We're talking about wrestling with God tonight.
Like I said earlier, Jesus wrestled with God in the garden
and prayer and the struggle was so great that he was literally
sweating blood. It's a scientific phenomenon.
It's been observed before under extreme stress, capillaries in
the skin can burst and blood comes out with the sweat.
And that's the degree of stress and strain and struggle that
Jesus was engaging in in the garden before he was ever
arrested. Knowing what was coming.
Knowing the pain he was about to suffer, The physical pain, the
emotional and relational pain of being betrayed and abandoned by
those whom he had known and loved.
And the spiritual pain of knowing that He was about to
bear not just the sin of all humanity, but God's wrath
against the sin of all humanity. The cup that He spoke of when he
said, let this cup be passed from me is a cup that is
referred to in multiple places in the Old Testament.
And it is the cup of God's wrath that God had said He would make
His people drink to the dregs when He poured out his wrath
upon them. And that was the cup that His
Father was asking him to drink. And Jesus said, if this cup can
pass from me, Father, let it pass from me.
Your will not mine be done. Before we get into any more of
the wrestling, though, oh, I want to talk about this business
of being faithful in a system stacked against you.
I, I, I think that it doesn't take too much looking at the
world around us to see that we live within systems that are
vast and powerful. Political systems, economic
systems, philosophical systems, educational systems, religious
systems that are far beyond our power to influence in any
meaningful way. I'm all for voting.
I vote often. But as good as it is to vote and
is is the blessing that is that we live in a society where we
have a vote to cast in elections for our leaders and for policies
and and laws and those sorts of things.
As good as that is, a single vote in the United States in a
national election, even a single vote in a statewide election is
not a lot of power, is not a lot of power.
And, and, and every year almost 50% of the people in the country
have someone and gets elected that they didn't want elected.
Well, every four years for the president and different times
for other offices. But there's a lot of a lot of
things in this world that are simply beyond our control.
Economic forces, again, political forces, military
forces. There are things that happen
that we think, my goodness, I, this shouldn't be happening.
But what can we do about it? We see women and others rising
up for freedom in Iran. What can we do about it?
We heard of Christian brothers and sisters in various places in
Africa being slaughtered simply because they're Christian.
And what can we do about it? We look at the world around us
and, and it, it's kind of goes in waves.
I'm in one of those points in, in, in the wave and in my life
where I'm meeting a lot of drug addicts.
Don't know why that happens, but it goes in waves in my life that
I find myself encountering and meeting a lot of folks that are
either recently given up or are actively engaged in, in, you
know, chemical abuse. And, and there's, there's so
little to do about the drug crisis in the United States, the
human trafficking problems, you know, as as the Epstein files
continue to make the news and and they become political to a
political tool for one side to beat up the other side with we
should not forget that the children were abused for profit
and pleasure. And what can we do about it?
What can we do about it? There are so many
extraordinarily difficult and challenging things in this world
and and sometimes the best we can do is just tread water.
How do we stay faithful in those kinds of systems?
How do we live faithfully in a world where you can't buy a
phone or a wireless electric drill or tool or a laptop
without participating in the slave trade?
Because that's where some of the stuff comes that go to make the
batteries, particularly the cobalt, 70% of it comes from the
Congo. Good portion of that is mined by
slaves. What do we do?
How do we live by faith when the clothes that we buy.
Thank you Walmart and Timu. When the clothes that we buy are
almost all at some level of the manufacturing process made by
folks that are slaves or in near slave labor conditions and these
systems that are overwhelmingly large and powerful and beyond
us, how do we live by faith in those?
I've been reminded again here recently of, of the words and
writings of a, of a gentleman that I've, I have not ever met
face to face. I, I actually got a chance to
interview him on a back during COVID.
I was doing a sort of podcasty thing and I interviewed him on
that. His name's Emmanuel Katangale.
He's a a native ethnically, a native of Uganda.
His parents fled Uganda before the genocide and he was raised
most of his life in a neighboring country in Africa.
And now he's a professor in the United States, was a professor
at at the seminary at Duke, which is a United Methodist
seminary. But I think he's moved to a
different university since then. And and so having grown up in
the shadow of the genocide of Uganda and the horrors of that,
those particular political and religious systems that led to
that awful destruction that so few could do anything about, he
had these things to say. He said, as we're well before I
read the quote, he said as as we're trying to be faithful in
these systems, as we're trying to live out the values and and
the principles of the Kingdom of God, as we're trying to follow
Jesus. What is essential is that we do
these things according to God's ways, not according to the
world's ways that we really cannot do the work of the
Kingdom of God using the world's tools.
We need to use God's tools and Kitangale, he pushes against the
stream of of every major church growth, church leader, large
church pastor, all of the folks that that that have the the
large growing, thriving churches.
