Prayer is wrestling with God. This wrestle is in a certain sense a resisting of God. You cannot have wrestling otherwise; but you may have Christian fatalism. It is not mere wrestling with ourselves, our ignorance, our self-will. That is not prayer, but self-torment. Prayer is wrestling with God. And it is better to fall thus into the hands of God than of man—even than our own. It is a resistance that God loves. It is quite foreign to the godless, self-willed defiant resistance. In love there is a kind of resistance that enhances it. The resistance of love is quite a different thing from the resistance of hostility. The yielding to one you love is very different from capitulating to an enemy:

   Two constant lovers, being joined in one, yielding unto each other yield to none—i.e. to no foreign force, no force foreign to the love which makes them one. 

   So when God yields to prayer in the name of Christ, to the payer of faith and love, He yields to Himself who inspired it, as He sware by Himself since none was greater. Christian prayer is the Spirit praying in us. It is prayer in the solidarity of the Kingdom. It is a continuation of Christ’s prayer, which in Gethsemane was a wrestle with the Father. But if so, it is God pleading with God, God dealing with God—as the true atonement must be. And when God yields it is not to an outside influence He yields, but to Himself.

The Soul of Prayer - P.T. Forsyth