Let's turn to our sermon text which is taken from the Gospel of Luke, Luke chapter 18 and verses 1 through 8, Luke 18, 1 through 8. This comes in a section where there's a series of parables that the Lord tells, a number of famous ones that you probably are aware of, the parable of the persistent widows, this one right after that you have the Pharisee and the tax collector who are praying and before that the dishonest manager and of course the prodigal and all of this in the context of Jesus setting His face towards Jerusalem in chapter 9, verse 51. And so all of this is in the context of Him making His way to that place to accomplish His Father's will and His will for His life. That said, chapter 18, verses 1 through 8. 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, hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give them justice speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? The grass withers, the flowers fade, and the word of our God remains forever. You may be seated. Like I said, this comes in the context of Jesus making His way to Jerusalem. And it is interesting to note that He doesn't seem to go on a direct line from where He sets His face to the city to the city itself. He seems to be wandering. And so often it is the case that God in His purposes for our lives seems to wander about and not go directly to the place where He says He's going to take us. But nevertheless, He is set His face is set, his will, his purpose is set to do just what he promises. And though it may seem like it's a wandering way, it is a straight way. And because of the wandering, I think it's important for us to learn what he teaches us here to pray. In his book on prayer, the late Timothy Keller describes prayer in this number of these two word sentences. He says, it's conversation and encounter. It's awe and intimacy. It's struggle and reality. And with each word pair, I think he's trying to describe something we all experience when we come to the place of prayer. When we bow before God, we experience something of a dichotomy. We vacillate between two poles. We love it and we hate it. We desire to pray, and yet, despite the desire, so often, when it's time, we procrastinate. Sometimes we experience the nearness of God as soon as we bow our knees before Him, and then oftentimes, it seems like He is distant, and the exercise feels empty. It feels like we're just praying in an empty room, and our prayers are just bouncing off the ceiling. We all experience it. It's true for each of us, from the greatest of us to the least among us, from the adults to the children. Prayer is a place of difficulty, and Jesus, I think here, enters that very space, that place where we feel difficulty. which we we call the place of prayer and rather than Seeking to reconcile the tension between loving it and hating it between it being a blessing and it being a struggle for us He calls us to persist in that tension to continue in that place in verse 1 we read that he told the disciples a parable to the effect that they ought always always to pray. You and I, Jesus says here, ought always to go into that uncomfortable yet most comforting of places. We ought to do so regularly, or as the Apostle Paul says, without ceasing. We see this in the person of the woman here set before us, the widow. She's described, if you noticed, continually, repeatedly by her action, her continual action. In verse 3 it says, she kept coming and saying. Notice the ongoing present activity of the verbs there, coming and saying. She is, in verse 5, a widow who keeps bothering the unjust. judge. She keeps going into that most uncomfortable of places, prayer. She threatens, it says, to even beat him down by her continual coming. The language there is one of blackening the eye. Her coming is so often that it feels like a physical beating. like water that continually drips, like a child that wants something from you, mommy and daddy, and will not let you go until you give them your attention, or like that mail that sits on your desk at home or in your inbox that continually bides for your attention and asks for you to open it and answer it and set it aside for the next thing. That's the picture, I think, that our Lord draws in this parable of what our prayer life should look like. We should be like that pesky envelope on your desk in the presence of the Lord. We should be like that. And then he adds in verse 7 that the widow is a picture for us, just in case we missed it and didn't notice, of the elect who cry out to God day and night. If we are to be one of the elect, then we ought to be regularly before Him continually in prayer. We ought to cry out to Him. It ought to be the very mark of our lives. The widow is memorialized for that very thing. What's she called? You all know it. The persistent widow. It's in the subtitle here in the ESV. We all know this parable as the one that's about the persistent one, the persistent widow. So his will, or better, his expectation of us in this regard, according to the parable here, couldn't be really any plainer, could it? But notice he doesn't leave us with just the bare command to always pray. He adds the next few words. It says, and not lose heart. He adds it because he knows that you and I are prone to that very thing when we pray. We are prone when we pray to lose heart. It is for us a struggle, it is, as the parable rightly portrays it, like going, so much, so often we experience it like this, going to a judge who neither fears God nor respects man, who doesn't care about us or anything that's going on. It often feels like our