Well, hey guys, I'm so glad you're still watching. I am so excited about what we're going to talk about today. Last Sunday, we started a new series, simply called Expect. The simple truth is that the experience we have in life is directly related to our expectations for life. Your experience is shaped by your expectations. In fact, you might even be able to say that there's nothing that affects the experience you have in life more than your expectations, because your expectations are actually one of the only things that you actually have some control over, or at least a lot of control over. You can't always control what happens to you. You can't always control the things that you experience, but you can always control your expectations about what you're going to experience. So if we want to have the right experience in 2021, we've got to have the right expectation. Last Sunday we started with this one. Expect God to be God. If we want to have the best experience in 2021, we've got to expect God to be God. We've got to expect God to show up because that's what he does. We've got to expect God to do God things because that's what he does. Right now, if you're looking at the world around you and you're seeing all the chaos and all the turmoil, and you're wondering what's going to happen, and you're fearful and you're full of anxiety, and maybe even I've talked to people who are depressed because of all that's happening. I have a simple question for you. Is God still God? Is God still God? And if the answer to that question is yes, which it is, then we should always be filled with hope. We should always be filled with an expectation for something good to happen because God is still God, and God is good, and God does good things. No matter what happens in our world, no matter how much division that we see, no matter how much ang we see, God is still God. He still sits on his throne. And as followers of Jesus, we've got to put our faith in that more than anything else. Definitely more than the kingdoms of this world, that's for sure. God is God, and we should expect God to be God in 2021. Today, we're gonna go with another expectation, and this is one that, to be honest, has probably been on the forefront of my mind the most in the last year to two years. This is a big one. I think this is a big one, not just for me, but really for all followers of Jesus, for all believers, because this is something that I see a lot of people miss. And it's something I've missed at different times in my life. And when we miss this one, when we don't have this expectation, we're we're very easily discouraged and disillusioned. I use those words a lot, discouraged and disillusioned in our faith. And we don't want to be that. And here's the expectation. In 2021, expect to wrestle with God. Expect to wrestle with God. Now, I don't know how much wrestling experience you have. I have a decent amount, not like official wrestling experience. I was never on a wrestling team, but I'm a I'm a boy. And I grew up with two brothers, and I have three sons, and so I have done my fair share of just boys being boys wrestling. When my oldest son was two or three years old, he used to love to wrestle with me. In fact, sometimes he'd just look at me and he'd have this glow in his eyes, and he would say, Dad, let's wrestle. Except he couldn't really say L's back then, so it was like it was Wetz Wessel. That was what he would say. Dad, Wetz Wessel. And when he would look at me and say, Let's wrestle, we would begin this whole wrestling match thing. And, you know, any dad that's ever done this with your child, you know what I'm talking about. You you kind of make it seem to them like it's really dangerous, but it's totally under control. So I would lift him up high and I kind of make it seem to him like I was about to slam him down on the ground, but I would totally control the velocity, and we would have so much fun. Well, one day we were we were having one of our wrestling matches, and uh I stood up really fast. And I didn't realize this, but there was this wooden piece of furniture that was like right, the corner of it was right above my back. And because I stood up so fast, I caught the corner, and it was a really sharp corner of this piece of furniture, and it literally like cut my back. Like it drew blood. I had this long, just huge, more than a scratch. I'm not gonna say it was like a gaping wound, but it was it was pretty deep. I had this huge scratch down my back, and it was bad enough that it actually left a scar. Now, at this point, this is years ago, eight years ago, at this point it's pretty much faded, but for a solid two years, I had a very visible scar going down the side of my back, and it looked really intense. In fact, I had a few different people who saw it at different times, and they went like, whoa, what happened? Did you get like a knife fight or something? Did you get stabbed? And I had to look at him and say, No, I got in a wrestling match with a two-year-old. And they just kind of stare at me confused, and I would say, You should see the two-year-old, as a joke. But no one ever laughed at that. Um, and I understand why. I had this wrestling match with my son, and it ended up with me having a little bit of a wound, but at the same time, I enjoyed those moments so, so much. Uh, if he wanted to wrestle with me now, I would throw my back out, so I can't do that with him anymore. But at least I've got my two-year-old