Well, I know I don’t look it, and this may be hard to believe, but there was a time in my life about 15 years ago when I was really into running marathons. I know, I know, I know, you’re thinking, where’d that guy go? He’s gone forever. He’s not coming back. I never was actually a runner. You know, like I ran, but I wasn’t a runner. I was the most reluctant of runners. I had just come off a failed church plant. My stress was high. My health was bad. I had a buddy who ran marathons. American Ninja Warrior was on TV. It was a confusing time is what I’m saying. It’s a confusing time. And somehow, somehow, in the midst of all that, I decided, hey, I’ve never run a 5K in my life, let’s start with a marathon. And so, I bought some shoes, and I trained with a schedule that I found on the internet, and I went from couch potato to starting line in 18 weeks. I ended up running three marathons over the course of two years. But there was a moment in that first marathon that comes to mind every once in a while for me, especially if I’m going through something that’s especially difficult and if it’s one of those things where I don’t see an end in sight. I had been told, for this race, that there would be water and food stations every two miles in the race. Marathons are so long, you have to eat and drink while you do them. And so, I was counting on these, and I passed the 20-mile mark, I still had 6.2 miles to go, and for a first-time non-runner like me, that is by far the worst part of the race. But as the despair started to set in to that, as I was going through that final stretch, I began to realize that there were no more water stations. I thought there would be some, but there were no more water stations. I’d burned through all my glycogen stores. There was no more sugar in my body. I didn’t have the fuel anymore, and I never found out why those stations weren’t there. For 6.2 miles all I could do was fight through the overwhelming desire to quit. All I wanted to do was just lay down in somebody’s lawn, I was running through this neighborhood, I just wanted to lay down, and everything in me wanted to just blame the race organizers and just stop. But I knew if I stopped, that I was never going to start again. Even if I tried to lie to myself and say, “well, just stop for a minute and then you’ll keep going”, I knew I would never, never start again. I knew I would just be overcome with my own frustration. So, I had to keep my legs churning because I knew that absolutely, without a doubt, the finish line was coming. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know where it was, but I knew it was coming.

Today we’re going to talk about endurance, but of a different kind. A much harder kind. We’re going to talk about the mental, spiritual, and sometimes physical endurance it takes to remain steadfastly committed to Christ when the world is crumbling around you and you don’t feel like God is listening to your prayers. Jesus is going to give us a parable today, where he will encourage us to keep our spiritual legs churning and keep our prayers to the Lord steadfast, even when we don’t see the end or we don’t see how God is going to make things right. So, our passage and this sermon this morning is especially for those of you who are exhausted today, spiritually exhausted. And I know you’re out there because there’s always a part of the church that feels spiritually exhausted, and you’re looking for that water station that you thought was supposed to be there. But it’s also this morning, for those of you who are doing real well right now, and if you’re seeing answers to prayer and life is going well and you’re excited about all that God is doing in your life. That is fantastic. But as you’ve heard me say on more than one occasion here, the best time to build your theology of suffering is when things are going well. It’s not when you’re in the midst of suffering. And so, I’d encourage you and encourage all of us today to take what Jesus tells us, put it into your spiritual toolbox so that you have it ready when things get difficult. Because Jesus wants us to pray and never give up when we’re in need of God’s justice, knowing that the God who chose us and loves us will never ignore us.

We’re in a new chapter of Luke today, Luke chapter 18, but the change of chapter does not mark a change in topic. What Jesus teaches in this parable follows right on the heels of his description of his second coming and the difficult lives that we’re going to live as Christians as the world gets progressively worse leading up to his return. And so, this parable is intended to show us how to live as faithful followers of Christ while we wait and while we suffer. Last week, we talked about the longing that’s in our hearts for Jesus return, that longing that we’re going to feel as we wait for the second coming of Christ. In this parable, Jesus tells us what we should be doing while we are longing; what we should be doing in the meantime. So, let’s begin in verse one. (Can I get the next slide, please?) And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought to always pray and not lose heart.

