A King Who Hears

Introduction

Read Luke 18:1-8

Luke 18:1–8 ESV

1 And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. 3 And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ 4 For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’ ” 6 And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. 7 And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? 8 I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Explanation

We don’t always get the purpose of Jesus parables explicitly. So, we are consistently looking for the “What?” What was Jesus saying. There are some parables where Jesus gives us the “What?” So we can then focus on the “Why?”

The what is two things:

We ought always to pray

We ought not lose heart.

So we need to now answer the question, “Why ought we always pray and not lose heart.”

The Parable

Jesus gives us a parable to demonstrate what He is saying. There is an unrighteous judge in town. He did not fear God, nor did he care about what man had to say.

There was a poor widow who was being taken advantage of, and she consistently went to this judge for him to help her. He would not do it. She persistently would go to this judge, until the judge said, “I don’t really care about justice for her, but I am just tired of her wearing me out.”

The Greek for “beat me down,” is literally “hit me under the eye.”

She was eating up a good portion of his week with her continual complaints.

Because of her persistence, he enacted justice on her behalf, not because he was a good judge, but because she was persistent.

Her persistence is the only thing she had. And she had faith in an unjust judge to eventually make the right decision. So he helped her.

Unfortunately, she had more faith in an unjust judge than we do in our Father.

Relate to Jesus.

Now, Jesus is not comparing our Heavenly Father to the judge so much as he is contrasting.

He is saying, “If even an unrighteous judge will help a woman out of annoyance, how much more will God who loves you care for you.”

God is not annoyed with your continual requests to Him. In fact, it is the exact opposite. God finds great joy in your consistent requests to Him.

I am living this right now. I am amazed at my two-year-olds ability to say the same thing over and over again. It baffles and amazes me.

The Lord is never overwhelmed or annoyed at your continual requests to Him. It is honestly too big of a concept for us to comprehend.

Practically, for your own life, sometimes quick and consistent prayer is all you have.

We tend to think that we need to pray a big, long, and intricate prayer at the beginning of the day or before we go to sleep.

I think we ought to center ourselves before the Lord like this - it is a good thing. However, the consistent conversation that you have with Jesus is also very important.

I am not telling you that one or the other is better, but if you are struggling with one, they try the other. We sometimes place burdens on our interactions with the Lord that He didn’t place.

When you plant your prayers in anything other than God’s gracious countenance as your Heavenly Father, they will whither.

When I was a little boy, my sister and I would come home almost every night and have dinner at the table. We would tell stories from our day elaborating on everything that happened that day. We did this through high school. Why? Because my mom and dad loved to hear us tell them about what we were doing. They were genuinely interested in us.

In the same way, our heavenly Father cherishes our every word. When the foundation of our prayers becomes His love and grace towards us, everything changes.

When we plant our prayers in our own effort, we will fail, because we are weak and fragile creatures.

When we plant our prayers in our guilt, we will come to God out of obligation instead of love. And our prayers will whither. How many of you have a relationship that functions out of guilt, and you would say, “Yeah, that’s the best and most healthy relationship I have.”

When we plant our prayers in the circumstance, we will find God faithful or not based upon whether he changes the circumstances. This is why so many people lose faith in God when He is seemingly silent to their prayers.

Oswald Chambers says this, “Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand. It will be a wonderful moment for some of us when we stand before God and find that they prayers we clamoured for in early days and imagined were never answered, have been answered in the most amazing way, and that God’s silence has been the sign of the answer.”

We must also remember that our fervent prayer do not necessitate God to ask. That shows an idolatrous view of God that looks like this wicked judge. Where they only reason God answers prayer is because we annoy Him. Sam Storms gives a few questions to evaluate if we do this or not:

Do we repeat the same request because we think that the quality of prayer is dependent upon the quantity of words?

Do we repeat our prayers we believe that God is unwilling to answer, so we must transform a hard hearted God into a compassionate one?

Do we repeat a petition because we think that God will be swayed by our performance of zeal?

Instead, we repeat our prayers, because our heavenly father listens, and we consistently and faithfully give our requests to Him.

Luke 18:7–8 “7 And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? 8 I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?””

Notice that Jesus asks if He will find faith - not faithfulness.

The wrong way to look at prayer is “if I can just pray enough then I will get what I want.” You are using your own faithfulness as a bargaining chip before God. And the problem with this line of thinking is that your faithfulness will run out. You only have it in limited supply and that supply is given to you by Jesus.

No, prayer is an act of faith. It believes that God will answer. It is much less about you and much more about God.

Prayer ought not be an act of naval gazing, but an act of looking up.

And the more you see of a beautiful, powerful King, the more you know he will administer justice.

When my prayer life is struggling, I have to get up and go outside. We forget that the psalms were often written by men who were consistently outside and looking up.

Invitation

Our Father’s gracious disposition towards us is best seen in King Jesus’s sacrifice for us. God sent His Son so that we could become sons and daughters.

I have a book that is a collection of prayers based upon the Psalms, and on Psalm 3, it says, “My words do not fall on deaf ears. From broken whisper to deafening wail, You hear me, and from infinite realms of glory, You stoop to reply.”