Luke chapter 18. Look at a parable this evening. You'll know this is the parable of the persistent widow from Luke chapter 18 verses 1 through 8. But before we read, I want to ask you a question.
Are you an optimist or a pessimist? And as you take the long view of your life and the long view of history, which are you, you know that both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. It's the optimist who made the airplane and the pessimist who made the parachute. Some of you are saying, I'm none of those things.
Don't categorize me. I mean, after all, the optimist will tell you the glass is half-form, the pessimist will tell you the glass is half-empty. But any engineer will tell you the problem is the glass is too big. So we're seeing rework it.
This is a parable about taking the long view, especially when trouble is abundant and taking the long view in light of the return of Christ, in light of the second coming of Jesus. And Jesus wants us to be optimistic about that and to live as it were on the edge of our seat in anticipation of his return. And so we want to think about his return and how we live in the midst of trouble in light of his coming. And to do that, let's open God's word and study together.
Luke chapter 18, verses 1 through 8, here now the word of God. And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, in a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, give me justice against my adversary.
For a while, he refused. But afterward, he said to himself, though I neither fear God nor respect man. Yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming. And the Lord said, here, what the unrighteous judge says, and will not God give justice to his elect who cried to him day and night?
Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? And man, this is God's word.
Let's pray together. Father in heaven, we pray that by your spirit you would open our eyes to see your truth and to be encouraged and strengthened by it in faith in Jesus. And we pray in his name. Amen.
Some of you have been in the past or might now be in the midst of the trials of life that tempts you to despair, that lead to great anxiety, frustration, a sense of hopelessness perhaps. Maybe for you it's the problem of unanswered prayer. Your prayers have left your lips or your heart and have not seemed to go beyond the ceiling again and again. You wonder and you ask yourself because you feel no hope.
Does God really care? Is he really truly interested in me? Is he going to do anything about what I've been talking to him about? These troubles can cause all kinds of questions in our heart.
And Jesus, in order to help his disciples, as he wants to help us, wants us to think about all of this. The troubles and the praying and faith in light of his return. And so he tells a parable. And I want you to think about the context.
We get that real clear. The context of the parable. And then I want you to see the command that's given in the midst of the story of the widow. And I want you to think then about the confidence he's trying to build in us to pray in persevere and prayer and the question that he ends with, the very pointed question.
And so in the first place, the context. A verse eight here, he speaks really looking ahead to when the Son of Man returns. And so the context here is the second coming. And we could have reached that conclusion had we been reading in chapter 17, which closes with a lengthy discourse about the coming of the return of the Christ when in chapter 17, he says to his disciples that the days are coming, when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man.
And you will not see it. And they will say to you, look here, look there. Do not go, he says, out or follow them, for as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. And immediately after that, he says, and so that they go lose heart, and so they go and give up, so that they will continue in prayerfulness and waiting on him, he tells them this story.
So it's in that context. And we have to say, isn't this timely, in a sense? And you might say, well, my sermon was designed around this, but no. But isn't it timely that even in our own day in America, you have a man in Harold Camping, some of you heard about this this morning, perhaps all of you have read it in the news and heard it on the radio, about the false prophecy by a false prophet of the supposed coming of Christ in May 21st of this year, and then now pushing that back to October.
And he had previously and other decades made these same kinds of things. And it's tragic, and it does for others who don't understand the good news of the gospel and what the Bible says about the return. It gives an occasion for the world to scorn and laugh. And who knows for how many who have followed him yet believe in Jesus?
It has been an occasion for them to lose heart. Well, he didn't come like this man said he would, and it just breathed skepticism. Is he ever going to come? And maybe in your heart, there's just a little loss.
Of optimism about the return of Jesus. Maybe for you, it's not that. Maybe it's just purely the pressures of this life, people around you tempt you to give up, throw in the towel, quit trusting in the Lord. Maybe it's the troubles of this life.
We live in a fallen world. It's unfair. It's disappointing. It's hard to lean on God when you cannot see Him face to face.