He pushes directly against what they teach and what they say,
which is strategic planning, strategic planning, strategic
planning. And Katangale says strategic
planning is for the powerful. Strategic planning is for for
boards to gather or politicians to gather or, or economic
leaders to gather. And they sit down and they set
clear achievable goals. They might be ambitious goals,
but they're achievable goals. And they do all of their
research and they do all of their planning so that they can
have as few variables as possible and, and as few things
happen that are not predicted and not predictable.
And that's how strategy works. It's from position of power,
when you can, when you can control the variables or have at
least a larger degree of control of the variables, where you can
predict, where you can plan and you can, you know, get results
that you plan and predict. Strategy is the posture of the
powerful, says Katangale. It sets goals and commits to
measurable outcomes. It is not comfortable with
uncertainties but always accounts for them as a
predictable variable. Strategy is always realistic,
even when it's ambitious. It lays out a step by step
process for moving with predictable results from where
we are to where we want to be. On the other hand, he says
tactics are the tools of the week.
They are the wisdom of the week about how to survive in a world
they do not own. I love that phrase.
How to survive in a world they do not own.
Tactics assume that the system we live under cannot be reformed
or reorganized. It's an in its entirety.
Instead, the tactics plot to subvert the reigning system of
those at those places where it is weak.
Tactics are worked out on the fly and passed on in the jungle
under the cover of night. Like strategy, they are
realistic, but tactics do not pretend to know for certain what
will happen in the future. Tactics depend on the art of
improvisation. When situations change, tactics
change with them. So over the course of Lent, as
we're talking about being faithful in a system stacked
against you, we're going to be looking at tactics.
Tactics for being faithful in worlds and in systems that are
designed not to help us be faithful to God, that are in a
very real sense designed to help us not be faithful to God, to
discourage that. And that's the kind of systems
we live in. We, we live in that kind of
system. And, and when we decide that we
want to be faithful, when we want to give generously, when we
want to care for others, we want to love sacrificially, when we
want to make faith a priority, it, it, it's, it's then when we
make those decisions that we discover just how much of the
inertia of the world around us pushes US against that and
pushes against us as we try to do that, Whether it's, hey,
don't give too much, you need to save and prepare for your
future. Hey, hey, we know faith is a
priority, but you've got this thing to do at work and that
thing to do at school and that thing to do with sports and this
thing to do with clubs and these things to do with this.
And, and all of these forces and factors come and push and push
and push. And we want to reach out to the
person who is alone and, and not accept it and not welcome, But
we know when we reach out to them that the folks that are
going to reject them might end up rejecting us.
And, and all of these things are happening around us and it's, it
can be a grind. It can be just to survive as
housing prices go up and rental prices go up and cost of living
goes up and all of that is increasing at a higher rate than
salaries and wages are increasing.
And, and, and kids in their 20s and 30s today going, I don't
know if I can ever own a home. Even with both of us working in
the family, These systems are a challenge to be faithful in, but
that's what we're called to do. That's what we are not called to
follow Jesus and be faithful to Jesus when it's easy and
convenient, but all the time, all of the time.
So the tactic we're talking about tonight then is wrestling
with God, wrestling with God. The first thing in being
faithful is is to is to commit to being willing to wrestle with
God. You see, wrestling with God is
not a sin. Jacob is not condemned for
wrestling with God. Jesus certainly was not
condemned for wrestling with God.
They both did. Jacob who was told by God time
to go back home and Jacob knowing that is it was far as he
know his brother still wants to kill him.
He's not heard any news from home to suggest anything else.
And he is about to cross back, cross the river back into
Canaan, go back to his his where his brother's been living and,
and, and he has sent word ahead to his brother.
He sent servants out to tell his brother, hey, I'm coming and I'm
bringing my family with me. And the servants come back and
report, hey, your brother Esau is coming and he's bringing 400
men with him. And the last thing Jacob heard
from Esau was I will kill you. But God told him, go back home.
And so Jacob sends everything he owns and all of his family
across the river ahead of him. He's alone by himself, and he's
wrestling with God. There's a lot of different takes
on this from Jewish and and Christian scholars and
theologians and writers. Some see this as the the Jacob
had a literal wrestling match with a physical person that was
either an Angel sent by God or some people will say a, a Jesus
himself taking bodily form before being born as as the
Savior hundreds of years later. Others say that it's a spiritual
wrestling match, that there wasn't a real physical
encounter, but it was a spiritual encounter, a vision of
wrestling with God that Jacob has.
It's we don't know for sure, but we know he was wrestling.
We know that God was calling him to do something and to go
somewhere and to be someone that he didn't want to go, he didn't
want to be. He didn't.
