What You Need to Know About Soul Wrestling

Here’s the truth: life requires wrestle.

Wrestle?, you ask. What do you mean by that?. After all we’ve seen guys wrestling, with their spandex body suits and ear muff head-gear, rolling awkwardly on a sweaty mat. In what way does our life embody that?

Wrestle means grappling; it means contending against an opponent. It means battling it out against a situation, challenge, or problem. To wrestle is to fight. And to soul wrestle is to fight in the innermost places, in the deep and soft places of our hearts.

We have wrestle in our life whether we like it or not. It comes to us in every phase. The kid on the growing-up journey wrestles - acquiring new skills, finding friends, facing down bullies (real and figurative). The teen moving toward adulthood wrestles - working through self-image, figuring out dating, pondering life after school. The adult wrestles - dealing with career challenges, interacting with spouse, confronting disappointments.

Wrestle finds us. We don’t have to look for it.

Throughout our life we wrestle with many opponents - with insecurity, failures, geography, painful situations. We wrestle with hopes, within relationships, against disappointments. Wrestle invades all parts of life.

And it’s continuous. You’re probably involved in a few wrestles right now. Some are on the small side - your kids’ in-fighting has gotten out of hand and ruins the evenings, but how do you stop it? Your friend group’s small and you hanker for deeper relationships, but how do you find them? You seem to spend ever more time engrossed in your phone, but how can you alter the pattern?

Some wrestles are on the big side. There’s a broken relationship in your family that plagues you, stagnant for years, and it seems like it’ll never change. You’re stuck in a career that’s killing your soul, but you’ve looked at it from every angle and there’s no way out. You’re confronting a health challenge that taxes daily life, prognosis is bleak; how can you cope?

So you’ve got wrestle, small and big, already. You’re wrestling, and it’s happening at level of your soul (even if you’re ignoring it). The big question is: how are you wrestling?

Because, like everything else in life, wrestle can be done well or poorly. With skill or without. Intentionally or haphazardly. If you’re wrestling poorly you’re most often experiencing fatigue, discouragement, and confusion.

I’m here to tell you: it’s worth it to learn to wrestle well.

To start, we need to realize that wrestling well is something God cares about. Not only does our wrestle not surprise Him, He’s right there where it’s happening. He’s paying close attention, right alongside, sometimes right in the middle.

God is a warrior. He raises a battle cry and fights against his enemies. His biggest enemy is Satan, though there’s no contest between them since Satan’s a created being (unlike God) and has limited power. God calls the shots, is the continuous victor. And Jesus’ resurrection from the dead spells the end for Satan in no uncertain terms - he knows that when Jesus returns, it’s all over for him. But in the mean time, Satan and his crew will do everything in their power to drag us humans into sin, mess with us, try to keep us from God. This is why the Bible is so full of the call for us to take up our arms and fight against Satan. We have the power of our warrior God at our disposal - our God whose infinite strength is available to us as we contend against Satan’s assaults. Through Jesus’ power, we can and will overcome our enemy.

God calls us to be fighters. He calls us to be lovers of truth, beauty, and goodness - and it’s war to commandeer those. In the day-to-day, fighting looks like wrestle.

Passivity is our enemy.

We live in a culture where laziness is called recreation and couch-sitting is our greatest comfort. “Do hard things” is a mantra rarely adopted today. High-quality wrestle is modeled seldom if at all.

But the abundant life that Jesus died to give us will not come without wrestle. Passivity will not move us forward. Our enemies will not be conquered and our struggles will not be conquered by our sitting on the couch, enumerating our anxieties, feeling discouraged. In fact, this type of passivity guarantees defeat.

We were made to wrestle.

It’s as we wrestle that we :

• get God’s wisdom on how to handle the specific struggles of our lives

• figure out our gifts and how God wants to use them in this world

• determine the direction God’s leading us in

• take hold of the promises of God and partner with Him to bring them to bear in our lives

• commandeer the peace and purpose that God assures us He’ll bring

There are many ways to proactively wrestle. Some of the better known ones are proactive intercession, action-oriented Bible-reading, mentoring, and prayerful research. There are many more, and the person committed to holy wrestle will uncover them as she goes - led (as she is) by the God who called her into the work in the first place.

I say “work,” because be assured of this: wrestling is the work of faith. And faith is the work of life. However hard the journey may be, we know that real life - the best life - comes to us as we do this work. The victory lies on the other side.

So let’s get to it.

---

If you like this post, please share it! For more content like it, take my free, fun QUIZ, “What’s Your Cell Phone Virtue?”

Or join us at the the susanbarico.com subscriber community, and I’ll send you my quick start guide: “5 steps to less CELL, more SOUL.” Sign up here.

---

You May Also Enjoy: