Genesis 32:26,
Jacob here is afraid that his brother Esau is going to kill him. He is returning back into the land and he is sending all these gifts ahead of him to try to win the favor of his brother Esau and so he is afraid. He has already sent some gifts ahead. And this one particular night he is left by himself and a man comes and wrestles with him. And soon he realizes that this is no ordinary man, this is actually God. Most pastors and people who have commented on this verse believe that this was a pre-incarnate manifestation of the Son, that this was God the Son in fact, that he was wrestling with.

In this wrestling match of sorts, Jacob is injured. God touches his hip and so he ends up limping after that. But his response to his injury and to this wrestling match appears here in verse 26, “Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.” So based on this short verse, I really just want to take out two things that I think we can learn for our own prayer lives and that is that our prayer life should be marked by desperation and determination. Desperation and determination.

So thinking about desperation, often it is the case that it is when we are recognizing our weakness; it is when there is some sort of a crisis that we are all of a sudden driven to our knees in prayer. Often we don't naturally have the sense of desperation that we perhaps ought to. And so often it seems like there is some crisis or something that the Lord will use to make us better aware of our needs.

Our prayers are not often marked by an awareness of our actual desperation. To try and illustrate that, I remember hearing a pastor mention how he used to have some real struggles in his personal prayer life, and he said, “You know what really worked for me? After I moved to the Middle East and became a pastor there, I've never wrestled with my prayer life ever since then.” And what he was getting at was when he was all of a sudden in a dangerous place fearing for his life on some occasions, and when the needs were very different, all of a sudden his prayer life had more life in it and it was marked by more desperation.

Jacob here recognizes that he is in need of God's blessing. He is in need of God's help if he is going to survive this. He fears that he is going to die and now he has even less physical strength to fight Esau if there was some sort of a fight, because now his hip has been put out of joint. And so it is in his desperation now that he has been led to be determined to receive the help that he needs.

And… I'm talking to myself when I say this too, but whenever you need a renewed sense of your own desperation before the Lord, you simply need to consider the duties that God has given you. I mean, consider just a couple of the commands that the Lord gives, “Love the Lord with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all your might.” Did we do that perfectly today? Can we do that without his help? Or even think of our duties as husbands or wives or as parents. These are high callings and it’s like, “Raise your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Don't provoke them.” Who can do that without God's supernatural help and strength? And so our prayers ought to be marked by desperation when we realize how much we really need him. We cannot do what he requires of us on our own.

Desperation was the first thing, and determination was the second. As a few people have noted before, it's interesting that God is the one who initiates this wrestling match in the text. God is the one who initiates this wrestling, but Jacob now is not willing to give up. He says, “I'm not going to let go unless you bless me.” And this wrestling, as many other pastors have noted before, this is a good metaphor for prayer. It’s a good picture of prayer, and in particular, it's a good exhortation towards persistence in prayer. As a matter of fact, when I was studying this in more detail, one of the footnotes or cross references linked to the parable that Jesus tells of the persistent widow and the words before he tells that parable, it says that he taught the parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and to not lose heart.

And so in Jacob's determination, we learn about the determination that we ought to have and the persistence that we ought to have in prayer. I thought there were two different ways of looking at that. On the one hand persistence on one particular occasion. So let's just say you're going to the Lord in prayer later tonight or sometime tomorrow morning, there is persistence in the sense that you are not willing to give up, you are not willing to leave that prayer closet until you have received the blessing of at least being in his presence, of sensing that you were heard by your father. So there's persistence in the sense of not giving up until you have received some sort of blessing in one individual time of prayer.

But then there is also persistence in continued prayer for a particular matter. And so continuing in prayer for a specific item, unless God has somehow made it clear that this is not his will to answer. But we are exhorted and encouraged to have this holy determination in prayer, because unlike Jacob, we are praying to God in the name of the one whom Jacob wrestled with. And we have more confidence with which to come to God because we now appeal to the merits of Christ, of his perfect righteousness. We appeal to his blood which was shed for us.

So even if the problem that we are going to God about is not immediately solved or the petition that we are raising isn't immediately asked, we can still receive the blessings of strength, the blessings of renewed appreciation of our adoption as sons and daughters just by wrestling with him. And the verse I was thinking of with regards to this was, “He has not told you, O Jacob, to seek his face in vain.” (Isaiah 45:19) And so in other words, brethren, I think this is a good reminder and encouragement that just as God's word does not return to him void, your time wrestling in prayer will not be wasted. Even if you don't get the exact outcome to prayer that you are looking for it is not in vain. At the very least, it is time that you have spent with your God and wrestling with him is never in vain. There is always a blessing that you are getting through that. So with that being said, I hope that there might be some encouragement for us in that and Lord bless you brethren.