(soft piano background music)
When you came in here
there was a scripture across the back screen.
"You will seek me and find me when
"you seek me with all of your heart."
We don't have any special tricks tonight.
We're not pulling out any special things.
We've just come with heart's intent
on seeking Him completely.
And I know you have too because why else would
you be in a church at 10:15 at night, right?
When I first met the Lord,
my first church was a Salvation Army Church
in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.
And one of the things I loved about
the Salvation Army was that every single service,
there would be the pastor preaching
and the worship team in their place,
but then just off to the side,
there was the mercy seat.
And it was a little step where at any time
during the service you could come
and do business with God.
And I loved that so much.
I loved the mercy seat.
I would use it often.
(giggles)
But I realized it didn't
just have to be in the church building.
That there was a mercy seat in my bedroom.
And there was a mercy seat in the car on my own.
That wherever I was,
there was a mercy seat.
There was a place.
And at the mercy seat, things happen.
(laughs)
At the mercy seat in my own life,
I have been healed.
In the mercy seat I have been corrected.
(laughs)
At the mercy seat I have been changed.
And at the mercy seat I have wrestled.
God is more than who we think He is.
Rich Mellon says, "He will bloody your nose,
"and then give you a ride home on his bicycle."
(laughs)
And I love that.
But God is a God who
invites us to wrestle with him.
I love that because it is an intimate picture.
Skin to skin and sweat to sweat.
But it's kind of a dangerous picture.
In Genesis 32, Jacob wrestled with God.
It says that night Jacob got up,
and took his two wives,
his female servants,
and his 11 sons and crossed the ford.
After he had sent them across the stream,
he sent over all of his possessions.
Jacob was left alone and a man
wrestled with him until day break.
When the man saw that he could not overpower him,
he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that
his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with a man.
Then the man said,
"Let me go for it is daybreak."
But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go
"unless you bless me."
And the man asked him, "What is your name?"
"Jacob" he answered.
Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be
"Jacob, but Israel because you have struggled
"with God and with humans and have overcome."
Jacob said, "Please tell me you name."
But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?"
Then he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the place "Peniel",
which means the face of God.
Saying it's because I saw God face to face,
any yet my life was spared.
See, when you wrestle with God,
you might get a blessing.
But the blessing might look like a wound.
The blessing might look like God exposing
or bringing the blessing
of a place of vulnerability.
When we wrestle with God,
we get a new name.
And we find out who we were always meant to be.
When Jacob was born he was called Jacob.
It means he grasps the heel.
He was a deceiver, a manipulator.
He tried to manipulate to get earthly blessing.
But when he wrestled with God, God said,
"Your name shall now be Israel."
And he went on to become the father of obviously
the nation from whom Jesus came.
Before we wrestle with God, we have these ideas
about what progress looks like in life.
And the chapter before Jacob wrestles with God,
it says he sent gifts ahead of him
to Esau to try and make peace.
To try to avoid conflict.
Sometimes that's what we do in our lives.
We like to send our gifts publicly thinking
that's how we will get where we need to go.
But God says, "Get alone with me and wrestle,
"get alone with me and wrestle and there
"you will find out who you really are."
He went from operating and strategy,
to walking in his identity.
You know, in some of my wrestling seasons
with God, He's spoken and given me clues
and hints as to what He has or where He is going.
But He never tells me the whole story,
because He is a good story teller.
So He leaves the best bits for me to discover.
But I remember a few years ago, actually not even
that long, a couple of years ago I was wrestling
with God because I felt like I had obeyed him
in a particular area of life.
And I hadn't seen what I thought He wanted the
fruit of that obedience to be.
And around that time my husband Scotty and I
went to a friend's ranch and spent some
time with them and they have
this beautiful piece of land.
They have about 20 acres of land.
It's gorgeous and amazing.
As we were spending time with them, they said
actually this 20 acres was amazing but they had
a dream and a vision that one day they would be
able to have 200 acres and that on that 200 acres
they would be able to build houses for people who
needed houses and plant gardens to eat from,
and plant gardens to make places of beauty.
They had 20 acres, but they had a vision for 200.
