In The Fight
Two things before we start. One, this is for the one who is struggling. I think when people say, I am struggling with my relationship with God we miss the opportunity that that is. Struggle, by definition, means to make strenuous or violent efforts in the face of difficulties or opposition. Today is about making efforts in the face of the difficulties of life, and the opposition of the enemy. Struggle is your opportunity, not your loss.
Second, God has yet to allow me to come up here and speak about something without rigorously putting me through what he is calling me to share about. I can point to 5 nights this week I was up wrestling, struggling through this passage and through so much at our church. I say that not to say woah is me, I say that to say, that when you are there, God is faithful and will bring you to the other side. He wants to grow you in the struggle you are in.
We struggle to know God, we struggle to be like God, and we struggle to be the people he has called us to be. Like Jacob, we need to be in the fight. My question to you today is, what are you fighting for? What are you struggling and grappling to achieve?
Many of us are struggling for something, some of us have given up on fighting altogether! But God has called us to come after Him with all that we are. Struggle is part of the process in getting there.
Are you in the fight?
Firstly, When we struggle with God, He teaches us perseverance.
Jacob encounters God in the midst of great fear and anxiety. Jacob is a fighter, he has his gloves up from the very start. He is born grabbing his brother’s heel and fighting for his place in his family and in his life.
So, who is Jacob wrestling with? God? An angel? Something else? Kenneth Matthews in the New American Commentary says this: “The appellative pĕnîʾēl means “the face of God [El]),” originated by Jacob because he survived this face-to-face (pānîm el pānîm) meeting with God. By this the reader learns from Jacob that the “man” was indeed deity, as we had come to expect from earlier hints. Hosea further interpreted the incident as an encounter with God’s “angel” (12:4), which is consistent with theophany in the lives of the patriarchs.”
This is the only place in the Old Testament that the verb “wrestling” is used. Let me ask this, if Jacob is wrestling God, can God completely incapacitate Jacob? You betcha. I wrestle my kids all the time, but I never go full on like I would an adult trying to defend my home or the people I love. It’s a different context when we wrestle or struggle with God.
God is in total control of this bout, and he is in total control of your struggle too. When you struggle with God, you will become who God has called you to be. James 1:12, Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.
Jacob had a life full of struggle. It started with his brother in chapters 25 and 27, his father in 27, his father-in-law in 29-31, and now God here in chapter 32.
To struggle is to grow, to not struggle is to give up. Let me encourage the person who is struggling in their relationship with God this morning: keep fighting. You are right where you are supposed to be. Struggling and grappling with this means you are in the fight, so keep on. Don’t be discouraged by the struggle, know that the struggle is creating perseverance and character to be the man or woman God has called you to be.
To have a successful walk with Jesus requires perseverance. James 1:2-4, Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
When you persevere, with Christ Jesus, you lack nothing.
When we struggle with God, He changes us.
Jacob changes because of his struggle with God. He gets a name change, he physically limps, and his character is changed.
So first we see that his name is changed. God gave many people in the Bible new names. Their new names were symbols of how God had changed their lives. Jacob, the ambitious deceiver, had now become Israel, the one who struggles with God and overcomes. Israel, the name of a nation that still stands today. The people of God, as they are listed throughout scripture, are born out of a struggle with God. Struggle is very important.
Second, he physically limps. I’ll tell you what, I’d rather limp and be in a deep relationship with God rather than be completely healthy and skip my way on to hell. Maybe, just maybe, God is using your struggle to help you see the need for him. And without your circumstances, you wouldn’t be able to see your need for a savior and you’d be lost. Life is bigger and deeper than physical struggle. God wants our hearts, he wants our souls, and sometimes we come out different than how we came in. And that is ok! God’s got us.
And third, Jacob changes as a person. Genesis 35:2-3, So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes. Then come, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.”
Jacob’s life is changed because he struggled with God. He came after the Lord, and he refused to give up until he was changed. But you can only change if you continue to struggle and grapple with the Lord.
Romans 5:3-5, Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
If a wicked deceitful scoundrel like Jacob can get a name change and a heart replacement so can you. Keep struggling, keep fighting, endure and persevere after him, he will change you. I can’t promise he will change your circumstances, but I can promise that he will change you.
When we struggle with God, we experience him like never before.
My last thought this morning is, when we struggle with God, we experience him like never before.
What I love and I find hard about the Bible, is you see everyone’s highlight reels. For instance, Moses kills a guy and disappears for 40 years into the desert. In between a few verses, there is no commentary on his life as a shepherd in a distant country. We just see the highlights, and so we expect those highlight reels all the time or something is wrong.
I won’t lie and say “sometimes”, almost ALL of the time, there aren’t angels coming into your room and delivering messages, stairs coming down from heaven, visions and voices speaking to you and big miraculous things. It is in the every day, the mundane that God changes you over time to become like him. It is faithfulness in everyday life that leads us to ultimate change.
Every single day as we press in to him we begin to experience him. And when we make ourselves available over and over again amazing things can take place. But we must be locked in, we have to be engaged in chasing after God and seeking him to see it.
This encounter that Jacob has with God is amazing, but it isn’t like that every day. We need to press in and contend for our God and our king. Philippians 1:6 tells us a glorious truth: being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Some of us need to stand on this verse right now. God didn’t bring you this far just to abandon and leave you here. He is a finisher, Hebrews 12:2, he is the finisher and the perfecter of our faith. He is not going to leave you incomplete and unfinished. He is going to carry you to the end, he is going to be with you as you struggle.
John 16:33, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
You WILL struggle, you WILL battle, so don’t lose heart. Jesus promised this would happen. Read on in the verse, take heart, he has… overcome. Not just your struggle, but the whole world’s struggles. All of them. You will experience him like never before when you choose to struggle for HIM and not for other things. Keep seeking after him, keep struggling and battling for the prize of Jesus.
Comfort isn’t the prize! Things aren’t the prize! The struggle to be over and finally stop isn’t the prize! Christ is. Fix your eyes on Christ, the true prize, and be fulfilled in him and him alone.