prayer meets one who initially, verse 4, refuses our entreaty. He does not seem to care. Jesus sympathizes, you see, with our weakness when He adds those words, don't lose heart, don't faint, don't give up, don't lose hope. Why? Well, I think he gives us at least two concrete reasons here in this text for the reason why we ought not to lose heart. We ought not to faint when we pray. First, he reminds you and I that the one to whom we come is not a man who is an unjust judge, but rather God. We come to God. not some contrivance of man or man himself. It's not an idol that we fashion by our hands, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's who we come to. When we pray, we come to the One who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. You come to Him who took on flesh and died for you to make a way for you that you might actually approach God in prayer. You come to him who even now sits at God's right hand and intercedes for you, meaning you come to him who's already setting the pattern for you in heaven of what praying ought to look like, being regularly, always at the right hand of God, interceding. Yes, you come to God in Christ on Mount Zion, where a great company is gathered around him, whose blood speaks better things than the blood of Abel. And Jesus reminds you of that here. He says, if the judge says that, how much more will God? So don't lose heart. But in case that proves insufficient, I think he gives us another reason. At the end of verse seven, you see there's a question there. It's translated as a question in the ESV. It says, will he delay long over them? But literally, it reads something like this. And he, that is God, is long-suffering towards them. the elect. God is long-suffering, patient with the elect. You see, in the very context of His call to you to be continually in prayer, Jesus brings up God's patience towards you in prayer. calling you to pray, He reminds you that you are praying to one who is patient with you, long-suffering. It's an attribute that is regularly used of God in Scripture. You can't read much of the Bible and not notice that God is described as one who is patient. He is not an unjust judge, but long-suffering towards you, not wishing any to perish, but that you might live, and living, you might be one who prays continually. Exodus 34, six, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful, gracious, and long suffering, abundant in goodness and truth. Again, Psalm 86, 15. You, O Lord, are a God merciful, gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. God is patient. We see it everywhere in Scripture. But what does that mean for us in our praying? Well, it means first, that if you are not praying, even though you've been called to continually pray, if you haven't done that, if you've neglected prayer, then hear this, He is patient with you, and you can start today. You can start in the quiet of your hearts right now. You can start when you get home, right before you go to bed. You can do it in the morning on your commute to work, and He is waiting for you to do just that. Begin. Start praying. You can turn toward Him at any time He awaits you and is a patient for you. And the word there for delaying long, by the way, in the Greek is this compound word meaning of two words, large and wrath, makrothumos. In the Hebrew, it's funny, there's a word, the way he describes his long suffering is that his nose is long because his nose gets hot when he is angry. And so a long nose takes longer to get hot. Right? This is not a short-fused God, but rather, His fuse is long. The vessel of His wrath is big and takes a long time to fill up, to overflowing, to pouring out wrath upon you. He is patient over you, even in your beginning to do this, starting in prayer. Which further means, not only is He patient over you in that way, He's also patient over the way that you pray. Isn't that important? That you and I don't have to pray perfectly for God to accept us. He is patient with us. He will bear with our wandering minds when we bow down to come before Him in prayer. He will bear with us in our abortive attempts. Have you ever bowed down or bowed your head? Whatever your posture is, when you pray and you start, and then something distracts you, and then you start again, and then you start again, and then you start again, He's patient. with you in those attempts to start. He's patient with your repetitions. You keep saying the same thing over again. Every time I pray, I feel like I'm just praying the same thing. He's patient with you. He's patient with your bungling attempts at theological richness, at your jumbled Bible quotations, all of it. He's patient towards you. He bears with it all. The widow here, I think, is commended not only for her prayer, but in her continual presence in the place where she prays the judge. And so in one way, we can say that the thing that is taught us here is not just saying something, but being in the place. It's more about her presence than her words. It was her continual presence in the presence of the judge that moved him to do what he does. And so how much more will your presence move the heart of God who sent His Son and is infinitely patient towards you? Merely setting aside the time and the place and coming to it and sitting there is a great beginning. So don't lose heart, Jesus says. Don't lose heart. Pray. That then I think is the first thing that this text teaches us. We are given a general call and an encouragement to always pray. And then secondly, and then and more specifically, I think that Jesus teaches us something here about