Labor to believe

Pre-message
-Jacob wrestled with the angel
-its the struggle that often embitters us and causes us to make it even harder for ourselves to believe and others
-Jacob is going to usher in the multiplication of belief
-but when you believe, you can work and when you work you can get paid
-we put in half a day of work and start asking, when am I going to get paid, because we are astonished with the effort the work is getting out of us... and our own effort is a bigger god in our minds than believing in God. 

John 4:7-10,25-27,31-36,46-48,51-54
Matthew 20:1-7
John 6:27-29
Psalms 112
Lead up
-Jesus in this chapter is trying to draw us out of conventions to change how we view him
-He often will contrast against things he is not
-He needs us to come out for the work he has for us to do and the reward he has for us to get

Main Point
-We labor and eat, but is it to increase our confidence in God?
-When he says the battle is not yours, that's because your battle is to believe 
-the struggle produces multiplication
-How an these things be seeing I know not a man
-when you believe, somebody else is going to believe
-When you want to believe God he will meet you like the nobleman and Jacob at night

Altar Call
-this is for those who have been struggling, but struggling for the wrong thing, and you've come up empty
-repentance from dead works


Book idea:
We all struggle with, labor with, push, and press at some some sort of goal in life. The majority of what it takes to accomplish a thing is in believing that it is possible and worth it. When it comes to believing God it is no different, and this is the only goal that will produce eternal satisfaction and proliferation.

Probably the most readily understood example of struggling that pays off in the Bible is Jacob wrestling with God. This scene and character of Jacob should be revisited throughout the book as an example of how believing God is often a mental grappling with him as to what God is calling us to and what God has brought us from. Many of us will not progress in belief in these moments because it is a challenge and a test, and the ideology of many is to get to a place in life where we are no longer challenged or tested.

The book would basically outline several modern day easily grasped examples of how we struggle to believe God and how we fall short of full belief in God which results large-scale failure. The book would interlace scriptural references that would highlight the issues and the resolution.

1. Marriage and child rearing in modern times
2. Recovering from tragedies and trauma
3. School and education

Also a section on anger and rage and bitterness should be added to the book (maybe in the beginning). In this section we would cover how struggling often hints at frustration and irritation which often spins us off into perpetual anger (or being malcontent). In modern popular culture violent action movies are the most successful. An appetite for this material is emerging globally. If this were a way of venting and releasing this anger, it would be ok. But instead it re-enforces our fantasies of violent engagement with society. But this is borne of a frustration that either to get where we need to go we need to be violent, or since we can't get where we want to go we resort to violence as self-expression.