Summary
Pastor James walks through Luke 18:1-8, emphasizing the importance of persistent prayer, especially during times when God seems silent. He encourages the congregation to remain faithful and to trust in God's timing, illustrating that delays in answers are not denials but opportunities for growth in faith. The sermon highlights that true prayer is about building a relationship with God rather than merely presenting a list of requests, urging believers to keep praying and not lose heart.
Welcome and Church Information
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcrhonda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen. Well, thank you, choir. Thank you for singing along with us.
If you have a child that wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, first grade and under, that's dismissed at this time. If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Luke chapter 18. I know my notes say Luke chapter 18, verses 1 through 18.
We're just going to be in 1 through 8. So if you want to turn there, Luke 18, 1 through 8 is where we'll be at. We have been preaching through the Psalms in the summer.
Before the summer, if you can remember back that far, it was a long, long time ago, we had started on a prayer series on looking at what the Scripture tells us, how we can pray and how we can
have a prayer-filled life. We looked at our mother's prayer and how mothers pray for our children. We looked at the priority of prayer.
We looked at praying for others and then praying through the storms. And today we're going to look at when heaven seems silent, how to have a persistent or prevailing prayer life. And so we're going to look at one of Jesus' teachings here. He was the greatest teacher that ever lived.
And so he gives us a lot of good advice and a lot of good things. And so we're going to look at what he says on how our prayer life should be.
And so if you have your place there, Luke chapter 18, verses 1 through 8, let's stand by the reading of God's Word and we'll jump into the message today. The Bible says, Let us pray. Lord, we love you. Thank you for your blessings.
Thank you for your goodness to us. Thank you for the reading of your Word. Help us to minister well today. Help us to allow the Word of God to penetrate our hearts and to work in our lives. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated.
This is a wonderful passage that Jesus gives. It gives such a great word picture for us to look at. I like giving word pictures. I like giving illustrations. And this is Jesus in his prime form giving us a illustration that we can relate to.
And I think that if we ask ourselves a very honest question, each and every one of us can probably relate to this and say that we've all experienced seasons or times in our life where we feel like God was far from us.
Or we felt like there was this distance or even as I titled it today that heaven was silent in our life.
Praying for Prodigal Children
Maybe you've been in here today and you've prayed for a prodigal child, a child who was wayward and not serving the Lord or not taking his life seriously or her life seriously. And you've been praying and you're like, God, are you going to work in this situation?
Maybe it's a spouse that has began to make wrong decisions that you've been praying for or healing or wisdom or revival in a church or for God to remove a burden in your life. Maybe you've been here and you've said, God, I've been praying for these things for so long.
Is God even hearing what I'm saying? And yet day after day, we begin to go through this and we begin to say, God, nothing's happening. Nothing's changing in my life. Are you even there? It almost feels like you're praying and the prayer is getting as far as to the ceiling and it just never makes it past the ceiling.
Oftentimes in our life, when we go through this time of silence, it is God testing us. It is God beginning to work in our life to see where our faith is at. One commentator said it like this. We often mistake God's silence for God's absence.
We often think that because God is silent, he's not answering my prayer. He must be an absent God and he must not care about me. And yet that is the furthest thing from the truth. God begins to accomplish his will in our life.
As we begin to wait on patiently and begin to wait on what God has for us into something greater that we may not see in this moment. We may not ever even see in our lifetime.
Luke tells us this at the very beginning of this parable. He begins to lay out this whole concept or whole idea.
And he says this in verse one. Now he told them a parable on the need for them to pray always and not to give up. Oftentimes this is what we think.
We think prayer is me coming to God and saying, God, here is my list of everything I need.
I'm going to rub the lamp a couple of times and you're going to pop out and you're going to be a genie and you're going to grant all of my wishes. This is oftentimes how we perceive prayer. And prayer is not this.
It is not a wish list of what God can and can't do for us. And it is not just us getting what we want, but it is us trusting God even when the answer doesn't seem to be the way we want it to be. It's saying, God, I'm going to pray.
I'm going to trust you.
