Luke does something rare when he records this parable: he gives away the point before the story starts. What does the parable of the persistent widow mean? Simply this: men always ought to pray and not lose heart. If even a corrupt judge will give a penniless widow justice because she keeps coming back, how much more will our God answer His elect who cry out to Him day and night. Jesus told it days before His death, paired it with the Pharisee and the tax collector, and left His disciples the two keys to a successful prayer life: persistence and humility. In this study we walk from the end of Luke 17 through Luke 18 and pick up both keys.
Watch this teaching in full above, and read on as we open it together.
- A Tutor Before the Test
- As It Was in the Days of Noah
- The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge
- God Is Not the Unjust Judge
- Will He Find Faith on the Earth?
- The Pharisee and the Tax Collector: Praying with Humility
- The Rich Young Ruler: What Riches Do to Prayer
- Persistence and Humility: The Keys to a Successful Prayer Life
- A Prayer to Pray Without Ceasing
A Tutor Before the Test
To feel the weight of this parable, we have to see the moment it was spoken. The pressure on Jesus is enormous. He sees them coming to entrap the twelve. He knows He is days from His death, and on the human side that is a concern. On the God side, His concern is the twelve: so green and raw that everything He shares lands at face value, and most of the time they are simply confused. So He is like a tutor before a test, trying to get it all in.
And here is what He wants in before the bell. These men are about to be imbued uniquely with the Holy Spirit: healing the sick, prophesying, raising the dead if need be, in the midst of a population that will hate them and eventually kill them. Yet their most important tool for the great commission is none of that. It is prayer. And in the mind of Jesus Christ two things are absolutely essential about prayer: never stop, and stay humble. This whole stretch of Luke is about the duty of continual prayer and this promise: the answer to persistent prayer is certain. So do not abandon your faith when God seems distant. He has not gone anywhere. It is just not working according to your timing. Continue to pray.
As It Was in the Days of Noah
Jesus goes into the parable straight out of a hard conversation.
And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.
Luke 17:26-27 (NKJV)
It was the same in the days of Lot: eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting, building, business as usual without regard for sin, until the very day Lot left Sodom and it rained fire and brimstone, burning hunks of sulfur that archaeologists have found buried around the Dead Sea. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to save his life, his stuff, his position, will lose the whole race. Whoever loses his life to Jesus Christ, crucified with Him as Lord of his life, keeps it.
Then Jesus gives some salty detail: two in one bed, one taken and the other left; two women grinding at the mill, one taken, one left; two men in the field, the same. Some translations reverse who goes and who stays, but my best understanding from setting multiple passages side by side is that the believer is taken and the unbeliever remains. When He returns there will be a shout and a trumpet blast, lightning across the sky, and everyone will know in a nanosecond. That trumpet wakes the dead, believers who have been with God as spirits, and they rise first to their heavenly bodies; then the believers still alive rise right up out of theirs. Where the corpse is, the vultures gather: bodies left like candy wrappers all over the earth. And then it is Noah shutting the door on the ark. Pencils down. That is why Jesus is teaching this hard, and why He turns immediately to prayer.
The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge
Now the parable itself, told for the benefit of the disciples:
Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart, saying: “There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God nor regard man. Now there was a widow in that city; and she came to him, saying, ‘Get justice for me from my adversary.’ And he would not for a while; but afterward he said within himself, ‘Though I do not fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow troubles me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.'”
Luke 18:1-5 (NKJV)
Everybody listening understood this judge instantly. Judges in that day were appointed by Herod or by Rome, and the system was corrupt: the moment a man opened his courtroom, his hand was out under the robe. Little cases, make me some kind of bribe and I will get you justice; big cases, I am waiting for a big bribe. It still operates that way in places: in New York State a judgeship costs serious money going in, because it is assumed the bench will pay for itself. Everybody wants a piece of whatever action is going on.
Against that machine stands a desperate widow. She has no money, so she cannot pay bribes, and the judge knows it. She has exactly one weapon left, and she uses it: she comes, and comes, and comes, and comes. Even the judge’s surrender is not what it seems in translation. “Lest she weary me” is softer than the original idiom, which is “lest she give me a black eye.” He is not moved by her case; he is worried about his reputation, that everyone will see somebody was that unhappy with him. So he gives her justice to protect his own name.
