Praying With Persistence: Luke 18:1-8

Introduction

Good morning to you all!

Now I may not be a familiar face to many of you, some of you may have seen me or heard about me here and there but can’t quite place me, so I’ll start by quickly introducing myself. I’m Jude, and I am the LST Student on my placement here at Croxley Green Baptist, and I’ve been quite limited in what I’ve been able to give to you guys over the past 5 months or so because of everything that is going on.

But here I am today, and I’m going to be preaching to you on the topic of prayer and being persistent in that, and we’re going to be taking a look at Jesus’ teaching to the disciples in Luke 18

So if you want to follow along in your bibles with me, we’re going to be reading from Luke 18:1-8, and I’m reading from the NIV translation:

The New International Version Chapter 18

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2 He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’

4 “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’ ”

6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

Let me just pray before we start:

Gracious and loving God, help us to prepare ourselves to hear from your word today, and let us try to forget anything that might be in our minds trying to distract us. From this written word that we’ve just read, through the spoken word, Lord may we encounter your living word. I ask that you will allow any of my words that are from you today to rest on our hearts and to have a profound impact on us, and anything that isnt from you, would you just discard it and let us all forget about it.

In your son, Jesus Christ, we pray

Amen

Persistent prayer

So, Jesus starts this parable that he is telling his disciples with this instruction in verse 1, we know that he is telling them this to show them that they ‘should always pray and never give up’, and this might be something that you’ve heard before. It comes up quite a few times in the Bible, perhaps most famously in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 where the apostle Paul says,

The New International Version Chapter 5

16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

But this is something that is pretty hard for us to be able to understand, and I wanted to shed some light today on what this ‘persistent prayer’ that we see in this parable can actually look like for us today as Christians.

So I want to tell you a story. I want you to imagine there’s a little boy, some of you might know a little boy yourself so this might not even be all that hard to imagine, and more than anything in the world, he wants a dog.

Some of his friends have dogs and they get to play with the dog and take him for walks. Now personally I don’t see the appeal, and if you’re a cat person like me, you’ll understand that dog people don’t realise how much work they would have cut out for them if they just upgraded to a cat. But thats besides the point. This little boy REALLY wants a dog. And so he sets about pestering his mum and dad for it, because he cant get one himself. He needs his parents to get him this dog. And so he tries EVERYTHING HE CAN.

He goes up to his room, and he writes a little post-it note that reads ‘Ples can I have a dog?’, because he can’t spell please, and he goes and sticks it on the fridge. And he thinks, oh surely my parents will see this, and they’ll get me a dog.

Days pass, and the little boy hasn't heard anything from his parents on the dog matter, but he notices that the note has disappeared from the fridge. So he thinks, well, I’ll just have to write another note for them then.

So he goes back up to his room, and he writes another note for them. “Ples can I have a dog?”

This time he’ll put a ‘kiss’ at the end to persuade them more, he thinks. And he goes and sticks it on the mirror in the lounge. That will do the trick surely.

But the same thing happens again, his parents ignore him and days later the note has disappeared, and the boy hears nothing about it. This calls for desperate measures.

So over the next week, the boy writes hundreds of notes. All saying the same thing: ‘Ples can I have a dog?’

And he sticks them wherever he knows that his parents will look: in their bedroom, in the bathroom, inside the fridge (he knows his mum will look there, she’s always in there), in the garden, on the shed. Everywhere you can think of, the boy stuck a note.

At this point his parents knew that had to do something, this was clearly something that their son was bothered about. And so as any good parents would do, they did the right thing, and? (Pause) They bought him TWO CATS right? That seems like the best deal to me.

Anyway, the boy’s dad came home with these two cats one day, and showed them to the little boy, and said ‘Surprise! We’ve got cats!”

And the boy smiled and said ‘Oh yes. I love cats.’

But he’s not very convincing

And the next day, the little boy went downstairs in the morning, knocked on his dad’s study door, and pulled his dad for a chat like a real man. Just a man to man convo, no rubbish.

The little boy got down on his knees and he said, ‘Listen, dad, I know you got me two cats, and I LOVE the cats, they’re great. But I WANT a dog. Not cats. I asked you for a dog. So please, can I have a dog.’

There were tears in the little boy’s eyes, as he looked up at his father, and his dad had no choice to say, ‘Fine, son. We’ll get a dog.’

