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We’ve all prayed about something so long that we start to wonder if God has put us on hold—and whether anyone is ever going to pick up. In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable about a powerless widow who keeps pleading before a judge who neither fears God nor respects people, and asks whether his people will keep crying out to him day and night or simply lose heart.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon contrasts the unjust judge with God, yet Jesus seems to say “if an unjust judge will respond to persistence, how much more will God?” What does this comparison teach us about God’s character that a direct description might not capture as powerfully?
The preacher mentions that rabbis debated whether praying more than three times a day might anger God. How does that cultural backdrop help explain why Jesus’ parable would have been so striking to his original audience—and what does it reveal about how we sometimes limit our own prayers today?
When have you felt as though your prayers were “on hold,” and how did that waiting affect your hope and trust in God?
When Jesus says “will he delay long over them?” the sermon suggests the delay is intentional—not because God doesn’t care, but because he wants more people to know him before his return. How does understanding God’s delay as an act of grace rather than neglect change the way you think about unanswered prayers in your own life?
The sermon argues that persistent prayer benefits us more than it “reminds” God—that it helps us recognize his hand at work when he does answer. How does repeated prayer change the way we pay attention to God’s activity in our lives?
What burden, injustice, or unanswered request do you need to keep bringing before God with renewed hope and thankfulness?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
One of the other announcements that our computer decided needed to be mentioned after the sermon began is that we have a special guest for Sunday School Express tonight. We’re not going to show him on screen, but we sure are glad to have him here. If you know the story of Little Hills, and how we started, and how God has shaped us—where before we ever even met, we had church family gathering from multiple countries, and then missionaries that we got to know from multiple countries, I could begin to support and get involved in the ministries of before we’d ever even met in person. There’s a milestone in all that that we haven’t yet had, which is to have a missionary who’s ministering in one of those countries that we often pray for, the church around the world prays for, actually come and visit us here.
So Tony tonight is our first missionary coming in from the field to share with us, and he’ll be sharing during our Sunday School time. Now you might say, well then why don’t you call him up, Tim, let him introduce him. Since we are a hybrid church that’s both online and in person, we’re taking precautions because Tony is ministering in an area that it would be dangerous for his full identity to be revealed. So what we’re going to do tonight is we’ll have the rest of our normal Sunday service, and then during our typical Sunday School Express time, 15 minutes after service, we’ll have the live stream but we’re going to obscure— we’re going to put an actual little screen up, so that we’re not broadcasting out Tony visually. You’ll be able to hear him, you’ll be able to ask questions if you’re online or in person, but we’re not going to reveal his identity because here’s the thing. This is what’s… I think this is almost hard for us here in the United States to get our heads around.
There are incredibly brave men and women, brothers and sisters in Christ, who are every day putting their lives in danger to carry the mission of the church forward. And we don’t have to do that here, and I’m thankful for that, but I’m not thankful for what they face; I’m thankful for them and what they do. I’m so thankful to hear from Tony tonight, have him share, and then we can be praying for him and encouraging him in that time as well. So make sure to be there for Sunday School Express.
In the meantime, though, we have a sermon to attend to, and we’re ready to turn to Luke 18 tonight to begin our brand new series, Parables and Problems. Here’s what we read in the first three verses of Luke chapter 18:
“And he told them a parable to the effect 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 saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’”
That’s the setting. A lot of times we feel like that widow. “Give me justice, God. Help me to figure out how this situation is going to resolve because it seems like it’s just a mess.” Those are the situations that we can come before our God and ask for his help in. So let’s go ahead and come before our Lord as we dig into His word tonight. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for the goodness of your word. Thank you for the love that you show us, that you are indeed a God who is with us each and every day. Lord, we pray that you would guide us tonight as we come to your word, that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would apply your truth to us, and that you would assure us that you are there, that you are with us, that we would not lose heart but would hold strongly to the God who gives us hope. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Thinking about this widow, I found myself thinking about what we do way too much of the time—that’s waiting for customer service, trying to get results from customer service. I asked on X or Twitter or whatever you’d like to call it these days, “Tell me your customer service stories.” Someone wrote back to me and said, “Are you sure you want to ask that question? Because everyone has a horrible one, right?” I was telling someone the other day about one though that seemed apropos, and that’s about our Facebook page for Little Hills.
