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Don’t Give Up

When you were a kid and there was something you wanted your parents to get for you, did you approach them one time and ask for it? Or did you keep asking until they either got it for you or convinced you that if you asked one more time there would be one less child in your family?

Most of Jesus’ parables are fairly easy to interpret and understand the application. But one of the challenging ones is his story about the persistent widow and the unconcerned judge (Luke 18:1-8). The intended message is not difficult to understand but it is quickly obvious that we need to be careful about trying to assign meaning to every detail in the parable – i.e. the judge “did not care about men.” That’s not a characteristic of God.

But Luke tells us the message of Jesus’ story right at the beginning – it was “. . . to show them that they should always pray and not give up.” So, the message is about persistence in prayer.

Persistence in prayer demonstrates two things:

First – it is evidence of how much our request means to us. If we desperately want/need something, we will refuse to be dissuaded or discouraged. If we ask once or twice and no more, it isn’t that important to us. Or . . .

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It seems to me that this is what Jesus is addressing. We can reach a point that we pray simply out of habit. We don’t really expect God to actually DO SOMETHING!

I think that’s Jesus’ focus in this story because of the way he ends it. Listen – “When the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

Where you find faith, you find people praying!

Ken Stegall