and my four-year-old, I still get to do that with them. Wrestling. That's what we're talking about. Let me focus again. Wrestling. I don't know if you have any wrestling experience, but what I want you to understand is that God, he's looking for wrestlers. That God is looking for wrestlers. And if you want to have the experience with God that He desires for you, if you really want to have a life shaped and transformed by the work that God does in your life, you've got to be a wrestler. I want to take a look at a story in Genesis chapter 32. It's the most famous wrestling story we have in Scripture. I'm gonna start reading in verse 6. But to give you a little bit of setup, this is the story of a man named Jacob. And Jacob has been away from his home for a very, very long time. And when he left, he left with some really bad blood between he and his brother Esau. Jacob deceived Esau, really tricked Esau out of a lot of things that were supposed to go to Esau, because Esau was the older brother in their culture. The older brother got the inheritance, got the father's blessing. Jacob sort of weasled his way into taking that from Esau, and then he left with Esau vowing to kill him. It's been years and years and years. And now he's on his way back. And he's nervous because he doesn't know what Esau is going to do. So as he heads back, he sends a group of people ahead of him, and he sends these people to sort of scope out and see if Esau's there and how Esau is responding. And that's where we get in verse 6. It says the messengers returned with the news that Esau was on his way to meet Jacob with an army of 400 men. Now, if you got news that your long-lost brother was on his way to see you, and you were excited to see him, you'd probably get yourself, maybe a few close friends together and go meet him, but I don't know if you get 400 people to come along. Jacob was nervous about what Esau would do when he hears the news that Jacob is coming to meet him with 400 men. Jacob was terrified at the news. He divided his household along with his flocks and his herds and his camels into two groups, and he thought if Esau attacks one group, maybe the other group can escape. And then he prayed. And you promised to treat me kindly. I'm not worthy of all the faithfulness and unfailing love that you have shown to me, your servant. When I left home, I own nothing except a walking stick, and now my household fills two camps. O Lord, please rescue me from my brother Esau. I'm afraid that he's coming to kill me along with my wives and children. But you promised to treat me kindly and to multiply my descendants until they became as numerous as the sands along the seashore, too many to count. So here's what's what's happening. Jacob has actually spent his entire life being a wrestler of sorts. It's just that he's chosen to wrestle with people, and he's wrestled a little bit dirty. So I said a minute ago, he deceived and tricked his brother Esau. That's just what, that's what Jacob did. He was a deceiver. So he would wrestle with the struggle that he had as a younger brother. He always wrestled with the idea that Esau was going to be greater than him, and he couldn't handle that, and so he wrestled with that. He wrestled with his brother. He had conflict and drama and turmoil, and he ultimately ended up tricking his brother out of his birthright, out of his blessing. He wrestled with his father. He wrestled with the idea that his father seemed to favor his older brother Esau. And he wrestled with that. He couldn't really come to terms with that. And so he ends up deceiving his father into giving him the blessing that was due to Esau. His father was blind and he took advantage of his father's blindness to get something from his father, pretending to be his older brother. Younger brothers can usually do pretty good impressions of their older brothers, and I guess Jacob could do that as well. Jacob was always wrestling with people. He was always trying to grapple with the frustration that he felt. And actually, at one point in his life, he sort of met his match. His father-in-law, a man named Laban, was just as much of a deceiver as Jacob was. And Jacob and Laban spend really decades kind of wrestling with each other, tricking one another, trying to manipulate the other person to get what they want, and this has been a constant in his life. He's always wrestled with people, trying to get what he wants out of life, and it's left him in a place of despair. That's what happens when we choose to wrestle with people the wrong way. To try to manipulate and get what we want. We often find ourselves in a place where we feel like we have no allies, and the only person we can turn to is God. The good news is when we turn to God, he's there. Let's keep reading the story though, because this is when the real wrestling starts to happen. Verse 22, it says, during the night, this is the same day that he's praying, God, please rescue me. During the night, Jacob got up and he sent his two wives, two concubines, and eleven sons across the Jabbok River. Now, we read stuff like this sometimes in Scripture, and we're like, oh my gosh, this is horrible. Two wives, what's going on? Remember, when we open up the Old Testament, these are old stories. This is 3,000 plus years ago, and people, like all people, lived very differently than we live today. After they were on the other side, he sent over all of his possessions. And this left Jacob