Let me start by saying, it is really great when the Bible tells you what the next thing you’re about to read is for. That is awesome when that happens, it’s going to happen again next week too, which is pretty great. I didn’t have to spend any time at all this week pondering what Jesus could be getting at here. Luke just says this one is about persistent prayer. This one is about not losing heart. Got it? Unfortunately, that does not mean that the parable is easy to understand. It’d be great if those went together, but they don’t. In this case. There’s an especially tricky part of this here in just a minute that we’re going to look at, but it starts off very clearly. It’s Jesus intention that while we are waiting for his return, that we keep praying, that we keep praying and refuse to give in to despair. Now, before we look at the story, I think it’s important to pause and reflect on what this means, Church. When Luke says this before Jesus parable, what does it mean for us? It means that God knows what we’re facing right now, and he knows that what we’re facing would give us reason to despair. It would give us reason to lose heart and stop praying. To lose heart means to despair. Despair is hopelessness. But the gospel is the source of true hope. And Jesus disciples are those who believe. So, what is Jesus saying here? Right? How do people who have the gospel, who have the hope, fall into despair and into hopelessness?

Jesus is describing a situation here where the most hope-filled people on the planet are going to feel, at times, utterly hopeless prior to his return. And will be so despairing and will be so saddened by our situation that we could be tempted to stop speaking to the Lord. It could get that bad. Because why? Why talk to him? What’s the point? God’s not listening anyway. So, if you’ve ever felt that way, if you’ve ever felt like God is not listening, you’re not alone. And it was to be expected. It was even expected by Jesus that this would happen. He knew this was coming. And this parable we’re about to look at is designed to pull you out of that mental space. Luke says that this parable is crafted by Jesus to be used when this inevitable feeling of despair kicks in and you start inching your way toward prayerlessness. Because, and this is the key, Church, this is the key to this. The despair is not the reality. The despair you feel is not the reality. You might feel hopeless, but that is not because the situation is hopeless. You’re wrestling with the very real problem of living for Jesus in a world that doesn’t. You’re feeling the tension of living for God in a godless world, and that can give you the mistaken impression that God doesn’t care. And this parable is designed to correct that.

So, here’s the setup. 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. So, there’s two characters in this parable. The first one is a judge, and Jesus description of this judge is brief, but it gives us a very clear picture of who he is. His first trait is that he doesn’t fear God. Now fear here would be referring to respect and honor. This judge does not see himself as under God’s authority or in need of showing God respect and honor. And that’s a pretty big deal for a judge, because this man is in charge of making decisions of guilt or innocence, of justice or injustice. And the only way you can do that, the only way anybody can say something is just or unjust is by comparing it to a standard, to an authoritative law. In ancient Israel, God’s law, the Mosaic Law, was the authoritative standard a judge would use to determine right from wrong. But this guy, this judge, doesn’t care about whether his judgments are in line with God’s law, because he doesn’t care about God’s authority.

And so right away, you can see the problem here. If a judge doesn’t care what is objectively right and wrong, and if he doesn’t fear the repercussions of dishonoring God, well, then how does he make his decisions? What standard does he use? Now, you might think, well, maybe he’s one of those sort of secular, godless humanitarians that we have today. Maybe he just makes the best decision for the people involved. He probably follows his heart, right? No, he doesn’t even do that because it also says he doesn’t respect people. He doesn’t respect people either. So, this judge doesn’t really care what happens to the people that come before him for justice. And that would be on the guilty side of things too, not just the innocent. The guilt or innocence of a person wouldn’t really matter to this judge. In some cases, then for him, the guilty might go free, or the guilty might go overly punished, or the innocent might be punished, or the guilty might receive a lighter sentence and be set free too soon and reoffend. How will we know what this judge will do? Well, we can’t know because this guy doesn’t care about God’s standard of justice and he doesn’t care what happens to the people involved. And we’re going to see in a moment just what standard this judge uses to make his decisions. But I want to just pause here to say that this combination of no fear of God and disrespect toward other people, it’s pretty typical. It’s a pretty typical combination. You could probably do a pretty interesting study of our US justice system, looking at the correlation between unbiblical laws and injustice to people. If you don’t care what God has said about the people that he’s created, then you won’t treat them with the value that he’s given them. The opposite is also true. If you stand before God in reverent fear of God, then you will treat people with respect and dignity that they deserve. This judge cares about neither, and he’s our first character.

