Praise the Lord for another
brand new day. We live beside Main Street in our town, and soon after 4:30 AM
the tractor trailers begin rolling past. I get up, knowing that the day has
begun praising the Lord for a new day and praising Him for the rest of the
night. It is going to be another wonderful day. I heard from one of our
friends in England about one of the missionary couples that served in our area
when I was a boy in the early sixties of the last century. . . the wife died.
She was faithful servant and witness for Jesus. I remember her as one always
dressed up working alongside her husband, serving the Lord together. Her
husband was educated as an Engineer but came to India as an evangelist and
church planter. I was blessed and impacted by the ministry of these dear
servants of our Lord.
Alice and I attended a high
school girls' soccer match yesterday afternoon. The girls from where Alice
teaches won the match. It was an Indian Summer afternoon. We got to meet many
of the parents and grandparents of the students, along with some of the local
athletes. I was reminded of my high school days where I played soccer. Best of
all I loved to watch some of the State soccer championship games played in our
high school soccer fields. I recall on one occasion the British missionaries
men's soccer team played against the faculty team of our high school. It was
fascinating. The Missionary team played with "much
Grace".
One of the fascinating and
intriguing Biblical stories I heard as a young boy, told to us by my uncle who
was wonderful story teller, was the story of Jacob wrestling with the Lord on
the edge of the Jabbok river. . . The story of Jacob wrestling with God is a story that has
been told over and over again in homes and churches and around campfires through
the generations. The key to this
whole story is the name Jacob, which means cheater, manipulator, little liar, cunning, and slippery.
These are people who will cheat you if given half a chance, and that is the
story of Jacob. In fact, there are
three wonderful stories about Jacob and his cheating and these stories
demonstrate how and why Jacob deserved to be named cheater or masterful
manipulator.
One night Jacob had a wrestling match with
God. Jacob had been cheating people his whole life. He had cheated his brother
out of the inheritance, cheated his brother from receiving his father’s dying
blessing, cheated his blind father, and tried to cheat his Uncle
Laban. His whole life he
had been cheating and manipulating people. His whole life he had been clever
and cunning and that night, in that wrestling match with God, God
touched him in such a way that he was changed. There and then God gave him a
new name Israel, which means, let God rule. Any time in the Bible, when a person was
given a new name, it was a sign of a dramatic and enormous change within that
person. Jacob, indeed, underwent this enormous change from being Jacob to being
Israel, from being a cheater and manipulator who was both cunning and clever to
being a person who finally let God rule in his life. This is what the New Testament, Jesus, and the Kingdom of
God are all about. The kingdom is God in any place and any heart in which Jesus
rules.
I am
sure that sometimes each of us wrestles with God at night, and
sometimes it goes on for a night or for a week or for a month or for a year, and
slowly we get through that process of wrestling with God. Our Lord God, if he wanted to with all his
power, could pin us down in the blink of an eye, slam us to the floor, and stomp
on us. If God wanted to, He could pin us down and make us believe and obey.
But that isn’t the way our Lord wrestles. He wrestles in such a way that we
slowly surrender our lives to him. We put our hands in his hands, and God
begins to lead us on a path of righteousness, of right relationships. That is
the way that God wrestles with us. God does not bash our hands down with his
mighty power and pin us. Rather, God allows us to put our hands in his and we
begin to walk together. That is the way God wrestles with us. At times He
figuratively "breaks our hip", so that we can learn to walk not on our own
power, but always leaning on Him.
We all go through that fundamental
transition in life. The issue is whether or not I will continue to be a
self-centered, cheating, cunning, manipulative person or whether I will finally
let God rule. Who will rule in my life? Myself, like Jacob, or
God? We spend a lot of time on the
banks of our Jabbok River. We wrestle about things we are doing wrong. We may
wrestle about whether to have a child or get an abortion, whether to move into a
retirement home or remain in our house, whether to go to college or enter the
workforce. We wrestle with illness and death, whether or not this chemotherapy
is going to work or the possibility of radiation. We wrestle with whether or not
we will be alive tomorrow or not and how we plan our future estate and future
economic years. We all wrestle with a lot of things in life. There is no doubt
that we wrestle a lot, spending a lot of time on the banks of our Jabbok River
but beneath all of these wrestling matches is the question, Who is going to
win? Who is going to rule my life? Myself? Jesus? Who rules in your life?
Are you a Jacob or is your name Israel? Amen.
In Jesus,
Brown
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