Every Last Word

Mark: Do you ever feel that no matter how much you pray for something, God never answers? Whether it's for a relationship, the salvation of a friend, or justice for those who are persecuted, it sometimes feels that God isn't answering. What does Jesus say about being persistent in our prayers? Let's look at the gospel of Luke today and see what Jesus says about continuing on in prayer.

Welcome to Every Last Word, a radio and internet program with Dr. Philip Ryken, teaching the whole Bible to change your whole life. Today we continue our studies in Luke, investigating what the Bible says about our prayers. Phil, why doesn't God immediately answer our prayers for good things like the salvation for a friend or justice for those who have sinned against God?

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: Mark, why don't you ask me an easy one instead of one I'd really have to be God to answer? It's one of the great mysteries, isn't it? Sometimes we come to God with a request that we know should be in keeping with His will and yet we don't get the speedy answer we're looking for. I think we need to understand that God does hear our prayers even if He doesn't answer them according to our timetable.

And particularly when it comes to justice, I think the teaching of Jesus in this passage helps us a lot because Jesus promises speedy justice, justice that will arrive at just the time that God has planned for it to arrive. And in the same way that Jesus died at just the right time, we can count on Him to bring justice at just the right time.

Mark: You'll say in today's message that God answers our prayers, but sometimes we're not even praying to God. Why don't we pray?

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: Well, there are probably a lot of reasons for that. Mark, I think prayerlessness is a great problem in the church and prayer is a great struggle, maybe for all Christians, certainly for most of us. And maybe one reason is that sometimes we don't get the answer that we're looking for and it's easy to give up on prayer. And that's one of the reasons for us then, today's parable is a big help because it's a reminder to keep asking God and keep asking again, knowing that prayer will be answered in God's good time.

Mark: Thank you, Phil. Let's turn in our Bibles now to Luke chapter 18, verses one through eight and listen together to Dr. Ryken.

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: It is hard enough to pray at all, let alone to keep on praying until we get God's answer. Now, there are many reasons that we have for this sinful negligence, but none of them are good ones. There is our physical weakness, sometimes we even fall asleep when we are at prayer. There is our lazy lack of self-discipline, we don't make the time that we know we ought to make to spend time alone with God in prayer.

There is our callous indifference to a world in need, a need so great that it ought to drive us to our knees. There is perhaps even outright rebellion or at least a false sense of independence, even if we never come right out and say it, we're doing so well in life just on our own we hardly think we need to ask for the help of God. These are some of the kinds of reasons we might give for our sinful negligence in persisting in prayer.

But sometimes we stop praying because we lose heart. We don't get the answer that we think God ought to be giving us when we pray. And so for example, we pray for the sick, but they are not healed. We pray for someone to get saved and yet they keep running away from God. We pray for God to provide and yet we still are looking for work. We pray for a partner in life and yet we find ourselves still alone. And then we start to wonder whether God is even listening and we may even get to the point where we are so discouraged that we stop asking for God's help at all.

Well, Jesus knew us well enough to know how much we would struggle with persisting in prayer. And so He taught His disciples a parable to the effect that we ought always to pray and not to lose heart. This is what we find at the beginning of Luke chapter 18. Let me encourage you to turn there in your Bibles where we consider what is sometimes called the parable of the persistent widow or alternatively, the parable of the unjust judge.

And one thing that is somewhat unusual about this parable is that unlike many other parables where we don't get the key to unlock its meaning until the end of the parable, if we get it at all explicitly, here we get the meaning right at the beginning. It is as if the key is already in the lock and all we need to do is open the door. The Son of God who always prayed to His Father and who even now is always praying for us is telling us not to give up but to persist in prayer.

Now, let me simply remind you of the context for this parable. Jesus had been speaking about the second coming of the Son of Man. Jesus came once for the salvation of sinners, born on Christmas day, died on Good Friday, raised again on Easter Sunday. And He will come again at the end of the world, very suddenly, and as we saw in chapter 17, very disastrously for anyone who is not ready for His return.

And so right now, we are living between these two comings of Christ in that long interval between the already and the not yet. We are watching and waiting for Jesus. We are longing for that great day when He will make everything right with our world. And yet the Son of Man seems so long in coming that sometimes we might be tempted to wonder whether His promise will really come true. And so here Jesus is telling us to keep on praying and He's telling us this by means of the following story beginning in verse two.

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 woman keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.

