If your goal is to find a single commit with a particular phrase in the commit message, my approach would be put redirect the output of "git log" into a file, read the file into an editor, and search for the desired phrase. Hmmm...
Perhaps this option to "git log" helps:
--grep=
Limit the commits output to ones with log message that matches the specified pattern (regular expression). I found that by searching the "git-log" manual page for "message".