And I may never answer this. This prayer may never get answered, but I'm going to trust in who you are through my life of prayer, through my life of serving you, and through my life of saying, God, I want to continue serving you.
Daryl Block says this, the emphasis on this parable is not persuading an unwilling God, but on encouraging persistent faith in a faithful God.
And we're going to dissect this passage a little bit as we walk through it. But oftentimes we perceive this passage as God is unwilling unless we continue asking over and over again to where we become pestering like it says here in this parable. But this is not what it's saying here.
And we're going to look at this. And so the first thing we're looking at is verses one through five. It says this, the persistence in the prayer that we have.
Encouragement to Keep Praying
The persistence in prayer. The first truth of this is it's very simple. Jesus is telling us, do not quit praying because the answer hasn't come yet. He says, continue to pray, continue to go forward.
One of my favorite seasons of all time is coming up. For my wife, it's fall because it's pumpkin spice latte or PSL season. And she gets all of the pumpkin spice that she wants for the year. And she stocks up the fridge with everything. But for me, pumpkin spice season means football season.
And football season is wonderful. It's great. We're going to see different games. And we're going to hopefully go to a couple of games with the boys and excited about that. But I've never seen a team that happened, that this happened. They go out and they take the field. Very first game comes.
They lose their very first game.
You know, half of all teams lose their first game because the other half has to win. So someone's going to be a loser. And so I've never seen the losing team come off the field and say, you know what? We practiced hard.
We lost our first game. We might as well go ahead and give up the whole season. Be done. That doesn't happen. We don't lose one game.
We don't end one time of something not happening the way we want and just give up on everything. But yet prayer can sometimes be that same way. We pray and we say, God, I need you to answer this prayer. The prayer doesn't get answered.
We're like, okay, I just give up on prayer. I'm just going to give up on what God has for me to do. No, Jesus is saying we must be persistent in praying as we see this story, how we continue to go forward.
Look at some areas of how we can be persistent in prayer. The first one is this, the frequency of prayer. Look at how the Bible says in verse one, how often prayer should happen. It says that we should pray always. We should pray continually.
Now, the question that my kids ask me all the time, and I'm sure you have this in your idea in your mind right now. What does this word always mean?
Does it mean that 24-7 I should be in this state of prayer where my heads are bowed and my eyes are closed and I'm walking around not looking at anything and I'm just praying to the Lord? That's not what it's saying here. It is a continual dependence upon God.
Paul echoes it like this in 1 Thessalonians 5.17. He says, pray consistently or pray constantly as we go through our life.
We go through life as you're riding down the road and you're remembering something in your mind. You're remembering something that was mentioned on a prayer list or someone tells you about something. You can begin to moment in that exact moment. You can say, God, I'm driving right now.
I'm not going to close my eyes. I'm not going to bow my head as I'm driving unless you're driving a Tesla and it's going to drive yourself. You're not going to do that and you're going to say, God, work in this situation. You're going to be praying constantly as you're going through your life.
You're going to be praying for what is going on in your life. We often think that prayer is reserved for only emergency situations.
It is the flat tire or the AAA that we have. And when something happens, we pull out that flat tire.
We pull out the AAA card that we haven't looked at in three years. And we go, I wonder if I renewed this. Is it going to be there?
If I call this number, are they going to come out and help me? And all of a sudden, you are relying on prayer in that same way.
And God is telling us in this life that we live as a believer, we should be in an atmosphere of constant prayer, showing us a constant dependence on who God is. It's like your life being plugged into an outlet.
And that outlet is the constant source of life and power. And our life is plugged into Jesus. And it is that constant energy that we have as we go through life.
If you're like me and you're like most people, we often spend more time worrying than we do praying.
We often spend more time sitting at our table, worrying over the things that are going on in life, whether they're big things or little things, than we spend in our prayer closet saying, God, I can't do this without
you. I don't know how I'm going to take my next step.
I don't know how I'm going to go through life. I don't know how I'm going to parent my kids. I don't know how I'm going to be a good grandparent for my grandkids.
I don't know how I'm going to do the things in my work that I need to do without you in my life.
