Take up the whole armor of God…praying always… —Ephesians
6:13,18
“You must learn to wrestle against the things that hinder
your communication with God, and wrestle in prayer for other people; but to
wrestle with God in prayer is unscriptural. If you ever do wrestle with God,
you will be crippled for the rest of your life. If you grab hold of God and
wrestle with Him, as Jacob did, simply because He is working in a way that
doesn’t meet with your approval, you force Him to put you out of joint (see
Genesis 32:24-25). Don’t become a cripple by wrestling with the ways of God,
but be someone who wrestles before God with the things of this world, because
“we are more than conquerors through Him…” (Romans 8:37). Wrestling before God
makes an impact in His kingdom. If you ask me to pray for you, and I am not
complete in Christ, my prayer accomplishes nothing. But if I am complete in
Christ, my prayer brings victory all the time. Prayer is effective only when
there is completeness— “take up the whole armor of God….”” CHAMBERS
As you read Chamber’s words are you thinking that he is encouraging
you to try harder? What he is
encouraging you to do is to “faith” harder.
Our ability to do anything that the Lord has told us to do is grounded
in faith not in works. “You” are no more
capable on your own after your new birth than you were before you put your
faith in Jesus. Why? (Ephesians 6:12) “For our struggle is
not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers,
against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of
wickedness in the heavenly places.” This
new life is a spiritual one. The weapons
we use to fight the battles, to wrestle before God, are other worldly. (2
Corinthians 10:3-4) “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war
according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh,
but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.” Stop trying to be stronger than your temptation
.. you are not. Stop trying to change
your nature, you cannot. Your ability to
do what God asks you to do .. what He commands in His Word … depends upon how
much of Him we are one with and not on your sincere desire to do better next
time. I have quoted this before “The definition
of insanity to do the same thing over, again and again, expecting a different
outcome.”
So why do we do it anyway?
Because life is not that simple.
I see that in my children and grandchildren. I talk to them about what to do to solve the
problem they face, but there are other pressures on them that they fail to tell
me about, for any number of reasons.
Pressures that, in their mind, make my advice unfollowable (is that a
word?) So, they continue to fail at whatever it is and I can do nothing but
stand by and watch them fail. Perhaps
you have experienced the same thing.
Well, that is something you can wrestle with before God. We are not the Holy Spirit, and we certainly are
not God. Perhaps one of the hardest
things for a parent/grandparent to do is to watch people they love choose poorly. I once heard an analogy of the metamorphosis of a butterfly. If you cut the cocoon open to help the
butterfly with its struggle, you actually hurt it because it will not be able
to fly. Their struggle is part of their journey.
An important part. We see it in the
natural, when it is, in fact, spiritual.
Can we trust God? Watching of their
struggle becomes our struggle. We can’t change hearts, only God can. But you can live in a manner that shows
others what trusting God in the midst of struggle looks like. Are you?
ELGIN
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