ANNOUNCER: The following program is sponsored by
generous friends and partners of Real Life.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Real Life with Jack Hibbs.
JACK: Listen, Christian, this is what God wants you to do. When
you come to the Lord in prayer, you're seeking his face for
something. Guidance direction. Is it for school? Is it for that
guy or for that girl? Is it for what? Go after the Lord and
listen you will wrestle with him in prayer, but don't let him go.
ANNOUNCER: Want to know the purpose of your life? Jack Hibbs
encourages you to seek the Lord, wrestle with him until you fully
understand his promises for you. Stay tuned for the message
"Get Ready to Rumble."
ANNOUNCER: America is facing unprecedented challenges and
turmoil with threats from secular agendas, widespread
moral corruption, and rampant violence everywhere.
Understanding Bible prophecy is more crucial than ever. In
"What You Need To Know About The Rapture," theologian,
Charles Ryrie explains the biblical prophecy of
the rapture in simple terms, clearing up
myths and giving clear scriptural insights
about the next event on the prophetic calendar. Dr.
Ryrie makes it easy to understand how these prophecies
relate to current events and America's role in them. Get your
questions answered about this highly anticipated event with
Charles Ryrie's insightful explanations. "What You Need To
Know About The Rapture" will be sent to you with our thanks when
you make a gift of any amount to Real Life. Visit JackHibbs.com
or call 877-777-2346 to get your copy. Order now.
JACK: Do you ever wrestle with God? Do you struggle with God?
Listen, if you don't, I have serious doubts if you're a
believer or not to be honest with you. Every, every child of
God struggles with him in the sense of hearing from him or
getting direction from him, or maybe he gives us information or
he gives us marching orders or whatever it might be. There is
always this dynamic in the Christian life of you and I
struggling with God. You know A.W. Tozer called that a time
where we have our crises with God. Everybody's got to have
their crises with God, and that's when God wins the
argument. Or in this case, God wins the wrestling match. We
learned that from Jacob. Jacob wrestled with God and Jacob
lost, and by losing to God, it was the greatest victory Jacob
ever experienced. Our situations can overwhelm us, but we need to
cry out to God. We wrestle with him because our wills are being
bent, molded, shapened into his will, into his image. So prayer
is what we do when we call out to him. We are crying out to him
like your child cries out to you in their moment of struggle and
difficulty. So again, let me ask you, do you struggle with God?
Are you wrestling with God? Well, this message is designed
in such a way to get you to think about grabbing hold of not
only God but the promises of God. And I hope you don't
forget. In fact, I want to encourage you to get into this
message to get ready to rumble. We all think about the great
matches and the wrestling or the fighting scenes, but allow me to
do it this way. The mic drops down and I say to you, get ready
to rumble because God wants to what? Wrestle with you so that
actually you might win by giving up. That's when we win. God
bless you guys. Let's get into this study.
JACK: According to the plan of God, Romans 8:28, mark it
down, put your names next to it. This is that famous verse. God
has a purpose. The question begs purpose for whom? The answer is
to those who love God. And I know I've told you before, I
share with you the same deficit. I love God and the moment I say
that I'm sick to my stomach as to how little I love God because
he's so amazing. I should love him even more, but I struggle
with the fact I don't. I want to, he's worthy, but I find
within myself a profound weakness to get as close to God
as I want to because I'm dragging this carcass of my body
in this life that gets in the way of my relationship with God.
But that's why there's the great promise that someday you and I
will be set free from our bodies. That's going to be a
great day. And so when that word tells us that we know it is a
knowledge of the issues, it means that God knows about the
issues of the past in your life. There's no but, there's no yeah,
but. No none of that. He knows about the issues of your life.
Watch this. He knows about the issues of your life now and he
knows about the issues of your life in the future, though you
and I do not know them yet, he already knows you can trust him.
He knows, and by the way, mark this down by the way, this
knowledge that God knows all about us and thus we know about
God. We can take a great rest in knowing this, that this
knowledge is not a cerebral knowledge. It's not analytical.
It's not limited by that. It's not theoretical. It's not a
dream. Oh, you Christians and your no, no, it's not
theoretical knowledge. It's not philosophical knowledge either.
It's not one of those possibilities. It's not a
knowledge that is just to be studied. You can get this
doctorate degree in this knowledge. We're not interested
in that. In all truth, we are interested in the knowledge of
God to where it's experiential. This book, the Bible lays the
foundation for you and I now to live with our feet as it were on
this word and live in experiential faith as a
Christian that makes a difference in this world around
us. We don't talk about Christianity. We are to do it.