And we must be so persistent in our prayer and so fervent in our prayer and so frequent in our prayer that we continue to go to God no matter what is going on. I want you to imagine a child in this moment, a child who wants to have a conversation with his father.
The child does not walk up to his mom and go, hey mom, can I schedule a moment to go and talk to my dad? Will you put me on dad's schedule?
Can you pencil me in on Thursday at two o'clock so I can go talk to dad? A child just walks in and begins having a conversation with the father.
And we, in that same way, we must have a relationship with God that is not scheduling at three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, I'm going to spend time with prayer, but constantly going to our father in heaven and saying, God, I need you right now.
God, I need you to work in my life. I need you to work through my life as I begin to go through all these things that I'm going through and begin to go to God as a reflex, not just a fallback plan.
Going to God in a way that it is the first thing that I think of when a moment happens, it's I've got to go to the Lord in prayer.
I can't go to a friend. I can't go to a neighbor. I can't go to someone else. I have to go to the Lord first. And it is reflexive to go to the Lord.
So not only do we see the frequency, but we see the failure in prayer as well. Look at what he says. Pray always in verse one and do not give up.
This is an awesome idea because we begin to look at this and we say, how often do we give up or do we collapse in our prayer life?
How often do we begin to go through our life and we begin to pray and then all of a sudden that answer doesn't come and we collapse or we give up and we begin to not go forward.
The idea behind this Greek word literally carries the idea of losing heart, becoming discouraged or giving in to the ways of the world.
Prayer Against Discouragement
Prayer in our life can battle some of the biggest discouragement that we go through. We live in, as I shared this past week at our pregnancy center here in Elkin, we live in a world that is anxious and constantly worrying about everything. And it's okay to worry.
It's okay to go through these things. But when we worry more than we can trust in the Lord, we begin to be out of balance in life.
And I shared with the workers there at the pregnancy center that we should be trusting in the Lord in everything that we go through.
And this is the idea when we begin to pray, we begin to fight back against that discouragement because we are connecting our life with the source of life, which is heaven. Satan, he loves when prayers never get answered.
Because when prayers go unanswered, he can come in as a sly devil that he is and come beside us and say, you see, your God doesn't really love you.
You've been praying for this for how long? And he hasn't answered your prayer right now? I think it's time to give up on God. This happened with a friend of mine recently. His daughter, who is in her 20s, has renounced her faith, completely given up on God.
And I asked him, I said, what happened? What was the reason behind your daughter giving up your faith? I'm just trying to understand this society, this generation a little bit more. And he said it was two things. She prayed for one of her animals to survive.
It was sick and it was old and it was dying. And she prayed for her animal to live. And then she prayed for her grandma to live. Her grandma had gotten cancer and was elderly.
And the doctor's getting to give her a long time anyways. And around the same period of time, both her grandma and her dog passed away.
And he said, she looked at me and she said, Dad, I'm renouncing my faith. Because if there was a God that would have loved me, he would have kept my dog and he would have kept my grandma alive. This is Satan coming into our life and Satan saying, you know what?
Prayers aren't working. Your prayer to God isn't working. He doesn't love you.
And therefore, we begin to renounce our faith and walk away because Satan is able to use these little things and open it up for us to fail in our life. Here to say that many prayers die, many prayers don't get answered because the answer comes a day before we stop praying.
And we stop praying too soon and we stop praying for God to come and work in our life. And he's like, I'm just waiting for you to have just a little bit more faith to come into here.
And all of a sudden we lose heart and we begin to grow weary and we begin to get distant from the Lord and we understand that God's timing is different than our time. And we must be a people who are understanding that God is a good and just God.
He is a father that loves us. And we cannot confuse delay with denial.
Sometimes God delays some things. Sometimes God denies things, but more often than not, he delays some things. Matthew Henry, a great commentator, write this. He said, those who would receive mercy from God must continue instant in prayer always.
We must continue to pray and allow God to work in his timing and in his way. I'm not a farmer. You guys know this. I'm just now recently starting to get grass growing in my yard again because we had this massive drought. I was talking to Claude Jr.
I said, man, I finally get to mow again because I've been mowing dead grass. It's been awesome.
