She Would Not Stop Coming

"...men ought always to pray, and not to faint" — Luke 18:1 (KJV)

For once, Luke tells you the point of the parable before Jesus tells it. Pray always, and do not faint. That word faint means to go slack, to lose heart, to quit. So this is a story about the thing most of us actually do with prayer. We do not renounce it. We just slowly stop, because it seemed like nothing was happening.

The story is about a widow and a judge. The judge is openly corrupt. Luke says he "feared not God, neither regarded man" (Luke 18:2). He has no conscience above him and no shame beside him, which in that world made him untouchable. The widow is the opposite. In the ancient world a widow had no standing, no money, no leverage, no husband to argue for her. She is the least powerful person who could walk into that courtroom, and she has exactly one thing going for her.

She will not stop coming.

She has no bribe and no connections, so she brings the only thing she has, which is her refusal to go away. And it works. Not because the judge develops a heart. He tells us himself why he finally acts: "because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me" (Luke 18:5). He gives her justice to be rid of her. Even a man who fears nothing will eventually move for someone who simply will not quit.

And right there is where people misread this parable. They hear it and picture God as the judge, reluctant and annoyed, and prayer as the nagging that finally wears Him down. That is exactly backwards. Jesus is not comparing God to the judge. He is contrasting them.

"And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily." — Luke 18:7-8 (KJV)

Hear the argument. If even a crook with no conscience will finally do right for a stranger he cares nothing about, just to stop the knocking, then how much more will a Father who loves you answer the children who cry to Him day and night. The widow's hope rested on a judge who did not care. Yours rests on a God who gave His Son for you. If she had reason not to faint, how much more do you.

So why does it still feel like the courtroom is empty? Jesus says God will avenge speedily, yet He also "bear[s] long" with us. Both are true, and holding them together is the whole discipline of prayer. God is never slow the way the judge was slow, grudging and indifferent. When He waits, He is not ignoring you. But from inside the waiting it can feel identical to being ignored, and that feeling is precisely where we go slack and quit.

Then Jesus ends not with a promise but with a question, and it is the real test of the parable: "when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8). He is not asking whether He will find believers. He is asking whether He will find anyone still praying. Still coming. Still refusing to faint after the long silence. The danger was never that God would stop answering. It was that we would stop asking.

So do not quit the thing you have been praying for the hard, unanswered thing, the one you have almost talked yourself out of bringing up again because surely by now the answer is no. You are not wearing down a reluctant judge. You are a loved child coming to a Father who is not slow and is not deaf, who told you to keep coming precisely because He knew the silence would tempt you to stop. Be the widow. Keep coming.

Amen.