26 Life-Changing Lessons From Matthew 15: Applying Matthew 15 to Your Daily Life

Religious men who knew the Scriptures walked away from Jesus over one sentence. A woman who knew almost nothing about Israel’s God would not leave him alone. That collision sits at the centre of the chapter, and it is why these lessons from Matthew 15 land where they do.

You can be near the Bible and far from God. You can come from nowhere and still get to Christ. Matthew 15 puts both possibilities in front of you and asks which one is describing your life right now.

The chapter refuses to let anyone stay a spectator. It goes after the heart, and then it feeds the hungry.

Brief Summary of Matthew 15

Scribes and Pharisees come from Jerusalem and accuse Jesus’ disciples of breaking the tradition of the elders by eating with unwashed hands. Jesus answers by showing how their traditions had cancelled God’s own commandment, then teaches the crowd that a man is defiled by what comes out of his heart rather than by what goes into his mouth.

He leaves for Tyre and Sidon, where a Canaanite woman begs him to deliver her daughter and receives the words “great is thy faith.” He then heals crowds on a mountain and feeds four thousand men with seven loaves.

Running through all of it is the heart God is actually looking at.

Lesson 1: Tradition That Cancels a Command Is Not Devotion (Matthew 15:3, 6)

Matthew 15:3, 6: “Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?… Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.” (KJV)

The Pharisees had a rule about washing hands before eating. It never came from the law of Moses. It came from the tradition of the elders, the body of oral rules the Pharisees treated as binding, and they used it to accuse the disciples of sin.

Jesus refuses to argue about hands. He goes after something far more serious. Their tradition allowed a man to declare his money a gift dedicated to God, and once he had said the words, he was considered free from using that money to support his aging parents. God said honour your father and mother. The tradition said you may keep your goods and call it devotion.

A rule invented to guard the commandment ended up cancelling it. Jesus names it exactly: they had made the commandment of God of none effect.

Order, custom, and the settled habits of a church are a different matter entirely. What he condemns here is a religious practice that lets a person disobey God while feeling holy about it.

Where has a religious habit of yours started competing with something God actually commanded?

Read also: Parable of the Pharisee and Publican Meaning

Lesson 2: Ask What Your Religion Is Letting You Off From (Matthew 15:5-6)

Matthew 15:5-6: “But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free.” (KJV)

You would never say the words out loud. But the machinery is easy to build.

The man in this verse did more than neglect his parents. He had a reason, and the reason sounded spiritual. His devotion was the excuse, and he walked away from his father’s need with his conscience intact. The word Jesus uses for what he thought he had become should stop us. He shall be free.

Serving at church can become the reason a marriage is starved. Bible study can become the reason a hard conversation is never had. Giving can become the reason a debt is never paid. In every case the activity is good, and the place it is covering is not.

Jesus aims this at religious people, and an honest reader will feel it, because it is far easier to see this loophole in a first-century Pharisee than in this week’s calendar. Take the thing you know you are avoiding, and ask whether some good duty has become your permission to keep avoiding it.

Lesson 3: Worship Can Be Sincere and Still Be Empty (Matthew 15:8-9)

Matthew 15:8-9: “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” (KJV)

Worship can be real in effort and empty in result. That is the warning Jesus lifts out of Isaiah and lays on men who were genuinely religious.

He never accuses them of skipping worship. They drew near. They honoured him with their lips. The mouth was in the right place while the heart stood somewhere else, and God, who sees the heart, called the whole thing vain.

These words were spoken over people who were still in the building. Songs can be sung by a heart that has drifted a thousand miles. Prayers can be prayed at a distance.

The cure is a new heart rather than a better performance. God’s answer to a far-off heart has never been to demand more religion from it. He promises in Ezekiel 36:26, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.” What you cannot manufacture, he gives.

A man can sing every word and still stand outside. God is looking past your mouth.

Lesson 4: Nothing You Eat Can Defile You, but What Rises Out of You Can (Matthew 15:11, 18)

Matthew 15:11, 18: “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man… those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart.” (KJV)

What actually makes a person unclean before God?