all alone in the camp, and a man came and wrestled with him until dawn. Now, this is like a very strange statement. He's all by himself. He sent his family way far off, and then it just says, A man came and wrestled with him. Like some guy just shows up and starts to actually battle a little bit with Jacob. When the man saw that he couldn't win the match, he struck Jacob's hip and he knocked it out of joint at the socket. And the man said, Let me go, for it is dawn. But Jacob panted, I will not let you go unless you bless me. What is your name? The man asked. He replied, Jacob. Your name will no longer be Jacob, the man told him. It is now Israel, because you have struggled with both God and men and have won. What is your name? Jacob asked. Why do you ask? The man replied. And then he blessed Jacob there. Now, this person that Jacob is wrestling with is not just a normal person. It's God. God shows up in physical form. This is actually something that he does a few times in Scripture, and obviously the most obvious one would be Jesus, right? Showing up in physical form. Sometimes we ask the question man, if only I could see God, if only I could talk to God, if only I could tangibly experience God, then I would be okay. Well, lots of people have done that. Jesus was here, he was that. And this is kind of a story before Jesus of God showing up in physical form and interacting with Jacob, and he wrestles with them, and it's a very strange story. He has a physical wrestling match with Jacob. And at the end of it, he ends up changing Jacob's name. He gives Jacob an entirely new identity. He gives him the name Israel. This is literally the defining moment of Jacob's life, one of the very most defining moments of his life. There's another time earlier on in his life where he has a dream, kind of a vision, and God shows him some things. That moment and this moment, they would be the defining moments of his life. Because from this moment on, he's not Jacob anymore. He's a new person. He's Israel. Israel means to wrestle with God, to struggle with God. And I think that's so interesting because this becomes the namesake of God's people. And this, by the way, is a name that still exists in our world today, Israel. In the Old Testament, prior to Jesus coming and opening up God's kingdom to every single person through his sacrifice on the cross, the nation of Israel, these were the people that God chose to use to reveal himself to the whole world through. And he chose to name them Israel, to wrestle with, to struggle with God. He didn't choose to name them a word that meant to love God, to obey God, to follow God, to serve God. Those would all make a lot of sense. But he chose the namesake of his people to be to wrestle with God, to struggle with God. What does this tell us about God? What does this tell us about our relationship with God? Well, it tells us a few things. It tells us, number one, that God wants us to engage with him. God would rather you fight with him than you leave him alone. I want you to think about that for a second. God would rather you fight with him, struggle with him, wrestle with him, argue with him. He would rather you do that than you to ignore him or leave him alone, because at least if you're wrestling with him, you're engaged. God wants us to have an engaged relationship. He wants us to be people who can wrestle with him. And frankly, if you look at Scripture, if you look at the whole story that we have of God and how he's interacted with people all throughout Scripture, the best ones, the ones that we tend to admire the most, they're usually wrestlers. We can look at a couple of classic examples. We can look at Psalm 13. The Psalms were mostly written by a man named David. David was a king in ancient Israel, and he's a man who God used to do great things, but he also made a bunch of major mistakes. And David was definitely a wrestler. He wasn't afraid to wrestle with God. Psalm 13, it's very short. Just let me read this to you. O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Turn and answer me, O Lord my God. Restore the light to my eyes, or I will die. Don't let my enemies gloat, saying, We have defeated him. Don't let them rejoice at my downfall. But then he says, This I trust in your unfailing love. I will rejoice because you've rescued me. I will sing to the Lord because he has been so good to me. What's going on here? This is David writing out a wrestling match he's having with God of sorts. He's struggling with God. He is he's battling with God. He's trying to come to terms, trying to grapple with what's going on in his life. He's going through a dark time. And he begins by accusing God. He's like, God, how long are you going to forget me? How long are you going to turn and look the other way? Maybe you felt like that before. Like God isn't watching, like God isn't protecting you, like God is allowing things to happen to you or happen around you that shouldn't be happening. And you're like, God, what are you doing? Are you asleep at the wheel? What's going on? Why aren't you doing what you've promised to do? That's wrestling with God. Sometimes we feel like maybe we don't have permission to do that. We do. Because David does that. And the result of his wrestling with God, the result of that inner struggle that he's having with the Lord, is that his perspective changes. Just like Jacob got a new name, David gets a new perspective. And he says, My God is the God