And he's like, no, my grass is like four foot tall. I don't want to mow right now.
But I've never met a farmer in my life that goes out and plants a seed in the ground and the next day pulls the seed up out of the ground and goes, yep, you know, it's not growing yet. Puts it back in the ground.
Next day comes back out and uncovers the seed, pulls it back in. Yeah, it's not growing yet. And every day for months and months pulls that seed out of the ground and puts it back in and says, you know what? It must not be working because the seed's not growing.
No, a good farmer plants the seed, waters the seed, takes care of the seed, fertilizes the seed, and over time that plant begins to grow up and provide a harvest for us.
That is the way prayer is in our life. Prayer is things that are happening beneath the surface that long before it ever produces any type of fruit is happening underneath the surface.
And we must be a people who are preparing our lives underneath the surface to say, God, I want you to work. I'm going to pray.
I'm going to pray as if it all depends on you and I'm going to work as if it all depends on me and I'm going to continue to trust in you no matter what.
Too many times we fail and we stop in our prayer life and we stop just short of when the answer was going to come.
But look as well in verses two through five, the fervency of the prayer that we see here. Verses two through five, we'll read it again.
It says there was a judge in a certain town who didn't fear God or respect people and the widow in the town continued coming to him saying, give me justice for my adversary.
For while he was unwilling, he later said to him, even though I don't fear God or respect people, yet because this widow continues to pester me, I will give her justice so that she doesn't wear me out by her persistent coming.
The fervency that's just this lady had, she continues to come to him and Jesus introduces these two characters. The first one is the corrupt judge. The Bible says that he didn't fear God and he didn't fear people.
Now you're going to introduce this people, this person in your life at one day or another. You're going to come into somebody who says, I don't care about who God is. I don't care about what's going on in life. I don't care about what people think about me.
I'm just going to live my life. And as Oprah says, I'm just going to do me and not care about anything else, which is the most vain type of living it can be as Jesus gives us right here.
He never feared God nor he feared people. This could possibly be the worst judge that has ever been listed in all of history. I mean, think about it. He had no compassion. He had no morality. He had no accountability. He had no concern.
The only thing that he depended on was what was going to benefit him.
I don't care if this person comes to me. How are you going to benefit me? Oh, you're going to give me a bonus if I make a decision for you? Oh, you're going to do this for me? I'm going to do these things because it benefits me.
And this is the person that Jesus lays out as the unlikely character that we begin to see. The second one we see is this courageous widow. This widow who comes to this judge knowing that he doesn't care about anyone. You know this would have been the reputation for this person in this area.
And yet she comes to him with no social standing, no legal protection, and she possesses one singular thing that Jesus is trying to point us to. It is persistence.
She is coming to this judge in a way that is so persistent that she's just saying, I'm just going to continue to come.
I'm just going to continue to do these things because I'm going to continue to say that this is the only thing I can do is come to you. Oftentimes widows in scripture are shown as weakness.
That's why Paul and Timothy and the apostles tell us to take care of the widows and take care of the orphans because they cannot take care of themselves in a lot of ways and we must come alongside of them and help them.
And so this widow is coming and she is begging for help and she is begging for this judge to do something.
And the judge looks at her and says, I'm not changing. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and I don't care what you have to say. There was no compassion. And instead of saying, you know what?
This judge doesn't care about me. I'm just going to give up and go home. She comes back the next day. Hey judge, I'm back. I'm not doing anything for you. Hey judge, I'm back. Next day. Hey judge, I'm back.
Continually over and over and over again, continuing to come back to the judge, continuing to compel this judge to do something. And all of a sudden the judge says, I can't handle this anymore. I've never met someone like this before.
I'm just going to give him because I don't want to deal with this person anymore. Now, a lot of people are going to look at this and say, well, that's how God is.
God's an unjust judge. I've just got to keep pounding the doors down. I'm just going to keep coming to him and I've got to keep asking him these things. And eventually he's going to bend his will to me.
One commentator said it like this. The point of this prayer is not that God is reluctant, but that persistent prayer is showing or demonstrating genuine faith.