Our second character is a widow who’s in trouble. Jesus says that she keeps coming to the judge asking for justice against her adversary. Now, we’re not told the exact problem that she’s having here, but the fact that Jesus mentions that she’s a widow probably means someone is trying to take the money that she needs to live. Widowed women were much more vulnerable in Jesus’ time, because the primary earners and owners of property were husbands in the first century. We have a lot more protections today on ownership than they did in the first century. So, this adversary is probably trying to swindle her money or swindle her property, something along those lines. But it doesn’t really matter. The point here is Jesus chooses someone who relies on the justice of the community. She’s vulnerable. She needs this judge to act with biblical justice toward her because she is in a vulnerable position. So, she keeps coming to this judge. She’s feisty. She doesn’t take no for an answer. She knows what’s right. And she needs this judge to do what’s right.

So, what does this judge do? Well, for a while he refused. But afterward he said to himself, though I neither feared 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. So, let’s be clear. How does this judge make decisions? Selfishly. That’s what motivates him. This judge loves himself some judge, right? He loves himself. That’s what he cares about. The internal reasoning of this motivation entirely turns on what will give him the outcome that he desires most for himself. So, his answer at first was to refuse to give the widow justice. Now we’re not told why, but based on what changed his mind, we can infer that there was nothing in it for him to give her justice. Why put your time into caring about a little people like widows if you don’t benefit from it? But then she got annoying. She got very annoying. She didn’t shrink. She didn’t become silent. She needed justice to be done. And so, she persisted. She endured. She badgered the judge into getting the justice that she deserved. I will give her justice so she will not beat me down. The Greek word there literally means to blacken the eye, to punch and blacken the eye. So, the judge here is saying, I’m going to give this woman justice that she wants. Not because I care, not because I fear God, not because I think this is important. Because I’m tired of dealing with this woman. She’s wearing me out. She’s hitting me in the face. So, this isn’t personal growth for this judge. This is annoyance aversion. This is the squeaky wheel gets the grease here. And the judge’s solution to a cry for justice is to wait until it affects him personally before he does anything at all. Now remember what Luke told us the purpose of this parable is. This parable is about staying persistent in our prayer and not losing heart. Is Jesus suggesting that the way to get God to give us the justice we need, while we struggle as we wait for his second coming, is to pray so persistently that we annoy God into doing the right thing. Is that what we’re supposed to do? Badger God with our prayers? All right, Kyle, all right. I’ll make your wife apologize to you. Right? I’m just kidding. That’s usually the other way around, actually. I have to say, if we don’t read this parable carefully, you could land there. That could end up being the way you think. God receives your prayers if we don’t read it carefully. This story could give us the impression that God is fairly indifferent to our situation, unless we do our part to put our needs in front of him, so much so that he’s forced to do something about it. Which is why we need to read the next part of this so carefully.

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. Okay, so with this parable, Jesus is using an argument style that’s called from the lesser to the greater. So, what you do is you give an inferior example of something that is true, and then you argue if that lesser situation is true, how much more this greater situation. Okay? It’s a way of arguing. And Jesus loves this style of argument for teaching. He does it all the time, usually when teaching us about the character of God. He’ll say things like, well, if God cares about the birds of the air, if God cares about the grass of the field, right? Of course he’s going to care about you. And here it’s the same thing in verse six. Hear what the unrighteous judge says. The key word there is unrighteous. If a godless, uncaring, self-centered judge will use his power to bring about justice because a woman is hitting him in the face with appeals and he and she won’t give up, how much more will a righteous God who has established the law? He’s not just following the law. He established the law and who loves his people dearly. How much more will he give them justice when they pray day and night? Of course, of course that God is going to do the right thing. Of course he’s going to ease their suffering and he’s going to protect them from harm. We’re told in Scripture that God’s plan of redemption for all his creation will eventually bring an end to all suffering. When Jesus returns, all sin is going to be judged. And every remnant of sin will be abolished. That includes people who refuse Christ’s forgiveness for their sins. God’s people, his elect in this passage, are those he has chosen to redeem out of the old creation, so that they can be with him in a new, sinless kingdom. As I said last week, Jesus second coming will be the culmination of that kingdom at that time when Jesus returns, the gates of that kingdom will close and final judgment will take place. But in the meantime, the gates are open and the kingdom is growing as people accept Jesus as Savior, as they worship him as Lord, as they obey him as King.

