15 Bible Verses about Striving With God
Most Relevant Verses
We all fell to the ground; and I heard a voice which said to me in Hebrew, "'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? You are finding it painful to kick against the ox-goad.'
"If therefore God gave them the same gift as He gave us when we first believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, why, who was I to be able to thwart God?"
"O stiff-necked men, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you also are continually at strife with the Holy Spirit--just as your forefathers were.
Nay, but who are you, a mere man, that you should cavil against GOD? Shall the thing moulded say to him who moulded it, "Why have you made me thus?"
But if it is really from God, you will be powerless to put them down--lest perhaps you find yourselves to be actually fighting against God."
and falling to the ground he heard a voice which said to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" "Who art thou, Lord?" he asked. "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," was the reply.
This too is my own earnest endeavour--always to have a clear conscience in relation to God and man.
"Strain every nerve to force your way in through the narrow gate," He answered; "for multitudes, I tell you, will endeavour to find a way in and will not succeed.
For we know that the Law is a spiritual thing; but I am unspiritual--the slave, bought and sold, of sin. For what I do, I do not recognize as my own action. What I desire to do is not what I do, but what I am averse to is what I do. But if I do that which I do not desire to do, I admit the excellence of the Law,read more.
and now it is no longer I that do these things, but the sin which has its home within me does them. For I know that in me, that is, in my lower self, nothing good has its home; for while the will to do right is present with me, the power to carry it out is not. For what I do is not the good thing that I desire to do; but the evil thing that I desire not to do, is what I constantly do. But if I do that which I desire not to do, it can no longer be said that it is I who do it, but the sin which has its home within me does it. I find therefore the law of my nature to be that when I desire to do what is right, evil is lying in ambush for me. For in my inmost self all my sympathy is with the Law of God; but I discover within me a different Law at war with the Law of my understanding, and leading me captive to the Law which is everywhere at work in my body--the Law of sin. (Unhappy man that I am! who will rescue me from this death-burdened body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!)
But every competitor in an athletic contest practices abstemiousness in all directions. They indeed do this for the sake of securing a perishable wreath, but we for the sake of securing one that will not perish. That is how I run, not being in any doubt as to my goal. I am a boxer who does not inflict blows on the air, but I hit hard and straight at my own body and lead it off into slavery, lest possibly, after I have been a herald to others, I should myself be rejected.
I long to know Christ and the power which is in His resurrection, and to share in His sufferings and die even as He died; in the hope that I may attain to the resurrection from among the dead. I do not say that I have already won the race or have already reached perfection. But I am pressing on, striving to lay hold of the prize for which also Christ has laid hold of me.read more.
Brethren, I do not imagine that I have yet laid hold of it. But this one thing I do--forgetting everything which is past and stretching forward to what lies in front of me, with my eyes fixed on the goal I push on to secure the prize of God's heavenward call in Christ Jesus.
and here is the motive of our toiling and wrestling, because we have our hopes fixed on the ever-living God, who is the Saviour of all mankind, and especially of believers.
Epaphras, who is one of yourselves, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, sends greetings to you, always wrestling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand firm--Christians of ripe character and of clear conviction as to everything which is God's will.
while He--an agony of distress having come upon Him--prayed all the more with intense earnestness, and His sweat became like clots of blood dropping on the ground.