And there's a big difference in all of that. Thus he says in
verse 28, all things work together for good. Everything
that is arriving in our lives is ordained by God. We are about to
find out. Very important. The Bible tells us it is to those
who love God. We're talking about this now, those who are
called according to his purpose. I love this. God's got a purpose
for your life. So we live in a bizarre time right now. We have
a world that is rejecting God wholesale and it's bringing
itself to an interesting conundrum, to an interesting
point of difficulty, which is this. The evolutionary theory
has almost all but dried up. Nobody runs around today
pronouncing that they're an evolutionist because then if
they do, you got to ask them, why do you think that? Tell me
why you believe that. And then they've got to struggle to try
to prove why they believe in, the more they talk about it, the
more foolish they look. No, seriously, scientists are
embracing now at the very least intelligent design, but they're
saying now that's not even enough. There's evidence of a
personal designer. You know that right now, all of us know that
there's evidence of a personal designer, but if you press it,
you've got to come to the conclusion that there's things
in this world and in this existence of yours and mine that
is not only personal, but it is deeply, deeply internal, that
there's a whole new world as it were inside of us that is spirit
and that is soul. And it's been the long desire of man to find
himself. Who am I? And so man goes on his pursuits. Well, I
want you to know and be reminded that according to the Bible, God
created you with his purpose in mind. Every one of us who are
believers in Christ Jesus are to know the purpose as to why we
are living. If you say, well, I don't know yet, well, then you
know what? Then do the Jacob thing. Remember Jacob? Jacob in
the Old Testament? Jacob, the Bible tells us was, I'll just
say it this way. He was minding his own business. It was at
night. He might've even been sleeping, if I remember right.
And the Bible tells us the angel of the Lord came to him. Now,
the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament is a statement of a
theophanies. If you don't know what a theophanies is, a
theophanies is a christophanie, which is a pre-incarnate
appearance of Christ. When Christ appears prior to being
born in Bethlehem throughout the Old Testament. And the Bible
says he shows up, and this is kind of cute, the angel of the
Lord. The Lord picks a fight with Jacob. I don't know how he
did it. Did he kick him in the nose? Did he poke his ear? Did
he take a feather and rub it underneath Jacob's nose? We
don't know. But the Bible says that Jacob got up and they
started wrestling. He said, well, that's ridiculous. Oh
yeah. Have you ever wrestled with God? Are you wrestling with
God now? And they're wrestling, and the Lord could have killed
them. The Lord could have done anything and wanted, but the
Lord had a plan. The Lord had a purpose. And the Bible says that
they wrestled all night, man, what is this Jacob made of? And
the Bible says, seeing that the angel of the Lord could not
prevail against Jacob, that the angel of the Lord struck his hip
and his hip went out of joint, and he limped all the days of
his life from that moment on, but he still wouldn't let go.
And then the angel of the Lord says, I got to leave. The day is
coming. I've got to go. And Jacob said, and this is what I
want you to have, Jacob said, I will not let you go until you
bless me. I will not let you go until you favor my life. Okay,
listen, are you hearing me everybody? This is the angel of
God, the Lord himself allowing himself. First of all, the Lord
picks the fight. The Lord comes in, picks the fight, Jacob's
fighting with the Lord. And here's what happens. The Lord
allows himself to be in this entanglement with Jacob because
God's got a plan with Jacob or for Jacob, and then for Jacob to
say, I'm not letting you go. So wait a minute. Who started this
fight? Well, the Lord did. But who's in control here? Well, the
Lord is in control, but he allows Jacob to take the upper
hand. Listen, Christian, this is what God wants you to do. When
you come to the Lord in prayer, you're seeking his face for
something guidance, direction. Is it for school? Is it for that
guy or for that girl? Is it for what? Go after the Lord and
listen you will wrestle with him in prayer, but don't let him go.
He allows himself to be caught. He allows himself to be in this
dialogue and he allows himself to have you and I say to him,
Lord, I will not let you go. I think God loves that when we
say, I'm hanging on you, Jesus, and I'm not going to let go. I
think God loves that and God bless Jacob. And you need to
remember that God's got a purpose in your life. And if you
don't know what it is, then it's time to go wrestle with God and
get an answer. Don't let go of him. Are, don't answer out loud.
Are you a born again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ? If you
say yes, then it's incumbent for me to ask, what is the purpose
of your life? And if you cannot answer, it's time for you to go
wrestle and God will give you the answer. The Bible says in
Galatians chapter 1, verse 15, but when it pleased God, who
separated me from my mother's womb, this is Paul speaking and
called me through his grace. Why? How come? To reveal his son
in me. That's a tremendous statement. Look at that verse.