Jesus called the crowd over and settled the question in one sentence. Food goes in and passes through. What comes out of a man comes from a deeper place, and the defilement lives there. The Pharisees had built an entire system around what a man touched and what a man ate, and Jesus told them plainly that unwashed hands defile nobody.

This is no licence for loose living. He says in the very next breath that adulteries and thefts and false witness are defiling. His point is that the outside is where the source shows, and the source itself lies further in.

So the fight is further back than most of us take it. A person can manage his behaviour for years and never once go to the room where the trouble is actually kept.

Have you been scrubbing the outside of a life whose inside you have never let God near?

Read also: Lessons from the Cursed Fig Tree

Lesson 5: Sin Is Already Underway Before Anyone Sees It (Matthew 15:19)

Matthew 15:19: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” (KJV)

Read the list again and notice what stands at the head of it. Evil thoughts. Jesus puts them in the same catalogue as murder and adultery, and he puts them first.

Most believers would never think of a thought as defiling. It has hurt nobody. It has not been said out loud. Nobody knows. That is exactly why Jesus names it, because God is willing to call a thing what it is long before it becomes an act.

Left alone, an evil thought can grow. Scripture stops short of saying that every wrong thought ends in murder, and neither should we. What Jesus does say is that whatever may one day walk out of your mouth or your hands is being fed right now, in a place nobody else can see.

Despair is the wrong response to that. Take the thought to Christ while it is still only a thought, before it has a life and a history and other people caught up in it.

The battle you keep losing in public may be one you have never once fought in private.

Lesson 6: Blind Leaders Do Not Fall Alone (Matthew 15:14)

Matthew 15:14: “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” (KJV)

Both fall. That is the part of the sentence that should hold you.

The blind leader ends in the ditch, which surprises nobody. The man who followed him ends in the ditch too, and his sincerity does not pull him out. He trusted the wrong guide, and trusting was not enough. Jesus is describing teachers who were confident, respected, and wrong. They had the training and the standing. What they lacked was sight, and everyone who followed them inherited their blindness.

You are responsible for who you follow, and not only for what you believe but for who you let form what you believe. A teacher’s platform, warmth, or following is no evidence at all that he can see, and a whole congregation can be led somewhere none of them would have chosen with open eyes.

Test the teacher you love most against the Word itself, the way the Bereans searched the Scriptures daily to see whether the things Paul preached were so.

Lesson 7: Jesus Did Not Chase the Offended (Matthew 15:12-14)

Matthew 15:12-14: “Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying?… Let them alone.” (KJV)

What do you do when the truth offends someone?

The disciples clearly expected Jesus to fix it. They came to him the way a nervous church member comes to a pastor: do you realise the important people are upset? He does not soften the saying, chase them down, or explain himself. He says three words. Let them alone.

He had already given them the Scriptures, the diagnosis, and the way out. They chose offence, and he let them carry it.

None of this licences rudeness. He let them go over the truth, not over his manner. Plenty of Christians offend people with their tone and then comfort themselves that they are suffering for righteousness, which is a different thing entirely.

Still, a believer who cannot bear for anyone to be displeased with him will eventually trim the truth to keep the peace. Jesus refused to trim it even when the men walking away were the most respected men in the room.

Read also: 20 Hindrances to Spiritual Growth

Lesson 8: Say You Do Not Understand Instead of Pretending You Do (Matthew 15:15-16)

Matthew 15:15-16: “Then answered Peter and said unto him, Declare unto us this parable. And Jesus said, Are ye also yet without understanding?” (KJV)

Many believers sit under teaching for years with a question they never ask, because asking it would show how little they know.

Peter had walked with Jesus, heard the sermons, and watched the miracles, and he still did not understand this one. So he said so. The reply comes back sharp. Are ye also yet without understanding? Jesus is genuinely disappointed that his own disciples are this slow.

And then, having said it, he explains the whole thing anyway, patiently, from the belly to the heart. The rebuke did not cost Peter the explanation. He was the one who asked, and he was the one who understood.

Confusion that is never voiced hardens. Years later a believer can still be nodding along to something he never grasped, and the silence that felt safe has cost him a decade of understanding. Ask the question you have been hiding. The Lord who answered Peter will not be embarrassed by you.

