To Wrestle with God

Thank you.

It is so wonderful to be back.

It feels great to be here.

This doesn't look exactly like what it looks like at my church on the weekend.

But uh just not as much lights.

That's the difference.

Um, uh we're having a blast planting and um and we're also um dying a little bit each day.

It is extremely difficult, uh, but very rewarding.

And the people that God has trusted us to work with there um have been incredible, and we've seen um God do some really amazing things in people's lives, and we love it there.

We love being there.

Uh probably the best uh part of all of this, of being there, is uh having the privilege and opportunity of working with my wife Hannah, and we love what we do together.

We love that we get to spend so much time together working in ministry.

And then uh my two kids now have uh settled in and adjusted.

Uh Grady is 12.

He's doing great, he's in band, and so I get to hear the bassoon whenever I'm studying for my messages, and uh, and that helps uh a lot.

He's very into technology, and uh, so I also get to hear about all the different processors that are available for computers and things like that, all the things that I don't understand.

Um, but he's brilliant and he's doing a great job.

And uh Willow, my daughter, is nine and she has uh fully adopted the Austin lifestyle.

We are currently um by ourselves trying to save all the sea turtles by using metal straws in our house.

And uh and I believe her.

She's passionate about it, she's got it down.

And so um, first she said she was gonna be a vegetarian because uh she didn't want to eat any animals.

We knew that was because she just was trying to get out of eating her dinner.

And uh so then she said, wait, what would it be called if I just ate bread?

And Grady said, a carbitarian.

And she said, Okay, I'm a carbitarian.

And so uh that's what she thinks she is now.

And uh so um we're just excited to be here, excited to be doing this.

I can tell you in planting, it is extremely difficult.

And uh the level of respect that I have for my parents um has just grown exponentially by seeing what Gateway is today, um, here nearing the 20-year anniversary, thinking about uh kind of closing out on my one year of doing this and imagining uh that all of this would come from just 20 of those is pretty outstanding.

And so uh so we watch you guys and we love you, and uh, and we pay attention to what's going on here and and wish that we were here more.

I want to read to you a story, um, and it's one that you may recognize, you probably will.

It comes in Genesis chapter 32, and it's the story of Jacob wrestling with God.

Genesis 32 · chapter mention

I'm gonna only read you a certain uh portion of this, but uh let me just go through this little part of the story, and then I'll kind of unpack it for you a little bit more.

Starting in verse 22, it says, That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed the ford of the Jabbak.

After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip, so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man.

Then the man said, Let me go, for it is daybreak.

But Jacob replied, I will not let you go unless you bless me.

And then the man asked, What is your name?

Jacob, he answered.

And then the man said, Your name will no longer be Jacob but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.

Jacob said, Please tell me your name.

But he replied, Why do you ask my name?

Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.

Now, uh, in order to look at the story of Jacob wrestling with God, let's go back in time a little bit.

And what I'm about to tell you will be very important at the end of our time together today.

So um, what you have then is you have uh Cain and Abel.

Uh Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel, and they were two brothers, but they fought viciously with each other.

One of them ended up uh murdering the other.

Uh I saw a thing where kids had written in their Bible questions to a pastor, and uh one of the kids wrote in, uh, do you think if Cain and Abel had their own rooms, maybe Cain wouldn't have murdered him?

And that that makes sense if you think about it.

Maybe if they just had separate rooms, that would solve the problem.

And then uh going down in history a little bit, after Abraham, you have Isaac and Ishmael.

And Isaac and Ishmael fought, and that feud in some ways still lives on today, Isaac and Ishmael.

Isaac then is married to Rebekah.

Isaac has Jacob and Esau.

And you might remember Jacob and Esau because Esau was born first, and it is said that Jacob came out holding the heel of him, trying to beat Esau out of the womb to be the firstborn, that he was constantly trying to pull his brother back.

And so there was this feud then that lived on with Jacob and Esau.

And it it culminated in Jacob tricking his father and pretending to be Esau and getting his inheritance.

Now, once he did that, his brother said, I'm gonna kill you.

And so he left and he fled.

Jacob went away and he then met uh Rachel, who he desperately wanted to marry.

Rachel's father, Laban, said, You're gonna have to work in order to be able to marry my daughter.

And so he worked, but he crafted and schemed all along the way.

Jacob, the word itself means he deceives.

And so he did this.

He would con everywhere that he went, pretending to be somebody that he wasn't.