Look at all the preexisting mechanisms that have to be
there. But when it pleased God, that is in some point in history
past who separated me from my mother's womb. Paul's now an old
man saying this. God had a plan back then, and not only that, it
was God's call that he placed upon me through his grace to do
what Paul? To reveal His son in me. God wants the world to know
that through my life, Jesus is Lord and Savior. That's true for
every single one of us. If you're a computer engineer or a
contractor, a stay at home dad or mom or a rocket scientist, it
doesn't matter. Do you understand? God's got a purpose
for your life and we need to get hungry and passionate to pursue
him as to what that is. Last service we had two awesome,
beautiful men of God in their eighties, US Marines fought in
Vietnam, and they came to service. I got to meet them, and
it just led me to think about how God has a deployment for the
believer. God's got a mission for the believer. You learn, you
read, you pray. You talk out to God. He talks back into you and
you say, Lord, here I am send me and God will commission you.
He'll deploy you and by the state of our nation, God needs a
lot of you to be deployed into this country. This whole nation
has become a mission field now, but I have to tell you, there's
a verse that somebody gave me. I was a brand new Christian, and
they gave me this verse because they had heard my story that I
had been a survivor of an abortion in 1957, and they heard
me say that, and they came and they said, listen, you need to
look at this verse. And I remember marking into my Bible
and keeping it forever to this moment, and it has served me
well for these years, and it's Jeremiah chapter 1:4 and 5. Now,
I'm going to ask you right now to wrestle with God as it were,
and grab this verse and tear it off the video screen and make it
your own, right? Do this. Then the word of the Lord came to me,
Jeremiah saying, behold, this is God speaking. Behold, or before
I formed you in the womb, I knew you before you were born, I
sanctified you. I ordained you a prophet to the nations. That
verse is for every single human being, not just Jeremiah, are
you hearing me? You say, I don't know how God went. Don't talk to
him like that. Don't define how he's going to do it. Just say,
Lord, this verse is in the Bible. If you want to live that
verse out in my life, here we go. Can you do that? Can you
just be there and say, Lord, I'm asking you to do whatever that
means in my life, and God will go to work in your life a
purpose called according to his purpose. God's got purposes.
He's got an absolute plan that is charted. In Ephesians chapter
2:10, the Bible tells us that we are his workmanship created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand,
that we should walk in them. Listen, the good works come out
of a life that is now under the control of Christ, okay? Very,
very important. These things that are for the purposes of
God, bring God, honor, advance the gospel and bring reality and
meaning to your life, and then that word, good. All of these
things to be worked out for the good. The word in Greek for good
is generous. The ending, listen, everybody, the ending is to be
generous. If you're a Christian, you and I are going through
troubles. We're going to go through more troubles. Don't
worry, don't be afraid of that. In fact, as a Christian, the
more you learn about how God brings you and I through
troubles, the more you look for God ordained trouble. It's a
good thing. Difficulties draw us close to God, and it's in that
moment we see the power of God. I've noticed that people who
criticize Christianity and claim to be Christians and they think
it's boring are people who've never gotten off the couch.
They've never made themselves available to him, but he's got a
generous plan and it's good. It's generous kindly. The word
means only that which is a good thing. Even in your marriage
that might be breaking up or that note from that physician,
or maybe that grade you thought you were going to get into
Stanford. Thank God you didn't. You wound up not getting in by
the grace of God to protect your life. Anything worse than that
would've been Harvard, but the exact same reality of God's
purposes, you and I love to read about them and know about them.
So what do you mean? How about this God's purposes? You think
God had a purpose for Noah? You would never doubt that, but did
you know that Noah is no different than you and I? See,
do you believe that? The Bible says that all of us, that
there's no one greater than the other, that we are all just like
Elijah. We have the same passions that the great prophet
Elijah had. The Bible says that God doesn't esteem one man
higher than the other. That means we all come to the foot of
the cross level. I love that. By the way, that's the message that
needs to be shouted across this nation right now to shut up this
talk about racism and division. No, come to the foot of the
cross. There's no color at the foot of the cross. If there is,
it's red. It's the blood of Christ because all of sin comes
short of the glory of God. We all come. It's nobody better
than the other, lesser than the other. And so think about Noah.
I wrote down Job. Job, by the way, you know all of us that
sometimes will have Job moments in our life. That's why God put
the book of Job in the Bible. Joseph? What about David? And
what about Peter? I thought about Luther, the great reformer
Luther. George Whitfield, one of my heroes, love George
Whitfield. Read everything I can about George Whitfield. Charles
Spurgeon, a big fan of mine, a guy that I just think the world
of. I'd love for you to read about him too, to find out who
he really is, is Samuel Adams, not the beer guy. By the way,
that was his dad. Samuel Adams was a malt brewer. Samuel Adams
Jr. was an incredible lover of God, profound insights into the
word of God. He just happened to be not only one of our founding
fathers, but the Bible, or I should say our nation's history
tells us that without Samuel Adams, there never would've been
a revolution at all because he understood that liberty came
from God and could not be taken away from man. What about Billy
Graham? Do you think God have a purpose for Billy Graham? By the
way, did you know that Billy Graham found his purpose not far
from here? In the San Bernardino mountains, Billy Graham took a
midnight walk not knowing what he should do, if he should quit
ministry as a young man or not, and God spoke to him just miles
in the Southern California mountains, and God told him that
you're going to be an evangelist and you have the gift of
evangelism and go do it. And he said from that moment on, his
life was never the same. Wow. I think of Chuck Smith who wanted
to be a medical doctor, and God said, you can be a medical
doctor or I can call you to be a doctor of the souls of men. And
Chuck Smith said, I'll go with the souls of men. What about Dr.
