because of what faith brings to you. It’s not the beautiful straw that’s important. It’s the object. It’s the drink. It’s the water of life that’s important. So faith empties me. Faith empties me of all my righteousness.

Faith actually does two things: It discovers to me my unrighteousness, and then it uncovers to me the righteousness of Jesus. So I’m hungry for and I’m thirsty for, and I drink it in. That’s what Jesus was doing with this kind of woman, emptying of herself through these siftings and trials so that finally, her prayers reduced to three words: Lord, help me. Our shortest prayers are often our best, aren’t they? When God drives us into need and we get emptied to be filled with Christ’s righteousness.

But when we experience faith, we are emptied of ourselves, we’re driven to his righteousness. Secondly, we then wholeheartedly, as I mentioned moments ago, assent to the truths of the gospel. And what that looks like, what that is shaped like experientially, is that I repudiate all my self-righteousness and I abandon all my self-merit, and I surrender to the gospel. I surrender to these truths. I fall into the outstretched arms of God. And when that happens, you see, I experientially in my soul by faith, I flee with my soul’s poverty to Christ’s riches.

I flee with my soul’s guilt to Christ as reconciler. I flee with my soul’s bondage to Christ as liberator. I say, with top lighting, nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling. And then, thirdly, faith not only empties us and moves us to wholehearted assent, but it also enables us to, as the Puritans put it, close with Christ in warm, loving embrace. I lay hold of Christ. I lay hold of his righteousness by spirit-worked faith, and I experience pardon and peace that passes under sin standing.

Calvin puts it this way. Faith justifies me in no other way than as it introduces me into a participation of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Faith apprehends him, closes with him, grasps him, clings to him, relies on him. So all these words in the New Testament that speak of the activities of faith become my experience. Coming to Christ, taking Christ, hearing, seeing, trusting, embracing, knowing, rejoicing, loving, triumphing. In Christ, in Christ, in Christ, says Paul 163 times. He says in his epistles, believers are in Christ. Faith does that. It gets us into Jesus.

So we clasp Christ, as Martin Luther put it so beautifully. I hope I’m going to repeat this enough till you really get it in your memory bank as a ring clasps its jewel. That’s what faith does. You remember that woman, you women don’t go around saying, look at my ring. You don’t look at faith. Faith is the ring; it clasps the jewel. When you get engaged, you show people the jewel.

So Christ must be not only the diamond that shines in the bosom of every sermon, as Charles Bridges put it, but Christ must be the diamond that shines in the very bosom of our lives. But that diamond can only shine when it is held there by faith. And so when we experience faith, we experience this appropriation of Jesus that weds our soul to Christ, betroths us to the savior, and we experience pardon and acceptance in the beloved, and our souls become partaker of every covenant, mercy.

And then finally, fourthly, faith not only empties us experientially, moves us to wholehearted ascent experientially, and enables us to close with Christ experientially, but we live out of Christ experientially. From that day forward, Christ becomes increasingly our life, being united to him, being objectively possessed of all his benefits, we become subjectively, experientially acquainted with those benefits. Christ outside of us is the ground of our justification. But Christ within us by faith, spirit worked, faith is the ground of our ongoing sanctification. And so Robert Marie McShane put it this way.

Faith, by uniting us to Christ, makes everything ours in Christ, so that no one ever needs anything more than is freely given him in Christ. You see, faith joins me to him. It’s like a couple getting married. It weds me to Jesus, but then they live the married life out of love. We live the married life with Jesus out of faith, hope and love.

We get cemented to him, joined to him by faith, and then we live out our lives by faith, drawing on his riches, drawing on him as prophet, drawing on him as priest, drawing on his king, searching the word, using good books, using prayer, using fellowship with the children of God, using every spiritual discipline, perhaps using journaling, whatever it may be, to meditate on Christ, to embrace Christ, to live out of Christ, to focus on Christ, evangelizing others about Christ. Oh, we want to know him better. We want to grow in him more.

We want to live out of him all the days of our life. Now let me close just with one application. At this point you’re probably going to say, but do I have any faith at all? I’m so weak. I’m a bad evangelist. I can go days without thinking about Christ the way I should. I’m a sinner. Maybe I’m no Christian at all. Now hear me well. Faith itself never doubts. Once you have faith, you’re in Christ. True faith, you’re in Christ. But the believer often doubts, and faith is too often indeed out of exercise.

The question is not whether you always have the exercise of faith, and no one would ever be saved except a very self-assuming hypocrite. And he wouldn’t be saved either; he’d just be deceiving himself. The question is, do you know these exercises of faith at all? And if your yes is only a little whispered yes, “I cannot deny I know something of it,” you have true, saving faith. Maybe not as much as you want, of course not as much as you want. But you can grow in it, and the Spirit can give you more.

Ask him for more, but don’t deny what he has given. Don’t deny the day of small things. Remember this: if your faith is so weak that it’s like one thin spider’s thread, but it’s connected to the rock of salvation, the object of your faith is just as strong as if you had strong faith.

So don’t deny that God has done, but ask for growth in spirit work faith that you may more and more, in thought, in word, and in action, live out of Jesus Christ by spirit worked faith, so that the Lord himself might say also of you, old woman, old man, o teenager, old boy, old girl, “Mature is thy faith.” Amen.