Lesson 9: Jesus Walked Toward the People Religion Shut Out (Matthew 15:21)

Matthew 15:21: “Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.” (KJV)

The direction he walks is the sermon.

He has just finished a confrontation about ceremonial cleanness with the most respected religious men in Israel. He has just said that a man is defiled from within. And the very next thing he does is leave Jewish territory and head north into Gentile country, toward the people that tradition would have called unclean.

Matthew sets these two things side by side on purpose. The men who spent their lives avoiding defilement are the ones Jesus calls hypocrites. The people they would not have eaten with are the ones he goes to find.

God does not share our instinct to sort people into those worth reaching and those too far gone. The company Jesus keeps in this chapter is a rebuke to every line we have drawn.

There are people your circle has written off without ever saying so, and Christ is already walking in their direction.

Lesson 10: The Cry That Annoys You May Be the Faith God Is About to Commend (Matthew 15:23)

Matthew 15:23: “And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.” (KJV)

Somebody’s need has felt like an inconvenience to you. That is the honest place to start with this verse.

Cruelty had little to do with it. The disciples were tired, they were being followed by a shouting woman, and they wanted the noise to stop. Send her away. Notice the reason they give. Her daughter’s condition never comes up, and neither does the merit of her request. She was crying after us.

Her persistence was an irritation to them and faith to Jesus. Within a few sentences the woman they wanted removed becomes the woman he holds up as an example, and there is no record that the disciples ever saw it coming. The church can still do this. The person who keeps asking, keeps calling, keeps needing, becomes the person we manage rather than the person we love.

Who have you been trying to get rid of that heaven has been watching with approval?

Read also: Parable of the Persistent Widow

Lesson 11: God’s Silence Is Not God’s Refusal (Matthew 15:23)

Matthew 15:23: “But he answered her not a word.” (KJV)

What do you do when heaven says nothing at all?

She cried out to the Son of David and got silence. No refusal, no explanation. Nothing. Anyone who has prayed through a long illness or a child’s rebellion knows the particular weight of that.

The text never tells us why he was silent. Preachers often say he was testing her, and that may well be true, but Matthew never says it, so we should hold it loosely. What Matthew does tell us is where the silence ended. It ended in “great is thy faith” and a healed girl.

So the silence gets read backwards, from what he does at the end of it, rather than from a motive we assign him in the middle. That is the only honest comfort here, and it is enough to stand on.

Your silence may not end the way hers did, and nobody should promise you that it will. But the silence of Christ has never once meant that Christ stopped caring, and this chapter is the proof.

Lesson 12: When Your Arguments Run Out, Worship and Ask (Matthew 15:25)

Matthew 15:25: “Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.” (KJV)

She had been ignored once and refused once. She had no covenant, no standing, and no argument left, so she stopped arguing. She came closer instead of backing away, she worshipped, and she prayed three words. Lord, help me.

There is no lecture in it, no bargaining, no list of reasons she deserved an answer. It is the shortest prayer in the chapter, and it comes from the person with the least to offer. Worship and a request, and nothing else in her hands.

Long prayers are fine, and Scripture is full of them. But there is a kind of praying that is really a defence of ourselves in front of God, and it can run for a very long time without ever once asking him for anything. We explain, we justify, we rehearse our record, and the asking never quite arrives.

When your case has collapsed and you have nothing left to bring, come the way she came. Worship, and ask.

Lesson 13: Jesus’ Hardest Sentence Was Not Contempt (Matthew 15:24, 26)

Matthew 15:24, 26: “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel… It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” (KJV)

Most readers arrive at this verse already offended, and it deserves a straight answer.

Jesus states his mission before he uses the image. In his earthly ministry he was sent to Israel first, and that order was promise rather than prejudice. Paul explains the same order in Romans 15:8-9, saying Christ became a minister to the circumcision to confirm the promises made to the fathers, and that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. Israel first, and then the nations. She is standing right at the edge of that “and then.”

