I Will Not Let Thee Go

Three people have said it now and the third one was a pastor, which is the reason it has stuck.

The advice is always the same and it always arrives kindly. You have prayed about this for a long time. At some point holding on becomes its own thing. There is a peace on the other side of surrender and you cannot get to it while you are still gripping.

He knows what they mean. He is not a stupid man and there is something in it, and there is a version of holding on that is corrosive and he has met people who are inside it.

But here is what he cannot get past.

He has been asking about the same thing for eleven years. It is a person. He is not going to describe the situation and he does not need to, and the only relevant fact is that it is a person he loves and the thing he is asking for is that person coming back to God.

And what he is being advised to do, in the end, when you take the language off it, is to stop asking for that.

And the third time it was said to him he went home and sat in the truck and thought, for the first time in eleven years, the sentence he had never let himself think: maybe the holding on is the sin.

If somebody has told you to let it go, come and sit down out here. Nobody is going to take your grip off you.

A man held on all night and was blessed for it

Here is a night in Genesis that ought to be preached at every person who has been told to release something, and almost never is.

Jacob is alone. He is about to meet the brother he cheated, who is coming with four hundred men, and he has sent everybody he loves across the river ahead of him. And a man wrestles with him until the breaking of the day.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.Genesis 32:26

Read who says what.

Let me go. That is God, or God's messenger, asking to be released.

I will not let thee go. That is the man, refusing.

And then read what happens next, because this is the part that settles the matter. God does not rebuke him. He does not tell him that his grip is the problem, or that there is a peace on the other side of letting go, or that eleven years of a hold like that becomes its own idol.

He asks the man his name, and then He changes it, and He tells him why: because as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

The refusal to let go is the thing he is renamed for.

You are being told to release something that a man in Scripture was blessed for holding, and it was already the shape God honored. Genesis 32:26 is where that sits, in an exchange where God asks to be let go and a man says no and is renamed for it, and the same Spirit who kept the whole ugly, limping, all-night scene in the record is the one who reaches a man sitting in a truck.

What the advice is actually good for, and what it is not

Now let me be fair to the three of them, and especially to the pastor, because the advice is not worthless and it is not always wrong.

There is a real thing they are aiming at. A person can hold a request in a way that becomes bitterness, or that curdles into a demand, or that makes them unable to live any of the rest of their life until the thing resolves. That is a genuine condition and it does real damage and I have seen it.

But look at what they are actually treating. That condition is about how a person holds something, not about whether they hold it.

And the prescription they gave him is not about how. It is: stop asking. And when the request is a person coming back to God, stop asking is not a treatment for bitterness. It is the abandonment of an intercession, which is a completely different act, and nobody in Scripture has ever been commended for it.

Read Luke 18. Jesus tells a parable specifically, and Luke says so explicitly, to the end that men ought always to pray and not to faint, and the character He builds it around is a woman who will not stop coming back.

You have been given a treatment for a condition you do not have, and the eleven years were never the disease. He promised it, in the parable told for the express purpose of teaching people not to give up asking (Luke 18:1), and His Spirit does not put a stop date on an intercession for a person.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing on this site is a lever. Persisting does not wear God down, going without does not move His hand, and eleven years of asking has not built up a balance anywhere. The reason to keep asking is not that it works on Him. It is that He told people to.

And the person you are praying for has their own will and their own road, and nothing here commands anybody's will or promises you an outcome about them. What happens with them is His and it is theirs, and it is not yours to make happen.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's stamina.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.