But if you’re doing that right now, if that’s who you are now, you’re in the kingdom now, you’re following Jesus now, you’re going to suffer, and you’re going to suffer for Jesus. You’re going to long for Jesus return, and you’re going to experience God allowing sin to affect this world for his purposes. And it will affect you. What Jesus is saying here is, while it is affecting you, don’t lose heart, don’t lose heart, and don’t stop praying. Why? Well, here’s where the difficulty of our passage comes in. We don’t lose heart, and we don’t stop praying day and night because God will not delay long in giving his people justice. Jesus elaborates on that. He says God will give justice to them speedily. If you’re starting to feel some questions bubble up inside of you hearing about short delays and speedy justice, I understand, I understand why. But let me just say it one more time before we address the elephant that just walked into the room on this. Jesus is saying that God the Father is a righteous judge who hears the prayers of his people who are suffering the injustices of sin. They are crying out to him day and night, and because he’s a good and loving God, he will right the wrongs for his people without delay, and he will bring them justice speedily.

And because this is his character, his people, his elect should not lose heart and should not stop praying. That is the point of the parable. That is what he is teaching us here. Now I’m just a guy with a Bible like you. Okay. That’s it. I have no more word from the Lord concerning the mysteries of his will than you have. We’re all working with the same information here. My phone has the same calendar on it that your phone has on it. Did you know that you can scroll on that calendar all the way back to AD 33, when Jesus said these words for the first time? Did you know you can do that? At full speed, scrolling, it took me almost 14 minutes to get there. It was a fantastic use of my time, just scrolling as fast as I possibly could. Almost 14 minutes to get back there. It has been 2000 years since Jesus declared that the justice of God would come speedily, with only a short delay to his people who cry out to him. 2000 years is an undeniably long time. From our perspective, what could Jesus possibly mean? Here we’re bumping up against the mystery of God’s unrevealed plan to bring about the redemption of the whole earth in Christ. And we’re not given God’s timeline, but it is unmistakable that Jesus is telling us not to stop praying, or to not stop praying, because if we pray for God’s justice, we will see it. To try to get at the mystery here, I’m going to draw in some other passages that give us some perspective. The Apostle Peter in in his letter Second Peter chapter three describes this delay. He says that scoffers are going to come, and these scoffers are going to say something very specific. They’re going to say, where’s the promise of his coming? Where is it forever? Since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. So, they’re saying, yeah, Jesus came, and then Jesus left, and then nothing. Of course scoffers don’t believe in the resurrection, so they see no interruption at all. They just see Jesus died and everything has continued on without interruption. And to this Peter responds, do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. So, God’s full plan of gathering his elect people into his church has to be fulfilled first, before the return of Christ.

Jesus said, the gospel will be preached to all the nations of the earth, and then the end will come. And so, Peter and Jesus agree on this, and that work has yet to be fully accomplished. That process seems slow to us. It seems very slow to us. But God is not bound by time the way that we are. A thousand years to God is like a single day. So, from our perspective, it’s been 2000 years. From God’s perspective, it’s been two days since Jesus gave us this parable. That’s the first thing to recognize. That’s the first thing we need to bring into our understanding of this. Our sense of slowness is not shared by God. The timeline of eschatology can’t be measured by what we think is a long time. That is part of the mystery, but that doesn’t fully address everything that Jesus is saying here in this parable to us, because the clear reasoning for why we should keep praying and not lose heart is that God hears us and he loves us, and he will respond to our prayers. There’s no way that the disciples walked away that day from Jesus, thinking that their persistent prayer for justice will only be fulfilled someday thousands of years from now. That’s not the reason he gave it to them. I think the best way to understand the present reality of God’s intervening justice is by remembering the nature of the kingdom of God, and by looking at what the earliest church saw when they were looking for God’s justice.

