In Genesis 32, we find the familiar story of Jacob wrestling with an angel.

This was no quick bout as they wrestled all night. It wasn’t the angel couldn’t easily win. God simply about to teach Jacob a lesson – a painful lesson.

Up until this point, Jacob had been a coward, deceiver, and liar. God was going to do what was necessary to give Jacob the opportunity to grow in strength and endurance because of what God had planned for Jacob’s future. Fortunately, Jacob humbled himself and learned his lessons.

But that came at a cost.

As the sun dawned, all the angel had to do was touch Jacob’s hip socket to cause Jacob’s hip to dislocate. We’re told that, from that time on, Jacob walked with a limp .

A.W. Tozer once made the following unsettling statement,

“I doubt God can use a person greatly until he has first hurt them deeply.”

Selah (Pause and think about that.)

It was precisely because of that painful night in the hills of Bethel that Jacob (though he would still get many things wrong) was able to be the person God had asked him to be.

One scholar called “being hurt by God” – “severe mercy” – since God often uses struggles in our lives to explode in our lives with his power and might.

Personally, I thought about growing up in a violent alcoholic home. Watching my dad and sister die due to life-long addiction. And then finding my son after he’d taken his life. I thought about my own struggles with mental health. I find myself asking God, “How many times are you going to dislocate my hip?”

No doubt, you’ve felt the same way at times.

But, I’ve learned that God wastes nothing. 

God will (if we let him) use our “limp” to bring light into a dark world, to bring love to those who feel unlovely, to give hope to the hopeless, and truth and purpose to those searching for it.

I read once,

“People don’t relate with our strengths; they relate with our weaknesses.”

Sure, we could play the victim – Jacob certainly could have. And Satan is hoping we will. 

In 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  wrote letters criticizing Joseph Stalin. For this he was arrested and spent eight years in the infamous Soviet Gulag.  Later, looking back on his “limp”, he wrote,

“…it was only when I lay on rotting straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good…. So, bless you prison for having been in my life.”

Do you have a “limp”? Good. Because, according to God’s very Word, it’s “in our weakness that he is strong.” (Cf. 2 Corinthians 12:10)

nick