We have a Facebook page, of course, that a lot of our online church family, that’s where the live stream gets viewed the most and where the conversation, applying the scriptures as we’re talking about them, happens and so on. We have that page and people gathering every week on it. We’re very careful about what we post as far as not violating copyrights and so on. But at some point, somehow something misfired and they became convinced that we had stolen a fireplace scene. I’d recorded it myself with my camera, but they became convinced that I had stolen it from Sony. So they put a complaint against us and they turned off the live stream.
I wrote in and said, “Here’s the situation. I can show you proof that I own this camera. I filmed this. It’s not the property of Sony.” Well, just like support, whether on phone or online typically goes, it said that I was going to go on hold and a customer service agent would get back to me. No one got back to me. Days passed. No one got back to me. So I wrote again and it said a customer service agent would get back to me. Finally, I realized no one was ever going to get back to me. In fact, the live stream came back up. A different problem occurred. I went to write them and I realized that whatever had happened, they’d left me on hold. And because it wasn’t a phone but it was online, there was no way to hang up.
For a year, I was on hold with Facebook. Anything that went wrong with our page, I could not reach Facebook to ask for help because I was just on hold. It wasn’t until they wanted to reach out to me that finally the hold disconnected and I could talk to them again. Sometimes when we come before our God, we pray to Him and we feel like we’ve received that hold message. “Your prayer is very important to me. I’ll be answered in the order it was received. Estimated wait time is 532 years.” We feel like that’s what it says, right? And God isn’t answering, or so we think.
That’s what Jesus is referring to here. That’s what Jesus wants us to be thinking about as he’s speaking about this unjust judge and this widow, this person on the margins of society. Because to be a widow all alone—we’ve been talking about that in our series on Ruth and Naomi—she has no one, no one to look out for, no one who’s going to speak up for her. All she can do is plead her case to whom? An unjust judge. What’s going to happen? Now, this is a parable. We don’t necessarily think that Jesus would be referring to a specific historical incident, but as Jesus is telling this, the reason it relates to people is they probably knew someone who had had this exact experience. Maybe the people listening themselves had had that experience.
They’d had that with human beings, but it’s one thing—we know human beings are going to do this to us, right? They’re going to put us off, or sometimes they’re just going to forget. I forget all kinds of things. As I remember, one of my professors said years ago, “My rememberer is getting worse, but my forgetter is getting better.” And I resonate with that. Sometimes I just forget. But then there are also times where people intentionally just choose not to respond, or maybe they even are actively working against what we come and ask them about.
It’s one thing with human beings because we know human beings are fallen. It hurts, and it often puts us in a terrible place. But then what happens when we start to wonder if God is doing that as well? We start to think, God, are you just doing what everyone around me does? Either I’m not important enough to remember, or you don’t like me, or you actually hate me and you want bad to come to me. I pray, and I pray, and I pray. How do I make sense of this?
Well, one thing that people in the ancient world had wrestled with was how much do you pray to God or a God? People worshipping different gods, but particularly among the rabbis, they debated this concerning the Lord. How often should you pray to them? Is there a certain line there that you could cross where you could go from, “I’m reminding God so he doesn’t forget my need,” to “I’ve just made him mad, and now he’s never going to answer my prayer”?
Well, the rabbis, I’m not entirely sure how they arrived at this, but they concluded that the most we should pray to the Lord is three times a day. Yes, we should pray three times a day, but the most was three times a day. They looked to Daniel and saw that Daniel and his friends prayed three times a day, and they said, okay, that’s the cutoff. You pray three times a day, you’re not irritating the Lord. You pray four times a day, you’re going to make him mad at you.
