Jacob walked away from his encounter with God with a limp. He had wrestled through the night and prevailed in the sense that he received the blessing he sought, but he did not emerge unscathed. The socket of his hip was put out of joint. He would carry the mark of that encounter for the rest of his life. And that, the sermon suggested, is not incidental. The limp was not a punishment. It was a reminder.
The sermon offered a direct and uncomfortable word: our comfort level is not our God meter. God does not grow small because circumstances grow hard. He does not become less faithful because our expectations go unmet. The Israelites had made the mistake of measuring God’s love by whether life was going smoothly, and when it was not, God had become, in their reckoning, distant and small.
Scripture tells a very different story. Jacob was refined through struggle. Joseph was refined through betrayal and imprisonment. Moses was refined through 40 years in the wilderness. Paul learned contentment through chains. The consistent testimony of the biblical narrative is that God does his deepest work not in the seasons of comfort but in the seasons of stripping. He removes what can be removed so that what remains is unmistakably him.
The pastor testified personally: He is going to keep bursting your bubbles until you realize it. I promise. I can testify to this. God strips away the things that fail us so he can prove that he will not fail us. He allows the limp so we stop trusting our own strength and start trusting his. The discomfort is not the absence of his love. In many cases, it is the most concentrated expression of it.