God Is Not the Unjust Judge
In the frame of the parable, the judge is represented by God, and the contrast is the entire point. God does not take bribes, and hear this clearly: we are never an intolerable annoyance to Him. The widow is us, the Christian church, always in fear of injustice, receiving injustice, and constantly asking for justice. Jesus is saying: approach God the way this persistent widow approached that bench. She never says, you did not give it to me, so I am not coming anymore. That is what we Christians do in our prayer life. She says, I will come and come and come, and I will not stop coming. We have to show God how important this is to us.
Then the Lord said, “Hear what the unjust judge said. And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily.”
Luke 18:6-8 (NKJV)
Speedily is not usually how it feels to us, though sometimes prayers are answered ahead of our asking and we never even realize it. God’s timing is not our timing, and it is best to keep timing out of our prayers entirely, because human expectation is what makes us impatient with God. He is omniscient. He is everywhere. He may be waiting for growth to come from you. He may be assembling chess pieces on the board. You do not get to know all that. Your only directive from Jesus Christ is to continue to pray. This is why I keep a prayer card: track what you are praying, notate the answers, put a little date by each one, and build a real data set of your prayer life. Paul gives the same directive in three words, pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and Augustine adds that beneath it runs another interior prayer without intermission: the longing of the heart. Jesus pressed this exact lesson from the other side in the Friend at Midnight, where a man gets his loaves not because of friendship but because he keeps knocking.
Will He Find Faith on the Earth?
Then Jesus closes the parable with a question that should stop us cold:
Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?
Luke 18:8 (NKJV)
I am not saying this to be pedantic: when I do this study, I get nudges from the Holy Spirit, and the nudge every time I come over these passages is the same. Tell these people we are heading into a valley: it will be tough, much prayer will be required, and many will have their faith shaken. They need to be persistent, remain humble, and understand that God is in charge of the whole thing. And that last line is the real warning, because it is aimed at the far side of the valley. When we come out into the sunlit uplands, a better and safer country with a chance at a new birth, the danger is that most of us will say: that was really difficult, I did enough praying for a lifetime, I just want my life back. Second things first again. It is exactly what happened with the ten lepers Jesus healed: all ten received the miracle, and only one came back to worship Him for it. If that ratio holds, ninety percent of us will trade our knees for our comforts the moment the pressure lifts. Do not do it. He is telling you from two thousand years away: do not do it. On the other side we should be on our knees more, starting and finishing every day thanking God.
The Pharisee and the Tax Collector: Praying with Humility
Persistence is the first key. Jesus hands the disciples the second one immediately:
Also He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.
Luke 18:9 (NKJV)
Why aim this at the twelve? Because of what is coming for them. People who experience the miracles are going to treat them like celebrities, like little gods themselves, and when you are constantly beaten up by everyone else, human nature wants to inflate: I hung with Jesus, I have been given superpowers. So He warns them: you cannot trust in yourself. Your confidence has to come from Me. Do not start posing. And then He tells the story.
Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men: extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.” And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!”
Luke 18:10-13 (NKJV)
In our society you could fill in senator, billionaire, or aristocrat for the Pharisee. The tax collector was absolutely reviled: a willing agent of Roman oppression, and he knew it, and most publicans made good money over-taxing everybody. Polar opposites, exactly as the culture understood them: everyone assumed the Pharisee was blessed by God, and everyone was praying the publican would lose his life.
Watch the Pharisee. He stands ostentatiously, posing like an opera singer about to launch into a monologue, and count how many times he says I. It is not a prayer to God at all; it is a prayer to himself. The law required one fast a year; he fasts twice a week. The tithe was owed on agricultural income; he tithes everything that touches his hands. The tax collector, meanwhile, will not even stand near him, because he believes what his whole culture believes, that the Pharisee is the blessed one. He stands at a distance, eyes cast down, striking his chest: God, be merciful to me a sinner. There is no fat on that prayer. We need to hang on to it.