First of all, remember what Jesus said about the nature of the kingdom, that it’s already started, but it’s not yet culminated. It’s going on right now, but it’s not yet visible everywhere. In a kingdom like that, I’d expect that there would be times when we would see incredible displays of God’s righteous justice, and also times when it seems like evil wins. I fully expect to see God use the prayers of his people to bring about swift, almost miraculous correction of injustice, and also, I expect that God will allow injustice to win the day, either because of the prayerlessness of his people or because his will requires it. And that last one is probably the most important one. Remember that even Jesus prayed right before he was arrested in the garden. Jesus prayed that there would be another way to redeem God’s people, but it was God’s plan that he would endure the injustice of the cross. And the early church shared that same perspective that Jesus had when they cried out to God to bring justice. For instance, they weren’t trying to get arrested as Christians. Did you know this? They weren’t trying to get arrested. But it happened a lot. They were pretty consistently arrested for preaching the gospel.

Sometimes they would pray and God would bring about justice. So, Peter and John preached in the streets, and they annoyed some Sadducees, and the Sadducees took them in, and they tried them, but they realized that they had nothing to hold them on. And so, they released them. And so what did they do? They went back to the church community, and the whole church community doubled down on prayer, praying for boldness to continue to go preach the gospel. They wouldn’t stop. In Acts chapter five the apostles are then thrown into prison. Right after this. They were praying for boldness. They get thrown into prison, and that night God opens the prison door so they could be let out into the street and then they kept preaching the same gospel. That’s injustice undone by the angel of the Lord. But just two chapters later, two chapters later, same community, Stephen is captured, he’s given an unjust trial, and he’s stoned to death for preaching the same gospel. Did the church fall apart? Did they say God is no longer listening to our prayers? He’s broken his promise to give us speedy justice. Is that what they did? No. That event triggered a greater persecution that scattered the church unjustly all over the region. Acts chapter eight, verse four says those who were scattered went about preaching the word. They just kept doing it. They just kept going and doing the very thing that they were getting arrested for.

The same people who saw God’s miraculous intervention of justice also recognized that sometimes God uses injustice to put people strategically where they need to be to continue his mission. And then we say, well, but what about Stephen? What about Stephen himself? Why didn’t God intervene for the injustice done to him? Does he not care? Did Stephen not badger God enough with his prayers in order to receive justice? Did God not listen to him because he didn’t pray enough. Where was God? I’ll tell you where God was. In one of the most beautiful passages in all of Scripture, it says, Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed up and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God the Father. And right before they killed him, he said, behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. God wasn’t absent. He was waiting. He was waiting. The moment had come when God’s answer of justice to Stephen was to welcome him into eternity. The early church understood this. They understood and church, we must understand that God’s promised speedy, shortly delayed justice is going to look different in different situations based on what God is accomplishing as his kingdom expands. Sometimes his justice is going to look like righteousness, crashing into evil and destroying it. That’s what we want when we pray for it. We want to see that happen. Sometimes it’s going to look like wickedness wins the day, and we have to keep praying with an eye toward what God might be doing strategically by allowing injustice for a time. And sometimes it’s going to look like God’s people succumbing to the horrors of sin. But they aren’t. They aren’t. They’re simply being welcomed into the waiting arms of God. God’s justice prevails in all three of those scenarios.

And then Jesus ends with this. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? It’s a simple rhetorical question that packs a devastating gut punch. What will Jesus find when he comes back? What will he find in his church? What will he find in you? Will he find a faithful people who didn’t lose heart when things got hard? Will he find his people are praying diligently, waiting on his justice, counting on his justice, trusting that all his promises are sure? You know, for those of you who came to church this morning feeling doubtful, like maybe God isn’t listening or doesn’t care, I hope you’re encouraged this morning. I hope you’re encouraged to keep going this morning. Keep praying. Keep your spiritual legs churning. The God of Justice is right here with us. We’re placed in this unique moment of history to be the ones who cry out to the Lord. We’re the ones that will cry out to God on behalf of the injustices around us in the world. That’s what we’re here for. Let’s pray.