Now, maybe the religious leaders liked that point because they didn’t want the people they were ministering to to keep pestering them either. So they set a limit and said, well, God only wants you to contact him three times a day. Then they were saying, and, you know, we’re mere mortals. You shouldn’t contact us even that much. Show up at synagogue and we’ll teach you some things if you’re smart enough to understand our wisdom and our wisdom. And if you’re not, well, that’s your own problem.
I believe that’s part of the subtext because notably, Jesus doesn’t tell a parable about a widow coming to a religious leader and asking for a judgment, because the religious leaders did handle the big cases still in the province of Judea. The Romans allowed them to handle cases that were secular in concern. Why is she going to a Gentile judge? Well, she’s going to him because she can’t even get to the religious leaders. They’re too busy. They’re occupied with more important things. So what’s her alternative? She can show up and speak to a judge whose reputation is that he does not fear God and does not fear human beings. That’s not the person you want to plead a case to.
But what happens? Let’s turn to verses four and five: “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.’” Jesus turns this theory a little on its head just from the get-go here because he says, “You know how you think that you should only pray to God three times? Well, look what happens with this unjust judge.” She just keeps pestering him and pestering him and pestering him. And what does he do? He finally says, “I can’t take it any longer.”
She probably pestered her husband to death, and that’s why he’s dead. She just wouldn’t stop. “Fine, I’ll solve the case for her. I just can’t take it any longer.” In fact, the way that he words it is maybe even a bit stronger than what we see in our translation. I think it’s kind of interesting. Basically what he says is that she’s going to keep pestering me. She’s going to keep bothering me until the end of the world; it will not end, or at least it won’t feel like it will end. And so I have to deal with this because she just won’t stop. She’s incessant. And so he gives her justice. He’s unjust. He doesn’t fear God. He doesn’t fear man. He does fear being bothered. So he gives her what she asked for.
And then he says, “You know what? I’m going to keep pestering you, and I’m going to keep pestering you, and I’m going to keep pestering you.” Often in our world, if anything, that’s how we get results. There’s that fine line. You go to someone, you’re nice to them. You ask them for help. You talk to the customer service agent. You’re very polite at first, right, because you’re hoping it’s just going to go smoothly. But then what you do when it doesn’t go smoothly, you pester. And I’ve learned this well, speaking of X, that’s why I thought of asking on there. It’s because I’ve found that if I can’t get results through customer service, what you do is you tweet about it. And then they say, “Whoa, wait a second. We didn’t really—we fear neither God nor man nor our customer, but we do fear the mob of social media, so we better quit overcharging him $20 a month.”
On bigger things, that’s how it works as well. I read that somewhere between two-thirds and 95 percent of lawsuits are settled out of court, civil lawsuits. Why are there so many settled? Is it because the big companies with their big lawyers know they can’t defeat the little lawyer who’s unimportant and doesn’t have all the resources? Is that it? Well, of course not. No, they know if they fight it to the bitter end, they can win. They’re not really afraid. They’re just bothered by it. It’s inconvenient. They don’t want the bad PR of a jury hearing about how this widow sits in her home in fear because the telephone company won’t stop charging her $200 a month. They don’t want that out there, so they settle the case.
They’re not really afraid. They just find it inconvenient. It doesn’t speak of honor. It doesn’t speak of care. They just don’t want the trouble. And so whether it’s an insurance lawsuit or a consumer purchase lawsuit, whatever it might be, especially the more embarrassing it would be if it got any coverage in the news, the more likely they are to settle out of court just to get it out of their hair and not have to bother with it.
They might say, “This is interesting, Jesus. Why are you comparing God to the unjust? Why do you want me to be thinking, as I’m praying to the God of the universe—you’ve been telling me about how he loves me and how his kingdom is coming and how you’re here to communicate the love of God to this world—and now you’re saying, God is like that corrupt bureaucrat that I try to get help from?”
Why would you do that? Because Jesus is implying something here, and he knows as the people are listening in this time, they already understand what he believes about God as a whole. They know that he’s not going to say that God is bad. They know he’s not going to say that God is unjust. Some people in the world today try to say, “Well, maybe God really isn’t just,” and that’s a whole other topic for a whole other time. But the assumption here is that he is.
