Quotes & Sayings About Wrestling With God

It was necessary to keep our religious masters at St. Michael's unacquainted with the fact, that, instead of spending the Sabbath in wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to learn how to read the will of God; for they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings. — Frederick Douglass

Here was the shattering of the second wall: I had read the Bible many times through, and I saw for myself that it had a holy Author; I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of sixty-six books with a unified biblical revelation. I heard for myself that when the words "this is mine" came out of my mouth in congregational singing, I was attesting to this one, simple truth: that the line of communication that God ordained for his people required this wrestling with Scripture, and that I truly wanted both to hear God's voice breathed in my life, and I wanted God to hear my pleas. The fog burned away. The whole Bible, each jot and tittle, was my open highway to a holy God. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Then as I was wrestling as Terry Boulder. I was on a talk show with Lou Ferrigno, and I was actually bigger than he was! I went back to the dressing room that night and all of the wrestlers go 'Oh my God you're bigger than the hulk on TV' so they started calling me Terry 'The Hulk' Boulder. — Hulk Hogan

Intensity is a law of prayer. God is found by those who seek Him with all their heart. Wrestling prayer prevails. The fervent effectual prayer of the righteous is of great force. — Samuel Chadwick

In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel ... — Jonathan Sacks

When people misuse a text with "Did God really say...?" to shut down someone's honest wrestling with God, they betray what seems to be their own lack of faith and humility. We ought not to be threatened by someone's searching. We ought not to try to control the outcomes in another's journey. We ought not to resort to using shame or fear or guilt to ensure others share our certainties. God can be trusted to lead those who question and struggle through prayer, his Word, their minds, and their experiences. Let's focus on encouraging one another rather than accusing and condemning one another. — Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

You must pray with all your might. That does not mean saying your prayers, or sitting gazing about in church or chapel with eyes wide open while someone else says them for you. It means fervent, effectual, untiring wrestling with God. This kind of prayer be sure the devil and the world and your own indolent, unbelieving nature will oppose. They will pour water on this flame. — William Booth

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

Enemies were:
The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs

Friends were:
God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The Novels of Charlotte Bronte
Slug pellets
and me, at first. — Jeanette Winterson

super-size emotions had saved me. God knows, I'd spent enough time wrestling with them, but I'd never thought before about how much of what animates us as human beings - or semi-human beings - depends on our feelings. Without — Jacqueline Carey

The spiritual task of life is to feed hope. Hope is not something to be found outside of us. It lies in the spiritual life we cultivate within. The whole purpose of wrestling with life is to be transformed into the self we are meant to become, to step out of the confines of our false securities and allow our creating God to go on creating. In us. — Joan D. Chittister

There is no power like that of prevailing prayer - of Abraham pleading for Sodom, Jacob wrestling in the stillness of the night, Moses standing in the breach, Hannah intoxicated with sorrow, David heartbroken with remorse and grief, Jesus in sweat and blood. Add to this list from the records of the church your personal observation and experience, and always there is cost of passion unto blood. Such prayer prevails. It turns ordinary mortals into men of power. It brings power. It brings fire. It brings rain. It brings life. It brings God. — Samuel Chadwick

If God allows you to wrestle with him, it is not so there will be a winner and a loser. He doesn't need to prove he is stronger and you are weaker. No. The point of wrestling with God is to give you an opportunity to cling to him. God wants you to hang on to him no matter what - and the result will be blessing. You are blessed when you bring your hurts and questions to God and struggle with them in his presence. In that divine wrestling match, you may feel wounded, but you will also receive a blessing you couldn't have received any other way. — Jennifer Rothschild

When we trust God, He can make the ordinary extraordinary! — John C. Maxwell

It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Like Gandalf, God knows the battle going on inside our hobbitlike selves, the wrestling match between the Baggins and the Took. The Baggins side of us takes our creature comforts for granted. We assume these comforts are part of the terms and conditions outlined in the job description Jesus offers when he says, "Follow me." But God never said anything about discipleship being comfortable. He's more interested in coaxing the Took side of us to the fore, the side that's willing to endure a little hardship for the sake of the final destination. When we learn to live without, we discover what we're really made of. — Sarah Arthur

How's that wrestling match with God going?" Pigpen asks. "From here you look mighty tired. — Katie McGarry

I am also very excited by the way in which we can see Paul wrestling not only with his Jewish world and its scriptures but also, by clear implication, with philosophical and political issues that were 'out there' at the time. The thing is that for Paul this is all part of the same larger, whole vision of God and God's purposes. Watching how everything comes together is an intellectual treat of the first order - as well as a spiritual and practical challenge to me personally and to the church ... — N. T. Wright

something happened to me. God heard my deep cries of anguish. A feeling of lightness flowed over me, and I knew a change of heart had taken place. I felt different. I was different. At last I stood up, placed the Bible on the edge of the tub, and went to the sink. I washed my face and hands, straightened my clothes. I walked out of the bathroom a changed young man. "My temper will never control me again," I told myself. "Never again. I'm free." And since that day, since those long hours wrestling with myself and crying to God for help, I have never had a problem with my temper. That — Ben Carson

I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling
just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is ... a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm ... It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose. — Tony Kushner

I love you," she whispered against his chest.
He hugged her tighter, and then drew in a deep breath. "And Iiiiiiiiiii-ee-iiii will always love yoooooooou," he sang, or rather butchered, the old Whitney Houston song.
Impossibly, Emilie burst out laughing. "Oh, God, that's horrible Derek." She pushed out of his arms, grasped one of the pillows from the edge of the bed, and planted it over his head. He continued to warble from under the cotton, and Emilie couldn't stop laughing.
Their playfulness quickly escalated into a pillow fight, and then a wrestling match, and of course she ended up underneath him.
Win-win in her book. — Laura Kaye

Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting hearts stay clear of the mat. — Dan B. Allender

God abides in men"

"God abides in men,
These are men who are simple,
they are fields of corn...
Such men have minds
like wide grey skies,
they have the grandeur
that the fools call emptiness.