And as we were leaving that place, I heard
the spirit of God speak to me and He said,
"You are mourning and you are grieving, because
"you did not see the harvest that you expected
"from the 20 acres, but lift up your eyes because
"I am plowing the 180."
He is breaking new ground.
When He breaks new ground, it's not just for us.
It's not so we can have a beautiful 20 acre plot.
It's for the community to live, because your
personal freedom will lead to a national revival.
And when we were praying for this night,
and we were praying for You
and we were praying for us.
And this is might be intense,
but I didn't see it on purpose.
I saw an army.
I saw an army rising up from what
happens in this room tonight.
(crowd cheering)
Because this might just be a few thousand people
in the room, but on the other side of each one
of your freedom there are hundreds more
people and thousands more people.
So you take this room and you multiply it
and there is an army on the other side
of you getting free tonight.
Bobby spoke so profoundly earlier.
He said that the enemy
has come to destroy lineage.
Well, in Jesus name tonight, we take it back.
(crowd cheering)
There is more at stake for us.
So really I just came just to speak for
a few moments before we proceed to ask you,
to ask myself, will we be people who are willing
to wrestle with God, no matter what it cost us?
Because we understand there is more at stake
than just our lives, there is more
at stake than just our freedom.
There is lineage, there is generations, there is
an army who will be missing a contingent if you
decide to draw back from the wrestle tonight.
I came to ask, will we be a people
who are not content to sleep through
the night and wake unchanged?
Will we be a people of God who are prepared
to wrestle until daybreak to find out
who we really are and walk forward in who we
really are at the knowledge that He is the King?
I'm going to finish with this.
It's one of my favorite quotes.
You'll know it well.
C.S. Lewis from the
"Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".
Mr. Beaver said,
"Aslan is a lion, the lion, the great lion."
"Oh!" said Susan, "I'd thought he was a man.
"Is he quite safe?
"I shall feel rather nervous
"about meeting a lion."
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver.
"Who said anything about safe?
"Of course he isn't safe but he's good,
"he's the king I tell you."
(crowd cheering)
So we are going to watch a little video now.
This is one of my favorite
guys in the whole world.
I didn't get to meet him while I was on Earth.
But I will one day.
He said some things that I think are going to
invite us further until we were about to go.
Let's get a bit real, hey.
Let's get some work done.
(Crowd clapping)
(Soft piano background music)
- [Speaker] Well this is yet another prayer song.
Sometimes I find it hard to pray.
Maybe that's why I've written so many prayer
songs 'cause it's easier if you sing sometimes.
God may find it more entertaining
than if you just say it too.
Who knows?
(soft piano background music)
Except that I'm not really all that sure that God
is all that concerned about being entertained.
It strikes up with us a healing thing.
Sometimes you know you try to pray.
You try to impress God with all the right words.
I just don't think it's an easy thing
to impress God Almighty.
You know what I mean.
Here's the thing that we often forget,
is that we don't have to impress Him.
He's already knocked out about you.
He already loves you more than you can imagine.
I remember reading a thing
that Picasso once said.
I like to read what famous artists have to say
because I can barely look at their paintings
without going into a coma
trying to figure out what it's about.
But he said this one thing I really did like.
He said that good taste was the enemy
of great art, which I think is very very true.
Good taste has all to do with
being cultured and being refined.
If art has to do with anything,
it has to do with being human. And one of the reasons I love
the Bible is because the humans in
the bible are not very refined.
There pretty goofy.
If you want to know the truth about it.
I remember when I was a kid and people would
always say, you know because I was one of those
typical depressed adolescent types,
I wrote poetry and stuff.
That's how morose I was as a kid.
People would go around saying,
"Oh, cheer up man, God loves you."
I'd always say big deal.
God loves everybody.
That doesn't make me special.
That just proves that God ain't got no taste.
And I don't think He does.
Thank God.
Because God takes the junk of our lives and
He makes the greatest art in the world out of it.
And if He was cultured, if he was as civilized
as most Christian people wish He was,
you'd be useless to Christianity.
God is a wild man.
I hope that the course of your life,
you encounter Him, that everyone of you
need to hang on for dear life.
Or let go for deal life, maybe is better.
This is a prayer for you,
and you're welcome to sing it along with us.
(soft piano music)