But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

 

            In case you did not notice it, Christians sometimes struggle with God.  You may also have failed to notice that many Christians do not in any way make use of the very thing which can help them in their struggles.  For how often have you gone to a friend or to a parent or Pastor or person you trust and you say, “You know, I’m having problems with so and so.”  What do they so often tell you?   Isn’t it something like, “Well why don’t you go talk to him?  Why don’t you speak to her?”  So often the words we hear are the best advice;  go and seek out the one with whom you are having a struggle and see what they have to say.  Well the same thing applies to God.  When you are wrestling with the Lord over some issue in your life instead of getting mad and doing the worst thing possible which is stay away from Church and stay away from every thing that is spiritually good – why not go to God and find out what He has to say.  In the case of the Lord you are almost always guaranteed to be pleasantly surprised.  And that happens when you make room for the Word of God in your life.  Every faithful steward of God does.

            If you look at our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures today, Genesis 32, you literally see a man struggling with God.  He isn’t wrestling with God in the symbolic way we usually mean when we say we are wrestling with a problem.  He is actually doing a full-nelson, top of the ropes body slam kind of wrestling with God Almighty in a way that would make the World Wrestling Federation proud.  In fact, Jacob wrestles with God all night long and when it is dawn and even God says that he has had enough Jacob wants to keep going.

            It is because Jacob is at one of the worst times in his entire life.  He had spent two decades away from his family and he was finally on the way home.  The rivers of our text are natural borders to the region his family had called home.  But instead of facing a happy reunion Jacob is worried and terrified.  He has a family of his own now after the two decades away which he has sent across the stream with everything he owns.  But the family he left behind long ago included a brother named Esau whom Jacob cheated out of his birthright and out of his blessings in those earlier days.  Twenty years ago Esau had sworn that he would kill Jacob when he had the chance.  Jacob has become aware that Esau not only has found out about his return but is coming with a band of men undoubtedly to exact his two decades old vengeance.  So Jacob surmises.  And Jacob is alone now pondering not just his fate but the fate of his family and his children.  And in the middle of the earthly darkness which echoed the darkness in his heart he runs into a man who seems bent on physically tearing him apart out there in the wilderness – what more could go wrong?

            But it is God who meets Jacob in his struggles.  And everyone of us knows that God if the Lord so desired could tear Jacob limb from limb.  But that is not the Lord’s intention.  This is more like a father wrestling with his children when they are very little. The father wrestles and pretends to be struggling but eventually he lets his little child win out and everyone has a laugh.  God the Father wrestles with Jacob all night but his goal is to teach something to Jacob about trust in Him so that Jacob can receive a blessing from his faith. 

            “Jacob, you may feel all alone right now. But I am with you.”  And there comes a moment when God teaches Jacob something about trust but not in the way Jacob or you or I might ever have planned.    God reaches down and injures Jacob by dislocating his hip joint.  Now I am not a physical therapist but I believe that in the entire human body the muscle that connects here is the largest muscle and the strongest muscle.  God took away from Jacob the greatest source of personal human strength.  He said, “No Jacob, do not put your trust in human might but in Me.”  Jacob may have had a limp from that moment forward in his earthly life.  But from that day forward Jacob made an incredible leap of faith as God gave him the ability to see it.  Jacob from that moment forward learned that every footstep he took had to be with God at His side and with the Lord leading Him.   And that it is easier to lean on someone else for strength when you are limping.

            Now I do not expect that you or I tonight if we are having the same kind of dark thoughts Jacob had will meet some unknown stranger who wants to have a wrestling match with us and that later on we find out it was Jesus all along.  But when I walk with the Lord today and tonight and tomorrow I need that same trust in Him that Jacob had and so do you.  And I get it not from physically wrestling with God but from knowing Him in His Word.

            You see, did you notice that Jacob didn’t even know the name of God.  Why not? Was it because although he was a child of God and did have faith in the Lord he never did much to strengthen his faith by making God’s Word part of his life?  Did a lot of Jacob’s character flaws early in life and his mistakes which he made come about because He didn’t know God or the Word of God the way He might have?  To be so unfamiliar with your own God that you don’t even know His name – is that a condition that describes you?  Or to put it in a kinder light to be so desirous of knowing your God better that you would do anything, even wrestle all night long with Him just to know His name – would that describe you?

            If it does then the good news is that God’s name and all that He is as represented by His name are freely available to you when you wrestle with the Word of God in your life and make it part of your life.  A faithful steward of the things of God always makes God’s Word a part of His or her life.  Whether it is in daily devotions or going to a Bible Study or hearing it in worship like we do today the way you get to know God and what He is like this side of heaven comes when you are in His Word.

            Paul today in writing to a man who has the same name I do said that most of us do this when we are children.  When was the time when you were reading God’s Word or were being exposed to God’s Word on a pretty regular basis?  Wasn’t it in Sunday School for a lot of us?  That’s when we got books for Christmas about Noah’s ark or someone perhaps gave us a Bible for a present on our birthday.  Then came confirmation class where we tore into God’s Word and what it teaches us.

            But it is as if Paul’s world had the same problems our world has when He encouraged Timothy to “continue” in what you have learned.  Might it have been the case that once childhood was over the average believer in Paul’s world tended to drift away from the Bible and from exposure to God’s Word?  I wonder if it was a problem in the Jewish world of Paul’s day that a young man would say, “Hey, I’ve had my Bar Mitzvah, I don’t need to study God’s Word anymore.”  That would eerily parallel the thousands of Christians who think that once Confirmation is over that for some reason there exists no more need to regularly be in the Word of God.  Paul says that those early days of life where you learned the Word and firmly believed the Word because those were the days when you truly were acquainted with the Word have got to continue into adulthood.