Now, a good story has strong characters and this is a good story, certainly. And here we see two very strong characters that stand sharply in contrast. One is a man, the other is a woman. One has power and influence, the other is helpless and almost defenseless, a widow. One is in the wrong and one is in the right. First character we meet is this crooked judge. Jesus calls him in verse six an unrighteous or more literally, an unjust judge, which almost sounds like an oxymoron, but this is the way the man was. His character was in contradiction to his calling.

He neither feared God nor respected man. In other words, he lacked the very two qualities which are most necessary for dispensing true justice. Now, in those days, someone who wanted a legal remedy often had to offer a substantial bribe. And so a penniless victim basically had no chance with a man like this. He was ungracious, he was unloving, he was unmerciful, he was ungodly. And strangely enough, he seems to have known this about himself. We at least can say he's honest about his own dishonest character. I don't fear God, he says at the end of verse four, I don't love my neighbor. He was the kind of man who only did something for someone else if it happened to align with his own self-interest.

The other leading character in the story is a woman who wanted justice and who wouldn't stop fighting for it until she got it. And I'm sure you'll agree that her situation was rather desperate. Here she was a widow, she was one of the most vulnerable members of that society. And therefore, she was entitled to special protection under the law of God who is the defender of widows. And yet very sadly, when she was attacked by an enemy, no one came to her defense. And since she was too poor to hire a defense attorney, she had no one to protect her. Her cause was righteous and yet she was at the mercy of injustice. Really without power or protection, the only thing she had going for her was her persistence. And as you'll see from the story, she wasn't afraid to use it.

Now, Jesus tells us she kept coming to this judge. We can imagine her pestering him on the streets, knocking on his door perhaps, coming after him day after day after day with this plea, give me justice. And for a time, he ignored her, hoping I'm sure that she would go away. But here was a woman who wouldn't take no for an answer. Finally, because she kept bothering him and kept annoying him, finally he decided to just give her what she wanted. She wore the man down. You see, if you keep asking for something long enough, sometimes you can get what you want even if people don't really want to give it to you. Eventually, they realize it will cost them much less to just give in than it will to resist your persistent pleading.

Some parents can testify that this is a skill many children master at a young age when really their stubbornness is the only resource they have. Or consider the strange case of a rancher from Powder Bluff, Colorado, who was asked if he wanted to resubscribe to National Geographic. The computer in charge of generating the renewal notices malfunctioned and sent the man 9,734 separate renewal notices. Well, after all of that, he couldn't resist. He rode down to the nearest post office, he sent in his check along with a note that said, I give up, send me your magazine. Well, that's what the unjust judge did, didn't he? He gave up. He finally acquiesced to the widow's incessant cry for help, belatedly giving the justice that she had always deserved. Not because it was the right thing to do, but only to get rid of her once and for all.

Now, Jesus told this parable to make a simple and very practical point, the one announced at the beginning in verse one. The point here is not that God is like the judge, don't get that idea. Some of the parables work with that kind of comparison, but this is a parable that works by way of contrast. Jesus is making good use of the man's bad example. Here is how He applies the parable in verse six. 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. Now here Jesus asks two questions, both of which you will recognize are rhetorical questions. Will God give justice to His chosen people? Answer, yes He will, because in His justice He has promised to save them.

Will He wait too long to save them? No, because His deliverance will come at just the right time. And you see by way of contrast, the parable is proving it. Even the worst judge will do what people demand if they keep on demanding it. How much more then, this is the way the argument works, how much more then will the righteous judge, who is the most righteous judge of all, give justice to the people He loves? And you see, this contrast between the unjust judge and between God in heaven is meant to encourage us in our prayers. We have a God who is everything that this judge is not. And all of His perfections give us confidence when we pray.

Now, let me just mention three things this parable is telling us about the character of God and how they help us when we pray and in particular to persist in prayer. First, God is a just God who is fair in all His decisions, who is righteous in all His ways. Unlike the judge in this parable, He is a God who defends the widow, who delivers the oppressed. In other words, He is on the side of the person who needs help, always on the side of justice, always against injustice. He is a God, Jesus says in verse seven, very simply and very clearly, who gives justice. And that means we always have a final court of appeal.

Surely one of our great frustrations in life is that justice is not always done, at least as far as we can see. No, ungodliness sometimes triumphs. The guilty often go free. We see this in the persecution of the church by hostile governments. We see it in various corruptions of our legal system. We see it in the structures of society that work to the disadvantage of people who don't have good connections. We see it in all of the messy interpersonal situations where it's hard to know what has really happened and who should be held responsible and what should be done about the whole thing. And we see it perhaps most clearly of all when we ourselves have been treated wrongly or unfairly. And sometimes we find we have no recourse, at least in this life, but to accept injustice no matter how much we rage against it.