Ed Hindson? What about Charles Stanley? And those are the guys
that have passed on. I didn't want Chuck Swindoll or David
Jeremiah to think I thought they were dead, but I threw them in
the group of all of the dead guys. Chuck Swindoll, David,
Jeremiah, what about us? What about you? God wants to use us.
Write this down if you would. 1 Corinthians 3:21. This is a cool
statement. Don't boast in men, meaning men cannot give you
anything that is going to translate into what God can give
you. All things are yours in Christ. That's what that means,
and it's going to say it here in a moment, whether Paul or
Apollos or Cephas, in other words, you know we're apostles,
but don't listen to us or the world or life or death or things
present or things to come. All are yours and you are Christ and
Christ is God's. What a beautiful statement that is 2
Corinthians chapter 4:14. The Bible tells us, knowing that he
who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus
and will present us with you for all things are, for your sakes,
the purpose of God in your life.
JACK: So I mentioned Jacob. Jacob was an amazing guy because
I got to tell you, Jacob is the guy in the Bible that we would
really want to study more because he was such a stinker.
Jacob was a tough guy, man, let me tell you. Somehow Jacob
always landed on his feet at others' expense. He's the last
guy you'd want to do business with. He'd wind up owning the
company somehow. Jacob. And Jacob took that resourcefulness
of himself and he thought he could handle God. How many times
do we do that? We take our own strength and we basically, I'll
say it for you. I'll say it for us. Hey, God, listen, I got a
good idea let me tell you how it's going to happen, and God
laughs at us. But you know what? He's so patient. He's so kind.
He's so loving and forgiving that he lets us wrestle with him
until we're tired, and then when we give up, that's when God can
go to work and that's why listen, a very important thing
to remember that when we pray, we are wrestling. We're
wrestling against ourselves, we're wrestling against this
world around us, and in some way we're wrestling with God. The
beautiful thing is when we lose to ourselves, that's not good.
When we lose to this world, that's not good. But when we
lose to God, that's where the victory is. That's when the
victory is had. In fact, didn't Jesus himself say in the garden
of Gethsemane, which means the garden, Gethsemane means the
garden of crushing. That when Jesus cried out and said,
father, if there's any other way that this cup can be removed
from me, he's really saying, if salvation can happen for mankind
any other way than the cross, let's do that instead. And then
Jesus said, but not my will, thy will be done. And in that moment
of wrestling, Christ himself yielded to the Father victory
was had. Listen to bring you more Bible study to give you
more insights into the word of God. JackHibbs.com is where I'd
love for you to go and share it with your friends, Facebook,
Instagram, all the various platforms. We're studying the
word of God because it matters. God bless you. Until next time.
ANNOUNCER: You are watching Real Life with Jack Hibbs.
ANNOUNCER: America is facing unprecedented challenges and
turmoil with threats from secular agendas, widespread
moral corruption, and rampant violence everywhere.
Understanding Bible prophecy is more crucial than ever. In
"What You Need To Know About The Rapture," theologian, Charles
Ryrie explains the biblical prophecy of the rapture in
simple terms, clearing up myths and giving clear scriptural
insights about the next event on the prophetic calendar. Dr.
Ryrie makes it easy to understand how these prophecies
relate to current events and America's role in them. Get your
questions answered about this highly anticipated event with
Charles Ryrie's insightful explanations. "What You Need To
Know About The Rapture" will be sent to you with our thanks when
you make a gift of any amount to Real Life. Visit JackHibbs.com
or call 877-777-2346 to get your copy. Order now.
ANNOUNCER: Life is full of fear, doubt and worry. The more you
listen to and see the world today, the easier it is to feel
hopeless and helpless. Amidst the confusion, a voice of Hope
has emerged, the Real Life Network founded by Jack Hibbs.
The Real Life Network is a free digital media platform void of
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forward your faith.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Real Life Radio with Jack Hibbs.
JACK: God's word never will return void. God's word is
spirit, it's power and it has its effect. God did not give
us Bible prophecy to scare us, but to prepare us. You are
the light of the world Jesus said, you are the
salt of the earth. How does that happen?
ANNOUNCER: Jack Hibbs truly believes we are living in some
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ANNOUNCER: The preceding program was sponsored by generous
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