Now that makes the comparison all the more shocking, but what Jesus expects them to do, and what we’re expected to do, is say, “If an unjust judge can provide justice, if a customer service agent who just wants to clock out will help the widow with her telephone bill and not keep charging her more and more and more, how much more a God who loves us, who knows us, who’s with us, has the power to do something?”
It’s the heart of what we celebrate on Pentecost, that here today we are reminded that God is not some distant entity in some galactic headquarters far away, wondering what might be happening to his creation on earth, but God is the God who dwells in the very hearts of the people who trust in him. So as we come before him, we’re not talking to someone far away. We’re talking to the God who’s with us every single moment and already knows everything that we’re facing.
How much more will he provide justice? How much more will he act? Scripture over and over again says it’s okay to come to him with the things that we want him to act on. It’s okay to come to God and say, “Help me figure this out because I don’t understand what’s going on, God.” The Psalms are chock full of these sorts of examples. For example, Psalm 25 verse 2:
“Oh God, oh my God, in you I trust. Let me not be put to shame. Let not my enemies exalt over me. Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame. They shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.”
Over and over and over again, if you read the Psalms, what do we see the psalmist crying? We see them coming before God saying, “Help me in this situation. Make this situation right. Cast down the wickedness of this world and rescue those who trust in you.” We see that over and over and over again. Why? Because they have confidence that God actually cares.
A wise man once told me that the Psalms are God’s authorized prayers. So if you can find it in the Psalms, God isn’t going to be annoyed when you bring your situation that applies to him. When God’s people come in the Psalms and say, “God, help us in this situation because we don’t see justice happening. We’re suffering and we need your help,” what we’re being told is, God wants us to do that.
We don’t need to count the times. We don’t need a prayer punch card. We say, “I’m really struggling, God, but I’d like to come and pray to you, but I’ve already punched my three prayers today, and I don’t want to make you mad.” You can come to him. The response of the unjust judge is to finally say, “Just get her out of my hair and I’ll give her what she wants.” God, how much more does he respond? Not in annoyance but in love. Say, “My child, come, tell me, I know what you’re going through, but I want you to have that relationship with me. I want you to know that I care about you.”
Friends, if you’re here today, if you’re watching online today, if you have breath today, know that God cares about you. That can be true for you. Not hassling the loving God of the universe to come and ask him for help. It is different with human beings, right? You have a friend helping you out of a situation. Maybe your car broke down and you don’t have a lot of money, and so you ask a mechanic friend, “Hey, would you help me?” Well, there’s a fine line there, right? Where you know that even if that friend really cares about you, you can only ask so much.
You don’t want to call him every 20 minutes: “Hey, did you get the part for my car yet? No? Still not? Okay, I’ll talk to you in 20 minutes.” No, you will not have a friend any longer. And part of that, no matter how much he cares, no matter how much she cares, we don’t have the capacity as human beings to handle that. I believe the rabbis, as they were trying to reckon with this, what they came to the conclusion about three times a day, the reason they came to that was because they were thinking of themselves. They didn’t have the capacity, even at their best, even if you had a truly virtuous rabbi who really loved the people he was ministering to, he didn’t have the capacity to handle every person’s petitions over and over again. And he also had nothing that he could do to resolve a lot of it.
Even the most just judge can’t bring justice to the whole world. Unless we’re talking about a God who is just. So Jesus says, keep coming over and over and over again. And here’s the reason why God wants us to do that. It’s not because he’s going to forget. It’s not because he needs us to keep moving up the queue of holding on prayer and remind him that, “Hey, I’m still here and I’m still interested.” Not that little button you see when you’re on your online banking that says, “Are you still there? Or we’re going to disconnect you in 30 seconds.” You have to hit that before God disconnects this prayer and you start all over the back of the line. It’s not that sort of thing.
Why does God want us to keep coming to him in prayer? Why is it that whatever you are facing right now, whatever scares you, whatever frightens you, whatever you hope for, why does God want you to keep bringing that to him? He wants you to do that so you recognize as he works, as he does work, as he does answer prayer. It’s not God who’s forgotten about our needs and our requests. It’s all too often that we forget. I forget about my prayers and requests. Something works out and I forget that I’ve been just going crazy and begging God, “Would you help this somehow to work out?” And it works. “Oh, okay. Just move on,” right?
