Don't Stop Asking (Dawn Gimena)

First, it says here, "Then Jesus told them a parable to show them that they should always pray and not lose heart." I wanna pause from this because from this sentence alone, what can we see from this story? Firstly, that this is a parable.

Meaning, it's a story.

It didn't happen in real life.

It's just a story that you- uses, like, real-life examples, but it shows a deeper truth or a deeper principle.

And Jesus usually uses parables.

We know the famous Parable of the Lost Son, the Lost Coin, Parable of the Good Samaritan.

We know all of these parables.

They're not real, uh, scenarios, they didn't happen in real life, but they're stories that Jesus wants to use so that it can convey and people can relate to the meaning.

The other thing that we know from this is unlike other parables where Jesus usually explains the meaning after the parable, especially when His disciples ask Him, "What does it mean?" 'Cause they don't understand.

Here in this parable, we already know, Luke already sets up the goal of this parable, which is to show them, which disciples in this case, that they should always pray and not lose heart.

And I want us to remember that.

And He starts the story with saying, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected people.

And there was also a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, 'Give me justice against my adversary.' And for a while he, the judge, refused.

But later on he said to himself, 'Though I neither fear God nor have regard for people, yet because this widow keeps on bothering me, I will give her justice, or in the end she will wear me out by her unending pleas.'" And let's dissect this story.

The story begins with a judge who the Bible describes as someone who neither feared God nor respected people.

In other words, and in other summaries that you may see, that why, that's why people consider him the unjust judge because he doesn't care what people think and he doesn't fear God.

And then there's a widow.

Not just any woman, not a man, not any other person, but a widow.

And you gotta understand, when Jesus uses characters in the parables, they're never random.

Yeah.

He's very intentional with the way He uses these examples.

And what do we know? That a widow at the time, they're one of the most vulnerable, they're one of the most powerless people in society.

One of the most obvious reasons is they're a widow, meaning they don't have a husband that can advocate for them, which means that they have no one else that they can rely unless they have a child, or even, in that case, even a son.

It has to be a son.

And they don't have means to get money, so even then, they also don't have wealth.