He was a man of many identities.

He was a con man.

He was somebody who traveled around, in essence, changing his appearance or his name to serve what purpose it would serve for him.

And so he was tricking Laban as well.

But Laban knew a deceiver whenever he sees one, and so Laban pulls a trick of his own.

Laban, on the wedding night, swaps the brides, and instead of marrying Rachel, he marries Leah.

And he says, Well, Rachel's who I really wanted to marry.

And so he offers him more work, and then at the end, he ends up tricking Laban again and finally getting to marry Rachel, and then he goes on the run.

Now, Jacob doesn't have anywhere to go now.

He's gotten himself into a really tough situation because behind him, while he's on the run, is 400 men that Laban has sent to go out and capture him.

In front of him is his brother Esau, who he tricked out of his inheritance.

In front of him is the home that he scammed and then left, and behind him is an army waiting to overtake him, overthrow him.

And so as he travels along with his family, he gets to this place, the river Jabbok.

Now, uh, all of this is something that we don't get to see very much because we're not reading it in the original Hebrew, and I can't say it and do it justice, but it's sort of like the river Jabbok is uh in Hebrew very close to the word Jacob, and Jacob is Ya'akob.

And then the word wrestling is Yacobing.

So he's Ya'cob is Yacobing at the Yabuk River.

That's kind of this play on words that you get to see in the Hebrew that we don't really get to see here.

My name is Josh.

It also means like joking around.

So it would be like if you said Josh is joshing around at the Josh Tastic River.

That would be this kind of saying right here.

That's what the that's what's happening.

And so Jacob gets to this place and he's trapped between these two worlds.

He finds himself in quite the kerfuffle.

He doesn't know what to do, he doesn't know where to go, and he's resting there on the river, and he gets attacked in the middle of the night by a man.

And he wrestles with this man.

He doesn't know yet that he is God.

He wrestles with this man until daybreak.

Um, there's a ton of weird things about the passage.

Like, we're we're I'm just gonna conveniently bypass some of those, but maybe I'll point out a few of them to you, which is that we find out later that it's God or an angel of God who is wrestling with Jacob, but he has to leave at daybreak.

Is he gonna melt in the sun?

We don't know.

We have no idea what's gonna happen.

He's like, hey, the sun's up, I gotta go.

Does he have God things to do?

We have no idea.

He just, I gotta go.

It's daybreak.

There's so many weird things in here.

We don't understand why Jacob can win in this battle with God.

Why, why does he fight him and win?

But this is a little bit uh of a misnomer, too.

It it we would a lot of people would say, well, it says that he just touched the socket of his hip and then his hip went out of place.

That's not exactly the right word either, because that Hebrew word means that he uh uh hit forcefully so hard that it knocked it out of its socket.

And so we look at him wrestling in in this uh river near it and and trying to fight until daybreak.

And and and then you have this extremely uh curious scene there where the the where God or the angel of God says, uh, tell me your name.

Tell me your name.

And Jacob responds, My name is Jacob.

Okay, here's what it would mean that he would have to say that.

As far as we can tell in the passage in the scripture, he has not used his name for twenty years.

He goes to Laban and his family and introduces himself as I am Kin.

You know my parents.

That's what we see in the text.

Everywhere else he names himself the name Jacob.

Of course, they called him something, and it may have been Jacob, but in the text, in the passage, we don't see him say his name outright.

I am Jacob the deceiver until God confronts him right there and says, Say your name.

For Jacob, his path to God started with an honest description of himself.

To stop and to look inwardly, to stop being on the run.

This is the first time where when problems get bad, Jacob just doesn't hightail it out there and leave.

He's caught in this battle with God, and God says, Say your name.

We have to get to the place sometimes where we come to God and we're willing to say, God, I can't do it.

And God, although I would like to think that my life is pretty and it's nice and everything works really well, if I'm honest, I lie, I cheat, I steal, I manipulate situations.

I'm constantly, I'm like Jacob, I'm constantly trying to maneuver life so that I can get what I want out of it.

And I manipulate these situations, and God, I just need to tell you that I've been deceiving.

I can't deceive you, but I've been deceiving others, and more importantly, I've been deceiving myself, and I've got to say who I am so that you can heal me.

So that you can address what it is that you see in my life.

He forces him in this moment to say his name.

Sometimes God's appointed means of grace is getting us stuck and lost and afraid.