But here there is one other thing that we can also do, and that is to pray. Because you see, we have a mighty judge who has promised in His word that He will do what is right, that in the end He will render total justice in the entire universe, that He will straighten out every distressing situation that no one else could ever make right, and He will do it on the side of justice. He is a just God and that encourages us in our prayers for justice. Second, He is a loving God, a God who knows His people by name and has promised to save them. The widow in this parable remains anonymous, Jesus never tells us her name. As far as the judge was concerned, she was a nobody. If she had been somebody, He would have helped her.

When Jesus speaks about the justice of God, He says that God will take care of His elect. Do you see that in verse seven? In other words, when we pray, we are coming to a God who knows who we are and has chosen us to belong to Him. This is what the Bible teaches, that God has loved us in Christ before the foundation of the world. And Jesus is taking that great biblical doctrine of election and He is connecting it to the life of prayer. He is reminding us that we have a God who has a plan for our salvation in which He has promised to save us to the very end. And what a help that is to us when we pray. On the basis of our election, we have a much stronger claim upon God than this widow ever had with this unjust judge. We have an even stronger claim than that. When we bring our helpless case before our great judge, we are coming to a God who knows us, who has chosen us, who cares about us and has already promised to save us.

And far from hindering us in our prayers as some have said, the doctrine of election actually gives us a more confident basis on which to pray. That's what Jesus is saying here. We've been chosen by God. This assures us that He will hear us when we pray. And so if you are ever tempted to doubt whether God is concerned about the things that are concerning to you, you can say, listen to my prayer, my Father in heaven, because You have chosen me to be Your own beloved child. On the basis of that relationship as a father to a beloved child, hear me when I pray. Because you see, even before you go to God with that prayer, you can know that God loves you and cares about you and is ready to act on your behalf.

This brings us to a third aspect of God's character helping us to persist in prayer, and that is the wisdom of God. Not just the justice of God, not just the electing love of God, but also His wisdom and particularly with regard to His timing. Now, I know that God is often criticized for His timing. In fact, when Jesus asks in this parable whether God will delay, you can see the question He asks at the end of verse seven, it's tempting perhaps to say yes because sometimes God's justice seems to be so long in coming. Many wrongs that won't be righted until the coming of the Son of Man are still left unresolved in this life. And as we have seen, there is a long interval between the first and second comings of Christ, at least it seems like a long interval to us.

But here Jesus is not saying that justice will come immediately. No, sometimes justice is delayed, I think everyone knows that. In fact, that's the reason why Jesus told this parable. Remember, it's to teach us always to pray and never to lose heart even when prayer seems to go unanswered and particularly in relation to the coming of the Son of Man to bring judgment on the earth. That's the whole context of the parable. But here Jesus is making it clear God is not ignoring us like the unjust judge was ignoring that widow. He's not putting things off because He doesn't want to be bothered with what we need. His delay, as it would seem to us, is not a denial. No, He will do things just when they need to be done. Think of the wonderful promise of Scripture in the book of Habakkuk speaking on the subject of the coming of the justice of God. It says, if it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not delay.

That's what Jesus is saying here as well. God's justice may seem like it is a long time coming, but when it comes, it will come swiftly. This is what Jesus means by speedy justice. There will be no unnecessary delay. But God will answer our prayers at exactly the time He knows that they ought to be answered. In the wisest way that brings Him the most glory and at exactly that moment, justice will swiftly come. In fact, Luke 17 was speaking on that very point, the sudden coming of the justice of God. Do you see how everything we know about the character of God, and that's just three examples taken from the teaching of this particular parable, but all of these things encourage us to persist in prayer.

This is the point of the parable that Jesus told. Not that we should spend all our time in prayer, I mean, there are other things that Jesus has called us to do. But you see, prayer is the holy habit of a sanctified heart. And so as often as we feel the burden of injustice in the world, as often as we struggle with the disappointment of our own sin and see our need of repentance, as often as we seek to step out in faith and serve God in the world, as often as we do any of these things, we are called to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God.