All these things make us sometimes be tempted to lose heart. And as I said, the problem with unanswered prayer. And in the midst of that, Jesus says, don't lose heart. Keep praying, keep trusting, keep believing.
Live on the edge of your seat and wait for my coming. And so He gives them this command. He tells them the story with the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. This is what He wants for His disciples.
And it's the story of a woman who's incredibly vulnerable. She's a widow, so she has no husband or protector. She's appearing in court instead of another male on her behalf appearing in court. And in that day, in that culture, that would have been expected.
And so she's evidently destitute of an uncle or a father or a grandfather, a brother, or even a son, to appear for her. She has been abused and oppressed in some way, treated unjustly, give me justice against my oppressor, she says. And the judge is bad. The judge is corrupt.
Everything seems against her in this. She is by design here for you. The picture of the most helpless kind of person. And Jesus wants you to understand that God cares about this woman.
The judge doesn't, however. Think about the judge for a second. He's the worst possible character. Verse two, he doesn't have an idegot.
So he doesn't respect God and isn't, therefore, move to do justly by thoughts of God's watch or God's judgment of him. You can't appeal to him and say, for the sake of God, give me help. Nor can you say to him, for my sake, give me help. Because he doesn't respect people.
He doesn't care about people. Nor can you say, for the sake of your reputation in this community, do the right thing. Because he doesn't give a rip about his community. Though in that day, there were all kinds of rules about public chivalry towards women and the vulnerable.
He doesn't care. He just does what pleases him, what serves his own interests, to promote his own ease. He is, in the language, a judge of injustice. That's what he is.
And so here she is. She's unsupported by others. She's too poor, evidently, to give a bribe, to induce him with money to hear her case, which would have been common. But what she has, she uses.
What does she have? She has her voice. And she wears him out, coming again and again. Give me justice.
She gives him, as it were, a black eye, beating him with her tenacity and her persistence. So he's driven crazy by it. And simply to get rid of her, to be done with it, to not be bothered by it. He does what she asks.
And Luke tells you, the point of the story is to convince you to keep on appealing to God and looking to God, asking for help. But the story is to be understood not by comparison to by contrast. By contrast, your God is not like this in any way. And we'll get to that in just a moment.
And, however, he will, even like this unjust judge, he will give what his people have asked. He is returning, Jesus says. The Son of Man is coming, and he will give justice speedily. The judge of the world is going to put wrongs to right.
And that day will be glorious. And so we should keep on praying for the return of Christ and don't lose heart. And keep on living in anticipation of his return when he will set wrongs right. Pray for justice at the return of Christ.
Pray for the end of Satan's malice. And the world's scorn. And life's sorrows. And the spread of evil at the return of Christ.
Pray for the end of the reign of injustice. The rich are pressing the poor. The strong taking advantage of the weak. Government keeping their people from worshiping freely.
All these things, pray for them. He says, and he commands us, don't lose heart. Don't lose heart. And he wants to build your confidence in praying that way.
And he does it in four ways. And I want you to see it here. He builds, I think, at least four arguments here for us. In the first place, what he says is this.
God is not like the unjust judge. It's very clear. Verse five. Verse six.
And the Lord said here what the unrighteous judge says. Did you hear what he said? He says, now, will not God give justice? And he wants you to draw contrast between those two.
Won't God give what his people asked? Of course he will. He isn't unjust. He isn't wicked.
Nor does he have to be bribed. He doesn't have to be brow beaten. He can't be. You don't manipulate him.
But he will give justice. So when you are hopeless and despairing, when that is hard to believe. And when we think he's disinterested in us, he's forgotten us. He doesn't care about my problems.
Jesus says to you, your God does care. He isn't like that unjust judge. You know how far God goes to be sure that justice is done? He takes his own son and places him upon a cross to free you and forgive you from what you deserve.
But at the same time to remain just in the way that he does it. He's so committed to what's right that he punishes his son in the place of his people so that sin is punished and justice is satisfied. Even while you and I walk free, pardoned and forgiven. Of course, he's a just judge.