God abides in men.

Some men are not simple,
they live in cities
among the teeming buildings,
wrestling with forces
as strong as the sun and the rain.
Often they must forgo dream upon dream...
Christ walks in the wilderness
in such lives.
God abides in men,
because Christ has put on
the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.
He has put on everyone's life...
to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,
to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...
Christ has put on Man's nature,
and given him back his humanness...

God abides in man. — Caryll Houselander

Pro wrestling was there, and I was good at it, thank God. I started getting a lot of offers, but unfortunately, at WWE I was under a tight leash. I think it had a lot to do with The Rock making the transition, and me possibly being the next guy - you know, the company didn't want to lose another top performer. — Kurt Angle

There are stages in the contemplation and endurance of great sorrow, which endow men with the same earnestness and clearness of thought that in some of old took the form of Prophecy. To those who have large capability of loving and suffering, united with great power of firm endurance, there comes a time in their woe, when they are lifted out of the contemplation of their individual case into a
searching inquiry into the nature of their calamity, and the remedy
(if remedy there be) which may prevent its recurrence to others as
well as to themselves.
Hence the beautiful, noble efforts which are from time to time
brought to light, as being continuously made by those who have once hung on the cross of agony, in order that others may not suffer as they have done; one of the grandest ends which sorrow can
accomplish; the sufferer wrestling with God's messenger until a
blessing is left behind, not for one alone but for generations. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Our faith, therefore, is not in the words of the Bible. That would be fundamentalism. Our faith is in a person. Our faith is in the Lord who is revealing himself to us. He is the Word who is calling us into personal dialogue. Fundamentalism is a slavish idealization of words which inevitably leads to a rigid, closed-minded, dead-ended approach to the Bible. The Word calls us into a personal dialogue which, in many respects, is like Jacob's wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32: 23-33). Only there, in that sort of personal involvement, do we come face-to-face with the mystery that is God. — Richard Rohr

Sunny didn't make a fool out of Phineas, God beat her to that. — Jerry Lawler

I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotch until he's got you fitted for that black suit. And I can't, I won't! ... So I'm left with wrestling with this anachronistic energy which God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled in my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying! — Arthur Miller

What makes the Bible God's Word isn't its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that, models for us our own journeys of seeking to know God better and commune with him more deeply. — Peter Enns

[ ... ] But then,
What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blind man's buff
Until hard edges break into out path.
Man life's is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief? — Jan Kochanowski

Of course they were children, he knew that, and that wasn't it. They gave off a terrible glow. They had the blank glow of angels. They lived smack in the middle of reality and never gave it a minute's thought. They'd never felt like actors. They'd never been sick with irony. The long tunnel of their thoughts had never swallowed them. They'd never had restless sleepless nights, the urgent wordless unexplainable wrestling matches with the shadowy bands of soul-thieves. God damn it, Sault thought. Everybody gets to be happy except me. Saul heard Anne's cries. The sun was sweating all over his forehead. He felt faint, and Jewish, as usual. He turned on the radio. It happened to be tuned to a religious station and some choir was singing When Jesus Wept. — Charles Baxter

If you're wrestling with some sort of decision, reflect for a moment and ask yourself, Am I being brave, or am I being safe? In the end, it depends on whether we think God can be trusted. — Gary Haugen

The normal Christian Life is not supposed to be an exhausting wrestling match with a dead man, but is an abundant, joy-filled life with God, salted with an occasional season of strong resistance from our archenemy. — Kris Vallotton

Cease striving and know that I am God. PSALM 46:10 The most profound need of your soul is to be still in the presence of God. Stop wrestling with your troubles or worrying about circumstances - the Lord Almighty is greater than all of them. So calm your soul and focus on His astounding wisdom, ability, and timing. — Charles F. Stanley

I learned a valuable spiritual lesson in my return to wrestling: God does not give us gifts that He does not intend for us to use. — Shawn Michaels

I figured you'd prefer that to skydiving or Sumo Wrestling Sunday."
"What is Sumo Wrestling Sunday?"
"We'd dress up in those sumo wrestling suits that would make us look real fat. And then we'd wrestle."
"Oh god lord," I mutter. " Shuffleboard Sunday sounds just fine."
"Good. I had no idea where I was gonna get sumo wrestling suits." I give him a look. — Miranda Kenneally

The successful people seem to have blinders on. Everything is straight ahead. They go forward and know exactly what they're going to do once they've made up their mind to do it, and by God they don't look sideways. — Jack Nicklaus