            Because contrary to what you and I will be hammered with on a daily basis, the Bible is not just a quaint book of stories that may or may not have a kernel of truth in them at best.  Our text from 2 Timothy says it is so much more.  In contrast to a world which continually says that the Bible is a book of mythology and that there certainly was not a real Adam and Eve and certainly not a real Noah because there could not possibly have been a worldwide flood and that there certainly was not a real Abraham or a real Moses or a real David or a real Solomon, these Biblical scholars will go on to the ultimate card in their hand:  there certainly was not a real Jesus.  Not the one you Christians claim to know at least.  There was no real Jesus Christ, there was no crucifixion, or if there was it certainly was not a saving act for the saving and redeeming of the world.  And as far as an actual historical resurrection on a Sunday morning long ago goes they will say, “Give me a break! Do you people actually believe this happened?”  And we say “Yes.  We believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was an actual historical event and it happened for our salvation from sin, death and a very real Hell!” Then we get the polite chuckles or the stares as if we just walked out of the insane asylum.   For we are told again and again that nobody beyond a fifth grade education could possibly believe the Bible as being actually and historically true.  And I will tell of you that I for one have had it up to here with that patronizing smug attitude.  I am sick to death of being told that no educated person could believe the Word of God is actually true.  Well I am an educated person.  I am an Ivy League graduate with a triple major in Classical Languages and Ancient History.  I went to four years of post graduate studies in theology and I have over twenty years experience as a trained theologian and a Pastor – and I believe Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.  I believe that He was born of the virgin Mary.  I believe that He died for my sins and yours on a cross outside Jerusalem on a Friday and that the only viable and logical explanation for the empty tomb is that there was no body in it because Jesus Christ was and is alive. 

            Like St. Paul says today I do not believe only in the portions of the Bible I pick and choose to believe in.  He said that ALL of Scripture was breathed out by God for us from Genesis to Revelation.  Does that mean that anyone who does not believe in a six day creation like I do is a lost and condemned sinner forever? No, the issue of salvation is Jesus Christ – do you believe and trust in Him as your personal Savior from sin and death and hell?  If the Holy Spirit has enabled you to say “Yes” to that question then you are redeemed and you are saved for all of eternity and we can discuss predestination and miracles and prophesy at Bible Study sometime if you want.  But you are saved.  However, that doesn’t mean that the rest of Scripture is irrelevant or unimportant to acknowledge.

            For the Bible is profitable God says for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.  It teaches us the truth, it reproves us when we are assaulted with a lie and gives us strength to answer to the pagans with their attacks, it corrects us when we are beginning to swallow some of the lies of Satan, which even Christians can do in their weaker moments, and it trains us in the paths of righteousness so we can grow in our faith.

            In fact, at least for Pastors, but I dare say for every man or woman of God, without His Word you are basically incompetent and unequipped.    That is a drastic charge to level against the believer who does not have God’s Word in his or her life.  But that is the charge Paul delivers today.  If the Word of God exists so that the man of God may be competent and equipped for every good work, then to be without it is to be incompetent and unequipped – and I don’t know about you but how would you like St. Paul’s to be led by an incompetent Pastor or Vicar who is personally lacking in all the equipment needed to be a faithful man of God?  Well if you don’t want it for your Pastor how can you settle for it in your own life?

            For it gets even better.  Paul warns us of the stakes that are there when the true Word of God is absent from life.  The danger is that Satan will very quickly fill that spiritual vacuum with the most unimaginable filth and garbage possible to confuse you, derail your faith, and make you question God every moment of the day, so that like Jacob you spend the entire night wrestling with God and seeming to get nowhere!

            Paul today said that the time would come when a world without the Scriptures would end up believing anything at all that would tickle itching ears ready to listen to every spiritual whacknut out there.  I saw it this week.  One ad I read about was from a brochure showed to me last Tuesday about a spiritual leader named Glenda Green who will heal you of every disease and one of the ways she does it is by channeling in a mystical way the voice of none other than Jesus Himself, whom she calls “Yeshua”.  A day earlier as I watched the local access channel there was a delightful nutball on who tried to explain how the human race got here and regularly made references to the Bible. OK, this might be good, I thought.  Then he told us from the screen of my television that the caucasion race came about because the local inhabitants of central Europe near the Caucasus mountains intermingled and interbreeded with a white race of Martians who came to earth long ago.  I stared at my cup of tea wondering if I had drunk a hallucinogen even as I tried not to hurl up my dinner.  And yet what scares me is how many people out there who watch that will drool at the mouth and stand in awe of this great new revelation and want to know more from this moron!  But when you get rid of the Word of God as our nation is determined to do in every public school, government office, and official publication – that is the alternative we face!  Get rid of God’s Word and it is not that people believe nothing.  Get rid of God’s Word and people will believe anything at all!

            And yet in my frustrations where it seems like we are all losing the battle against this tide of ungodliness remember what Jesus said today in the Gospel.  Do not stop praying and do not lose heart.  Stick to your guns, people of God, and don’t let anyone rob you of the truth of God’s Word.  You may have your struggles and some of them may even be with the Lord.  But as a Father lovingly allows his child to prevail when they are pretend wrestling so your Father will make it so that you prevail if you keep going!  Make room in your life for God’s Word.  Seek it out and read the Bible daily.  Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly.  And find out that you indeed have a faith that is competent and equipped for all the good things God has in store for your life. Amen.