Now we come to the reading of God's word, the second reading this morning, and we're going to turn to Genesis 32. Genesis 32. Our reading will start with verse 22, and we'll go through verse 32. And this is on page 27 of your Pew Bibles. Now, as you arrive at this place in scripture, I invite you to stand out of respect for the reading of God's inspired word. The same night, Jacob arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, his 11 children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream and everything else that he had, and Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day, when the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob. He touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, let me go, for the day has broken. But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. He said to him, what is your name? He said, Jacob. Then he said, your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed. Then Jacob asked him, please tell me your name. But he said, why is it that you ask my name? And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place, Peniel, saying, for I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered. The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore, to this day, the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is in the hip socket because he touched the socket of Jacob's hip on the sinew of the thigh. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God abides forever. Amen, you may be seated. Everyone here in this room knows what it's like to wrestle. Some of us wrestle with fear that keeps us up at night and we toss and turn. Some of us wrestle with disappointment over plans that haven't worked out. We wrestle with the what-ifs and the could-bes. Others wrestle over grief that never seems to let go. It always seems right around the corner. And sometimes in the darkness and difficulties of life, in our most honest moments, we wrestle with God. Jacob's story teaches us that the Christian life is a struggle with God himself. On this dark night of Jacob's soul, this is the climactic moment of his entire life. This is it. You want to find one place that makes all the difference for Jacob? It's this night right here. This night teaches us something about the Christian walk as a whole. That the Christian life is indeed a struggle with God. Not because God's against us, but because he's for us. The gospel is about the God who comes down to wrestle with us, wrestle for us. And in wrestling with us, he breaks us so that he can change us for good. Grace that breaks us and then grace that changes us. This is what we need to consider this morning as we look at this strange text. And it is strange, isn't it? Because here's Jacob on this anxiety-ridden nights. I mean, this is, you have to go back and see the context of what's happening. Remember what the sermon focused on last week. Jacob was coming back into the promised land after 20 years away. He'd run away from the promised land because he feared for his life. Why did he fear for his life? Because he'd conned his brother out of his birthright, out of his blessing, and Esau hated him for it. And Esau was on the hunt, on the hunt for Jacob's life. So Jacob ran away. He found a wife and another, and he worked for 20 years in Iran. And there he was, until God said, it's time to come home. But right on the edge of coming back into the promised land, something starts to stress him out. And you know what it is, Esau. I'm gonna have to confront him. I'm gonna have to talk with him. I'm gonna have to deal with him. And so here is Jacob stressed to the max about what Esau is going to do. Is he going to come with weapons and slay him and his family? He says, I fear for the women along with the children. And so what has he done? We talked about how Jacob started to send these waves of gifts to try to soften Esau by the time He meets him, so he sends all these, he basically gives away all of his blessings that he accrued during the 20 years away, hoping that Esau will be placated, pacified by the time he sees his scoundrel of a brother. At this very moment, it's late at night, and Jacob has already sent every single wave towards his brother, and there he stands alone. He parts with his wife and children, maybe wondering if this is the last time he'll see them, and he sits there terrified, knowing that just, he's hours away before he encounters his arch nemesis, Esau. There he is, and suddenly, An attacker comes out of the darkness and starts fist fighting with Jacob. Who is this guy? And you wonder if Jacob wondered, you know, is this Esau? Is it one of each Esau's henchmen sent to take me out? They've been spying on me and they've seen that I'm alone. He doesn't know. We will soon find out who this is. But at first, Jacob just knows he's got to fight for his life. He's just trying to survive. For six or seven hours, Jacob grapples with this stranger. And you can picture it, right? These two men crashing into each other in the darkness, punching and pinning with every ounce of adrenaline, trying to get the upper hand, angling to put the other in a choke hold to bring the fight to an end. Now, I get pretty tired and worn out after play wrestling with my little boys