God wants it to be embedded in our hearts that we’ve been wrestling with this with him so that as he works, we recognize his hand at work. It’s about our relationship with him. The weakness isn’t God. Not like the unjust judge. Clearly, there’s a weakness with that unjust judge. He fears neither God nor man. But with God, there is no weakness to be found at all. There is nothing that we could say is weak. It’s simply God who loves us and understands our weakness.
We lose hope. Too often we pray about something, God doesn’t answer immediately or we don’t see how he’s working in that prayer, and we just lose hope. We click the button to end the prayer, just hang up. Better than knowing that God’s not going to answer. We cannot hope too much. And that’s what we see as we go along here. Verses six through eight:
“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 justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?’”
Weaknesses in us. You see, Jesus looks at the people he’s ministering to, and he knows that those people are going to wrestle to hold on. A lot of them are going to look at Jesus and say, “I thought you were going to come and bring earthly justice right now.” And it’s not coming. And what are they going to do? They’re going to turn to some other hope. They’re going to do what I do when I feel like I’ve been on hold for too long. They’re going to hang up and just find some other solution. Because it’s not happening.
Is God unable to do it? God is perfectly able to do whatever he wants. He’s perfectly able to bring justice. But Jesus here gives us a hint of what’s going on and why we wait. The delay is intentional. It’s not because God likes to see us suffer. It’s rather because God wants to redeem his people.
Imagine for a moment if God brought complete justice to us right now. If you trusted in Jesus, you would be with him. But how many more people does he intend to save that are living now, or living in a generation, or two generations, or ten generations from now? We don’t know how long before the Lord returns. But what we know is that for the last 2,000 years there have been millions, billions of people that God intended to save that weren’t even there yet. And God, in his true justice and in his grace, delayed bringing ultimate justice so that more would know him and someday share fellowship with him and with us.
Think about that delay for a moment. Not a single one of us here would ever know the Lord, would ever have the joy of being in his presence had he chosen not to delay because we never would have been born. We never would have existed. But as Jesus spoke these words, he already knew every single person he had ever made, the ones that hadn’t even been born yet, and he knew that they had a place in his kingdom, and he was going to delay until they were fully brought into his kingdom.
I believe that’s what Jesus is referring to there. “Will he delay long over them?” Not long in the sense that he doesn’t care, not long in the sense that he is just ambivalent. God’s going to delay because he wants more in his kingdom. It’s why we talk about spreading the good news and going out and communicating. It’s why we’re going to hear during Sunday school about missions going across this world to proclaim the kingdom to people that need to hear about the good news of Jesus. It’s why those things happen. Why? Because God wants more people to experience ultimate righteousness in him.
He loves us. Sometimes it feels like nothing’s happening in the moment, but God is working. And when he returns, justice will be fast. That’s the point of waiting. When Jesus returns, there won’t be time to say, “Well, maybe now I should get right with Jesus. Maybe now would be a good time to finally come around and hear his promises.” No, the time—now. Time is now. He will faithfully respond because he loves you. And nothing is too big and nothing is too small that you might bring to him. So he calls you to know him.
But in the moment, it just feels like we’re waiting. I was reading about a woman by the name of Brandy Hunter. She made it into the news in April. She’s a worker at an Amazon distribution facility like many thousands of other people around this country, sorting packages, making sure that when we click that button that says, “If you order in the next 10 minutes, it’ll arrive within 24 hours,” making sure that those packages arrive.
She was also known to her colleagues as someone who loves animals. Those facilities do two things. They receive packages that are going to be sent out to customers, and they receive packages that are coming back from customers being returned. One of those packages arrived with four pairs of boots and a cat—a cat named Galena.
The co-workers of Brandy were surprised as they opened this. You don’t expect to find a cat in a box as you open the box, but there’s this cat. They open the box, they see the cat, and they know what they need to do. Brandy is off work that day, but they know that she’s the one that has a way with animals. She knows how to take care of this situation. Surely, they’ll call Brandy.