And we must be people who are genuinely saying, Lord, I don't really care what the answer is going to be. I'm just going to continue coming to trust you.
I'm not going to demand my will be done, but your will be done as we looked at Jesus's prayer. Jesus came to the father and he didn't say, God, give me these things.
He said, no, God, I'm going to come to you and I'm going to pray in your name. And whatever your will be done, I'm going to do.
He still came and he said, Lord, Jesus, he said, God, is there a way that this cup can pass from me? Is there a way I don't have to go to the cross? I know what's going to happen. I know the betrayal.
I know that the rejection, I know the loneliness that I'm going to go through. Is there another way? But if this is your will, I'm going to do it.
And so it is this attitude of coming to the Lord with our need, but ultimately surrendering to his will.
You see, when God delays in our life, as we often look at this and we say, God doesn't care about me, the delays begin to deepen our dependence on the Lord.
These delays begin to strengthen our faith and they begin to purify our motives by saying, God, I want this for a real reason.
Delay as Divine Preparation
Delay is divine preparation for God to work in our life and to prepare us for who he has designed us to be. There's this idea of God as a sculptor and we're just a slab of marble.
You can imagine this. And the sculptor comes in and he begins to chip away everything that's not needed there. And it's a slow, painful process.
But as he goes through this and at the end of this process, a beautiful marble sculpture is created because the artist came in and began to take away everything that wasn't there.
And in our life, God in the same way is beginning to take away some things and add some things and work in some things to work and make our life a beautiful masterpiece. And sometimes those delays that we see is that chisel and that hammer striking against that marble. It's painful.
We don't like it. We don't like waiting for things. I like things now. I'm a fast-paced guy. But yet when things are delayed, we begin to get upset. And as one person said, persistent prayer is an enduring evidence of faith.
We must be so persistent that God is continuing to show his work and his will in our life.
George Mueller, a great theologian, a great pastor, a great lover of people, he said this, it's the great fault of children of God is that they do not continue in prayer, they do not keep on praying, and they do not preserve the faith.
We must be people who are trusting in the Lord in our prayer and are fervent in our prayer and continuing to go to him. Which leads to our last part of this, which is our application of it, the patience in our prayer in verses six through eight.
Patience in our prayer is this idea of what we do.
Persistence, I'm sorry, is what we do. Patience is who we become while we wait. Now, let me ask you this. How many of you in here are very patient people? Raise your hand.
No one raised their hand. Maybe it's because you're asleep, I don't know. But no one in here is patient apparently. And so as we go through this, I want us to understand, waiting is never wasted in God's economy.
God's economy is different from our economy. The Bible says that God's ways are higher than our ways. God's thoughts are better than our thoughts.
And when God allows us to go through a waiting period, it is not a wasting moment in God's economy. He is teaching or trusting or allowing us to trust in him in a way that we never thought possible.
God's Character in Prayer
So how can patience in God's economy work for our good?
Let's look at the first thing. We must remember who God is or remember God's character.
Verse six and seven, it says, listen, the Lord said, listen to them. Look at the unjust God. Will judge, will not God grant justice to his elect who cry out to him day and night? Will he delay helping them?
Jesus is saying, look, listen to what the unjust judge is saying. He's responding and he's saying, will not God grant justice to those who love him, his elect, those that are part of him? Look at the descriptions, his elect, his children who cry out day and night.
This is telling us that those who have been born again, those who have trusted in the Lord as their savior, who have said, Lord, I understand that I'm a sinner. I understand that you are a just God and you can't look on sin.
And so you allowed your son to come and to die for me. And he was buried in a grave and he rose three days later. And I am trusting in that as my salvation.
He is looking down from heaven. And he is saying, will not a God that loves these elect people, will he not love them in their prayers? And look at what he says here.
He says, God begins to hear every one of our prayers, every tear that we cry, every sigh that we make, every whisper that we plea at night when we know that no one is listening and we know no one is around and we just feel like everything around us is falling apart.
He's saying, listen, I am in heaven and I hear those prayers. I see those tears.
I know what you're going through and I love you. And trust me, if you will just see what I'm going through, I'm going to work these things for your good.