So they did, they went out and got the dog, and the little boy finally got what he always wanted, and what he had been persistent in for so many weeks now.

Some of you may be detectives, and this story may not be the hardest to think with the sermon topic today. But lets really go back and dive into this incredible passage of Scripture to see what Jesus is challenging us to do here.

The Corrupt Judge

So, in this parable that Jesus tells, we’ve got this judge haven’t we, and we’ve got a widow who is appealing to him because she is being mistreated by her ‘enemy’ or her ‘adversary.’ We don’t know quite what this situation is, but we do know that this scenario that Jesus tells would have been very familiar in ancient Israel.

These images of a ‘judge’ and ‘widow’ are something that are used quite a lot by Luke in his Gospel and in Acts, some of you may have noticed this when reading it.

In fact, the Greek word for “judge” occurs 9 times in Luke and Acts, where it only appears another 8 times in the rest of the New Testament.

Similarly, “widow” occurs 12 times in Luke and Acts, and only 13 times elsewhere in the New Testament.

So what was it that was so significant about these judges in Jesus’ time that meant that he used them in his teachings?

Well, we know that they were very corrupt. We hear in books such as Amos about judges who accept bribes and turn aside the poor, but it wasn’t just corruption that was limited to the Old Testament.

Alfred Edersheim, who wrote the classic, ‘Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,’ describes the corruption of the judges in Jesus’ time as being so bad, that the people actually changed their names. They changed the Hebrew ‘dianeigh Gezarath’ into ‘dianeigh Gezalath’, just one letter different in Hebrew, but it completely changes the meaning. The first means, ‘A judge dealing with the Law’ and the second meaning, ‘A judge who is a robber’. These were not good people, and they went against the Bible for bribes.

This was well known about judges at the time, and so we have to bear this in mind when we consider who the disciples would have understood this judge character to be.

And we see in the passage that this judge is exactly like that, don’t we?

Verse 2: ‘who neither feared God nor cared what people thought’

This judge is being painted by Jesus, if we know the context, as a horrible man, who goes against God, and does nothing for those around him. Imagine the opposite of Jesus. Kind of like that.

And he is dealing with a widow, who is having to appeal to the courts herself, which we can infer probably means that she is destitute and has no men in her life at all, who would have at the time been far more successful at appealing in court. So here she is, representing the forgotten in society, those in desperate need, and she stands helpless before this ungodly and unjust judge.

God as the Judge

Some scholars have argued that this judge we see here in this parable that Jesus tells is painting God in a somewhat negative stereotype in the sense that he may reject us and be stubborn at first, but from reading the passage, I’m not sure that this is what Jesus is trying to show us with this picture of the reluctant and corrupt judge.

So what do I think Jesus means by this parable?

Considering what we’ve just learnt about the context behind these judges in Israel, I think its really verse 7 that we are paying attention to here.

Luke 18:7: And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?

Going on into verse 8: I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly.

So what have we got? We’ve got a man who, lets be honest is the opposite of God. He ‘neither feared God’ nor ‘cared what people thought’ right (verse 2)?

And even THIS man who we would expect to act the opposite to how God would act in this situation, and despite the circumstances of the person doing the pleading being a widow, even THIS man says, ‘I will see that she gets justice’ because of her persistence.

She wears him down and even this UNGODLY and corrupt judge is able to see what the right thing to do is, and he grants her justice.

And then now we look back, and we think, ‘God is the opposite to this man, so he will DEFINITELY give us justice’

And like I just read, Jesus makes this same point: ‘And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?

The answer? No, he wont

God answers our prayers and is just. God is the definition of just. In fact, the justice of the judge in the parable is compared to the justice of God, because God embodies justice and love. It is part of his character.

How should we pray?

So here’s the challenge for us, and this brings me nicely onto my final point:

The question cant be ‘Will God answer my prayers and my cries for justice?’, because we know the answer to that now.

The real question is, ‘Are we crying out to him day and night?’

‘Are we ‘always praying and not giving up’?

Sometimes it can be easy for us to pray once about something, and when we feel like it hasn't been answered, then we stop. We give up, because God has failed us hasn't he?

‘Try harder next time, God,’ we say, and we put the blame on him.

Maybe next time when I ask, God will do the right thing and respond to me.