The word Jesus chooses is the household one, the little dog under the family table, rather than the street term the rabbis threw at Gentiles. That softens the saying without making it soft, and she plainly felt its weight. What she hears in it, though, is a table with bread on it, and she presses in.

Christ has never yet turned away a person who came to him for mercy, and this scene, which looks like the exception, turns out to be the proof.

Read also: Lessons from Acts 10 Summary

Lesson 14: Faith That Takes the Low Place and Still Asks (Matthew 15:27)

Matthew 15:27: “And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” (KJV)

How does anyone keep asking after an answer like that?

She agrees with him. That is the first stunning thing about her reply.

She defends neither her dignity nor her place. Truth, Lord. And then she takes the very image that should have ended the conversation and turns it into her argument. If the children are being fed like that, there will be crumbs, and crumbs from that table are enough for a Canaanite mother.

Her words are faith rather than technique. Jesus commends her faith, and his mercy is what heals the girl, and if we turn her answer into a formula we will end up telling broken people that their prayers failed because they did not push hard enough. Scripture says no such thing anywhere.

What she models is a posture. She takes the low place honestly and asks boldly anyway, because she has understood something about the abundance of Christ. You do not have to be worthy of the table to be fed from it. You only have to come to the one who owns it.

Lesson 15: Great Faith Is Not the Property of the Credentialled (Matthew 15:28)

Matthew 15:28: “Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” (KJV)

You may have assumed, without ever examining it, that the people with the most Bible knowledge have the most faith. This chapter takes that apart.

Nowhere in Matthew 15 does Jesus commend a scholar. The men with the Scriptures, the training, and the pedigree get “ye hypocrites.” His own disciples get “are ye also yet without understanding?” A Canaanite woman with no covenant and no credentials gets “O woman, great is thy faith.”

She is one of only two people in Matthew’s Gospel who receive that commendation, and the other is a Roman centurion. Both were outsiders. Both believed that Christ could do what he said, and both came and asked.

Great faith, in this chapter, is measured by how hard a person holds on to Christ, and she held on with everything she had.

That is either offensive or it is the best news a struggling believer has heard all year, and which one it is depends entirely on where you have been putting your confidence.

Lesson 16: She Went Home Holding Nothing but His Word (Matthew 15:28)

Matthew 15:28: “And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.” (KJV)

The healing happened where she could not see it. Her daughter was miles away, in a house in Tyre or Sidon, and nothing about that roadside changed when Jesus spoke. There was no shout, no sign, no proof in her hands. She had a sentence, and she turned around and started walking home on it.

Faith often looks exactly like that. God speaks, and then there is a road to walk before you see anything. The promise is real, your circumstances have not moved yet, and the walk between those two facts is where most of the Christian life is actually lived.

The word of Christ loses none of its truth for being unverified in your hands. She found her daughter well because he had said it, not because she had seen it. Go home on what he has said, even while the house still looks the way it looked when you left it.

Read also: 10 Reasons to Have Faith in God

Lesson 17: Carry to Jesus the People You Cannot Heal (Matthew 15:30)

Matthew 15:30: “And great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus’ feet; and he healed them.” (KJV)

There is somebody you cannot fix. You have tried, and by now you know that you cannot.

Look at what the crowds do here. The lame did not walk to Jesus. The blind did not find him. Somebody carried them up a mountain, laid them at his feet, and stepped back.

That was the whole extent of their power, and it was enough, because the healing was never theirs to do in the first place. The verse says he healed them, and it records no condition, no sermon, and no delay.

Intercession is that carrying. It is what remains when advice has failed and money will not help and the person has stopped listening to you altogether. You cannot open a blind heart or soften a hard one, and you were never asked to. You were asked to bring them.

Bring them to his feet again, lay them down, and leave them there.

Lesson 18: Real Healing Ends in Worship, Not Just Relief (Matthew 15:31)

Matthew 15:31: “Insomuch that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they glorified the God of Israel.” (KJV)

What does a real answer from God do to the person who receives it?

Here it produced worship. They could have pressed for more, and they glorified God instead.

The detail worth noticing is which God they glorified. This crowd was gathered in a region where Israel’s God was not their God, and the healings did more than make them grateful to a remarkable man. The miracles pointed past themselves to the God of Israel, and the crowd followed the sign all the way to the one it was pointing at.

