⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷ And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? ⁸ I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
                                                                                    -Luke 18:6-8
 
So what do we do when it seems like God actually is putting us off? What do we do when it seems like God is not moving particularly quickly to see to it that his children get justice?
 
Sometimes when I come up against something like this I find it easier to establish what’s not true first.
 

1. What’s not true is that God is waiting for you to pray a magic number of times before he’ll do act.
   
   
2. What’s not true is that God is waiting for you to pray in just the right ways or to say just the right thing before he’ll act.
   
   
3. What’s not true is that we have to pester God into acting.
   
   
4. What’s not true is that God is reluctant to act.
   
   
5. What’s not true is that God is ambivalent about the troubles that his children are facing.

 
With those walls established pushing back various lies we might be tempted to believe, we’ve now got a space to play in.  And in that space are a couple of realities:
 

1. God is always loving, good and just, perfect in all of his ways.
   
   
2. We sometimes wish that God’s loving goodness and justice would result in God’s active intervention on our behalf much sooner or more often than it does.

 
Both of those things are true. And so we live in this tension. 
 
And the good news is that Jesus shows us how to live in this tension. Not long after Jesus tells us this parable about God’s prompt response to the cries of injustice by his children, Jesus is in a garden. And he’s weeping. And he’s praying that God would deliver him from the greatest injustice in history.
 
And God does not grant him that request. But that God is still good. And Jesus will still trust in that God, even in the face of that disappointment.  And that God will come through for him by raising him from the dead just a couple days later.
 
God’s goodness is not on trial with each difficult situation we face. God’s goodness is constant even while our earthly experience of that goodness varies season to season.
 
But ultimately the invitation to you and to me is to trust that the same God who came through and proved himself to be good to Jesus will come through and prove himself to be good for you and for me, too.
 
So in light of that, we come back to Luke’s wildly important take-home, presented at the very beginning of this story.
 
Always pray, never give up.