For Jacob, as long as he could continue to manipulate the circumstances, as long as he could continue to craft a way out of this, as long as he could just be on the run again off to the next city, then he could figure it out.

I can delay the inevitable, I can just fight it off, and I can figure it out.

And in this moment, he's caught and he's held in a place where he cannot move.

This is God's appointed moment of grace for him, the way that he tells him, You're not going anywhere until we deal with this.

You are here right now, you are going to face me, God, and you are going to face yourself.

The meaning of the encounter between Jacob and the angel lies in the struggle itself.

And the purpose of the adversary was to change and test Jacob not to destroy him.

The wound that Jacob would carry would signify, it would be a memento of his encounter with God.

Jacob becomes a new Abraham because this is where he makes his covenant with God.

This is where he has his own encounter with God.

He doesn't live off of the encounter that his forefathers had.

Instead, he has his own encounter with God.

This is a crafting moment where he discovers himself, but he discovers God also.

When he walks with this limp after this moment, it is signifying that he has had an encounter with God.

If you want to know who around you is close to God, it's the ones who walk with the limp.

It's the ones who don't think that they can get out of every situation.

It's the ones who are willing to say, I humble myself before God.

I can't continue to craft my plan or work my way out of this.

I know that I cannot rely on myself, so I must now rely on God.

There is a humility that is present in people who have had that kind of encounter with God.

In the narrative, Jacob uh had not used his own name for 20 years.

He's confronted there with this.

He he he in essence has this encounter with God that that brings him to himself, but also uh marks him.

He goes out of that place marked and changed.

He's a new person.

Uh he comes out of this place uh changed.

Now, uh, as I said, it's always been a sort of difficult and weird passage for me.

Um he wrestled with God, he he seems to claim that he won the battle.

You have wrestled with God and man, and you have overcome.

And Jacob, uh for me, in my eyes, I keep looking at this going, but it's supposed to be Esau.

Obviously, it's supposed to be Esau.

He was the firstborn, and why does God reward the the this man, Jacob, who who cheated his way into this position?

Why why does he get a blessing?

And and why does it happen so that they wrestle like this?

And I was studying and I was reading commentaries, and finally I just sort of gave up and I said, God, I I'm just gonna I'm just gonna admit that that's a mystery and that I don't understand it.

I really felt like God asked me in that moment, well, why don't you ask me?

And I did, and instantly I was taken back in my mind to an instance that happened with my son Grady.

He was about three years old, he was at the height of the terrible twos.

Uh uh, he's a strong-willed boy with a lot of energy, he's a handful to keep up with.

He test us, he, he, he, he was uh, you know, constantly pushing and pushing, trying to find the boundaries, and we had tried every form of discipline that you uh can read about or study about.

We had worked really hard to try to uh correct his behavior.

And uh and one day he did that thing that that the kids do sometimes where they just flail, you know, like if you try to pick them up, they go limp and they fall on the ground and they kick and they they scream, and he just was going crazy.

He just couldn't handle it anymore.

And I didn't know what to do anymore.

We had already tried everything.

We're 20 minutes into this to this time, and I knew if I leave and we haven't resolved this, then he wins.

And he'll just keep doing this over.

So we just stayed there.

We stayed in that room.

Well, uh, we kept trying to deal with it, I kept trying to use reason, we were going through everything.

And finally I went to pick him up to sit in my lap, and he did that.

He went limp and he started flailing and kicking and everything like that.

And I thought, you know what?

No, I'm bigger, I'm stronger, I'm not gonna do this anymore.

I don't have to put up with this.

And I wrapped him up like this, and I just wrapped up his arms and his legs, and I just held him and I held him tight.

And man, did he fight.

It was like I was in the rodeo all of a sudden.

I mean, he was really bucking, and I just held on to him, you know, and I was like, no, uh-uh, not gonna do it.

And Hannah was in the room, so I was trying to look tough, but it was a little bit.

He was getting away from me a little bit, you know, and I squeezed again, and I just held him there, and he just kept fighting and fighting and fighting, and I kept thinking, this is about to end, this is about to end, and it wouldn't.

And so I just kept holding him and I kept holding him, and I kept holding him, and he was fighting, and he was fighting, and he literally fought me until he had nothing left inside of himself.

He had no energy, he had no ability, he could not fight anymore.

He had pushed and pushed as hard as he could, and finally he gave up and he just fell into my arms.