for what, 15 minutes? Here's Jacob. I can imagine the degrees of exhaustion that he has gone through fighting for hours and hours and hours with this attacker who seems determined to rip off his life. But Jacob knows something about wrestling, doesn't he? In fact, you look at this night and it's something of a parable for Jacob himself, for his whole life. Jacob, if he had a theme song, it would probably be something along the lines of Simon and Garfunkel's boxer, right? In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade. And he carries the reminder of every glove that's beat him down or punched him. till he cries out in his shame, I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains. That's Jacob. He's the fighter. He's the wrestler. His entire life up to this point has been full of wrestling. Even in the womb, he'd been grappling with his brother and trying to get his birthright. You remember this from chapter 25? His mom said, what's going on inside of me? Well, the brothers were fighting, punching and kicking and pulling with Jacob trying to grabbed the heel of his brother and his brother said, let go. And it wasn't long before he was wrestling with his father too. Wrestling with his father for the blessing. We saw that in chapter 27. And then he was wrestling with Laban for 20 long years. Back and forth, he strove with his father-in-law to try to get the upper hand, to try to cling to the blessing that he'd already stolen, that he wanted for himself. And then on his way back into the promised land here, he's wrestling once again with his brother, trying to find some way to, to get the upper hand, to calm down his brother as he comes back into the land. But who was Jacob really wrestling with all this time? wasn't just men, he was wrestling with God. All this time, his whole life, Jacob had lived in such a way that he was always trying to get ahead of God, always trying to control his circumstances and get the blessing, the good life through his own clever schemes. He was always trying to beat God to the punch, always trying to step around the order that God had set up and say, just give me the blessing and give it to me now. I don't want to wait for my brother. I don't want to somehow wait for you to give me a blessing that you promised God. I'm going to step in. I'm going to grab it myself. That's Jacob, the heel grabber, the deceiver, the schemer. What about you? Have you been wrestling with God? So many of us are just like Jacob. We talk like we wanna be part of God's plan, but then we make our own plans. And we don't understand why God won't get with our program. We come to our relationships and our work and our calendars, things to manipulate, to control. And when things don't go our way, we find ourselves in a frustrating stalemate with the Lord, grappling with Him. It's exhausting, isn't it? And some of you know what this is like because you know what it's like to try to box and punch and fight for every ounce of goodness that you could get out of the good things that God has given you. You know what it's like to come out of your relationships tired and exhausted because that the people in your life just won't bend and give you what you want. And you come out of the week just tired because your calendar and the way you set it up, you set up your schedule to maximize your comfort, to maximize your blessings. And you come to the end of the week and you're exhausted. You feel like you've been in a boxing match, punching and prodding and trying to grab from time every ounce of goodness you could get. But deep down you realize what you're really frustrated with, what you're really tired from is a long week, a long night of fighting with God, contending with Him. Because He won't give you what you want and He always makes things so hard for things to go your way. I wonder if you were to identify this morning the areas of your life where you most are tempted to contend with God, to grab a hold of him and fight him, where would those be? What are those areas? Where are your greatest complaints with the Almighty? What you need to realize is that Jacob's story reminds us that God is determined to break our self-reliance for our own good. Our God is not some punching bag in the sky who gives us whatever we want, whenever we tell him to, and wherever we punch in the air. He's a God who comes down to grapple with us because he knows that he must save us from ourselves. You see, when a stranger realized that Jacob was never going to submit, he touched Jacob's hip socket. And with just that little touch, he put Jacob's hip out of joint. agonizing pain, crippling pain, seared through Jacob's leg. I wonder if you've ever seen a football player's leg after a nasty injury. I've seen this, perhaps, almost every game I've watched, to be honest. Someone limping, as it were, off the field, or they try to stand up, but they just can't, and they fall down, grimacing in pain, and the. .. the reporters for the game will say something like, you know, we're going to go to a commercial break because it's just too gruesome to watch. Here's Jacob's leg dangling like a rag doll. And all of this just from one touch from this fighter, this stranger. It was at this very moment that Jacob