DEVOTIONAL: BIBLICAL PRAYER - JACOB

By Ted Schroder

What do you do when you are confronted with a life-threatening crisis, when all that you have worked for, labored over, and loved, is jeopardized, when you are at the mercy of something other than yourself over which you have no control? Anxiety grips you. Sleep eludes you. You toss and turn as you replay possible scenarios in your mind, and contemplate the worst that could happen, and how you could have handled things differently and possibly have prevented this happening to you. What can you do? You pray, "Lord, help me."

Jacob is returning home after twenty years in Mesopotamia. He left in a hurry after stealing his brother Esau's birthright and his father Isaac's blessing. He fled from his father-in-law Laban, whom he has deceived. He arrives on the borders of his family's land, and sent messengers to Esau to announce his arrival. He hears that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men. Jacob is in great fear of his brother. He divides his people into two groups, so that if one is attacked the other can escape. He prays: "Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother Esau, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and also the mothers with their children. But you have said, 'I will surely make you prosper and will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.'" (Genesis 32:11,12)

He sent ahead of him a generous gift of several hundred goats, camels and donkeys to be presented to Esau. He thought, "I will pacify him with these gifts I am sending on ahead; later, when I see him, perhaps he will receive me." (Genesis 32:) Then he sent his wives, his eleven sons and all his possessions ahead of him, and stayed behind alone all night. He was seriously anxious about what would happen the next day. He gave himself to prayer.

All night Jacob wrestled with an angel of the LORD until his hip was displaced. But still Jacob continued to wrestle. He would not let go even when the angel asked him to. Jacob said, "I will not let you go until you bless me." (Genesis 32:26) Then the angel named him Israel, and gave him a new identity: Israel means 'he struggles with God.' The angel blesses him. "So Jacob called the place Peniel (which means 'face of God'), saying, 'It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life is spared.'" (Genesis 32:30)

"The conflict brought to a head the battling and groping of a lifetime, and Jacob's desperate embrace vividly expressed his ambivalent attitude to God, of love and enmity, defiance and dependence. It was against God, not Esau and Laban, that he had been pitting his strength, as he now discovered; yet the initiative had been God's, as it was this night, to chasten his pride and challenge his tenacity. The crippling and the naming show that God's ends were still the same: He would have all of Jacob's will to win, to attain and obtain, yet purged of self-sufficiency and re-directed to the proper object of man's love, God Himself. After the maiming, combativeness had turned to dogged dependence, and Jacob emerged broken, named and blessed. His limping would be a lasting proof of the reality of the struggle: it had been no dream, and there was sharp judgment in it. The new name would attest his new standing: it was both a mark of grace, wiping out an old reproach (27:36), and an accolade to live up to." (Derek Kidner, Genesis, p.169)

Jacob represents all of us who have struggled for God's blessing all our lives. We have hung on, even when we have been wounded. We have faced anxiety, and having done all we humanly can to escape disaster, we go to prayer. We recognize that there is something greater going on in our lives over which we have no control. All our human ingenuity will not get us out of this one. Walter Brueggemann says that Jacob, or Israel "is not formed by success or shrewdness, but by an assault from God." (Genesis, p.269)

The prophet Hosea calls upon all God's people to strive with God as Jacob did. "In the womb he grasped his brother's heel; as a man he struggled with God. He struggled with the angel and overcame him; he wept and begged for his favor." (Hosea 12:3,4)

Have you ever been there? We are reduced to weeping and begging for God's favor. This describes a condition of human extremity when we are at the end of our resources. Jesus in his humanity, in the garden of Gethsemane, spent the night wrestling with his Father in prayer, trying to find a way out of having to face the suffering of the day ahead, the brutality of the Passion, his public humiliation and the terrors of the Cross. But that was not the only time in his life that he wrestled with the Father in prayer. Scripture records that, "During the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission." (Hebrews 5:7)

We find our identity, our strength, not from our human endeavors, but through struggling with God in prayer. James writes, "the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." (1:3,4) Peterson puts it this way, "You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way." (The Message)

Tim Chester (The Message of Prayer p.97) comments, "The story reveals an important dimension to our relationship with God that our sentimental age often fails to see: God is dangerous. He is the aggressor in the narrative. He is not comfortable to have around. Yet in the struggle with God our relationship with him grows and our faith is immeasurably deepened. Calvin says we should think of 'all the servants of God in this world as wrestlers.' He continues:

'God himself, as an antagonist descends into the arena to try our strength. This, though at first sight it seems absurd, experience and reason teaches us to be true. For as all prosperity flows from his goodness, so adversity is either the rod with which he corrects our sins, or the test of our faith and patience. What was once exhibited under a visible form to our father Jacob, is daily fulfilled in the individual members of the Church.' (Genesis, vol.2, pp.195, 196)"

God tries our strength as we wrestle together over the issues of our lives. Why does he not just reassure us that he will be with us to take care of the problems we take to him? Why do we have to go through all this pain, and come out limping like Jacob? We are never the same again. Why do we have to go through all this struggle?

