I want you to reach back into your Junior High school experience and remember something your English teacher taught you. For some of you that's going to be quite a stretch. For others not so much. You know who you are.

The concept I want you to pull up into your memory banks is the concept of a metaphor. A metaphor is a figure of speech in the English language where you use something totally unrelated to a particular idea, to describe that idea. Usually metaphors capture our attention, because in a few words, they accurately describe our emotions or the facts of a situation.

Let me give you some examples:

• That person is about as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
• I feel about as helpless as a trombone player in a phone booth.
• You can't tell how much gas is in the tank by how loud the horn honks!
• Going to church doesn't make you a Christian, any more than going to McDonald's makes you a Big Mac.

But my all time favorite comes from the old TV program, "Cheers." Norm walked into the bar, and Sam the bartender asked him, "How's it going, Norm?" And Norm answered, "It's a dog eat dog world out there, Sammy and I'm wearing Milk Bone underwear."

Then there are metaphors that use contrast to emphasize truth:

• Like the football player that stands 6'5" tall and weighs 300 pounds. His nickname is "Tiny"
• In the old Three Stooges comedies, the one guy who had no hair was called, "Curley".

I think you get the idea. Metaphors paint vivid pictures for us through word pictures or contrast in order to emphasize the truth about something.

Well, in the parable we're going to look at this morning, Jesus uses two metaphors to teach us something about God. And He uses both kinds of metaphors that I've just described, to do that. In this Parable of The Persistent Widow, he uses contrast to teach us about the character of God, that's the part about the judge, and he uses comparison to teach us about justice and prayer, that's the part about the persistent widow.