Wrestling for Love // October 24, 2024

READ: Genesis 29:1-30

1. What about the sermon most impacted you or left you with questions?

2. What most shocks you about Jacob’s “love story”? What can you most relate to?

3. In the message it was said that the “pull of love” (i.e. romantic attraction) is a good thing designed by God to move us toward the blessing of God’s gift of marriage. As such it is meant to pull us out of selfishness and create a partnership of blessing for the world. Do you agree? Is this what we are thinking and feeling while under the pull or spell of “love”? If no, what are we thinking/feeling?

4. This “love story” is meant to be read in tandem and in contrast to Jacob’s dad’s love story found in Chapter 24. The main contrast is that God and prayer are entirely missing in Chapter 29. What are the results of this in Jacob’s story? What are the results of this in your own experience of the “pull of love”? What role should prayer play in someone’s pursuit of love?

5. The peril of love (that love doesn’t advertise) is that love will show us who we really are. How does this happen to Jacob?

6. How have you handled the inevitable disappointments of love in your life? What has God taught in you in these? How has your experience with the pull of romantic love or in marriage shown you who you really are?

7. Often in the disappointment and difficulties of love, we can blame the other person or just give up. The Bible offers us a different way to discover the purpose of love:

In John 4, we find another encounter of a man and woman at well that has to do with love. It’s known as the story of the “Woman at the Well”. Read the story in John 4:1-42.

a. Why does Jesus bring up her “love stories”? How would you describe her love story? (stay with what we can glean from the text) Can you relate to her?

b. Jesus is presented her as greater than Jacob (the greater Jacob, the true Husband) How? He comes to the well to give – not to take or grasp; he comes to the well to not to meet his need but to serve, he doesn’t come looking at the surface but looking deep within, he isn’t driven away by the ugliness, but it draws him close.

In meeting Jesus, this woman discovered the living water she was looking for. What difference would it make in our struggles with love – if we knew we were loved by Jesus in the same way he loved this woman?