I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
Luke 18:14 (NKJV)
This is where Jesus blows every head in earshot. The tax collector goes home justified, in right standing with God, and the Pharisee does not. The twelve could not have handled it; everything they knew about life was the opposite of what Jesus just said. A complete paradigm flip. And notice what the exaltation of the humble actually is. Not social standing. Salvation.
The Rich Young Ruler: What Riches Do to Prayer
Luke tags one more scene onto the chapter, not a parable but an encounter, and it lands on the same two keys. A certain ruler approaches: “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Stop right there. By this point Jesus has raised Lazarus and healed thousands; the multitudes believe He is the Son of God. This smug young aristocrat calls Him teacher, a deliberate demotion, and pads it with good, thinking he can patronize Jesus. Jesus catches all the sleight of hand: Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone. Then the man claims he has kept every commandment from his youth (we recently studied the parable of the perfect servant, told precisely because there is no such thing). So Jesus has to bust him:
You still lack one thing. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.
Luke 18:22 (NKJV)
That is what is called a body slam. The man walks away deeply sad, because he is extremely rich, and Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a man who places his faith in wealth or status to enter the kingdom of God. Those who heard it ask the obvious question: then who can be saved? His answer: the things which are impossible with men are possible with God. Notice Jesus never says it is impossible for the rich to be saved. He says it is exceedingly difficult. Abraham was rich. Job was the richest man on earth. David was wealthy, and so was Zacchaeus, the tax collector we meet in the very next chapter in The Parable of the Minas and Zacchaeus in Luke 19. Godly, wealthy men exist; there are just not many, because the deceitfulness of riches will get you if you are not continually on your guard. And where do you keep that guard? In your prayer life: persistently praying, God, please do not let this money get control of me, and humbly remembering whose hand it came from.
Persistence and Humility: The Keys to a Successful Prayer Life
So the keys, according to Jesus Christ, to a successful prayer life are persistence and humility. Pretty simple. Hard to walk out. Have a prayer time at some point in the day, whatever hour fits your life. But also keep the rolling prayer going, the continual conversation that acknowledges everything large and small, part of your spiritual multitask. Not to the point of distraction: you are doing your work. But inside the work it sounds like this. Wow, this is really going well, thank You for that. And other times it is like me with technology: the meeting vanishes, the cursor circles the frame, nothing pops out, and I finally have to back out and cancel. I prayed before and I still messed it up. But I did not lose my temper. That is a positive thing, and it counts. Everything else we chase is external fluff next to the one reason we are here: staying in relationship with God.
That is why we teach these parables, because there is so much in them, and it is the very reason we opened this series by asking why Jesus taught in parables at all.
A Prayer to Pray Without Ceasing
We close with a prayer attributed to Benjamin Franklin, a man history rarely files under prayer warriors, quoting Scripture back to the people he cared about. This guy was always thinking. Hear how much of Luke 18 is in it:
Let us live then under the continual impression that men ought always to pray and not to faint… that we should pray without ceasing, rejoicing evermore, and in everything give thanks… The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Come then in childlike confidence to our blessed and glorious Father, not as a formality, nor merely as a duty, but because you need His almighty arm to protect and sustain you, to guard and shield you in the midst of the evils of the world, and finally to save you… who will be with us in every trial, in all our sufferings, and in crossing the cold river where He will receive us to Himself, to be with Him forever and ever.
Prayer attributed to Benjamin Franklin
In everything give thanks: the good things and the bad things. He is our everlasting trust, our stronghold, the rock of our defense. The widow kept coming because she had nowhere else to go. We keep coming because we have a Father who has been listening all along. Men always ought to pray and not lose heart. So come, and come, and come, and do not stop coming. Amen and amen.
Further Reading
For deeper verse by verse study of Luke 18, David Guzik's commentary at Enduring Word is an excellent companion on the widow, the judge, the Pharisee, and the tax collector alike.
Chuck's own study over the years has leaned most on six teachers. If you want to keep going after this parable, their work is where he would send you:
- John MacArthur at Grace to You
- James Burton Coffman, whose Coffman Commentaries are free at StudyLight
- Charles Stanley at In Touch Ministries
- Robert Deffinbaugh at Bible.org
- Chuck Swindoll at Insight for Living
- David Guzik at Enduring Word