P.T. Forsyth wrote, "We shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God's great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer. Our soul is fulfilled even when our petition is not." (Soul of Prayer, p.14)

If God were to grant us answers to our prayers too quickly and easily we would not develop into healthy and strong disciples of Christ. No matter how we might want it to be different real life is struggle and conflict, not superficial peace and premature reassurance. Jim Packer writes,

"Biblical Christian experience, whatever else it is, is active battling throughout, inwardly against the flesh, outwardly against the world, and in both against the devil. Awareness and acceptance of the fight is itself gauge of spiritual authenticity and vitality. God may actually resist us when we pray in order that we in turn may resist and overcome his resistance, and so be led into deeper dependence on him and greater enrichment from him at the end of the day." (David Hanes (ed.), My Path of Prayer, p.59)

Paul describes Epaphras as "always wrestling in prayer" for the Colossians, that they may "stand firm in the will of God, mature and fully assured." (Col.4:12) "Our relationship with God often involves struggle. Sometimes it is a struggle with temptation. Sometimes it is a struggle with the circumstances of life. Often it is a struggle with ourselves. But sometimes it is a struggle with God himself. God gives us this struggle to refine our faith and to deepen our relationship with him. He wants us to cling to him, like Jacob did - holding out for blessing. As Forsyth says, 'too ready acceptance of a situation as His will often means feebleness or sloth.'" (Chester, p.98)

The life Jesus modeled for us, and urged upon us, is not a passive acceptance of life's circumstances, a resignation or fatalism, but the strengthening of the will to "wrestle, and fight, and pray." Sometimes we have to hang on, not let go of God, until we are sure that we have divine blessing. We are not to give up or give in prematurely. Surrender is not always the right thing to do.

There is another element to this struggle with God. That is the anxiety of the human struggle with Esau. Jacob carries this anxiety, this threat, into his tossing and turning with the angel of the Lord in prayer. What we struggle with in our daily life is taken into our wrestling with God in the night. When we are faced with a life-threatening crisis in our lives, we find that it controls our prayers for a long time: days, months, even years, before we win through to a blessing. On the way we may be disabled or wounded in our emotions, but eventually the light dawns and we find that we have been given a new identity in Christ, a new maturity, where we can "stand firm in the will of God, mature and fully assured."

Isn't this what parenting can do to us, or battling cancer, or other debilitating diseases? Can we not win through to the blessing of becoming a better person, a more mature believer, because of our struggles?

"In the National Gallery of Scotland hangs a painting by Paul Gauguin called The Vision of the Sermon. Gauguin believed that art should represent not only what was there but the way it made you feel. In The Vision of the Sermon a group of devout Breton women have heard a sermon on Jacob wrestling with God. It is so real to them that they see it before their eyes. Gauguin distinguishes between the literal reality of the women and the reality of their vision. The grass is red and they are separated from the struggle by the line of a tree. Yet the struggle is real. Indeed one of their cows has strayed into the fray. The reality of wrestling with God is as real as their cow." (Tim Chester, p.101)

Wrestling with God is not some myth or some far-fetched idea reserved only for mystics. It is part of everyday life. It can happen to any of us at any time we are face with a crisis. When you are in the midst of it, and are tempted to give up, or think that God wants to destroy you, that life is against you, and that there is no hope, remember that God wants to bless you. "If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things." (Romans 8:31,32)

The Rev. Ted Schroder is the rector of Amelia Island Plantation Church in Florida

DEVOTIONAL - BEING ON THE WAY: THE NORMAL CHRISTIAN LIFE

By Alan Medinger

Regeneration News, December 2003

This article was inspired by the book On Hope by Josef Pieper, published by Ignatius Press, 1986; translated from the German.

A number of times in these articles I have addressed the question as to how we can live with relative peace within the context of two truths that seem to crash headlong into each other—the truth that God calls us to live a holy life and the truth that we keep on sinning. Most recently I touched on this in the article "Who Is I? And Who Is Me?" (October 2003). This is a critical issue for most of us because if we find ourselves accepting too easily that we are sinners, we risk falling into complacency or worse yet, we abuse God's grace. On the other side, if we go too far berating ourselves for our sinfulness, we risk not experiencing the joy and freedom that is rightfully ours in Jesus Christ.

You probably know people who live at either of the extremes; those who with an attitude of, "Well, we all sin," seem to live in a permanent state of cheap grace, and those who seem to live in a state of perpetual self-condemnation show little of the joy of knowing Jesus. I suspect most of us don't dwell constantly at one extreme or the other, but rather, we bounce back and forth between the two. In this article I am going to approach the problem from a different direction—from the perspective that we are all becoming, we are all a work in process, we are all on the way. Accepting this truth can bring both stability and hope into our lives, and both stability and hope inspire victory in our Christian walk.