And so I said, Grady, I love you.

Grady, I'm doing this because I love you.

You can't act like this anymore, but I'm here for you, and I'm not letting go until we resolve this.

And he turned and he gripped onto me and he just held tighter.

Something changed that day.

It wasn't that we never had uh a problem with him anymore, it wasn't that we didn't have issues anymore, but he stopped fighting.

He stopped his internal angst where he constantly had to test us and fight us, and I'll never forget that moment.

We talked about it all the time, and it wasn't until I was praying and meditating on this passage that God reminded me of that.

When you read that Jacob was wrestling and fighting with God, that was Jacob's will, trying his best to keep fighting God and living how he wanted to live.

And then in the end of it, you see that the angel or God says, I gotta go, it's daybreak, I'm getting out of here, but no.

What does Jacob do?

He doesn't let go.

He keeps holding on and he says, You must bless me.

That blessing is to say, from now on, we are good.

We're good.

We had this out, you have submitted, you will walk with a limp from now on.

This will mark you.

It will change the way you act, it will change the way you behave, but from this point forward, we are good.

There are some people who are hearing this message who, when you hear that description, you know that you've been fighting for a long time.

You know that God has got some kind of hold on you because your family has brought you into this place, your your peers, your co-workers have brought you into this place.

God has moved heaven and earth to get you to have an encounter with him, and you just keep fighting it.

What he wants for you today to do today is to turn around and embrace the wrestling.

To hold him and let him hold you.

Today, today, it stops.

Sure, you might mess up, you might make a mistake, but today it stops.

From from now on, we are good.

From now on, we are together.

We have worked this out, and it's not going to affect us anymore.

From now on, we move forward.

Now, when all of this is said and done, Jacob goes to meet Esau, and he has uh all kinds of gifts for Esau.

Again, this is Jacob saying, What I'll do is buy my way out of this.

And when you read and look at the text, you can see that the gift made absolutely no difference.

A feud between two brothers, while they were separated and not near each other, was resolved by one of them having an encounter with God.

And then God made a way for him.

This was the first sign for Jacob that he didn't have to manipulate his way into God's blessing.

That God would go ahead of him, that he would make a way for him.

There's so many times that we are so tempted to fight and work and manipulate the situation to get what we want.

We need this promotion at work, and so we gotta put others' people down.

We gotta do whatever we can to put ourselves in first, and all of that is for naught.

If we just turn around and embrace God and let Him do the work for us.

God changes the relationship between Jacob and Esau.

It doesn't take uh a worldly gift or anything like that.

What it takes is for one of them to submit to God, and he changes the circumstances.

Now, uh a couple years ago, I'm gonna tell you uh a little bit more about this uh brotherly uh fight.

A couple years ago, um uh I got the chance to go to a A Shabbat, which I saw on the video announcements that there will be a Shabbat service coming up.

I definitely recommend that you go to it.

And uh I was the kind of person who thought, uh, you know, that's that's the old stuff.

We got the new, the new kind of way to worship God.

Like, we don't need that.

That's you know, I'm not that interested in it.

And I always thought it was a little bit weird.

Like I just saw it happen over and over.

Like somebody would go to Israel one time and they would come back thinking they're like an honorary Jew, and you're like, no, you're not, all right?

And they would do all the Jewish practices and you're like, get over it, all right?

No.

And I was just kind of annoyed by that.

And so I got invited to go over to uh the Benjamins and the Griffings house and to participate in Shabbat with them.

And what I saw changed my life.

Literally, what I saw in the family values that that that were placed on there.

And so it's something that we started enacting in our lives.

We started having a Shabbat service.

And through this year of church planting, it is one of the things that has kept us grounded and kept us together as a family.

As hard as everything around us has been as a family, we've been more together than we ever have been before.

And I think part of it is that we've chosen to uh to bring in the practice of Shabbat into our family.

So what we do is uh sometimes on Friday nights, sometimes on Sunday nights, we just get together as a family.

We do some of the practices.

I won't go through all of them, but we pray some of the prayers, we have a meal together, we have hollow bread, we we we we just play, we we we we have fun with the family, the kids will show us the a video that they want to show us, or or we'll just turn on some music and and and they'll hang out with us and we just spend time together, we hear about their week.

It's uh it's uh a time of the week where every single week I stand with Grady uh behind Hannah and Willow, and we as men lay hands on them and pray over them.

It's it's an amazing thing.