Silence never means that God isn't listening. It simply means that God isn't quite finished with where we're at. And we must be a people who are understanding that God's delay is not a neglect, but it's purposeful in his timing.
I want to illustrate it like this because I said a lot of words just now, but I want to give us a practical illustration of this. As a parent, you don't give your child everything they ask for when they ask for it.
While we were on our mission trip, Brody constantly, because his phone just updated, he turned 13. And so by turning 13, Apple allows you to request money to someone else's phone.
And he can send me a request. Dad, can I have $20? Dad, can I have $100? Kim was telling me the other day that one of her kids requested like $4,000 because you can request as much as you want.
And once you hit accept, it automatically goes out of your bank account and theirs. And so there were many times where I had declined these requests. And he was like, Dad, why are you declaring my request? I said, why do you deserve this money? He ain't done nothing.
Why am I going to give you this money? As a good godly parent, we're not going to give our kids everything they want. Hudson tells me often, Dad, can I drive your car?
If I tell him no, does it mean I hate him? No, I love him enough to give him boundaries to tell him no.
No one in their right mind is going to give a five-year-old the keys to a car. And we in the same way must understand God looking down from heaven is a good and much better godly father than me. And sometimes he is telling me no because I'm not ready for that yes.
Because he loves me too much to give me something that I don't need in that time. He is infinitely wiser than who I am and he knows the timing better than I will ever know. And who am I to question a holy and just God?
Number two, we see here, not only do we remember who God is, but we remember God's timing. He says this, I will tell you that he will swiftly grant them justice. At first, this sounds very confusing. We're talking about swiftly.
We're talking about how we've been praying for years. We're saying, God, why is this not happening right now? And then it says, all of a sudden it's going to suddenly come. And we can see this through scripture.
Joseph waited for 13 years as he was held in bondage and as he was in the prisons. We see that Abraham waited decades.
We see Israel and the nation of Israel waited 400 years for Jesus to come for them. And then it says God moved.
Now, this word swiftly, if you look and you study often through what Jesus says, he uses this word, as we talked about on Wednesday night, this word soon. He says soon it's going to happen.
If you study end times, you study Revelation, you see this word soon. Does that mean like soon right now?
What this word means is that once the things start happening, it's going to happen very quickly. And so swiftly or quickly or happening very quickly begins to happen.
And so we don't need to read in our English definition of what soon or swift means. We have to understand what it's saying here. It's saying that God is never late. He's always on time. He's going to deliver his answer when the appropriate time comes.
And when it comes, you better be ready because it's coming. It's like what happens with Jesus. He's on the earth for three and a half years. He's preaching. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent. Turn from your ways. He does miracles. He helps people out.
And he's constantly for three and a half years, he's saying these things and the disciples are saying, Jesus, when are you going to set your kingdom up? When are you going to overtake Rome? Look at the oppression that we're going through. What are you doing?
Do you not care about us? And Jesus just simply tells them, hey, it's going to happen.
It's going to happen when God's ready. And then all of a sudden they take this new covenant in the upper room and they're like, all right, this is it, Jesus. We're ready for you. Set your kingdom up.
And then he goes to the cross and dies. Hold on. I just gave up my entire economy. I left my family. I gave up everything to follow this man for now for him to die. This doesn't make sense. God, what are you doing?
And this, when we understand this, this is why we see that the disciples fled and they ran and they hid because they were so confused at what was going on.
And then they're sitting there on a Friday night and Saturday and all of a sudden they're like, what is going on? Why is he gone? They're questioning and what they thought was going to happen didn't happen. But then Sunday morning came and Sunday changed everything.
And when we begin to understand that God's greatest work happens after a moment of silence, we will begin to love those moments of silence because we understand that when God is sometimes silent, the resurrection happens on the next
day. And we begin to get a salvation and we begin to get this eternal glory and victory that only comes through him. But it's because of a momentary amount of silence that happens in our life.
And so not only should we remember who God is and rest in God's time and that I've got to hurry, we've got to remain faithful until he comes. The last part of verse 8, he says, nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, he will, will he find our faith on the earth?