Now, you'll notice that here Jesus speaks of His people praying night and day. We do not need to beg God the way the persistent widow had to beg the unjust judge. I mean, this parable isn't telling us we have to keep bugging God until finally He listens. Now, don't get the idea that prayer is a way of talking God into doing something He doesn't want to do. No, on the contrary, we persist in prayer just because of the character of God, because He's the kind of God that He is, a just God, a wise God, a loving God. A God who listens very carefully when we pray. A God who will answer in His best way at His best time. You see, we do not persist in prayer because God doesn't listen, but just because He does. That's the point of the parable that Jesus teaches.

In practical terms, persisting in prayer begins, of course, with coming to Jesus in the first place for the forgiveness of our sins, coming to Him in repentance and faith. That's how we begin the life of prayer. It's praying for our own salvation through Jesus Christ. And then persisting in prayer means coming to God with the rest of our personal requests, spending time alone with God in prayer each day. It means praying regularly with our families or with our household or with other close Christian friends depending on our situation in life. It means safeguarding time for prayer in our small group Bible studies. It means participating in the corporate prayer life of the local church.

It means persevering in prayer even when we don't feel very much like praying at all and maybe are tempted to wonder whether it makes any difference if we do or not. It means praying for all of the things we need, our daily needs, for victory over sin. It means praying for the help of the Holy Spirit in ministry. But let me say that I think the most direct application of this parable is to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God and specifically for the people of God to get the justice they are waiting so long to receive. For of all the cries that go up to God day and night for speedy justice, the most urgent are the ones offered by and for the persecuted church in the world.

This is about praying for justice, that's what the parable is about. And sometimes we ourselves are in need of the speedy justice of God. We may be suffering in some way because of our commitment to Christ, some kind of opposition, maybe even in a way a form of persecution, being treated unfairly because of our commitment to Christ. And if that's the situation we're in, we need to keep appealing to God for the justice that He can only bring. Ask for God to bring that justice at His good time and in His right way.

But of course, for whatever suffering we may be enduring, we have other brothers and sisters who are suffering much more severely than we are. And we are called to keep them in our prayers. Are you aware of some of the needs of the persecuted church in the world? You know that in China house church leaders are under government surveillance and in some cases are put in prison. You know that in Sudan Christians are facing genocidal violence from militant Muslims. In Saudi Arabia, people are not permitted to convert to faith in Jesus Christ. Are you familiar with the plight of Christian pastors in Vietnam meeting secretly to get the training that they need so that they can preach the gospel? Or the situation in Eritrea where growing numbers of Christians are being put in prison? Or in India where low caste Christians are denied even the most basic civil rights? These are only some examples of the kinds of opposition that Christians are facing in the world, much more severe than anything we face in this country, that is for sure.

Sometimes Christians in countries that are hostile to the gospel are even put to death. In fact, only this week news has come from Iran of the pastor of a house church, a father of four, who has been killed in cold blood. The man was kidnapped by local police. He was stabbed repeatedly unto death, and then his bleeding body was thrown in the street in front of the family home. And we hear this kind of horrific news and we can only cry out to God for His mercy. We come to Him with the prayer of the martyrs as we find it recorded in Revelation six. O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?

You see, this is the prayer of the people of God as they join with the voice of the martyrs, how long before the Lord will bring justice? That's the situation Jesus was talking about in the parable. We're waiting, we're watching for justice to be done. And it is exactly in that situation that Jesus tells us to pray and to pray and never to lose heart. And Jesus tells us this because of course He is the one who will see the justice is done. He knows that the great day of the Son of Man is coming. He is preparing for it. He knows that the day is coming when He will return like lightning to judge the world. We saw all about that in chapter 17.

When Jesus tells us to persist in prayer, He is also speaking not just about what will happen but about what has happened. He's speaking about His own experience of prayer when He suffered and died for our sins. In the gospels, particularly in the gospel of Luke, we are shown Jesus busy at His prayers, praying again and again alone and with others to His Father in heaven. In other words, we see Jesus doing exactly the thing that He is calling us to do. We see Him always praying. We see Him never losing heart. Or do we? Because there was a time when Jesus almost did seem to lose heart. In His dying hour, He was close to despair. Remember how as He hung on the cross, Jesus was enduring the full weight of God's wrath against our sin.

During that time on the cross, there came a time when the happy fellowship that He had always enjoyed with His Father was ruptured. Jesus took the guilt of our sin upon Himself, and when He did, the shadow of our sin passed between the Father and the Son, and Jesus cried out His God-forsaken prayer, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? When Jesus said this, He was suffering the greatest injustice in the universe. He was the sinless Son of God dying for crimes He had not committed, for wrongs that He had never done.

