Text: Luke 18:1-8
Focus: Luke 18:8 “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man
comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Title: Waiting around!
In three weeks we will be celebrating Veterans Day! A day
that we set aside to remember all the brave men and women who have fought and
still fight to defend their country. However
today I want to stop and think about the families of all these soldiers. The wives, husbands, children, parents,
siblings, and friends who have all had to say goodbye to their loved ones, not
knowing if they will ever see him or her again.
And as they go back to their normal daily lives; right back to the rush
of life, their loved one who is gone is always on the back of their mind. They constantly miss him or her, worrying,
fearing they may not come back, and they just long for him or her to come back
to them. The longer they wait, not
receiving any letters or calls, not hearing any kind of news, just hoping everything
is OK, the harder it seems. There is
nothing they can do but hope while they wait.
Even if you
do not have a loved one in the military, we all know what it’s like to
wait. Spending two months away from my
girlfriend while she did her clinical, I was very impatient while I waited to
see her again. I think she actually
enjoyed the break away from me, but I hated being apart from her. We all have experienced some point in our lives
where we had no choice but to wait for something.
Our text
for today is a parable that comes immediately at the beginning of chapter 18 in
Luke. Jesus is talking to His
disciples. However, before we look at
the parable, we need to step back to the end of chapter 17 where Jesus’
conversation with His disciples begins.
Here at the end of 17, Jesus is explaining to them about when the
kingdom of God will come. With this he
lets them know that terrible and tough times lie ahead of them when the Son of
Man will no longer be with them. He
compares the day when the Son of Man will be revealed to the horrible times of
Noah. When the world was so gruesome and
so sinful that God killed everyone and everything other than Noah and the
animals on the ark in the flood. He also
compares it to the time of Lot, when the city of Sodom was so unbearable to
God, He destroyed it with fire and sulfur from Heaven. These extremes of disastrous times are what
Jesus compares the day when the Son of Man will be revealed to. These are the days that lie ahead of the
disciples and all followers of Jesus as the end times approach. Then, immediately after Jesus forewarns them
of the days when they will desire to see the Son of Man, He tells them this
parable. You see this is important
because some people take this parable of the persistent widow to be all about
persistent prayer, and it is. I mean
look at verse 1, “and he told them a parable to the effect that they always
ought to pray and not lose heart.” Luke
tells us this parable is about prayer.
However, the generic “meaning” of this parable that most people get out
of it is, “If I really, really, really want something, I just have to keep
praying for it and God will give it to me.”
This is not what this parable is about.
This parable is the silver lining to the alarming conversation they just
finished with Jesus. Jesus tells them
you are going to see some of the worst times ahead of you, but be like this
persistent widow. Be like her in the
sense that as she waits for the judge’s decision, she doesn’t give up. She keeps going to Him and asking Him to help
her; she is persistent in asking the judge to give her justice. As the world becomes this dark and immoral
place, we need to be persistent in asking for justice. Except we do not turn to a secular judge, we
turn to the Lord, the one true Judge.
Verse one tells us this parable is to teach the disciples to pray and
not lose heart, and then in verse 7 and 8 he says, “And will not God give
justice to His elect, who cry to Him day and night? Will He delay over them
long? I tell you He will give justice to them speedily.” We are to be like the widow, persistently
asking for God’s judgment to come and take us out of this present evil age we
live in, we need to be the ones crying out day and night knowing He will not
delay over us long, but will bring His justice speedily.
You see we
are the family of our loved one who has left for war. Jesus came to Earth, to live a life of
temptation, die on the cross, rise from the dead, and ascend back to
Heaven. He ascended to Heaven to sit on
His throne as victorious King winner of the war. But He left us behind, to live our daily
lives, to go about the busyness of life, longing for Him to come back to us,
wondering when He will come back for us.
And at times it seems there is nothing we can do but hope while we
wait.
I want you
to imagine a five year old boy, sitting at his desk in his room wearing his
favorite, dirty, sweat-stained, Cardinal’s ball cap. He has on one of the multiple David Freeze
jerseys he owns. There is a huge poster
of Freeze over his bed, a Cardinal’s baseball sitting on his desk beside a
David Freeze framed baseball card. This
little boy, lives and breathes Cardinal baseball and stands up and cheers every
time Freeze walks up to the batter box.