of unfailing love. He's encouraged. He's lifted up. But if he didn't go to the depths of his heart and his soul with God, he never would have reached those heights. He wrestled with God and it changed him. There's an amazing story in 1 Samuel chapter 1 of a woman named Hannah. Hannah ends up being the mother of a man named Samuel, and Samuel is a prophet. He's a great man. Hannah, before Samuel was born, can't have kids. And it's something that brings her a tremendous amount of shame. And every year she goes to this temple and she wrestles with God there. She cries out and she prays with anguish in her heart and her soul for what she desperately desires, which is to be a mother. And it says, Once, when they were at Shiloh, that's where they would go to pray, Hannah went over to the tabernacle after supper to pray to the Lord. Eli the priest was sitting at his customary place beside the entrance, and Hannah was in deep anguish, crying bitterly as she prayed to the Lord. And she made this vahu, Lord Almighty, if you will look down upon my sorrow and answer my prayer and give me a son, then I'll give him back to you. He'll be yours for his entire lifetime. And as a sign that he's been dedicated to the Lord, his hair will never be cut. She's bargaining with God, she's wrestling with God. She's trying to say, God, what do I have to do to have my heart's desire fulfilled? Maybe you feel like God hasn't fulfilled a promise that you feel like he's made to you. Maybe you feel like there's something missing in your life, and you look around and other people have it and you don't, and you're crying out in your heart, like, God, why? Why is this missing? Sometimes maybe we feel like we can't even ask that question, but Hannah does. She's wrestling with God. She's asking him why. As she was praying to the Lord, Eli watched her, seeing her lips moving, but hearing no sound. He thought she'd been drinking. She's praying and acting so intense that he thinks she's under the influence. And so he says, Must you come here drunk? Throw away your wine. And oh no, sir, she replied, I'm not drunk. I'm just very sad. And I was pouring out my heart to the Lord. Please don't think I'm a wicked woman. I've been praying out of great anguish and sorrow. In that case, Eli said, Cheer up. May the Lord of Israel grant your request that you've asked for. And God ends up doing that. But it comes through a period of struggle, a period of wrestling. Even Jesus wrestled with God. You can read about it late in Matthew, Matthew chapter 26. Jesus is praying. And he's about to get arrested and go to the cross. And what's he doing right before he gets arrested? He wrestles with God. He says, God, is there any other way? Father, is there any way that this suffering that I'm about to go through, is there any way that it can be skipped? There's got to be another way. And then he ends up praying, God, not my will, but your will. But see that prayer that he had, that wrestling match that he had with God, that's what gave him the peace. To be able to say, I accept your will. If he hadn't wrestled with God, he may have not gotten there. My point is that we've got to be wrestlers. God is looking for wrestlers. He would rather you engage with him, even if it means fighting with him, struggling with him, questioning him. He would rather you do that than ignore him. God is looking for wrestlers. And if we want to have our hearts changed, if we want to become the new people that he wants to create us into, he wants to recreate a new person out of all of us. It's one of the sort of interesting half-truths of our culture, especially church culture in America. It's very common to hear someone say, I know God loves me just the way I am, and he just wants me to be myself. And the real answer is God absolutely loves you exactly the way you are. You don't have to change a single thing about yourself for God to love you. But don't believe for a second that he wants you to stay just the way you are. God wants to transform you. He wants to make you into a new person. He literally wants to make us new creations. But that's a that's a wrestling match type process. That's not an instant change. It's something that happens as we engage with God and we engage with him in our joy and we engage with him in our frustration, our anxieties, and our sorrows. We've got to be people who wrestle with God because God is looking for wrestlers. And if you want to be shaped into the person he created you to be, if 2021 is going to be a year for you where you grow more into the person that God's created you to be, you're going to have to be willing to engage with God and to wrestle. But hear me when I say this, very few people are willing to do that. Because most people just hate tension. And wrestling is all about tension. Wrestling is constant tension. I mentioned earlier my wrestling experience, just being a guy and having brothers and a dad and kids. The only other wrestling experience I have is my roommate in college was a wrestler. And he had actually wrestled in high school and was really good. And we used to kind of all goof around in the in the dorm in college and joke around and kind of fight a little bit, you know, guys being guys. And one day he made the statement that no one can beat up a wrestler. And that sort of was like a challenge to all the other guys around. And we said, okay, let's go. And so we all kind of had this like we we all basically had a play