You’re believing God for something but you haven’t gotten an answer or the answer you desire. How do you respond? Do you give up and walk away or do you persevere, confidently trusting that God will come through for you? There are only two people that I’ve come across in the New Testament that Jesus said had “great faith”. Both were gentiles. Great Faith is something that Jesus wants us to have. Most, if not all the people that Jesus described as having “no or little faith”, were either His disciples, His followers, or people who were very familiar with Him, including those He grew up with in Nazareth and the Pharisees. The people who are ‘closest’ to Christ are often the ones who exhibit the least faith and this is unfortunately still the case today, even in the Churches. This post focuses on the great faith of one who was far from Christ (and the Jews), a Canaanite/gentile woman, and the lessons we can all learn from her. God bless and keep the faith!
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I recently started studying the Book of Matthew and was today studying chapter 15. What stood out to me was in verse 28 where Jesus described this gentile Canaanite woman as having “great faith”. This got me thinking, why was she described as having “great faith”? It was such an honorable description. Then I recalled that earlier in the book, in Matthew 8:10, Jesus had used a similar terminology to describe the faith of the Roman Centurion.
I asked ChatGPT how many people in the Bible did Jesus describe as having great faith. In studying its response, I noticed that there were only two such individuals – the Canaanite (gentile) woman and the Roman (gentile) Centurion. In this note, I focus on the great faith of the Canaanite woman and lessons that we can learn about why Jesus deemed her faith so great.
The Great Faith of the Canaanite / Gentile Woman
This woman’s story is found in two places in the New Testament: Matthew 15:21-28 and Mark 7:24-30. The Matthew version emphasizes her perseverance and the greatness of her faith, while the Mark version emphasizes her background and perhaps how much of an outcast she was in the sight of the Jews, which puts the solidity of her faith in proper context.