The Persistent Person
Luke 18:1-8 | 10/18/1998
"Look! Look!" shouted the bear cubs. "Little rubber cats that stick out their tongues when you squeeze them!" [Hold up and squeeze a squeaky toy, if you have one].
"Cubs," said Mama, "that will be quite enough! I don't want to hear another word ...."
"Oh please!" they shouted. "May we have them? Please! Please! Please!"
Papa decided it was time to put a stop to all the fussing .... "Of all the outrageous, disgraceful, EMBARRASSING behavior I have ever seen," he roared .... "Brother and Sister have the worst case of the galloping greedy gimmies I've ever seen!"
How many of you can guess the source of this little story? If you have been involved in the raising of children or grandchildren in the past 10 years, you have probably run across it. It's from The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies (New York: Random House, 1988), one in a series of popular picture books by Stan and Jan Berenstain. The Berenstain Bears are shaping the adults of the 21st century as surely as The Cat in the Hat shaped the lives of their parents.
In each of these tales, a thorny family issue is handled by a family of bears -- Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister, Gramps and Gran -- and by the end of the story, some measure of peace is restored to their big tree house in Bear Country. In this particular book, Gran and Gramps come up with a plan to help selfish Brother and Sister Bear get rid of a bad case of the "galloping greedy gimmies."
Wouldn't it be nice if childish behavior could be eliminated by a single story? We wish that such books would solve behavior problems, but of course they cannot. Not by themselves, anyway. Kids are tough, and child-rearing is one of the greatest challenges any of us ever face. Children can be self-absorbed, defiant, inattentive, greedy, overly aggressive and downright difficult to handle. A whole industry has grown up around parenting issues, with specialists offering a variety of books and videos to parents of difficult children. Does your kid have the "galloping greedy gimmies"? It should not take you long to find advice on limit-setting, problem-solving and improving your parenting patterns.
But we have many difficult adults around us, too. The fact that some people are difficult is reflected well in modern bumper stickers:
"The more people I meet, the more I like my dog."
"Sometimes I wake up grumpy; other times I let him sleep."
"All men are idiots, and I married their king."
"Sorry, I don't date outside my species."
"I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it."
"How can I miss you if you won't go away?"
But there is a positive side to the difficult child—and adult--one that should not be forgotten. In his book The Challenging Child, child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan identifies five "difficult" types of children. One is the defiant child, a boy or girl who is unusually stubborn, negative and controlling, but at the same time, the owner of such positive traits as energy and persistence. If you have such a child in your house, you know how maddening and yet how oddly admirable such behavior can be.
Many defiant children are unusually clever, writes Greenspan, able to figure out ways to defeat your most sophisticated arguments. They can also be extraordinarily well-organized and methodical, as well as deliberate and purposeful. "The key challenge for parents and teachers is helping the defiant youngster use these various assets in a constructive way so that, as he gets older, he can use his talents for such pursuits as science, mathematics, philosophy, law or any other field where persistence and organization are an asset" (Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D., The Challenging Child [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995], 125).
In Luke 18, Jesus tells the story of an adult who may well have been "the difficult child" in her youth: a widow who refuses to give up. Let’s look at that passage now, Luke 18:1-8: (READ) She approaches a judge again and again, asking him to grant her justice against her opponent. The judge refuses at first but finally decides to give her what she wants, since he fears that she will wear him out with her persistence. Jesus makes the point that God, like the judge, will "grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night," and he encourages his followers to be like the widow, praying persistently and faithfully. Two lessons emerge from this story of a difficult person:
1. Persistent prayer is the way to pray. According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather funny to have to explain it at all. In Luke 11:5-8, He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again.
Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there's nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). And, as Jim read to us from Matthew Chapter 7, even a stinker, Jesus says, won't give his own child a black eye when the child asks for peanut butter and jelly, so how much all the more will God when HIS children? ... (Matthew 7:9-11).
Jesus contrasts the judge with God, but there is one big difference: Verse 8 says, “God will act quickly in contrast to the judge who "for a while" refused to take the widow's case, but "later" agreed. God will hear those "who cry to him day and night" and will not "delay long in helping them" (v. 7). Indeed, "he will quickly grant justice to them" (v. 8a). The inference that Jesus draws in this case is that God, unlike the friend, does not need to be browbeaten into answering our prayers. "Ask, and it will be given you" (11:9).
Jesus does not want us to be casual about prayer, but serious, intentional, determined and disciplined. Julian of Norwich says prayer "is yearning, beseeching and beholding" -- an activity which involves desiring, begging, imploring ... and finally seeing God, face to face. While it is doubtful that Jesus wants us to pester God, he most certainly wants us to be diligent in our lifting of requests to the Lord. It is in our prayers that we grow closer to the One who is the source of every good and perfect gift.