He was afraid. He was afraid for himself.
He was afraid for his family. He was afraid for his future.
And worse yet, he knew that he was afraid because he'd screwed
up. This was all his fault.
He's the one that conned his brother out of his birthright.
He's the one that stole his blessing from his father away
from his brother. It wasn't an accident.
It was 100% deliberate, 100% intentional.
And after 20 years of being lied to and deceived and manipulated
by someone else, Jacob I think was going OK.
Or maybe I get why he's also mad.
I understand. But he's been told by God to go
back and he's afraid of what will happen to him and what will
happen to his family, and so he's wrestling with God about
this decision. And he refuses to let go when
he's wrestling with God. Before we get to that though,
it's wrestling with God. It we and I, the one of the
things I preach and teach so much and I've I've heard it a
lot and I firmly believe in it, is surrendering to God that
Jesus's prayer, thy will not mine be done.
Is is so important that that I forget how important it is to
wrestle with God. This is a part of our
relationship with God too. It's not only not sin to wrestle
with God, it's part of the way God forms us and shapes us as we
push back against God. God forms and shapes us into the
people that God wants us to be, the people we would not become
if we didn't wrestle with God. Think about literal wrestling
in, in, in, in, in high school or at other levels.
College, Olympics, maybe WWE, who knows?
You know you get better by doing it, right?
You can't learn to wrestle by reading a book.
You can't learn to wrestle by watching a video.
You might be able to learn some of the basic maneuvers and
stances and those kinds of things, but you'll never be good
at it until you do it. And it's the act of doing it
that allows you to become better at it.
You gain strength, you gain understanding, you gain muscle
memory, you gain confidence, you gain hope, you gain skills, You
gain tactics by wrestling. You get shaped and formed into a
wrestler, and this is part of how God shapes us as we struggle
and wrestle with God. And, and in that struggling and
in that wrestling, Jacob refused to let go.
He refused to submit. He refused to tap out.
Even after God, the Angel, whoever was you who had knocked
his hip out of socket, Jacob still refused to tap out.
He refused to yield. I don't know if anyone's been
watching the Night of the Seven Kingdoms.
It's not a kid friendly show, but it's, you know, there's
there's there's combat in there in an arena trial by combat.
And I'm not going to spoil if you're watching, I won't spoil
anything. In the lattice episode, the hero
and the villain, we're fighting each other and and one of them
forced the other into a position where they either needed to
yield or they would be killed. I won't tell you who it was.
You'll have to find that out yourself.
Jacob refused to yield. He refused to surrender even
after God knocked his hip out of joint, even after God wounded
him in that struggle, Jacob refused to yield.
That seems strange as an act of faith if faith is just
surrendering to God. But faith isn't just
surrendering to God. Part of the process of
surrendering to God is struggling.
Ultimately, Jacob did what God wanted him to do.
He went back home and he faced his brother.
And we'll look at that on Sunday.
But the struggle is part of it. It's part of the faith.
Faithlessness would have been walking away.
Faithlessness would have been like Jonah, You want me to go
there? I'm going to go there instead.
The willingness to struggle with God and wrestle with God is part
of faith. Richard Foster is is another
wonderful writer and he's written a lot of books about
spirituality and spiritual growth and spiritual
disciplines. And in one of those, and I can't
remember which one, he talked about gathering in prayer some
folks from church and there was a a child that was sick, that
was very sick, bordering on death.
And, and Foster got there and they were getting ready to pray
and there were other people that were already praying.
Well, God, you know, and you know, we would like him to be
healed, but your will be done. And Foster said to that group of
people, no, no, we will pray for God to heal this child.
Foster, I refuse to believe it's God's will for this child to
die. We will pray for this child's
healing. We will pray for the parents,
we'll pray for the doctors, we'll pray for the nurses, and
we will insist that God heal. Foster was willing to wrestle
with God in prayer on that occasion.
The child was healed. It doesn't always turn out that
way, but there are people in situations in our life.
Where where we need to grab hold of God's coattails and say I'm
not letting go, God, until you make this right, I'm not letting
go. I love this person.
I love those folks. I love this community, I love
this country. I'm not going to stop praying
for these people. I'm not going to give up on
them. My grandmother was like that for
my uncle. Both of them are past now and I
can talk about him, but one of my uncles had again, drugs and
alcohol. You know, he, he got enough Duis
that he was eventually sent to prison, not jail, but prison for
DUI. And he was sent to, I can't
remember which one it was, but you might know the name of it.
It's the, it's the prison in West Virginia you don't want to
get sent to. And, and that's where he was
sent. By this point, his mother, my
grandmother had passed. She had died and she prayed for
my uncle every day, even after he would lie to her, even after
he had cheated her, even after he tried to steal from her, even
after he done all of these awful things.
