Wrestling in Prayer

Being a father is one of the greatest gifts that I could have been given on this side of glory. It is simultaneously rewarding and scary that it is my job as a father to help our kids grow, mature, and develop into the young men and women that God wants them to be. Truly this is a high calling! One of the things that our family does on occasion to encourage growth and development is to teach them how to persevere under trial…through wrestling. I’m sure that you are all familiar with the old saying, “a family that wrestles together, stays together.” That’s how it goes, right?

For my family, wrestling is a fun thing. We push the couches out of the way and throw some blankets on the floor and grapple for a bit. We’ll even do variations on certain nights, one of my favorites is called “quiet wrestling,” where the first one to laugh or make a noise is out…which certainly levels the playing field. Though we don’t do this every night, the kids ask quite often if “tonight is a wrestling night.” They want to wrestle because wrestling is fun!

But we know that some wresting is more fun than others. To wrestle, in the purest sense of the word, is to struggle with something, and it can often be accompanied by great pain, discomfort, and even anguish. And some of the most difficult pains come not with physical wrestling, but wrestling with emotional and even spiritual trials and circumstances.

One such wrestling that many Christians engage with is wrestling with prayer. Some would ask though, “Isn’t prayer supposed to be a blessing? Isn’t it a gift?” Absolutely, it is! But there are many who have certainly wrestled with this gift given to us. There are those who know the struggle of finding the time to pray, finding the concentration, or even the motivation to pray. Then there are the times when we overcome those struggles and do pray, but our prayers aren’t answered when we want or how we want and we grow discouraged. Often, this vicious cycle of wrestling with prayer just begins again at this point and many grow discouraged and slowly give up the desire to wrestle anymore. Does this sound familiar?

This is far too common and has been common as long as people have been praying! Ole Hallesby wrote,

“Most of us cannot quite understand how prayer can involve difficulty and anguish. Why should praying entail so much suffering? Why should our prayer life be a constantly flowing source of anguish? If we reflect but for a moment, we will, however, see that it really cannot be otherwise. If prayer is, as we have seen, the central function of the new life of faith, the very heartbeat of our life in God, it is obvious that our prayer life must become the target against which Satan directs his best and most numerous darts.”

Our wrestling in prayer comes because there is a foe who we wrestle against! At times, this foe wins battles and we grow discouraged and may even be ready to quit and give up! What is there for those of us who have been wrestled to the mat and are about ready to give up?

It is here that we must learn the secret of prayer: it does not rely on our strength to withstand the evil one, but God’s alone! Hallesby writes that “Prayer is for the helpless,” because it is only in our helplessness and our inabilities, only when we are losing the battle in prayer, that we remember that it is God who fights for us! It is here that our prayer life simply rests in Jesus, who desires to enter in to our lives and give us rest (Revelation 3:20). Christ says, “for my power is made perfect in weakness,” (2 Corinthians 12:9) and it is in our own weakness that it fails to be about what we can do about our prayer lives, but about what He is able to do in us!

This sort of wrestling isn’t always fun, but through this wrestling comes victory because God is able to sustain us and intercede for us to God the Father. So, His call to us is to wrestle, to struggle in prayer, knowing that He will give us all that we need and that He will win the victory!

In Christ,
Pastor Evan