In the parable, when the widow kept coming to the unjust judge her plea was “Grant me justice against my adversary” (Luke 18:1-8 NIV). In her plea, she used a word that is easy to overlook but that makes all the difference in what she requested. What’s that word? It’s justice. The word justice is based on the word just which means “based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair” (Oxford Dictionary). So when the widow requested justice, it indicated that she wasn’t asking for a favor, she was asking for something that was rightfully hers.

In any society, there are laws that dictate what should happen when certain conditions are met. We are normally aware of the laws that result in negative consequences if we break them, but there are also laws that benefit us if we ask according to them. The persistent widow understood this.

We can learn from the widow by asking for things smartly. By smartly, I mean with knowledge. Asking with knowledge not only includes knowing what is rightfully ours, but also the way we ask. If we do, it’s no question of whether or not we will get what we ask for, it’s only a matter of when we’ll get it. Jesus used the example of a judge “who neither feared God nor cared what people thought” (Luke 18:2 NIV) to represent how we can get a breakthrough in a worst-case scenario by our persistence. But at the end of the parable, He goes on to explain how God, unlike the judge, is just, pointing to the fact that we can definitely get an answer in reality.