That is what an answer from God is meant to do. It is a strange thing about the human heart that an answered prayer can leave a person more attached to the gift than to the Giver. The relief gets banked, the crisis passes, and the God who moved is forgotten by Friday.

The last time God plainly answered you, did anyone around you end up thinking more highly of him because of it?

Lesson 19: He Had Compassion Before Anyone Complained (Matthew 15:32)

Matthew 15:32: “Then Jesus called his disciples unto him, and said, I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat.” (KJV)

Nobody asked for bread. The most easily missed miracle in the chapter happens before a single loaf is broken.

The crowd had been with him three days. They had not complained, and there is no record that anyone raised the subject. Jesus raises it himself. He had been counting the days they had gone without food while he taught and healed, and he says so out loud.

He is the kind of Saviour who moves before he is told. Psalm 103:13-14 says the LORD pities them that fear him, for he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust. The compassion of Christ flows from his knowledge of us rather than from our eloquence about our needs.

Some of you carry needs you have never prayed about, because they feel too small or too tiring to raise again. He has already counted the days.

Let him care about the thing you have stopped mentioning.

Read also: When Its Hard to Pray

Lesson 20: God Provides for the Road Home, Not Just for the Moment (Matthew 15:32)

Matthew 15:32: “and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way.” (KJV)

Some of what God provides only makes sense long after he gives it.

Read the reason Jesus gives for this miracle. It is the walk home. He refuses to send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way. His eye rests on a road they have yet to start walking, a stretch of country he can see and they have given no thought to, and he feeds them for it.

God’s provision has a longer reach than the moment you are standing in. He is supplying you for a stretch of road that is still ahead, which is why so much of what he gives makes better sense later than it does now.

The strength you were given last year was for a hill you had not seen yet. The Lord who fed four thousand people for a road they had not begun to walk knows exactly how far you still have to go.

Lesson 21: Forgetting Yesterday’s Bread Leaves You Doubting Today (Matthew 15:33)

Matthew 15:33: “And his disciples say unto him, Whence should we have so much bread in the wilderness, as to fill so great a multitude?” (KJV)

You may have watched God provide before and still find yourself panicking now.

These are the same men who had filled twelve baskets with leftovers from five thousand people. They had held the bread. They had carried the baskets. And standing in front of a smaller crowd with a bigger problem, their honest question is where on earth would we get bread out here.

The miracle had not survived in their memory as an answer to the next crisis. Jesus lets it pass for now, though he brings it up later in Matthew 16:9-10, asking whether they still do not remember the five loaves and the seven.

Forgetting is a spiritual problem rather than a memory problem. What God did for you last year was meant to be evidence, and evidence you cannot remember cannot help you in the crisis you are standing in today.

Yesterday’s bread was testimony, and you were supposed to keep it.

Lesson 22: He Starts With What Is Already in Your Hands (Matthew 15:34)

Matthew 15:34: “And Jesus saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven, and a few little fishes.” (KJV)

The disciples answer the impossible with a question, and Jesus answers their question with an inventory. How many loaves have ye.

He gives them no lecture about faith and produces no bread out of thin air to prove a point. He asks what they already have, and it is nothing worth mentioning: seven loaves and a few little fishes, which is precisely why nobody had bothered to mention it until he asked.

The thing they had written off is the thing he multiplies, and that is his consistent way through the whole of Scripture. He takes the little that is genuinely in your hands rather than the greatness you keep wishing you had. Most of us are waiting to have more before we offer anything. More time, more money, more knowledge, more confidence.

Bring him the seven loaves you have been embarrassed about, and let him do the rest.

Read also: How to Pray Like Jesus

Lesson 23: The Bread Multiplied in the Handing Out (Matthew 15:36)

Matthew 15:36: “And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.” (KJV)

You have been fed by other people’s hands more often than you have stopped to notice.

Christ broke the bread here, and the disciples carried it. Follow the route the food takes: it goes from his hands into theirs, and from theirs into the hands of four thousand hungry people, and somewhere along that line it keeps being enough.

