THE REVELATION OF JESUS CHRIST: WRESTLING WITH GOD

P.T. FORSYTH (1848-1921)

THE ROMAN Catholic writer Carlo Carretto said he did not trust theologians who do not pray, presumably because the great temptation of theological inquiry is to reduce Almighty God to an object for study. Prayer is the great antidote to this presumption because true prayer is loving, humble communion with a person.

In this sense, Peter Taylor Forsyth was the ideal theologian, for he was a theologian who loved to pray, and he wrote lovingly and wisely about prayer. He began his little classic, The Soul of Prayer, with fear and trembling: "It is a difficult and even formidable thing to write on prayer and one fears to touch the Ark. Perhaps no one ought to undertake it unless, he has spent more toil in the practice of prayer than on its principle." ¹But Forsyth prayed that God would nevertheless regard his efforts as a theologian of prayer "as a prayer to know better how to pray." ²

Forsyth believed prayer was so central to the health of the Christian life that "the worst sin is prayerlessness. Overt sin…[is] the effect of this, or is punishment. We are left by God for lack of seeking him."³

Forsyth was also a pastor. He believed that one had to spend time with people in order to know their problems and to spend time with God in order to solve them. It is this combination of Forsyth as pastor and theologian that makes The Soul of Prayer so helpful. As theologian, Forsyth writes thoughtfully on the mysteries of prayer; as pastor, he speaks to our hearts.

Only a pastor/theologian could have written as creatively as Forsyth did about what it means to wrestle with God in prayer. Forsyth hated resignation and fatalism in prayer, believing that sometimes to resist the permissive will of God is to do the perfect will of God is to do the perfect will of – if what we resist is what God only temporarily wills to be (e.g., poor health, a bad job, a difficult marriage). It may be God’s will that we be in a difficult circumstance but not necessarily that we stay in that situation. "He has a lower will and a higher, a prior and a posterior. And the purpose of the lower will is that it be resisted and struggled through to the higher."⁴ Wrestling in prayer from the lower to the higher is one of God’s chief means of education our spirits.

Resist God, in the sense of rejecting God, and you will not be able to resist any evil. But resist God in the sense of Closing with God, cling to him with all your strength, not your weakness only, with your active and not only your passive faith, and he will give you strength. Cast yourself into his arms not to be caressed but to wrestle with him. He loves that holy war. He may be too many for you, and lift you from your feet. But it will be to lift you from the earth, and set you in the heavenly places which are theirs who fight the good fight and lay hold of God as their eternal life. 5