the content of our prayer. In all of our praying, it seems that we are asking for something, whether we realize it or not, very specific. Here we see that Jesus pictures it in terms of asking for, as you read it repeatedly, justice. She's crying out for justice. That's what the widow continually, regularly comes into the presence of the judge for. Justice from her adversary, verse 3, she cries out for. And in that sense, because it's for justice and he is a judge, it calls to mind something of a scene in a courtroom. There is the judge, unrighteous though he is. There is a desire for justice, unformed and maybe misinformed though it may be. And then there's this adversary who we may rightly interpret as a prosecutor. It's a prosecutor, and a judge, and a woman seeking justice. There seems to be some kind of disagreement over what that justice is, what is just, what is right. The widow thinks it's one thing, and the adversary, he thinks it's another thing, and so there's a disagreement there. The adversary sets his rightness. The prosecutor sets his sense of justice over against or in place of hers, and she comes into the presence of the judge and calls on him to be just that, a judge, to judge between the two of them. In some translations read it even stronger, she asks for vengeance, avenge me of my adversary, the King James says. We may paraphrase what she's crying out for as a yearning for true justice and right judgment to be brought forth. Something like this, bring out justice. That's what she's saying. She gets into the presence of the judge and she says, bring out justice, show it forth, make it manifest. And it seems to me that this is something of an articulation of the groaning of all creation, as we learn about in Romans 8. You're familiar with it. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And I think we all know something of this. this groaning, this desire for something better than what we have. I feel it when I try to grow tomatoes. If anybody has ever tried to grow tomatoes, I imagine it's hard here, but it's particularly difficult in Savannah. And as I try to grow tomatoes year after year, I find that I'm battling weeds and stink bugs and variations of stink bugs and then some kind of rot or fungus that gets on my tomatoes. And no matter how hard I try, those things keep threatening the fruitfulness of my tomato vines. I can grow them 10 feet tall, but I can't get any good, beautiful, red, ripe tomatoes. They rot on the vine before they get to the place where I can harvest them. And just when I think, recently this happened, I cut them all back, and I had one big green tomato, it was beautiful. And I used a vacuum to vacuum off the bugs. I did everything you could possibly think of to keep bugs, fungus, sprayed it with stuff, and was hoping for that tomato to get green, and then the rains came for the hurricane, and I went out after it dried up, and the thing had burst and rot on the inside. The bugs came back, the rot continues, and what do I do? I groan. I groan. And of course, it's just tomatoes. That's not necessarily a serious thing, but there are more serious things that we experience that cause us to groan. We know it when children wander from the truth. After all the teaching that we've given them, we groan. We know it in the aging of our friends and family. We know it when we look at ourselves in our own aging. We know it in the death of loved ones. We know it when we fail at work as we're trying to succeed in whatever our occupation is. We know it in relationships that fail. And even in our attempts, mamas probably know this more than any, at cooking a meal that everyone's thankful for and enjoys. And yet sometimes the best efforts end in groaning. We know it in our own hearts, don't we? And the reality of continued sin, as we seek sanctification before the Lord, and so often we find sin is still there, brokenness continues to rear its ugly head. And I really imagine that this is what Mary and Martha experienced after Lazarus had died and been risen again by our Lord, and yet a number of years later he grew old. and he grew sick, and he died again, and he was buried, and this time without immediate resurrection on the third day, or the fourth day, as it were. And they, with us, groan. They groan. Every man, woman, and child groans under the weight of this cursed world, but we, the church, I think this is important, we give words to that groan. We articulate the inarticulate yearning in prayer. And I think that's what Paul says in the next verse of Romans eight. He says, and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit, that is the church. grown inwardly as we wait eagerly, and notice the specificity, for adoption as sons, for the redemption of our bodies. We groan with creation inwardly and outwardly, and outwardly we pray for very specific things, those two things, adoption and redemption. And Jesus teaches us here in this parable, I think about that specificity of what it means to groan. See, what I really desire, what you and I really desire is not red ripe tomatoes. What I really want is a world where there's no more fungus and no more bugs and no more weeds at all. What we're really attempting to articulate when we pray, like babies learning to speak and voice their thoughts, is the cry of the Spirit and the Bride that comes at the end of this book. And they say, Come, Lord Jesus. The Spirit and the Bride, voice that. And isn't that the essence of every one of our prayers? It is the reality which we know now as our own by faith and long to see one day in its fullness. Now we have