Vance Havner on Genesis 32:24

I’m trying not to quote this southern gentleman too often here on Vibrance, but this one is too good to keep to one’s self.  (Formatting for emphasis is mine.)

  Source:  Day by Day ©1953 by Vance Havner,  Fleming H. Revell Co.

“And Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day”    Genesis 32:24

IT IS NOT in some favored vacation spot, where the setting seems perfect, that we have our best season with the Lord.  We do not find our Bethels where we recharge our spiritual batteries in some ideal retreat.  

• It was in desperate loneliness at Jabbok that Jacob met the Lord and gained power with God and men. 
• At the backside of the desert Moses came to the mountain of God. 
• It was in the year that King Uzziah died that Isaiah saw the Lord
• Do not forget that John wrote Revelation on Patmos,
• that Pilgrim’s Progress came from Bedford jail, and
• precious hymns from Fanny Crosby’s blindness.

Our choicest art and literature came out of poverty and suffering, and God does His best work with us oftimes when it seems that the time and place are most unpropitious.  We do not come to know the deeper things by rocking on the porch of some lazy rest spot, sipping lemonade, reading a novel.

You cannot set the stage and arrange the scenery and then work up the experience you need—have it made to order.  The Spirit does not work that way.  … It may be in the unlikeliest place and on the darkest day when you are “left alone” that God will come down to wrestle until daybreak.

Selah ~

—PLR—