realized that his attacker was no ordinary man. His attacker was God. This is God. Come in some sort of manifestation. The pre-incarnate Christ. Come to engage Jacob in combat. Jacob was wrestling the Lord. It was the Almighty who had wounded him with this one touch, showing Jacob that he could have done far more, that he was, as it were, holding back his strength, engaging Jacob just at his level until he realized, and of course he knew this all along, that Jacob was just going to keep grappling and grappling and grappling forever. Why would God hurt Jacob? God wounded Jacob to bring him to the end of himself. When Jacob's will wouldn't bend, God broke it. When Jacob refused to surrender, God made him surrender. All for a grand purpose, to teach Jacob to stop scheming through works and to start clinging by faith. This is tenacious, powerful, intentional, irresistible grace. This is what God's grace did to Jacob. This is what God's grace does to us. Sometimes God's grace hurts, and I'm not trying to minimize that pain. that all of us in different ways and in different times experience. We're living life our own way, on our own terms. And then some crisis comes through which God lays his hands upon us. And suddenly life becomes dislocated, out of joint, nothing makes sense. In fact, everything is quite painful. And we scream out in agony. God, what are you doing here? That hurts, why would you do that to me? You see, God uses the trials of life to dislocate our pride, to smash our sense of self-accomplishment, to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the end of our resources. God's law pins us down and says, stop resisting. Tap out. I wonder, have you, Christian, been brought to the end of yourself? Perhaps there are some here today who have questions about this Christianity thing. I wonder, have you started to come to the end of yourself? Have you realized that there's no use fighting with the Almighty, there's no use contending with Him? That there's a purpose for the pain that is in your life. and that you can complain about it and blame him and say, well, I don't like this kind of God. Or you can surrender to him for your own good. If you've been brought to the end of yourself, you'll stop contending against God and here's what you'll start to do. You'll start clinging to him for dear life. You see, there is a kind of wrestling that we ought to model, that Jacob models for us. It's the kind of wrestling that grabs a hold of God and says, I don't understand this, but I'm not gonna let go. You see, at first Jacob was just trying to get this stranger away from him. He was punching and pushing, trying to say, get off my back, get off my, he's, who are you, man? But when Jacob realizes this is God, what does he do? He doesn't push him away. He doesn't punch. He grabs a hold and he holds onto God for dear life. And he says, I'm not going to let go until you bless me. Jacob's surrender can be your surrender. And it looks like this. Lord, I'm done fighting against you. But now I'm going to start fighting for you. I'm going to keep holding on by faith until you bless me, Lord. I used to want you to get out of my way. I used to want you to do my will. Now I understand that I need you. Now I do your will. I'm nothing without you. If you let me go, Lord, I die. If you let me go, Lord, I slip into oblivion. Lord, hold onto me. Lord, don't let me go. That's the kind of wrestling that is modeled for us in this text. The kind of fight that says, Lord, I'm not going to stop clinging to your promises. Wash me, Savior, or I die. That's the cry. of Jacob in this text and it can be the cry of the Christian. It must be the cry of the Christian. Give me Jesus or I am nothing. I cling to him or I have nothing. And the great mystery of this text, the great beauty of this text is that that cry can come out of even the most painful and hurtful places of our life. Even those places where we don't understand what God is doing. Even in those moments when it's dark and cloudy and God feels to us like a stranger, and the wounds that he inflicts upon us are wounds that hurt, yet we can know that they must be meant for our good. And so we cling to the one who in his providence inflicted them upon us. This is grace that breaks us, but it is also grace that changes us. You see, once God brings us to the end of ourselves, he begins the work of remaking us into new people who are forever marked by his grace. And the scene in verse 31 is vivid. I love it. The sun starts to rise, it's a new day, and there's Jacob, tattered, torn and limping into the light. He carries with him two distinctives that he did not have before his wrestling match with Guy. Let's look at those. The first is he carries with him a new name. A new name. Before the fight, he was Jacob. Remember what the wrestler said to him in the midst of the fight. What is your name? What did he say? I am Jacob. And in just that one word, he confessed the story of his whole sad life. Because Jacob means heel grabber, deceiver, the self-sufficient schemer, the sinner. He's saying, that's who I am. I'm the sinner. but no longer, because now he's Israel. Look at verse 28. God said, your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed. No longer