Being a Person Still on the Way

In seeking to overcome sexual sins, we can only be in one of four states:

• moving forward

• moving backward

• standing still

• arrived

My belief is—and I am going to build a case for it—that if we are leading "the normal Christian life," then we are moving forward. I am going to describe what I mean by the normal Christian life, but first let me eliminate one of the four states—having arrived. I am not ready to state this unequivocally, but I believe quite strongly that as long as we possess the capacity to imagine, we will not be totally free from lust, at least not in this life. Using concepts from the writing of Thomas Aquinas, Josef Pieper refers to living in either status viatoris or status comprehensoris. Status viatoris means "being on the way" while status comprehensoris means "having arrived", no longer being a viator, having achieved perfect union with Christ. While status comprehensoris is our ultimate hope and destination, certainly none of us will be there until the moment of death. Even the Apostle Paul was quite clear that he was a viator, a person still on the way:

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make [knowing Jesus Christ and the power of His resurrection] my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. (Philippians 3:12-16)

Part of the good news of Jesus Christ is that being a viator is the natural state for all believers. In the born-again believer the indwelling Holy Spirit is constantly drawing us towards status comprehensoris, the state of perfect union with Jesus, the state of perfect happiness. We do not reach it in this life, but being drawn towards it is at the center of Christian life. Being drawn is certain to occur because it is what the Holy Spirit does. Now it is true that we can resist being drawn, and with our abiding free will, resist it so successfully that we find ourselves stuck or falling backward. But this is analogous to my using an umbrella to shade myself from the sun. Even if I do this, the sun is still shining.

The Normal Christian Life

It is not any extraordinary effort on our part, any sort of heroic Christianity that causes us to be drawn forward towards completeness in Jesus Christ. We simply need to be ordinary Christians leading the normal Christian life. What is this normal Christian life? I believe it is marked by the following conditions:

We agree with basic Biblical truths as historically interpreted by the church and as expressed in the ancient creeds of the church. We hold to those beliefs that are universal in time and place. These are the fundamental Christian beliefs about God and man, about sin and redemption. There is a matter of choice here. Christians who take hold of "new truths" (such as those recently put forth at the Episcopal Church's national convention in Minneapolis) are quite likely in rebellion, a rebellion that is, at least in its early stages, freely chosen. They have chosen to adopt beliefs that will justify their behavior, rather than trying to change their behavior to be in accord with the beliefs expressed in Scripture and taught by the church. To a far greater extent than most people imagine, people believe what they want to believe. What have you chosen to believe, especially about sexual sin and sexual purity?

We spend significant personal time with the Lord in prayer, meditation and the study of Scripture. This is how we grow in knowing Jesus and the power of His resurrection (Philippians 12:10). If we are growing in Him, we cannot help but be on the way.

We are an active part of a community of believers. We are called to be a part of His Body. This is not an option. It is in interacting with other believers that we are challenged, convicted, encouraged, comforted, inspired; we experience all of the elements that provide growth. If you are in a large church where you are not known, join a small home group. If you are in a church where there is no body life, you may need to change churches. If you are in a church where body life is present, and you choose not to be involved, don't look for growth and healing.

We are trying to be obedient to God. We try to do those things we should do, and we try not to do those things we should not do. Don't berate yourself with, "If I only tried harder..." I have never found that such self-talk helped anyone. Ultimately, it will be God's power that enables us to become obedient. Our role is to cooperate by never giving up trying.

We confess when we sin. As people on the way, those who haven't arrived, we will sin. We have the answer to sin—repentance and confession. This seems so simple, and it is. But over and over again in our ministry we see confusion enter right here. We encounter many Christians who in broad terms want to live a life of obedience to the Lord, but who have consciously decided to go on with their lust, their fantasy, their masturbation. They see overcoming homosexuality or lust as a step by step process, and they imagine—or tell themselves—that they know just what the steps are. Usually they hide behind something like, "Later, I am not at a place to stop yet." The truth is, they are choosing to go on with their sin. When this is the case, I believe that confession of that particular sin is inappropriate. However, there are other things that such people can do. They can confess the sin of rebellion, asking God to change their wills. If this is where you are, right now, go back and re-read the previous four elements of the normal Christian life. What do you really believe about lust and about your sexuality? What are you choosing to believe? Take time to pray about this, to talk to Jesus about it, to study God's word with respect to sexual sins. Share with mature Christians in your fellowship where you are. And try, even if you feel like trying is futile.

As a "sacramental believer", I would add a sixth element to the normal Christian life, the regular participation in the Eucharist. I believe that receiving the Lord's Body and Blood has a life changing effect on us, but I realize that this is not where many of our readers are, and I do believe that the five elements described do comprise a life in which change will occur.

Part of Your Life Now

Here's a key point in all of this. There is not one of these five (or six) elements of the normal Christian life that cannot be a part of your life. And if they are present, you are on the way, and a part of this being on the way will be your growth in sexual purity. There will surely be times when you feel you are stuck, times even when you sense that you are falling back. That too is "normal." The road toward completion is never a straight line. God may have you on hold until he gets your attention in some other area of your life. Most of us have found times when we had to sink deeply into the muck and mire of our own sins before we would find ourselves at a place where we were ready to truly die to something. If you are leading the normal Christian life, you are on the way to true and lasting change because it is not your power that is going to change you. It is His power. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians:

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 1:11-12)

It is His power. And for this reason, you have every reason for hope.