And that's the first thing, the character of God. He's not like this unjust judge. But the second thing is this. You are not like the widow in this story.
And you, unlike her in her situation, you have a standing with God. I mean, what was her position? She had nothing to offer. She had no money to bribe him with.
All she had was her voice. But you're not like the widow here. You are, it says, as Jesus puts it, you are the elect who cried to him day and night as he describes God's people talking to God. You were supposed to persist in prayer like the widow, absolutely.
But you are not in the same position before the judge as the widow. This is emphasized to your friends. You are near and dear to the heart of the judge. He gave his son for you.
He brought you home to himself. He loved you before you loved him. This is whatever might trouble you about the meaning of the word of election. At its root, it means he loved you before you loved him.
I mean, how do you explain the language of election here? Don't let it frighten you. We're not going to say a lot about it here. Some people would say that there is no such thing as election.
But to do that, you sort of have to throw the Bible out. We just read the word in the Bible. Others would say, well, election is the result of God's people electing God. In other words, that we elect him and he elects us in response.
And that's all that election is. A description of his responding to our believing. The problem with that view then, of course, is that salvation is based ultimately on our choice, not his choice, by our work of faith and not by his gracious gift of salvation by grace. The Bible's view is that we choose him because he first shows us.
And that means he gets all the praise for our salvation. But the point is that to fight over the idea of election or the theological vocabulary or the meaning of the term, the point Jesus is getting at in using the word is, think of the standing. These people who cry out to God day and night already have before the court. There, his chosen ones, his dearly loved, beloved ones, he is to us our father.
Jesus is to us our elder brother. We belong to him. And he belongs to us. And he made that happen.
He was ahead of us in this whole thing. And so you're a child of the king coming to the king for help. And one of the marks of that is that you cry out to him day and night. Lord, come to my aid.
Lord, give me help. So we do not pray, believing that the Lord is unwilling to bless like an unjust judge. One that we must ring favors out of him by force. The libel on God to cherish the notion that he's reluctant to bless his children.
As one man put it, the inference from the parable is not that we shall be heard because we persevere in prayer, but rather that we should persevere in prayer, even when the answer appears to be long to lay. Because it is God to whom we are praying. And we know that he's always willing to bless. And will ultimately give to us that, which is best, as he proved to us on the cross.
It didn't bring us home to himself. So you pray in a different position than the widow. You have a standing in the courtroom of heaven, purchased by the son. In the third place, he wants to build your confidence by reminding of God's plan, that he is long suffering.
And you see it there in verse seven. And there are some challenges here with deciding the meaning of the phrase here. But will he long delay over them? Jesus says, will he long delay?
Will he not suffer long with them or for them? And it's perhaps the idea that he's getting at is what Peter makes clear in his epistle. When Peter talks about how people are going to over the course of time, scoff at the return of Christ. They're going to mock the very idea.
Or they're going to say, what's over there? He's over there. And they're following their own sinful desires, Peter says. When they say to you, where's the promise of his coming?
A soft Facebook post from one of the students I've been trying to reach at the University of Arkansas at Easter when all the Christians were writing on their Facebook posts, he is risen. He is risen celebrating the resurrection. And this guy posted on that very day. Come on, we're still talking about this.
It's been 2,000 years. As if to say, the resurrection didn't happen because the second coming hasn't happened. But Peter will go on to say in his epistle, do not overlook one fact, friends, that with the Lord one day is like 1,000 years and 1,000 years are like a day. The Lord's not slow to fulfill his promise is some count slowness.
But he is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish. But that all should come to repentance. And the idea is that God answers prayer, though it may be long-delayed because there are purposes in his delaying his justice, purposes of mercy and salvation to those who might otherwise get pure, strict justice. And so when you pray and God says wait, it may be because he aims to show mercy to somebody.