She prayed for him and prayed for him and prayed for him and
prayed for him and refused to stop praying for him.
And she died with him still an active addict.
But it first night in prison, another inmate got in his face
and said you're going to be dead by morning.
My uncle stayed up all night praying and he never took a
drink again. Fear can help sometimes too.
I'm all wouldn't give up on him. She wouldn't surrender.
She wouldn't let go. She kept hold of God and it hurt
her. It's painful.
And that's what happened to Jacob.
God wounded. Jacob, God wounded.
When we hold on to God like that, when we wrestle with God
and say God, I am not giving up on this.
I am not giving up on this person.
I am not giving up on this situation.
When we hold on to God like that, it's like grabbing a tiger
by a tail or the bull by the horns.
We will get hurt. We will get hurt, but that's
part of the struggle and that's part of life too.
And that's part of faith too. And I heard an old preacher once
say years ago, Jacob walked differently after he met God.
And he did. He walked with a limp the rest
of his life from that wound in his hip given to him by God as
he wrestled with him there. And I think Jacob's a beautiful
example of a strategy, a tactic when we're wrestling with God.
God's blessing comes through your strengths and your
weaknesses came through Jacob's strength.
He refused to let go. It's very interesting.
The Bible says that the man he was wrestling with couldn't
overpower him. All commentators, Jewish and
Christians, say this is hyperbole, that that God
certainly could have overpowered Jacob, but God willingly
restrained himself. What it speaks to is Jacob's
persistence. There was a strength in Jacob
and that I will not submit even to God without a struggle.
I won't do it. I'm holding on until God gives
me this blessing that I need. And in that strength, Jacob
received that blessing, but it was also in his weakness and God
hid him in his strength to turn it into a weakness.
And, and, and that's, you know, that spot in the hip where we're
strong place in our body, our abdomen, our, our, our thighs,
our upper legs, our quads, right there in the middle of that
strength is where God hit Jacob, where God wounded Jacob, where
God weakened Jacob. And in his weakness he was
blessed. It's our strengths and our
weaknesses, not our strengths or our weaknesses, but it's in our
strengths and our weaknesses that God's blessing comes
through. So as we're struggling with
things in this life, in this world that are beyond our
control, one of the one of the tactics we can have is wrestle
with God with these things in prayer and do not submit, do not
yield, do not surrender, do not tap out.
But there's another tactic we can have when wrestling with
God. And that other tactic, well, I'm
going to skip that one. That other tactic is to yield
because that's what Jesus did. Certainly Jesus is a good
example to follow, right? All agree on that.
And Jesus there in the garden saying, God, if there is any
way, let this cup of your wrath pass from me.
I do not want to drink this. God, I do not want to go through
this. I do not want to be publicly
rejected, disgraced and humiliated.
I do not want to feel the weight of this sin in my soul.
I do not want to experience your rejection and your wrath.
I do not want that. But Jesus tapped out.
I surrender God Your will not mine be done what you want, God
I will do. I wish there were an easy guide
for when to tap out and when to not tap out, when to yield and
when to hold on. But there is no easy or simple
guide for that. There just isn't.
We just have these two tactics presented to us both in the
scripture of one person who refused to let go and was
wounded in the process, and one who surrendered all and died in
the process but got his life back again.
And part of our walk as followers of Jesus is to kind of
have to figure that out as we go.
It's the struggle, it's the journey, it's the process by
which God is forming us, by which God is teaching us to
depend upon Him. Whether we struggle, whether we
hold on and refuse to let go, or whether we tap out and yield to
depend on God and put our hope and our faith and our trust in
Him. This is the question that we
have before us. To yield or not to yield?
Father, if you're willing, take this cup from me, yet not my
will, but yours be done. And being in anguish, he prayed
more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling
to the ground. Sometimes in the struggle with
forces beyond our control in this world, the best thing we
could do is to yield. Yield to God and let happen what
will happen. Sometimes the best thing to do
is to refuse to submit. Refuse to yield.
Hold on to God in prayer and say God, I will go to my grave
without surrendering this and God will show us.
Either way there's pain, either
way there's suffering. Either way, there's wounding and
either way, God is faithful and our our task day in and day out
is to sort out what can I hold on to in prayer?
What do I need to surrender and let go of?
And God will guide us through that whole thing, wrestling with
God, being faithful to God and a system stacked against you and a
system stacked against you. The first I think and most
important thing we can do is to is to be willing to wrestle with
God as we pray our way and walk our way and work and worship our
way through these systems in life that we encounter, that we
wrestle with God. And sometimes when we wrestle,
we'll submit, sometimes we won't.
But God will form us either way in Jesus name, Amen.