Are you too polite with how you pray to God? When praying for a certain cause, emergency, or even praying that God would bring a loved one to the faith, do you pray for it a few times and then just stop praying for that thing? Some reasons we might give for halting our prayers for certain things are, “God knows about this,” or “There are 7 billion more people for him to worry about, and I don’t want to be a pest.” While it is true that God remembers your prayers, and that he even knows what you will pray about before you fold your hands, that doesn’t change the fact God, the creator of the universe, has given you an open line of communication directly to his ear and tell you, “pray continually” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
Too often we think that God gets annoyed with us the way we get annoyed with that person who keeps reminding us about what we told them we would do. God isn’t going to one day thunder down from heaven saying, “SHUT UP! You’ve already said this, you’re just repeating what I promised I would do.” God will never say something like that. We know this because Jesus, who is the Son of God, and one with God the Father, gave us a story for the purpose of teaching us, “that [we] should pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1). In the NIV translation of the Bible this story is given the title “The Parable of the Persistent Widow” (Luke 18:1-8).
At first glance it seems odd that Jesus would use this parable to teach us to be persistent in prayer. We’re told of a woman who has been wronged in some way and she is going daily before the town judge demanding that he dole out proper justice. The judge in this story didn’t find this woman’s persistence endearing, he was annoyed by her. The judge viewed this woman the way you or I might treat that prolonged pain in the back that won’t go away; at first you think you can suffer through it, but when it doesn’t go away then you need to act on it and go to the doctor. Eventually this pest of a widow annoyed the judge so much, that in order to silence her pleas for justice he did his job!
Is Jesus admitting that God is annoyed by persistent prayers, but wants us to keep on praying in order to keep him honest about doing what he is supposed to do? Of course that is not what Jesus is saying here! The judge in this parable is the opposite of who our God is. The judge in the story publicly declares, “I don’t fear God or care about men” (Luke 18:4b); You have a God, who is judge of all. He can read hearts and minds, and sent his only Son into the world to die for sinners who justly deserve hell but because of Jesus life and death all who have true faith will justly be given heaven – of course he cares about people!
At times we might think that God is not listening to our prayers because we aren’t getting the answer we want. That is when we need to realize that God doesn’t just answer the prayers of a believer with an automatic, “Yes.” Since we trust God knows what is best for us we need to be willing to accept when God answers prayer with a “No” or a “Not yet.” So be persistent and be willing to accept the answer according to the will of the Lord who is working for your good (Romans 8:28).
There is something else that we need to recognize about the persistence of this woman’s petitions to the unjust judge; she was asking for justice against her adversary and this justice was legally hers. Jesus taught this parable to prepare his disciples for the Last Day, when he would come to dole out full justice. Jesus is teaching us to pray persistently for the Last Day to come. To pray for God to declare his just judgement concerning the devil and all of his demons and everyone who denied the faith and held to unbelief; to give them the punishment of hell that they justly deserve. Jesus is teaching persistence in prayer as we keep the Last Day in perspective. We do persistently pray for this justice over sin every time we pray in the Lord’s prayer, “deliver us from evil.” It is on that day when Jesus returns that all who believe will be completely delivered from all evil and will justly be given the gift of heaven that Jesus won for us by shedding his blood on the cross.
God isn’t annoyed by your persistent prayer. He invites it. Jesus is telling you to pray and not give up as encouragement to not give into the evil temptations that threaten to tear you from God. The Christian who is persistent in prayer is one who is persistent in reading the Bible, because it is in the Bible that you learn what to pray for, and it is there that you learn that God loves to hear you pray to him.
It is also in the Bible that you learn that God is not annoyed when you come to him confidently in prayer. When we speak about confidence in the way we pray I’m not talking about the confidence that a man might have in his ability to talk his way out of a speeding ticket he deserved. The confidence that we have in prayer comes in knowing that we deserve to end up in hell, but we have a God that he promised us salvation, and because of his history told in the pages of the Bible, we know that he will keep his promises.
The widow in Jesus’ parable was not confident that the judge she was pleading to would answer, but she was confident that she had a legal right to petition this representative of the law that she get the justice she was promised. It was public knowledge that this judge cared little about the people he was supposed to administer justice to. Eventually he was sick of the woman coming to him. In order to silence this woman, who was probably drawing unwanted attention to how bad this judge was at his job, he saw that justice was properly given in the widow’s case.
There will be times in life when it seems like we are in a wrestling match with God as we seek to hold him to the promises that he made. In Genesis 32 we read about how Jacob wrestled with God. Jacob had been a schemer who had previously failed to trust God’s promises. When Jacob wrestled with God he came to the realization that he would not be able to force God to do anything. The best he could do is demand that God bless him, which is what God had promised to do in the first place! When your prayers feel more like wrestling matches where you struggle to know how God is working for your good cling tight to him, not hoping to change God’s will, but confidently holding God to his promise to work all things for the good of those who love him. This means that we remain confident in prayer even when we don’t understand God’s will.
You, as a Christian, can be confident that God will deal with you justly in how he answers your prayers. This confidence doesn’t come from the thought that we will wear God out with prayer, but it comes from the fact that God has shown that he loves you, and has gone through great trouble to fulfill the promises he made, and according to his divine law these promises are yours to cling to.
When mankind sinned against God in the garden of Eden God could have justly determined that all men deserved to end up in hell, he didn’t do that. The Lord made a promise, a divine legal decree that he would send a Savior from sin. And our God kept that promise and sent his Son, who would declare that God had heard our cries for mercy. God’s son Jesus would give up his own life and suffer the punishment that God’s divine law said we sinners deserved. Because Jesus took our punishment, paid our debt, we legally have a claim to be delivered from our adversaries of the devil, the sinful world, and our own sinful nature. We who cling to faith in the work of Jesus, will be given heaven. Jesus made this happen by the divine decree that he signed with his own blood.
Too often when we examine our own prayer lives I think we’ll find that we’re the opposite of the persistent widow. We know what God has promised to us and how great it is. Jesus even tells us, “will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly” (Luke 18:7,8). We either get tired of asking God to give us this promised justice, or we wrongly think that God will get tired of hearing from us. God forgive us for such thinking. If we are too often the opposite of the persistent widow, it is a good thing that God is the opposite of the unjust Judge! He doesn’t tire of dealing with us according to the justice that Jesus won on the cross. That justice means you’re going to heaven, and it is God’s will to keep you as a recipient of that justice through faith. “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 John 5:14).
