Sermon Tone Analysis
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I saw a T-shirt this week that I’m thinking of getting to wear around the house.
It read as follows: “If I said I will fix it, I will fix it.
There’s no need to remind me every six months.”
Now, it would be appropriate here for me to stop and note that Annette isn’t laughing.
Maybe this just hits a little too close to home for her to find it funny.
We have a wonderful marriage, and we love each other very much, but it may surprise you to hear that it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.
Then again, most of you know me well enough by now that you’re probably not surprised by that at all.
We do have our sore spots.
And for Annette, one of the sore spots is my office at home.
I like to think of it as a glorious mess.
Annette just thinks of it as a mess.
Last year, about this time, when I was just finishing a semester at school, she suggested I might want to straighten it up a bit.
And then, life intervened, and I ran out of time to do it before the next semester started and I got too busy.
Then, when spring rolled around and I had graduated from school, she mentioned it again, and we actually spent a bit of time separating things into piles on Saturday, and I got distracted, so we didn’t finish.
The piles of documents and books remain, and they’ve since been joined by other piles.
I haven’t forgotten that it needs to be done, but organizing and filing stuff is overwhelming to me, so I keep finding reasons to put it off.
She hasn’t said anything in a while, but I know she still wants me to get everything straightened up, and I fully expect her to gently suggest that I take care of it sometime in the near future.
Sometimes when she makes these suggestions I think she reminds me of the persistent widow in the parable of Jesus that Luke records in Luke, chapter 18.
Turn there, if you will, and let’s take a look at it together.
Now, the context of Jesus’ parables is always important to understanding the thing He was teaching with these stories.
So, the context here is that Jesus has been telling His disciples about the still-coming day of His return for those who have followed Him in faith.
We looked at a brief portion of that teaching in a parallel passage last week.
Remember that He said it would be like the days of Noah, when people were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage.
In other words, they were living as if this life on earth is all there is.
And His point was that people need to be ready for His return.
Those who are lost need to place their faith in Him as their Savior and Lord while there is still time.
And those who have already placed their faith in Him need to be doing the work He gave us to do while He is gone.
And He continues this teaching in chapter 18, where He discusses how they can maintain hope in His absence and in the presence of the trials they would face.
Let’s pick up in verse 1 of chapter 18.
Now, the first thing to understand about this parable is that Jesus isn’t comparing the unrighteous judge to His righteous Father.
In fact, what He is doing is contrasting them against one another.
In the Ancient Near East, widows were among the most helpless and vulnerable people in society.
This widow would have been desperate for help from a righteous judge, one who judged according to the Mosaic Law, one who remembered God’s commands to protect and speak up for widows and orphans.
But the judge in Jesus’ parable wasn’t like that.
He didn’t fear God — in other words, He didn’t love God and keep His commandments.
And he didn’t care about his fellow man.
He was corrupt.
But the widow had a need.
She kept coming back to the unrighteous judge, asking not for him to bring judgment against whoever was hurting her, but simply that he give her legal protection against that person.
And finally, the widow prevailed, not because the judge cared about her situation, and not because he finally became righteous, but because he just wanted to be done with her.
She was wearing him out.
The point Jesus was making was that if such an unrighteous judge would finally give in to such persistent pleas, would a righteous God ignore the cries of His children of faith?
NO!
In fact, Jesus said, God will bring about justice for them quickly.
Now, we have to be careful about how we apply this passage.
Clearly, Jesus was anticipating the persecution that His disciples would face as they spread the message of the gospel after He had been taken back to heaven in His resurrected and glorified body.
But we know that He also told them to EXPECT persecution.
And we know that they experienced it.
In fact, the traditions from church history tell us that all of the apostles except for John were martyred for their faith.
So, we need to be careful in taking this parable to mean that God will hear our prayers in the midst of suffering and remove the suffering from us.
That is not the experience of church history, and it’s not what Scripture teaches us, either.
I think there are two keys to understanding what Jesus is promising here.
The first is the word quickly.
“He will bring about justice for them quickly.”
Notice that Jesus doesn’t say that God will bring about justice SOON.
This isn’t a promise to remove suffering from our lives as Christians.
This isn’t even a promise that those who treat us badly will experience justice in this life.
What Jesus says is that God will bring about justice QUICKLY.
Those who perpetrate violence and injustice against the adopted children of God in Christ around the world may get away with what they’re doing HERE.
But they will experience God’s justice and His wrath, and it will be sudden and overwhelming.
Paraphrasing the prophet Amos, it will roll down like the waters of a mountain stream in a thousand-year flood.
This is helpful for us to remember, but the truth is that it’s not much of an answer to the question of how we bear up in the here-and-now, how we live in the in-between time between the first advent of Jesus and the second.
How are we to live joyfully in the midst of affliction, and suffering, and even persecution?
The answer to that is in the second key to understanding this parable in its context.
Look back at verse 1.
According to Luke, what was the reason Jesus told the disciples this parable?
He was showing them “that at all times, they ought to pray and not to lose heart.”
How can we live joyfully in the midst of affliction, and suffering, and even persecution?
By praying.
At all times.
This doesn’t mean praying continuously.
That wouldn’t be possible.
It means praying in all situations.
It means living life in continual communication with God.
It means praying not necessarily for God to remove the suffering — or at least not exclusively for that — but rather praying that He would give you the grace to persevere through it.
The grace to be joyful in it.
Paul prayed for God to remove the “thorn in his side,” and we don’t know what that thorn was.
But what we DO know is that God’s response to Paul was this: “My GRACE is sufficient for you.”
The point was that God’s grace would enable Paul to joyfully persevere through whatever affliction he was praying about.
And there’s the connection to the next of Paul’s 13 imperatives for Christians and the church in Romans, chapter 12.
We’ve worked our way through nine of those commands during the past several weeks.
Let’s read them together today, beginning in verse 9 of chapter 12.
Now, remember that the first command, “Let love be without hypocrisy,” is the umbrella under which the others fall.
The other 12 are manifestations of the command to love genuinely.
So, the first thing to note about today’s imperative — to be “devoted to prayer” — is that devotion to prayer is one way we demonstrate genuine love for God.
To be devoted to something means to be persistent in doing it, to be doing it in all circumstances.
It’s the same thing Jesus talked about in His parable of the persistent widow.
If I’m devoted to my wife, then whatever else I’m doing, she’s never far from my mind.
Maybe it even means I should clean up my office at home.
Being devoted to prayer suggests that God is never far from our minds, that we are ever looking for opportunities to communicate with Him, to commune with Him.
And the fact that this is what God wants is, frankly, amazing to me.
The creator of the universe wants me to talk to Him about my day.
He wants me to share my hopes and dreams with Him.
He wants me to share my fears and failures with Him.
He wants to be the first one I go to when I’m happy or sad.
He wants me to tell Him I love Him.
And He even wants me to tell Him when I don’t understand Him and what He’s doing.
That the almighty God should call us into such a personal relationship with Him just astonishes and humbles me.
But we see that devotion to prayer is a recurring theme in the New Testament.
Speaking of the apostles and other believers after Jesus’ ascension into heaven and prior to the Day of Pentecost, Luke writes:
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