Will You Wrestle With God?
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
In truth, I’ve wrestled with God… and it seems like I still am at times.
When we wrestle with God, we tend to throw in some pretty big questions and blame him on how certain situations play out in our lives. Questions such as, Why aren’t you listening to me? Why is this happening to me? Why is my life unfair? What is the purpose of all of this?
In the article, “When You Wrestle with God”, author Donna Jones shared that anytime we struggle to grasp God or His ways, we wrestle with God and His will. She shares that the notion of wrestling with God makes many of us uncomfortable, to a point where it might even make us think something is wrong with us, or with our relationship with God.
But know that wrestling with God is a good thing. As Jon Bloom preached, there are times when God only releases his blessings on us after a season of prolonged and even painful wrestling with him. In his article posted in Desiring God, he realized that “all of our struggles with God in faith leads to peace.” Jazmin Frank added that “trials have a strange way of bringing people closer together, and the same is true with God. When we’re willing to wrestle with Him through hard seasons and things that hurt and are hard to understand, that’s when we grow.”
Let’s look into how wrestling with God can lead to more blessings from God.
A Wrestling Match With God
In an interesting read in Got Questions, the meaning of Jacob wrestling with God was uncovered and we found out where his real struggle began.
Fleeing his family history had been bad enough; wrestling with God Himself was a different matter altogether. That night an angelic stranger visited Jacob. They wrestled throughout the night until daybreak, at which point the stranger crippled Jacob with a blow to his hip that disabled him with a limp for the rest of his life. It was then that Jacob realized what had happened: “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Genesis 32:30). In the process, Jacob the deceiver received a new name, Israel, which likely means: “He struggles with God.”
An insightful explanation from Jon Bloom at Desiring God reads,
Take note of what God did when he wrestled Jacob. Jacob began the night dreading Esau’s arrival. He was full of fear and desperation. But he ended the night of struggle with God’s blessing and a renewed faith.
At the end of it, Jacob does what we all must do. He confronts his failures, his weaknesses, his sins, all the things that are hurting him . . . and faces God. However, what is most important occurred at the conclusion of that struggle. It was only after he came to grips with God and ceased his struggling, realizing that he could not go on without Him, that he received God’s blessing (Genesis 32:29).
Lessons Learned From Wrestling With God
“Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.”
Donna Jones shared 4 lessons learned from wrestling with God from her article in Crossline Church. These are (1) we usually wrestle alone, (2) wrestling with God can take a while, (3) the secret lies in not letting go, and (4) wrestling with God will change our walk with him.
As this is true with Jacob, so it is in our own lives as well. Donna shared valuable suggestions to hold onto God during our season of wrestling:
Read your Bible: You need God’s perspective now more than ever!
Go to church: Don’t stop being connected with other believers–you need support and encouragement!
Don’t stop praying: Keep talking with God. Pour out your heart to Him and let Him pour in His wisdom to you.
Praise: Crank up the worship tunes and sing! Write down why God is worthy of your praise. Thank God out loud. Nothing realigns our perspective more than praise.
When we wrestle with God and refuse to let go, we experience God in a deeper way. Like Jacob, our struggle allows us to see God face-to-face, and experience God up close and personal.
Wrestling With God Will Change Us
When we wrestle with God and do not give up, we get to experience God more intimately and it allows us to fully embrace him. When Jacob wrestled with God, he was never the same after. The whole experience changed him, and having a limp is a physical reminder of this encounter and how he had prevailed despite the struggle.
In Bloom’s words, “do not let God go until He blesses you.”
So when God calls you to wrestle with him in prayer, it is an invitation to receive his blessing. Stay with him and don’t give up. Do not let him go until he blesses you! He loves to bless that kind of tenacious faith and you will come out transformed.
Wrestling with God can lead to 2 things - it can either deepen our faith or destroy it. As we wrestle with God at our lowest lows, let’s be reminded that this experience will change us. As we persevere like Jacob and don’t let go, God’s blessings await us beyond the wrestling.