Our Sermons

Bible Passage: Luke 18:1-8
Pastor: Pastor Schlicht
Sermon Date:  October 16, 2022

How is your prayer life? Consistent, passionate, purposeful? How would you rate yourself as praying Christian? Almost inevitably there is tension in our hearts when we think about the repeated invitations to pray in God’s Word and the often neglected practice of prayer in our lives. In fact, that struggle is implicit in the very first verse of our gospel today, “Jesus told them a parable about the need to always pray and not lose heart…” Your Savior sees a need for encouragement. He recognizes that there are times when prayer will be hard, when we will be tempted to stop praying and lose heart. There is some healthy realism seeping out of this text, isn’t there? We struggle with prayer but Jesus encourages us to Always Pray and Don’t Lose Heart. That’s exactly why he tells the parable of “The Unjust Judge & the Persistent Widow”. 

As we heard the parable’s main characters were a crooked judge, who could care less about God or people and a poor widow who had no lawyer to represent her, no family to help, and no money to use as a bribe. However, what she did have was persistence. Leaving messages on his machine, constantly banging on his door, giving him no peace—she was persistent. Finally the judge said to himself, “This widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not wear me out with her endless pleading.” The literal translation of “wear me out”  is “blacken my eye,” which conveys even better his frustration. This was a boxing expression (cf. 1 Corinthians 9:27). Her persistence had been pummeling him, probably in the sense of public embarrassment, giving his reputation a black eye. So suddenly there was justice! The crooked judge is KOed by the persistence of an old widow.

So how does this interesting parable encourage us to “always pray and not lose heart?” Is the lesson: “If at first, you don’t succeed, pray, pray again!?” No, that’s not it. Is Jesus saying that you can pester God into giving you things if you really dig down deep and pray hard? I don’t think so. This false view of prayer reminds me of the Prophets of Baal who opposed Elijah on Mount Carmel. Those prophets of Baal, a false idol, whipped themselves up into an emotional frenzy and danced and howled to coerce their god to respond. They slashed and cut themselves and went on for 6 hours! Now that’s persistence! But there was no answer. Then Elijah stepped up to pray. His words were few, but the Lord answered immediately. The parable is not told so that we imagine that our fervent prayers begin to accumulate a meritorious critical mass that God cannot ignore. That’s not the God of the Bible. Our God is nothing like the unjust judge. That’s exactly Jesus’ point.

Listen to how Jesus explains it: “Will not God give justice to his chosen ones, who are crying out to him day and night? Will he put off helping them?”  Jesus uses a lesser-to-greater argument: If the sleazy judge would give justice to that pesky widow, how much more will your Father in heaven open his hand to you, his beloved child? The judge was unloving, evil, and ungracious. But God is good, gracious, merciful, and just. Moreover, whatever God is, he is infinitely. He is infinitely loving, infinitely just, infinitely merciful, beyond our understanding.

My friends, the power of prayer doesn’t come from our persistence…it doesn’t come from how frequently a prayer is prayed… it comes from our God who hears and answers those prayers. Our God doesn’t need to be pestered, because he cares about us and wants his justice and his righteousness to reign even more than we do!  What this parable is holding up to us as an encouragement to pray  is the very character of God. We are encouraged to pray and not lose heart, because even if we don’t feel like it, we know based on God’s character that our prayers work! 

At certain times in our lives, prayer seems arid and unproductive but this is normal Christianity. It is easy enough to pray when life with Jesus is novel, exciting, and eventful. But to persist in prayer when everything is flat—that indicates real progress. The old puritans called prayer a discipline of the Christian life. In other words, it’s something you do whether you feel like it or not, because deep down you know it is truly good and worthwhile to do so. You know that God hears and moves on behalf of his children. There will be times when you have no emotional energy, no warmth of feeling, for prayer. When a creeping sense of pointlessness will slither into your mind and you will find that your motivation is failing. In those moments there is a certain doggedness of faith that needs to kick in. A faith that says, I don’t feel like it, I can’t see it, but I know who my God is, I know this prayer is powerful because he is powerfully at work. I will not lose heart even if I don’t perceive the answer.

Reynolds Price is a professor at Duke University and the author of several books including “A Whole New Life,” which is the account of his ordeal with spinal cord cancer.  It’s an ordeal he barely survived, but it left him without the use of his legs. In the book, he tells of a demonstration, as he calls it, of Christ that he received during the depths of his illness. He came to the conclusion that God’s two answers to his prayers were this: #1. “You need forgiveness more than healing.” and #2. “You are going to have to suffer even more”. Those are some of the answers God gives to the prayers of his people, aren’t they?  As someone who prays for himself and for many other people, I can tell you they are hard answers to take when you are fervently praying.  But if we learn the lesson of Jesus’ parable, we should understand that our prayers, when they are their best, are not necessarily to change our circumstances but simply requests to God asking him to be who he is and promises to be.  Faith tells he is good and gracious and in control of our lives even if we suffer, even if we don’t heal.  Faith tells us he will see that we get justice. Faith tells us to always pray and not lose heart because God works all things for our spiritual good.

In the parable, the judge did not want to be bothered, did not want to be troubled. But Jesus was so troubled at the thought of losing you that he carried a cross to Calvary for you. And there his judgment was given. Jesus was condemned for your sins your faithlessness and died in your place. You have been justified. There is now no condemnation for you. Only grace and forgiveness.  My friends, the cross is the certainty of God’s love. It tells us that we pray not to a God who is far away in power, who may or may not act, may or may not care—like a judge who doesn’t want to be bothered. You pray to a God who hung on a cross for you, has promised to hear you, and promises to bring you what is truly good. This is really why Christians ought to pray persistently. We do not lose heart because we know the heart of God. 

Oh to think of that day when we are standing before him, and we get to see how lovingly and wisely he answered every prayer… To see how generously he provided for us and protected us during our lives, when we didn’t even know the danger we were in…what might have happened if he had said “yes” to some of our requests. We will see then how the Father’s delaying, his seeming not to care, was actually part of preparing us to receive the greater gifts of his life and salvation. We will see how patient he was with us, encouraging us to pray, and loving the sound of our voices, faltering and feeble though our faith may be. 

That’s who our God is. He loves you and cares for you more than you know …more than you can know. And so when God seems to delay in answering, when your motivation runs dry, remember—even then, especially then—to keep praying. God will answer. He’ll roll up his sleeves to scour out sin and wrong expectations from you if he has to.  He’ll even wrestle with you all night and leave you injured if that’s what it takes to bless you, like Jacob in our first reading today. No matter what, keep praying because you know your God! Don’t lose heart because you know his heart for you. Amen.