You see, Jesus ends with the question that probably none of us in here would have asked.
Jesus looks at his people and he says, I'm going to come back one day and when I come back, is there going to be faith on this earth? Notice he didn't ask, are there going to be successful people in this world?
There have always been successful people. There have always been people who have elevated themselves up to the top of the ladder of the food chain. He doesn't say, are there going to be successful people? He doesn't say, are there going to be gifted people?
Are there going to be people that can do things that I've never even imagined that can happen? He looks at his people, he looks at his disciples and he says this, am I going to find faith when I come back? Persistent prayer is one of the clearest evidences that we have enduring faith.
If we are continually and persistently coming to the Lord in prayer, we are saying, God, I am trusting in you. I'm going to keep praying. I'm going to keep trusting.
I'm going to keep hoping. I'm going to keep waiting. Even when I don't know if it's going to ever happen, I'm just going to continue trusting in who you are.
One of the greatest theologians of our lifetime recently passed away, John MacArthur, and he says this, the issue isn't whether God is faithful to answer, but it's whether believers will remain faithful while we are waiting.
If Jesus were to return today, if Jesus were to split the eastern sky open, he were to come back and all of what we see in Revelation were to begin to happen, would he find us still praying over the burdens that have been burdened us for the last 20 years?
Or would you look down at us and say, why did you stop praying?
I came to find people that were faithful, people that loved me and people that honored me and you gave up just a little bit too soon. As Terry comes, I want to give some concluding thoughts and begins to play. There are some prayers in this room that have been prayed for years.
Me and my wife, we have prayers that we have prayed for many, many years. And we will continue to pray for those prayers.
We have prayers for our children and prayers for our grandchildren and the spouses of our children and the salvation of Hudson and things that we will be continuing to pray for.
Some people in this room have begged God for healing and have pleaded God for the salvation of their children and for the salvation of a father or a mother or a grandparent. Some have prayed for restoration, for God to restore a broken family or a broken situation in their homes.
I want to encourage you, do not allow the silence of moments of God in his silence convince you that God is silent and God is not there. Allow us to remember that in his silence, he is giving us a moment for us to grow in our faith.
He's not denying our prayers. He's not turning us away.
He is not absent from us but he is beginning to work in and through us. Just as a child is not ready for a certain answer to a question that he's asking, we may not be ready for an answered prayer.
God knows who we are, God knows about us and he may say, if I gave you this answer, you would turn away from me because you would take whatever that answer is and you would be boasted up and
you would be prideful and I cannot give that answer to you because you're going to take the glory for it.
We must be a people who are like this widow, who are saying there's nothing that I can do, I'm just going to keep coming, I'm going to keep knocking.
God, I know you're there, I'm just going to keep coming, I'm going to keep praying, I'm going to keep begging for you to work in my life no matter what happens.
Final Encouragement and Prayer
Jesus' message is very simple, pray always, don't lose heart and trust in your father's timing.
Know that his ways are greater than your ways, know that he is a more just and faithful father than we will ever be and to trust in him.
And when we have this moment of prevailing prayer and we do not be overcome with God's reluctant to answer, we begin to say, God, I'm going to grab a hold of your faithfulness, I'm going to grab a hold of who you are and help me to be a faithful follower of you.
Maybe you're here this morning and you've never accepted Jesus, you've never accepted this free gift of salvation, today would be the day that you put your faith and trust in him.
I don't know what it is, as I pray we're going to go into a time of invitation, I'll be down front to pray with anyone that needs prayer.
Lord, we love you, we thank you for who you are, we thank you for your goodness, your graciousness to us, Lord, help us to be faithful even when you come back, help us not to lose heart.
We see in this passage that there are some that gave up and never came to that judge because they knew the judge wouldn't grant what they were praying.
But God, there's this one widow, this one woman that said, I have to keep coming.
The only thing I can do is to come to this person and help that to be our prayer this morning that is the only thing that I can do is go to a holy just God who loves me more than I even know what love is.
Help us not to take this momentary moment of silence as rejection but a time of growing praying to get us ready for that prayer to be answered. God, help us to trust you more.
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