The men who had just said the thing could not be done are the men through whom it is done, and nobody records that any of them saw the bread grow. They kept giving away what they had been handed, and it kept coming.

God’s supply still tends to travel through people. The comfort you needed, someone carried to you. The meal, the money, the word at the right hour, all of it came through hands that were holding it for a moment on the way to yours.

Whatever Christ has put in your hands was given to be passed on.

Lesson 24: He Gives More Than Enough (Matthew 15:37)

Matthew 15:37: “And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the broken meat that was left seven baskets full.” (KJV)

Christ gives more than the need requires. Seven loaves went in, and seven full baskets came out after every person there had eaten as much as they wanted. They ended with more than they started with. Not a careful ration measured out so that everyone got a little and nobody got much, but a crowd that was filled and bread left over lying on the ground.

That is the character of the God we are dealing with, and most of us pray as though we were dealing with someone else entirely. We ask him for the minimum. We assume the supply is thin and our request had better be modest. The bread on the ground at the end of this miracle was a statement about him, left there for four thousand people to see.

What have you been asking God for in a small voice, as though he were running out?

Lesson 25: The Insiders Walked Away Offended, and the Outsider Would Not Leave (Matthew 15:12, 32)

Matthew 15:12, 32: “the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying… they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat.” (KJV)

Now stand back and look at the whole chapter at once.

The men who owned the Scriptures, who had studied them and taught them and built their lives around them, left over a single sentence they did not like. A Canaanite woman with no covenant refused to leave when he said nothing to her at all. And a crowd of nobodies stayed with him three days on empty stomachs rather than go home.

That is the argument Matthew is making. Nearness to the Bible is a different thing from nearness to God. Position, training, and heritage produced not one ounce of faith in the men who had the most of all three.

The LORD looketh on the heart, Samuel was told in 1 Samuel 16:7, and the whole of Matthew 15 is that sentence acted out in public.

You can be inside the building and outside the kingdom, and you can come from nowhere and be commended by Christ himself.

Lesson 26: Christ Is the Bread for Children and Crumb-Takers Alike (Matthew 15:26-27, 36)

Matthew 15:26-27, 36: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs. And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs… And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them.” (KJV)

Bread runs through this whole chapter like a thread.

It starts as bread eaten with unwashed hands, the thing the Pharisees were fighting about. It becomes the children’s bread, which a Gentile mother is told is not hers. It becomes the crumbs she asks for and receives. And it ends with seven loaves broken in Christ’s own hands until a crowd of outsiders is filled.

One question has been running underneath the chapter the whole way through. Who gets fed at God’s table?

The answer belongs to the ones who came hungry and would not go away, and the men from Jerusalem would never have guessed it. Paul told the Ephesians they had once been aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and that in Christ Jesus those who were far off are made nigh by his blood (Ephesians 2:12-13). The woman under the table and the children seated at it are eating the same bread now, and the bread is him.

Come and eat. He has never once run out.

Key Themes Behind the Lessons From Matthew 15

• The heart, not the hands, is what God examines.
• Human tradition can cancel the very commandment it claims to protect.
• Faith is commended wherever Christ finds it, inside Israel or far outside it.
• The compassion of Christ moves before anyone asks him for anything.
• Christ is the bread God sets on the table for everyone who will come hungry.

Frequently Asked Questions About Matthew 15

Related Articles to Read Next

• Book of Matthew Summary by Chapter 1 28
• Lessons from John 15
• Reasons Why Our Prayers Are Not Answered
• Lessons from the Life of Judas Iscariot

Conclusion

Two kinds of people meet Jesus in Matthew 15, and what separates them has nothing to do with what they knew. One group came with the Scriptures in their hands and left offended. The others came with nothing at all and were fed until there was bread on the ground.

These lessons from Matthew 15 press on the one thing God is actually looking at. He looks past your hands, your record, and everything you have to show for your religion, straight to your heart, and he sees whether it is near him or only near his things.

You know which of the two you have been living as. So come the way the woman came, with no defence and no credentials, and ask him for a new heart. He has never turned that request away, and there is more than enough bread on his table.