And so he encourages us to pray in light of God's plan. And the fourth way he builds our confidence is to encourage us to persist in praying and believing in light of the promise of Jesus. Because what Jesus adds to this is I tell you, he will give justice to them spheally. Jesus says it is true and it is going to happen.
He underswords his argument with his own promise. And if there is anybody you can trust, it's Jesus because he went for the cross for you. He's coming, friends. Jesus died the just for the unjust, to bring you to God.
And he's coming to bring and give justice so that you're not going to enjoy all the blessings and benefits of his rule and his reign, which he purchased for you at the cross and applies to you in the fullness of glory. Now that all of this means you and I have never prayed a prayer that God has not or will not answer. Listen, God doesn't answer your prayers because in praying them you obligate him. Nobody obligates God.
God does not answer your prayers because you persist in praying them and your persistence overcomes some reluctance on his part. He's not reluctant to bless you. God answers your prayers because Jesus went to the cross and fulfilled all righteousness and raised from the dead to rule in the reign to mediate all of God's blessings to his people in their appointed time. God does want you to persist in praying.
The point of this prayer was that you will not lose heart but keep on praying. He wants you to persist in praying because he wants you to persist in trusting and in looking to him for help and anticipating his help, believing his promise. But sometimes Jesus says that help will only come in its fullness and finality when he returns and not till then. So you and I will pray prayers and sometimes we'll get an answer and it's yes.
And it's almost immediate. And sometimes we will pray prayers and the answer will be no. And our prayer is a prayer of our own will after our own desires and God has his own purposes and he says no. And sometimes we'll pray and God says wait, wait, but don't lose hope because when I come I will make all things right Jesus says to us.
And so he closes with a rather pointed question to you and I, verse eight, nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes will he find faith on the earth? We know what the question is, it's not speculation. Jesus isn't suggesting here that he won't find faith on the earth when he returns. Nor is he wondering out loud, well I don't know when I come back, will there be faith on the earth?
His question is meant to get you to examine your own heart. He invites your reflection on yourself, your introspection for a moment. Do you have faith? Prayer is a mark of faith.
It's one of the first evidences of faith. We might say it like this, that a baby born takes its first breath and cries out. And so it is with a soul that is born again and takes its first breath as it's made alive, it cries out to the Father in heaven. Prayer then is a mark of faith.
And he's asking us, are we praying? Are we a praying people? Then we're believing people and he will find faith on the earth when he comes. So you should ask yourself, what does your prayerlessness or your prayerfulness say about the state of your soul?
Are you in relationship with God? Are you waiting on his return? But he also invites not only our introspection, he invites our reorientation. He invites us to remember God's plan for the world is bigger than our plan for ourselves.
And we have been designed not to fit God into our plan for our lives, but to fit our lives into God's plan. Looking at my plans and my ability to carry out my plans leads me to despair, will his hope. I can never make that happen. I can never get that done.
I can never fix this problem. But when I'm looking at his plan and his ability to make happen what is necessary, then I have hope. Because Jesus sits on the front of the universe, friends. And he is advancing his kingdom and he is bringing people into his kingdom and he's waiting.
He's waiting until everybody who is going to come, comes. And so he's patient. And then he's coming back in power. And in glory, to rule of the reign, in a world remade for him and all who wait for him.
That's the story our lives were designed to fit into. You know the source of much of your unhappiness is trying to squeeze God into your story. You expect him to bow to your will and build your empire and he will not do it, but in grace. He says, welcome to my story.
I invite you into my empire. And I will teach you to do my will. The one who offers that to you is the king who died, just for the unjust, to bring you to God. That's the way to be happy and optimistic.
As you await his return, let's pray. Father in heaven, I thank you for the promise that Jesus will return just as he went up into heaven and disappeared into the clouds so he will come. And it will be public and visible. And he will bring with him all who have believed in him, all who have been saved by you, by your mercy.
I pray that you would stir us in the midst of our troubles to trust in you and to wait on you in Jesus' name. Friends, let me invite you to respond by standing and singing. It will sing together what a friend we have in Jesus.