It's incredible to be a part of, and it's an incredible to witness.

And uh in some of these times of doing Shabbat and Passover, uh, my friend Jonathan uh told me about the prayer that you're supposed to pray, and it is the prayer of Ephraim and Manasseh.

And uh Jewish people pray this prayer over their kids.

I pray that you would be like Ephraim and Manasseh.

Now, why?

Uh why not Abraham?

I pray that you'd be like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Why Ephraim and Manasseh?

And whenever Jonathan told me about it, I was like, I gotta know more about this.

And so I went and I started studying and reading about this, and and and this is what happened.

Jacob, the guy that we were just talking about, who was in this feud with Esau, um, and who comes from a long line of fighting brothers.

Jacob gets to be in his old age, and Jacob had 12 sons, and they, Jacob's name became Israel because God renamed him Israel.

And so Jacob becomes Israel.

Those twelve tribes then make up the nation of Israel, and that's where we get the twelve tribes of Israel, and that's what made them uh the nation that they are in the way that we know it today, called Israel.

So Jacob has 12 sons.

One of those sons is Joseph.

Now, Joseph was the one who was sold off by his brothers, ends up living and growing up in Egypt, and eventually uh, you know, uh what happens there, but in in living in Egypt, Joseph's sons grew up in Egypt.

So while the rest of the brothers, their sons, grew up in Israel, uh learning and understanding the customs and growing in their faith in God, uh, Joseph's sons were raised in Egypt, where uh the predominant uh religion was not uh uh uh a Jewish belief.

And so uh Ephraim and Manasseh are Joseph's sons that grew up in Egypt.

Now, when Jacob is on his deathbed, he comes and he tells Joseph, come close to me so that I can tell you something.

Joseph happened to have Ephraim and Manasseh with him.

And Jacob says, Now, what I want to do is, I know that I have twelve sons, and we're breaking up the land, and you're receiving your inheritance, and and I know that my inheritance is supposed to go to my sons.

But because Ephraim and Manasseh grew up in a foreign land and maintained their faith, I want to give them an equal share.

This means Ephraim and Manasseh, as two grandchildren, became equal with the sons and got an equal inheritance.

Now, what the Jewish belief says about Ephraim and Manasseh is they are known as the two brothers who never fought.

I believe that Jacob on his deathbed realized that after all the fighting and after all the hurting and after all the manipulating to get what he wanted, if he had rested and trusted in God the entire time, God would have just handed it to him.

And so when he saw the two brothers who didn't fight, who had it harder than anybody else growing up in a foreign land where there are foreign gods and foreign influences, where no one believes the way that you do, when they kept their faith, and even in the midst of that, never fought for power.

God said, You get an equal inheritance.

You get what the Son gets.

We can choose whichever path we want.

We can fight, we can strive for the things that we feel God has called us to.

We can push our way in, we can do it at the expense of others.

We can knock other people out of the way so that we are first, or we can surrender to God and say, Lord, whatever it has you have for me, I receive it.

And I choose not to put others down or behind me in order to get what you so freely give away.

I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes with me, if you will.

In just a moment, we're gonna have a prayer team at the front of every single sanctuary.

So, whatever campus you are in, there will be a prayer team there at the front.

And as I said earlier, there are some of you who are right in the middle of the wrestle with God.

And you need to surrender.

You need to fall into his loving arms.

It won't be easy.

Everything is in you is gonna tell you not to come forward.

Everything is gonna fight with inside of you.

To keep being selfish, to keep living for yourself.

But if you know it's the right thing to do today, don't let anything stop you.

If you know you need to fall into his arms today, you can win in this wrestle.

You can fight back all the urges to stay in your seat or to not come forward.

And you can give your life to him today.

For others, you may have other circumstances in your life that you need prayer for.

Maybe you need some prayer in the area of health or finances or a job.

I can tell you what'll make the difference.

Prayer.

An encounter with God.

Why not today agree with someone in prayer?

Why not come forward and pray with someone?

And so, Lord, right now we pray and we ask.

Lord, that you would draw every person who needs prayer today.

Lord, that we would surrender our lives to you today.

God, we give you our whole selves.

We want to stop fighting you, Lord, and today we surrender our lives to you.

And so, Lord, I pray and I ask that you would draw every single person who needs prayer today to come forward to receive prayer.

And Lord, may we have a divine and miraculous encounter with you today.

We pray all these things in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.