it and see it in a glass darkly, but then face to face and we yearn inwardly, continually for the world to be just what we know it shall be on that day. And that's why I think this parable is so fitting, because it so fits the picture of what it's like for us to be in the state of groaning and learning to articulate fully what we're longing for. It describes a world, the world, as we experience it. It's a world where we feel as though we are widows deprived of our husband. not only our husband, but also deprived of our right, where it seems God is a judge who is distant, unfeeling, and unjust, and where the prince of this world comes and says, you're right, God is distant, and He really is uncaring about your troubles. He has abandoned you. You are but a widow, and you deserve nothing but this life and death, the end. And it is just here, when we experience the world like that, that we groan. It is here where we struggle in prayer to resist that voice and say something else that's true. But I fear that often, when we struggle to do so, our prayer is merely as a widow for a better life. Oh, just make my widowhood better, Lord. Make my widowhood better with some justice, however we may define it. Make my widowhood better with good food. Make my widowhood better with good health. But I think Jesus subtly presses us beyond such paltry supplications. Instead of make my widowhood better or more comfortable, he encourages us to cry out and give full voice to the desire that is in the groaning that we experience. Not make my widowhood better, but rather send the bridegroom, O Lord. Make me who I am in truth a bride. Remove from me these dark garments of mourning and replace them with the bright white righteousness of your gown, O Lord. Don't hide your face. You're not an unjust judge, but my Father. Cause your face to shine. Give me justice. Let Jesus come and bruise the serpent beneath my feet and avenge me of this, my adversary, or come, Lord Jesus." is exactly how he understands the request, I think, of this cry for justice and its answer here in our text. He says that God will give it speedily. Verse 8, he says, I tell you, He will give justice to them speedily. And then he goes on to mention, almost as an afterthought, what he understands this justice to mean when it comes. He says, nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, as though he understands that to be the answer. That is, when God answers, He will answer with the second coming of the Lord. For that is what we both want and need, ultimately, isn't it? As men and women of faith, we long for that very thing, for the consummation, for new heavens and new earth, full adoption, full redemption, the realization of what we believe. Only His return will give us that. and only His appearance will mean true and lasting justice. We cry for justice, and the true justice will only be on that day. And the question for us, as we consider that, is as we gather here and as we are praying, people, do we believe that? Do we believe that? Do you believe the only way you will ever know true and lasting fulfillment and peace is at the coming of the Lord? Well, I think that is what he means when he speaks of the faith in his closing question. When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth? What does he mean by that? Well, that kind of faith, that hopes alone in that. My children, when we have dinner in the evenings, They often come begging for food before dinner is ready. Dinner is on the stove and they come and they start opening the refrigerator and they want cheese sticks and crackers and bits of chips at the bottom of the bag and anything and everything they can just get their hands on to scarf down because they're hungry. They groan with it. We want to eat, Daddy. And little do they pay any attention to the fact that there is steak literally cooking on the grill and if they just They would smell the steak that's cooking there. I tell them, just wait. Don't spoil your appetite. Something better is coming. And as they age, the younger ones begin to understand what that means. They begin to realize that if they just wait a little longer, there is a meal coming. And so they stop just asking for snacks and cheese sticks and crumbs. And they begin to ask, what time's dinner coming? What are we having for dinner? Will it be here quickly? They learn, slowly, over time, that what they really long for is dinner. And it's coming. Trust your Father. You see, that's the kind of faith that this is speaking about. Faith that is growing and coming to the full realization. This parable speaks of a faith that is regularly learning a prayer that what we really want, what I truly long for, is Jesus. in his return in glory, not some benefit or gift, but the man himself returned in consummation, not food to get me by as a widow, no, but a wedding feast to feed me forever. That's what we want. For when he appears, as he says, We shall be like Him. Justice will finally be done. And I will, you will, we all will be avenged of our adversary. And until then, I, all of us, we ought to pray and not lose heart. For truly, surely, He is coming quickly. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we are thankful to you for a reminder of the call to pray and the end for which we all ultimately long for our prayers to be answered. And so, oh Lord, we do pray, come pray, teach us to pray and to pray faithfully. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. We'll have a hymn of response from this hymnal again, number 518, Come My Soul With Every Care, number 518. We'll rise as we sing.