You’ve probably noticed, if you’ve reflected at all on your friends and people you work with, that some people do everything well. I supposed by contrast you know people who don’t seem to do anything well. Most of us do some things well and other things not so well. And then there are people who really do everything well. David, a great king, was one of those people. He spoke well. He ruled well. He fought well. But I think above all, he knew how to give thanks well. The text we’re going to look at is a text in which he tells us how to do that.
The third point of application in this story is a great encouragement for hurting people, especially those who know themselves to be unclean. You know I talk to a lot of people in the course of a year, and people are not always forthright about the things that are rankling deep in their heart. But if you have opportunity to talk to them and pursue it long enough, many people have experiences in their past of which they are so ashamed that they almost cry out thinking themselves to be unclean in different ways.
The second thing is that in her faith she acknowledged her need. That is, she had her faith in Jesus and she knew that there wasn’t any use putting faith in herself, even to the point of being able to appeal to Jesus on the basis of something that she may have been. She uses that powerful word “mercy” in her first approach. “Lord, Son of David,” she says, “have mercy upon me!” Now mercy is favor upon people who don’t deserve it. As a matter of fact, it’s favor upon those who deserve the exact opposite.
In the latter part of the discussion about clean and unclean things from Matthew 15, Jesus went on to say that these Pharisees think that the way you get defiled is by touching things or by eating things. It’s not what you eat or what you touch that makes you dirty. What makes you dirty is your heart, because the thing that defiles a man or a woman is what comes out and not what goes in.
