12 Jul 2026 5 min read sermons

Have a Jacob Moment

Why do you keep wrestling to control a life that was never yours to control? Genesis 32, a broken hip, and the name that only comes after surrender.

Why would God pick a fight with a man in the middle of the night? That is the strange scene Pastor Josh opened this week in Genesis 32, the second half of Jacob's story in our Full Life: His Story series: Jacob alone by the Jabbok, a man who wrestles him until daybreak, a dislocated hip, and a new name to go with the limp. Last week covered God's sovereign choice of Jacob. This week was about what it takes for a lifelong schemer to finally surrender. With camp only five days away, the timing was no accident.

A language you can understand

Why would God wrestle anyone? Because Jacob was a wrestler. He came out of the womb gripping his brother's heel. He wrestled Esau out of a birthright, wrestled a blessing out of his blind father, wrestled twenty years with a scheming uncle, wrestled his way into wives, children and wealth. There was hardly a peaceful day in his life. So when God finally cornered him, God met him in the one form Jacob had spent his whole life practising.

Pastor Josh drew the lesson out gently: God teaches us in the language we can understand. He dealt with Abraham one way, Isaac another, Jacob another again, because they were different men with different desires. Pastor Josh's wife meets God in nature and gardens; for years he could not fathom it. As a father he had to learn that Nathan is not Sky: saying the same words in a language his son could hear changed the whole relationship. If you have been quietly wondering why God never seems to encounter you the way He encounters the people giving testimonies, take heart. God is not monocultural. He knows how to speak to you in a custom-made way, and camp is designed around that this year, with different rooms and different ways to pray.

Who are you?

Here is the detail that unlocks the passage: before the man at the Jabbok blesses Jacob, he asks his name. Odd question, until you set it beside Genesis 27, the chapter we read last week. Same three elements: a desired blessing, a question of identity, an answer. Back then, blind Isaac asked, who are you? And Jacob lied. I am Esau. He took the blessing by deception, because deception and willpower were how he got everything he ever got. The price was a life of running: a brother's hatred, and a long exile.

Now, twenty years on, Esau is coming to meet him and Jacob is out of moves. He has split his camp in two, sent gifts ahead, prayed a desperate prayer reminding God of His own promises. He has done everything cleverness can do, and it is still not enough. Then, in the dark, with a broken hip, comes the same question. What is your name? And this time he tells the truth. I am Jacob. The heel-catcher. The deceiver. The one who has spent his whole life trying to control what was never his to control. Right there, everything changes. The blessing he could never scheme his way into arrives the moment he stops pretending.

Pastor Josh was careful with the application. This story does not teach us to twist the arm of a reluctant God until He pays up. The real wrestle is with our own sinful nature and its grip on control, and its destination is a sentence you could put on the fridge:

God's blessing comes in the surrender rather than self-sufficiency.

Remade, renamed, revived

Then Pastor Josh stopped preaching and started testifying. He landed in Australia in 1988 with no English, no visa and no grand vision, a young man from a country where people still came to the airport just to watch someone board a plane. His bold faith shattered against circumstances he could not control, and his prayers shrank to something puny: God, give me a future, let me stay. Years later came the surgery, the removed intestine, a newborn Sky, and a man who could not control anything at all. In seasons like that, he said, nobody is debating how old the earth is or which Bible translation is best. The question is simpler. Can I survive tomorrow?

Out of all of it, one thing he says he knows for certain.

Simply because the moment of surrender, God somehow remade me, renamed me, and revived me.

That is exactly what God did for Jacob. The new name, Israel, sounds like victory with God, but Pastor Josh pushed on the better translation: God wins. Jacob did not defeat God that night. His defeat was God's victory in him. Surrender works the same way in us: God remakes, renames and revives, and things you could never overcome before begin to move. Paul knew it too. Three times he begged God to remove his thorn, and the answer in 2 Corinthians 12:9 was not removal but grace: my power is made perfect in weakness. Sometimes the unanswered prayer is the answer.

We all have Jacob in us

Honesty demands one more admission: the new name did not make Jacob permanently new. Pastor Josh quoted Spurgeon: the Lord's people alternate between Israel and Jacob, princes one day and limping the next. You go to camp, catch fire, and six months later you are back where you were. Jacob himself spent twenty years grieving a son he wrongly believed dead, fooled by a bloodied robe. Have you ever loved something you felt God took away? Those are the moments your true colours show. Even the sweetest 83-year-old golfing grandmother, missing one shot, revealed a vocabulary that surprised her pastor playing partner.

From there the message reached Colossians 2 and named the counterfeit. Legalism is Jacob's method dressed up as faith: do more, do better, be perfect, make God bless you. Paul says those self-made religions carry a show of wisdom but no power to stop the flesh. One old translation calls it will worship, and Pastor Josh did not let us dodge the modern version of it.

You're not worshiping God. You're worshiping your willpower.

None of this cancels effort. There is something beautiful in Jacob, a spiritual grit that refuses to give up, and Dallas Willard's line holds the balance: grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Strive, run the race, struggle against sin to the point of shedding blood, as Hebrews puts it. Just do it from surrender, never instead of it.