So they called her up and she drove in, brought a cat carrier, loaded up the cat, and said, “Well, this cat’s been in the box, and this cat’s been in this box for who knows how long. I’ll take him to the vet.”
So she took him to the vet. The vet checked him out. He was fine, no broken bones, a little dehydrated, but fine. The cat had a microchip. So they checked the microchip and they found out that the cat was owned by Matt and Carrie Clark, 600 miles away. And you see, like so many cats, like my cat, Galena loves boxes, loves jumping into boxes. Matt was packing up some work boots that he’d ordered. He ordered five different kinds so he could try on and figure out which one was going to be the best for him. He decided to keep one of them.
The box was shaped right for five pairs of boots, but he only put four back in, walked away perhaps for a moment, maybe answered a phone call, whatever it might have been. Walked back, lids down, taped up the box, put it on the porch for the carrier to pick up. It all looked fine because what do you know? A cat’s about the same size as a pair of work boots, apparently, that he’d ordered.
They were none the wiser until suddenly they realized their cat was gone. They did what you do. They posted pictures up around the neighborhood. They were going crazy trying to figure out how Galena had gotten out of their house. In fact, Carrie then decided to pray and fast that she would find her cat. Then she got a phone call from a woman that she’d never met before, 600 miles away in California. Brandy said, “I have your cat.” They drove in and they got their cat.
Here’s what Carrie said: “God’s hand is in the details of our lives. Like, he’s really the one who can control it all. And if he wants something to happen, he can easily make it happen.” She said, “That’s honestly my main purpose.” If you looked at this incident and suddenly the fact that the media wanted to talk to her about this feel-good story about this rescue cat, she said, “Here’s my main purpose in this. I want you to know that God is the one that’s in control.”
She’s exactly right. She understood that God is at work and you couldn’t see it. This was six days that they were looking for their cat between the time that the cat went in the box and the time that the distribution center opened up the box with the cat. Imagine this cat stuck in there for six days. The cat comes out unharmed and they get the cat back. She understood that God was working. She kept praying, expecting.
No, that’s not a promise that every time we pray about a lost animal, God is going to return the animal. But it is a reminder that God is the one who’s in control. Sometimes he does delay justice. Sometimes things don’t work out right. Sometimes there are places in the world where we have to hide someone ministering there so that people don’t use that information in horrible ways. I mean, think about how many times we want to cry out and how many times we should cry out to God about the injustice in this world.
But here’s what we know: He’s working. Sometimes someone at a facility 600 miles away opens up the box and finds the cat. Sometimes we keep waiting, but we don’t wait in vain. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:15, “See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
Paul writes this to the Thessalonians who are wrestling with what it means to be Christians. We have loved ones who are dying and we don’t know how to make sense of that. There’s persecution rising in the empire. We don’t know how to make sense of that. Paul says, keep doing what the Lord’s commanded you to do. Love people around you. Be faithful in this moment. Do what he’s called you to do and know that he’s working. And because he’s working, keep praying. Come to the just judge who does hear your prayer and wants to hear your prayer.
Give thanks because you can already thank him for the amazing work that he’s doing that we don’t even see. We cannot pray too much or hope too much because someday Jesus will return. Someday he will make all things new and every tear will be wiped away. But even right now we can thank him because he’s right there with us in whatever problems we face. And that’s our hope tonight, friends.
Would you pray with me, please? Lord, we come before you, and we know as we look around this room that everyone we see here carries a burden, carries that lost cat that we haven’t yet had the blessing of someone opening the box and discovering. Loved ones who are sick, jobs that are insecure, decisions that seem overwhelming, the stresses and challenges of life that affect each and every one of us.
Here’s what we know, Lord. We know that you say that every single detail, that none of us as we wrestle over the things that we do in our lives, are wrestling with something that’s inconsequential to you. And so, Lord, as we wait to see you work, would you help us to keep praying and to remain thankful for you, O Lord, our faithful each and every day. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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