His imagination is filled with one day being just like Freeze playing
third base for the Cardinal’s wearing number 23. And as he sits at his desk, he writes a
letter to his favorite athlete. He signs
it, stamps it, and mails it to Mr. Freeze.
And for the next couple weeks, all the boy can think about is getting a
letter back from the ball player he looks up to. As soon as he gets off the bus after school
every day he runs to the mailbox to check and see if there is a letter back
yet. And as time passes, day by day
there is no letter. His friends begin to
make fun of him for thinking David Freeze would actually take the time to write
back such an unimportant kid. They mock
him by telling fake stories about getting letters back from their favorite
athletes who they wrote to. His older
brother antagonizes him by sarcastically asking him day after day, “Did you get
a letter back yet?” His parents try to
convince him to focus on other things because they do not want to see him get
his feelings hurt. And the longer the
boy waits for a response, his hope begins to fade and his fascination with
Freeze beings to dwindle.
This is
what happens to us as we wait for our Lord to come back on that final day when
the Son of Man is revealed. We try to
live as faithfully as we can, and stay strong in our faith as we wait and hope
for Him. However, the world makes fun of
us for thinking that Jesus would actually care enough about us sinners to come
back for us. Skeptics tell us this
“Jesus” doesn’t even exist and we are waiting for an imaginary idol and are
wasting our lives on a hopeless dream.
People mock us by sarcastically claiming to be a believer or asking
where God is during disasters. Our
friends who are supportive but not religious try to kindly tell us we should
focus our attention on other things. And
the longer we wait, our hope begins to dwindle.
We slowly give up hope to the point where we haven’t been to church in
two months and don’t even feel guilty.
We realize we haven’t opened our Bibles in a long time. We even begin to make jokes about our sinful
deeds leading us to hell as if eternal condemnation is funny. We put life, relationships, careers, or
hobbies ahead of our faith and before we know it, we aren’t really waiting for
Jesus to come back at all because we are just too busy with everything. In fact if He came back now it would be a
burden rather than a blessing because we like our earthly life and aren’t quite
ready for it to end yet.
But this is
the very point Christ is making at the end of verse 8 when he asks the
disciples, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” Jesus told the disciples you are going to
have to wait, and times are going to be extremely difficult, but will you still
be waiting for me when I come back? Like
a soldier who finally comes home from war, after all he has been through, and
for so long he has waited to just be back with the ones he loves, and he expects
to find his wife still faithfully and loyally waiting for him, his children to
still love him as a father, his siblings to welcome his back and his parents to
be proud of him. He would be completely
distraught if he came home and found his wife remarried because she gave up
waiting on him, and his children won’t even call him dad because they have
forgotten who he is. Jesus is going to
come back and be revealed as the full glory of God, and He wants to find us
faithfully waiting for Him, strong in our faith, still desiring Him and longing
for Him. He is our victorious King who
has won the war. He fought the battle on
Calvary on the cross and He won the War on Easter morning when He rose from the
dead. He has been on His throne as our
triumphant king this whole time, and on that day He is revealed, He will come
to bring His judgment and end the horrific times once and for all, locking the
Devil, sin, and death behind the gates of Hell permanently. But just as this parable ends in question, I
ask you today, when this glorious day comes, will our King find faith on this
earth?
Because you
see Jesus didn’t just leave us behind, our only option is not to just sit and
hope as we wait. God gave us the gift of
prayer. He gave us a direct
communication line to cry out day and night, begging for His judgment to
come. He gives us the graceful means to
be the persistent widow who doesn’t just sit and wait, but continues to ask for
justice. We can go to God in prayer any time
anywhere and know He hears us. No matter
how terrible or horrific these end times get, we have the silver lining of this
parable to remind us we have the gift of prayer. And we are not praying to an unrighteous
judge who finally gives in, but we are praying to the one true and perfectly
righteous judge who will give us our justice because we are His elect and He
will give us that justice speedily. So
as the world and the Devil try to surround us with doubts and fears of Jesus
not coming back while we are here waiting, we are not alone, and we can cry out
through the gift of prayer, “Come Lord Jesus, Come quickly.” Amen.
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