fight as grown men. Just don't judge me. It's just it's a guy thing. And uh and I remember going against John, my roommate, and he got me into this like position. Like he twisted my arm behind my back and pinned me to the ground. And I remember thinking to myself, I've never felt pain in every part of my body at the same time. And my body couldn't even figure out how to get out of it. Like that's how much tension there was there, and I hated it. And so I tapped out. That's what you do, right? You submit, you tap out because you don't like the tension. Most people live their lives trying to avoid all the tension. We're people that tend to crave personal security and comfort. Don't avoid tension with God. Don't do it. Not for a second, because the tension is actually what leads to transformation. Without the tension, you won't experience the transformation. Do not avoid tension with God. Here's actually something that a lot of people do, and I've seen it happen so many times over the last 20 plus years of being a Jesus follower. I've seen it happen even in people that I've considered friends. When people have a lot of tension with God, And they begin that wrestling process way too early, way too early. Instead of going through that with God and letting God use that tension to shape them, they end up creating a God of their own making that they don't have to wrestle with anymore. They end up just altering their view of God and saying, okay, well, I don't see God that way anymore. Now I see God this way. And they create this sort of version of God that never disagrees with them, that his views line completely and totally up with their views of the world, with their views of themselves, and they've created a God that they don't have to wrestle with. They've eliminated the tension from their relationship with God. And it feels great, but it has no ability to transform you. Don't create a God of your own making that agrees with you on everything. That God will never be able to change you because that God isn't real. No, the real God, there's gonna be times that you disagree with him. The real God, there's gonna be times that you don't understand what he's doing. The real God, there's gonna be times where you have no idea why he's going about things the way that he is, but he's God and we're not. And if we'll be willing to be people who hold on to him in those moments, who don't let go, who don't quickly tap out the moment we feel tension and settle for some version of God that isn't real, but man, it's nice because I don't ever have to disagree with that God. If we'll hold on to that God that we sometimes disagree with, sometimes we don't understand, we'll be transformed. Just like Jacob was transformed in Israel. And yeah, you know what? He had a little bit of a limp. I mean, maybe he should have submitted to God just a little bit sooner. I don't know, but the point is, Jacob held on to God. I heard a pastor say this years ago about Jacob. I've said this before. If you read his story, he's not a very admirable person. He's a terrible son, he's a terrible brother, he's a pretty terrible dad. And sometimes it's hard to look at Jacob and go, why in the world did God choose that guy to be his namesake for his people in the Old Testament? Why? There's so many better candidates. And I heard this pastor say the one thing about Jacob was that he would have rather died holding on to God than have lived letting go of God. The moment the pastor said that, I was like, ooh, wow, okay, that was that's big. He would rather have died holding on to God, wrestling with God, grappling with God, than have let go and lived the rest of his life going, man, what if? Your expectations determine your experience in life. And if the experience you desire is one with no tension, no discomfort, don't wrestle with God. Make up a God of your own making and worship that God, but just know that that God will never transform you. That God will never be able to do the things in your life that the real God can do. Because that God isn't real. You made that God up. But if you expect and desire to be transformed, to be made new, to become the person you were meant to be, if you can look at yourself like I'm looking at myself right now, not literally like this is a figurative looking at myself and going, there's things that need to change, there's ways I need to grow, there's things I need to be so much better at. The way that happens is not just me trying harder and doing more, it's letting God change me. And that's going to happen by engaging with God, that's gonna happen by wrestling with God. The tension is what creates the transformation. In fact, we sang a song earlier, New Wine. In the crushing and in the pressing, God's making new wine. God wants to do new things in your life. He wants to take you places you haven't been before. He wants to take you into a place and a depth with him that you haven't been before, but that's only gonna happen if you're if you're willing to wrestle with him. So no matter how much tension, no matter how much struggle, hold on. Expect to wrestle with God this year. And when that wrestling happens, you won't be caught off guard. You're like, oh, I thought this was gonna happen. And hold on and wrestle and struggle and do not give up and do not tap out. Live your life holding tightly to God, and you will experience everything that He has planned for you. And he has good things planned for your life.