I’m very guilty of this myself, and it was very convicting for me as I prepared this sermon and examined my own prayer life and how I can tend to treat it in this way. Maybe some of you can relate to this as well.

But in this parable in Luke 18, Jesus says, ‘God WILL answer your cries, IF you are persistent. IF you don’t give up. IF you pray without ceasing.’

Like I said earlier, we all struggle with this idea of ‘praying without ceasing’ because it seems unattainable really doesn't it? But thats the standard. That is what Jesus says is what we should be aiming for as we strive to grow closer to God.

And prayer is a HUGE part of that relationship.

But what does this sort of prayer look like? It can be nice for us to say all of this, and I’m sure you’ve all heard it before, but we need really look at what Jesus wants prayer to look like for us.

Recently I’ve been reading through the Psalms, and I’ve been struck by the way that King David, who was a mighty and godly man, prays, and cries out to God in his time of need. You may have heard this before, but in fact approximately 70% of the Book of Psalms is actually what we call ‘lament’, which is this cry out to God in a time of pain and suffering.

We can take Psalm 13 as an example:

How long Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

David seems pretty persistent in that, doesn’t he?

And its something that as the Church, as a body of people proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord, we are rubbish at!

We don’t know how to lament, how to cry out in pain to God.

Here’s another statistic for you: out of the top 150 worship songs on CCLI which are the songs that we sing in church the most, approximately...wait for it...

0% are lament. 0!

And here we see in this parable, that the woman ‘cries out’ to the judge, she keeps coming with the ‘plea’

This is a woman who is suffering, who clearly has a problem that she wants justice for.

And she asks. And she asks. And she asks. And she CRIES OUT.

Maybe, sometimes we just feel like we cant go any further, like theres a problem, a situation pressing down on us in our lives, and we just think:

“God I can’t do this anymore! I am suffering, I am in pain, and I’m just tired.”

Maybe you’re worn down from something, you just cant take the burden of this thing any longer, and you feel like giving up.

Well, Jesus says ‘CRY OUT’

Just like we see David doing in the Psalms, just like the widow cries out to the judge.

We can come to feel like this sort of prayer is wrong, like God doesn't want to hear us upset or angry or just fed up.

But he does! He wants us to not only cry out to him, and say “Father how could you do this to me!? Why would you treat me like this?”, but he wants us to KEEP doing it.

To continue, and persist.

Just like in the story I told earlier about the little boy, he kept going. He didnt just ask once, and then forget it, and assume he’s been forgotten about. He persisted.

If that doesn’t sit well with you, and you’re sat thinking, “No I couldn’t do that”, then I hate to tell you that maybe its time to reconsider what prayer really is.

Yes, we praise God. Yes, we repent. Yes, we ask for things.

But sometimes that can be pretty hard can’t it? Sometimes, life just doesn’t feel praise worthy.

So let’s cry out. Lets get down on our knees, just like the widow, and scream ‘Grant me justice’

And don’t stop. Keep crying out.

No one needs to pretend that what we’re going through at the moment is easy, for anyone. Lockdown, isolation, loneliness, loss, pain: all things that we can relate to at this time.

But let’s embrace it, and come to God with exactly what we’re feeling, and cry out to him and say, ‘God, this isn’t fair, why is this happening!?’

Will he find faith on earth?

I think that is what prayer CAN look like, and its beautiful.

And that is the sort of FAITH that Jesus is referring to in verse 8

‘However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?’

When Jesus comes again, what is he going to find? Is he going to find his followers praying without ceasing, calling out to Him, and believing that the true and perfect judge will grant us justice?

Or is he going to find a group of people who call themselves Christians, and pray every now and then, but are too afraid to persist in their calling, and too afraid to be real about their suffering and struggles, and so they give up after praying about it once or twice and assume that God has abandoned them this time. Maybe next time?

This seems harsh doesn’t it? It’s unbelievably convicting for me personally, and I have a feeling that Jesus’ disciples were probably feeling very similarly when he told it to them 2000 years ago! So it is a harsh message; its challenging! But its a challenge straight from Jesus himself, not me.

So let’s be praying without ceasing, not giving up, because THAT is what faith looks like. And if the ungodly judge who doesn’t care about what people think could grant the widow justice after she persisted, then our gracious and loving Father in Heaven WILL certainly be able to give us justice.