(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the podcast. On Monday, we took a question from Rose, a woman who has emailed us several times over the years. She's emailed us the same brief question, how do I pray for my husband to be saved? It's a question from desperation and maybe from weariness too.

So how does a woman, how does a wife like Rose not lose heart in praying for her husband over years? And maybe even over decades? Pastor John there ended his answer with a brief mention of Luke 18 verses one to eight, a parable, a great parable for those who need motivation to endure in prayer.

But it's also a very odd parable. It has sometimes been called the parable of the unjust judge, which is where one of the problems rests. How and why is God likened to a godless, unjust judge? Because of this, we often just skirt that problem and we just call it preferably the parable of the persistent widow.

That's cleaner. But no matter what we call it, this remains perhaps the oddest parable that Jesus ever told. Odd because of how many false correlations we need to untangle to understand it. And that's what we do today in a clip from a sermon preached on January 9th at the end of the first week of 1983.

So way back the first week of 1983. Here's a very young Pastor John preaching during a pretty intense season of focused prayer for himself and for his church. Here's what he said. - It's one of the few parables to be interpreted right at the outset, lest we miss the point.

Verse one of chapter 18 of Luke is the interpretation to the parable. He said, "Tell them a parable to the effect "that they ought always to pray and not lose heart." Jesus' answer to the question, "How can you endure to the end and be saved?" is pray, pray, pray, and don't lose heart in your praying.

The parable goes like this. In a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor regarded man, and there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, "Vindicate me against my adversary." For a while, he refused, and afterward he said, "Although I neither fear God nor regard man, "yet because this widow bothers me, "I'll vindicate her, or she'll wear me out "by this continual coming." Now, don't be offended that Jesus compares God, the Father, to an unjust judge.

That happens several times in the Bible. For example, the most familiar one, Jesus' coming is called the coming of what in the night? A thief, which is not very complimentary to Jesus. But clearly, when the New Testament talks like that, it doesn't mean Jesus is a thief. It means that the point of comparison is suddenness, unexpectedness.

So here, the point of comparison is not that God is unjust, but that he gives in to prevailing prayer. Verse seven draws out the lesson very clearly, which was stated in verse one, "And will not God vindicate his elect "who cry to him day and night?" The answer, of course, is obviously God will vindicate his elect who cry to him day and night, that is, who always pray.

Therefore, the point of the parable is, cry to God day and night. Show yourself to be the elect by acting like the way the elect always act, cry to God day and night, or to use the words of verse one, pray always. Don't lose heart. And if you do that, you will not become like Lot's wife, in love with the world and turned back into a pillar of salt.

You will not be left in judgment as one is snatched away from your home. You will endure in faith and love, and God will vindicate you when the Son of Man flashes from one horizon to the other. So always pray, and don't lose heart. Now, what's driving me this morning in this sermon is that this is the last day of a week of concerted prayer.

So we're at the end, right? The end of prayer week. That's a dangerous place to be, according to this parable. Don't end, is what this parable is saying. If we end praying, we're in trouble, deep trouble. Some of us this week have had a great time. I've prayed more hours in the first week of 83 than any week in my life, and many of you have too.

Now what? The word of Jesus to us this morning is don't stop praying. Don't peter out. Don't be fickle. Always, always, always pray. Cry to God day and night. Here's the way Peter put it in his first letter. The end of all things as at hand. Therefore, be sane and sober for your prayers.

The closer the end draws near, the more threat against the warmth of the faith of the church, and the greater the need for persevering prayer. The pressures of worldliness will be so great as the end draws near that only a few, Jesus said, most men's love will grow cold.

Only a few will make it. I hope we're among the number. Now how does this parable, how does this parable help us and encourage us to pray continually? The widow comes to an unjust judge and she pleads for help. Evidently, she's being oppressed by some rascal and she's helpless, and she asks the judge, vindicate me, help me, tell him to stop that.

And that's us, right? The widow, weak, poor, no husband to stand up for her. Her only recourse, the judge, even though he's unjust, and our only recourse, God. Now the argument of the parable is not, well, if you can get on the case of the judge long enough, he'll try to get you off his back by vindicating you.

Therefore, if you get on God's case long enough, then to get you off his back, he will vindicate you. You could interpret the parable that way, but there are two reasons why you shouldn't. The first is that that would contradict clearly Luke 12, 32, where it says, "It is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." He's not reneging on any promises.

He's just eager to give you the kingdom. But the main reason why we shouldn't construe the parable that way is that there are two clues right here in the parable for the fact that God isn't like that judge. Notice in verse 2, "This judge neither feared God nor regarded man." And those two things are repeated in verse 4, "Though I neither fear God nor regard man, yet I will vindicate her." Now, when it says, "Yet I will vindicate her," that must mean that fearing God or not fearing God and not regarding men are big obstacles to helping the widow.

Right? If you don't fear God, it's an obstacle to get over to help her. He gets over it by ulterior motives. But notice first, he doesn't fear God. And if fearing God is an obstacle to helping the widow, then presumably, if you did fear God, you would incline naturally to help the widow.

Right? That must mean that God isn't at all like this judge. Because if he inclines the people who fear him to give to the widow liberally and quickly, he must be that kind of God. And so by saying that this judge doesn't fear God and therefore doesn't answer her readily, he shows that God isn't at all like the unjust judge.

And so the argument of the parable is an argument from lesser to greater. If by knocking on the door of the judge who doesn't have an ounce of justice in his body, you can still get your answer, how much more by knocking on God's door continually will you most certainly be answered?

Because he's not like a judge at all. The second thing it says about the judge is that he has no regard for man. Now, we need to ask, since he doesn't know this widow and therefore doesn't care about her at all, has no regard to her, is God like that?

When we approach him and pray to him, verse 7 makes it very, very clear that that's not the case. Because verse 7 says, Jesus says, "And will not God vindicate his elect?" When they cry to him night and day, see that word "elect"? That's a dynamite word. That means when we come to God and pray to him, we're not coming like a stranger, a widow whom he doesn't know or care about.

He has chosen us, elected us, set his favor upon us, adopted us into his family, made us his children. When we knock on the door and say, it's me, he's very different than when a strange widow knocks on an unjust judge's door and says, it's me. Who? God knows our voice.

We're his children. We're the chosen. We're the elect. And therefore, Jesus argues, same from lesser to greater, if an unjust judge who has a stranger whom he doesn't care about at all knocking on his door will give in to her, how much more will God, who not only knows us but chose us, loves us, adopts us readily and lovingly answer our request?

So the parable is intended to encourage us to get on with the business of praying because we have such a hopeful prospect of being answered. When Jesus asks at the end of the parable now in verse 8, "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?" Coming at the end of this parable, that could be also phrased like this.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find that we have kept praying or not? Evidently, in Jesus' mind, prayer and faith stand and fall together. Yeah, that's a fascinating connection with verse 8 in the parable. Persistent prayer and enduring faith are correlated as the same thing. Persistent prayer and enduring faith are correlated as basically the same thing.

Such an important parable to understand. That was from John Piper's sermon preached on January 9, 1983, titled "Always Pray and Do Not Lose Heart." Thanks for listening. Today, I am your host, Tony Reike, and we are rejoined in studio with Pastor John when we return on Friday to close out this week.

We'll see you then.