would Jacob be known for his former life of scheming. Now he's known for clinging to God's grace. No longer sinner, but now winner. And the interesting thing about Jacob is that the rest of his life, you know, with Abraham, once he goes from Abram to Abraham, it's for good and his name change is settled. But with Jacob, it goes back and forth the rest of Genesis between Jacob and Israel. And I think there's some significance there. Because isn't this true of us? that when God comes into our lives and with this decisive intrusive break into our lives, he gives us a new name. He gives us, he calls us his own. And yet we struggle with the old sin nature that clings. And so there's Jacob close at hand, and yet we say, I am Israel. And there's the back and forth throughout our lives in which we struggle to not live like Jacob, but to live like Israel, to live like one who has been made new and freed. Christian, you have a new name too. Sin no longer defines you. You are no longer sinner, but by God's grace, winner. Slowly but surely you are being transformed from Jacob into Israel. We ought to live like people who have been dramatically changed at the very core of our identity. When you're tempted to give into sin this morning, This afternoon, this evening, I want you to say, that is not who I am. I am not the schemer any longer. I've been saved, I've been redeemed, I have victory over sin. I have prevailed through faith. And so you have a gracious new name, just like Jacob, that's been put upon you. You are, children, the Israel of God. you also have a new walk. You see in this text, we see that never again will Jacob walk the same way after his wrestling match with God. Now he walks with a limp, his foot dragging slightly as a forever reminder in his body, the marks of his painful yet gracious encounter, which brought him to surrender to God. Christian, after you encounter God, you will walk differently. Have you noticed this? We walk with a gospel limp. Our lives are marked with humility and dependence, and people around you will notice that something about you changed. You aren't walking in your own strength, but in the power of the risen Christ. You aren't turning to the same schemes you used to turn to, but you're turning to things not like prayer. You go to be with God's people on Sunday morning. You worship, you fellowship. You limp your way to God. You throw yourself upon him for mercy. That's the new mode in which we walk. And all of this is pointing to weakness becoming the stage in which Christ displays his sufficient grace. Second Corinthians 12 9 says this. Remember, my grace is made perfect in your weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weakness so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Christian, how do you prevail? Not through your own strength, not through your own scheming, but through weakness, through a holy surrender to the Lord. Not my will, but yours be done. The limp of the gospel. Do you see this in your own life? Do you need to walk with more of a pronounced limp today by faith? dragging your way to the Lord in prayer and in humble dependence upon him. This is the new mode of your existence. A new name, a new walk, and all of these things, vibrant reminders that what we see in this wrestling match in Genesis 32 is all about Jesus and the cross of Christ. You see, it was on the cross that we saw that God himself came to wrestle us. He came down. He came down to wrestle us, but ultimately he came to wrestle for us. On the cross, Christ wrestled the powers of darkness that had taken us captive, but he wrestled more than that. He wrestled under the weight of our sin and he wrestled the wrath of God and the heavy hand of God that had come down upon us because of our guilt and because of our sin, because of our scheming. And what Christ did is almost too magnificent to behold. He gave himself up to the will of his father. He surrendered. The touch of God's wrath upon him left more than a dislocated hip socket. It left bleeding mortal wounds that took his life. But he never stopped clinging to his father's promise. He never let go. He said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Father, if it be your will, take this cup from me. And yet your will be done. And he clung on to dear life, even unto death, because he knew that his surrender would mean our salvation. Jesus received his mortal wounds on the cross so that our struggle with God would not crush us, but save us from the very worst of ourselves. the great wrestler, the great fighter, our savior, the greater Jacob, who surrendered himself for our blessing. Brothers and sisters, let us cling tightly to this Christ. and let that be the struggle. Let that be the wrestle of our lives, the struggle for faith in Christ. Let's go to pray right now. Heavenly Father, we thank you for all that the Savior has done, wrestling us out of the pits of death and hell at the cost of his very life. Lord, when he was pinned to the cross in that fatal hold. He did that for us so that we, Lord, would never struggle to our doom, but our struggle would be for faith, a faith that you freely give us through your irresistible grace. So let us claim to you and let this be our gospel limp now and forever.