I wonder, why don’t we pray more persistently? What is it that keeps us from praying persistently? I read in a book called The Aladdin Factor, written by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen—the same guys who wrote all those Chicken Soup for the Soul books—that there are five barriers to our asking: 1. Ignorance; 2. Limiting and inaccurate beliefs; 3. Low self-esteem; 4. Pride; and 5. Fear--Fear of rejection; Fear of looking stupid; Fear of being powerless;Fear of humiliation; Fear of punishment; Fear of abandonment; Fear of endless obligation. So what is it for you? (PAUSE)
There is nothing wrong with being dependent on God, and full of desire for the gifts of God that give us abundant life. "We are made for God," writes Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "we yearn to be filled with the fullness of God, and so we come asking the One who is always eager to give. We place ourselves in his hands before the One who is ever the gracious one ready to give beyond our asking and our deserving. We are like a parched land thirsty for the gift of rain -- yearning, waiting and asking and assured that we will be heard and that we will be given.”
If we are persistent in prayer, we will see God more clearly and will receive the gifts that are part of life abundant. In addition, we will discover that:
2. Persistent prayer is faith-inspired prayer. A difficult child will only make demands on a parent who loves her and who will provide for her. She knows that if she asks her father for bread, he will not give her a stone; if she asks for a fish, he will not give her a snake (Matthew 7:9-10). In the same way, when we pray persistently to God we are showing that we have faith God will answer our prayers. We trust that the Lord will help us quickly, granting us justice and mercy, fullness of life and everlasting salvation.
Perhaps more than anything else, such difficult children and difficult people long for God's love and God's presence. They yearn to behold the Lord, to see him face to face. "Prayer is essentially the expression of our heart longing for love," writes Jeffrey D. Imbach. "It is not so much the listing of our requests but the breathing of our own deepest request, to be united with God as fully as possible" (The Recovery of Love [New York: Crossroads, 1991]). Just as a persistent child really wants the attention of a parent more than he wants a little rubber cat toy, a persistent child of God really craves the presence of the Lord more than any particular gift.
We pray persistently because we want to see God’s presence in our situation, in our lives. And I am here to tell you that the God you call upon will finally come, and even if he doesn’t bring you the answer you want, he will bring you himself. Persistent prayer is not a sign of the "galloping greedy gimmies"; it is a sign of intense desire for God's presence, God's power and God's peace. And if we act like difficult children in this behavior, we are in good company. The Lord we worship is nothing less than a persistent God: eternal, everlasting, the Rock of Ages, a Mighty Fortress, the source of steadfast love.
Difficult children -- difficult adults -- are persistent -- as we all should be in prayer. God grants justice to his chosen ones "who cry to him day and night," and Jesus commends the faith of people who pray always and do not lose heart. There are many positive qualities associated with being a difficult child -- energy, organization, determination and persistence -- and all can be an asset to our life of faith, helping us to maintain a lively, ongoing relationship with our Lord. The challenge is to keep a focus on God and the abundant life he offers, and not fall victim to the galloping greedy gimmies. And to remember that sometimes, “No” is also an answer to our prayers.
Let us continue to pray for each other. Let us decide to expand our prayers and pray in more inventive ways. We need wisdom to be faithful with our resources. It is a great service to lay hands on one another and pray for an increase of the gifts of wisdom and giving. Pray over how to budget money. Pray for freedom from money's power. Pray for money to be provided to those who need it. Before giving money away, pray over it, asking God to use it for his good purposes: Do the same for money that is invested.
Learn to pray preventive prayers. Rather than waiting until there is a financial problem, pray for protection of those who are doing well. If they have no money problems, pray that they will continue to know freedom. If they show the grace of giving, pray that the grace will increase. If they are called to manage and use money, surround them with the strong light of Christ so that they will be free from greed. (from Richard J. Foster, The Challenge of the Disciplined Life (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985), 60.
The widow wanted nothing more than for the judge to take her case. In the words of the hymn we are about to sing, the author, Thomas Dorsey asks the Lord, not to take his case, but to take his hand, to take his life and guide him through the coming storm. Let’s sing this hymn as a prayer of petition: #575 in the blue hymnal.
BENEDICTION:
Persevering prayer produces God's presence, God's power and God's peace. Sing, pray, and keep God’s ways unswerving, with faith, and persistently. Amen.
Children's Sermon
Tell the children that there are at least three things that can lead to success in life. (1) Having famous parents. (2) Talent (pull out a toy instrument and try to play it; make it clear that you have no talent, and will never succeed with such an instrument). (3) Persistence (ask the children to define persistence). Let them know that success in life does not always come right away, and some people have to work long and hard before they succeed (use some examples from the community). Remind them that the woman in Luke succeeded because she was persistent. She knew that the judge had the power to grant her justice, and she relied on him even when he did not seem to care. Encourage them to be persistent in asking for what they need from God, who always cares.
