For some reason or another, many of us have come under the assumption that we do not hear from the Lord becomes He wants us to "fight for it." It always comes back to Jacob wrestling with God. The teaching is that god wants to make sure that we want t hear from Him bad enough before He will relent and speak to us. This is blasphemy. Just because Jacob did it does not mean we have to do it. In fact, Jesus sacrificed Himself so that we wouldn't have to wrestle to receive The Blessing of God. Galatians 3:14 tells us that Jesus died so that The Blessing of God might come upon the Gentiles (us). Jesus paid the price for that Blessing so that we could freely access it. And it was God's idea. If God wanted us to fight for The Blessing, why send Jesus to make it easier for us to obtain?
The Holy Spirit has been given the assignment of speaking to us what is on the Father's heart. Jesus explains that to us in the Gospel of John,
But when He, the Spirit of Truth (the Truth-giving Spirit) comes, He
will guide you into all the Truth (the whole, full Truth). For He will
not speak His own message [on His own authority]; but He will tell
whatever He hears [from the Father; He will give the message that has
been given to Him], and He will announce and declare to you the things
that are to come [that will happen in the future]. He
will honor and glorify Me, because He will take of (receive, draw upon)
what is Mine and will reveal (declare, disclose, transmit) it to you. Everything
that the Father has is Mine. That is what I meant when I said that He
[the Spirit] will take the things that are Mine and will reveal
(declare, disclose, transmit) it to you. ~John 16:13-15, Amplified.
That is the Holy Spirit's job description: to reveal the heart of the Father to His children. We preach in our churches that the Father is constantly pursuing us. However, when we struggle to hear His voice, we turn around and preach the exact opposite - that He is withholding Himself to make sure we really, really want to hear from Him. These two teachings contradict. They cannot both be right, or else God would be a hypocrite. God does not want us to wrestle with Him the way Jacob did. He sent us His Son and His Spirit to see to it that we have free access to all that He has. Our problem is not that God is withholding for a time, it is that we cannot hear Him when He calls.
We live in a noisy society. So many voices are vying for our attention. We have developed a "hearing problem." The Holy Spirit is always speaking to us; He is always disclosing the Father. However, we rarely take the time necessary to be still in His Presence and listen for His voice. That was what He showed with Elijah, when the prophet was hiding in the dessert. Elijah was wailing about God not having his back and leaving him to run and hide, when the Lord showed him something we all need to understand
Then He said, “Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. ~1Kings 19:11-12, NKJV
God wrestled with Jacob once; He speaks in that still, small voice all of the time. We are not required to fight with God to hear Him. We need to learn to fight against all the things in this world designed to distract us from Him and His leading. He is not withholding anything from us. He is waiting for us to be still long enough or Him to speak. The manifestations of His Word may not appear immediately, because His Word is a seed (Mark 4), and seeds take time to grow. But His Blessing is upon us now. His voice is readily available. We don't wrestle with God; we wrestle against the world to be with God.
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