Nevertheless, in his own need for justice, Jesus persisted in prayer. He did not lose heart and in His dying moments He said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And really what He was praying for was justice to be done. He was entrusting His justice, His cause, His situation to the Father in heaven. He was asking God the Father to vindicate Him by raising Him from the dead. Because only then would justice be done, justice for Jesus as the sinless Son of God and justice for Him as the suffering savior of sinners. And you see, just as Jesus Himself prayed for justice in the cross and through the empty tomb, so now He calls us to entrust our cause to God and not just our own personal cause, but the cause of the church in the world, to follow His example by persisting in prayer.

And as He gives us that command, He has one final question for us, it's the question you see at the end of verse eight. When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth? You know, most people think God is the one who has questions to answer, questions about what's going wrong in the world, questions about whether justice will ever be done, questions about whether the promises about the coming of Christ are true. But those are not the real questions as far as God is concerned. Because of course Jesus will come again, of course justice will be done. I mean, God has promised that in His word.

The real question is the question that God has for me and for you. Not whether Jesus will come again, but whether we will be ready for His coming. Or to put it another way, the real question is not whether God will do what He has promised to do, but whether we will keep trusting Him to do it. And so when the Son of Man comes the way that He promised He would come in chapter 17, will He find us praying the way that He commands in chapter 18? And we need to answer that question at the personal level. Because in one sense, the answer to the question that Jesus asks at the end of verse eight is perfectly obvious. Will He find faith on the earth? Yes Jesus will, because He's promised that His church will endure, there will always be a remnant preserved by grace.

But will Jesus find you in the faith? That's the real question, that's the question Jesus is really putting to His disciples. Remember what we learn from the end of chapter 17, remember Lot's wife. Remember her terrible situation, how unready she was for the coming of judgment, the way that she looked back at all the things that she loved and was lost forever. Well, here we are reminded again how important it is for us to be ready for the coming of the Son of Man. What will happen to you when Jesus comes again? Will He find you in the faith? Well, one of the ways to see whether this is so is to see whether you are trusting God by never losing heart, by persisting in prayer, by praying for the kingdom to come.

If we stop praying, if we give up on prayer, we are saying really we think God is even more unrighteous than the unjust judge. Because even that judge was willing to listen if you came to him often enough. But if we stop praying, we are practically saying we don't believe God will listen to us at all. And so I ask you again, will Jesus find you in the faith when He comes again? And if so, is He finding you faithful in the life of prayer even now? Well, if not, you would be wise to follow the godly counsel of J.C. Ryle. He asks this question, do you ever feel a secret inclination to hurry your prayers, or shorten your prayers, or become careless about your prayers, or to admit your prayers altogether?

Well, if Pastor Ryle asks us that question, I dare say we all know the answer. Let us be sure, he says, when we do feel these very sinful inclinations, that they are a direct temptation from the devil. He's trying to undermine the very citadel of our souls, he's trying to cast us down to hell. Let us resist the temptation therefore. Let us resolve to pray on, to pray on steadily, to pray on patiently, to pray on perseveringly. Let us never doubt that it does us good. However long the answer may be in coming, still let us pray on. Whatever sacrifice and self-denial it may cost, still let us pray on.

And our Father in heaven, we would pray on now. We would go on praying for the kingdom of Christ, for the judgment of the world in righteousness. And as we pray, Father, we would confess our own sin, our own lack of faith, our own lack of persistence and perseverance in prayer, our own need for the prevailing grace of the Holy Spirit. Father, we pray for ourselves individually, in our families, in our small groups, in our ministries, in our church as a whole. We pray that You would make us people who persist in prayer. By the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His name we pray. Amen.

Mark: You are listening to Every Last Word with Bible teacher Dr. Philip Ryken, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance exists to promote a biblical understanding and worldview, drawing upon the insight and wisdom of reformed theologians from decades and even centuries gone by. We seek to provide Christian teaching that will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. Alliance broadcasting includes the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, Every Last Word with Bible teacher Dr. Philip Ryken, God's Living Word with Pastor the Reverend Richard Phillips, and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible featuring Donald Barnhouse.

For more information on the Alliance, including a free introductory package for first-time callers or to make a contribution, please call toll-free 1-800-488-1888. Again, that's 1-800-488-1888. You can also write the Alliance at Box 2000, Philadelphia, PA 19103. Or you can visit us online at AllianceNet.org. Ask for your free resource catalog featuring books, audio, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding reformed teachers and theologians. Thank you again for your continued support of this ministry.