Discovering a power of "Jabez's Prayer"

 

I want to share with you couple ideas I’ve learned from the book of Bruce Wilkinson ‘Jabez’s Prayer’. He teaches in this book how to pray a daring prayer that God always answers. This book is a testimony about what happens when ordinary Christians decide to reach for an extraordinary life which is exactly the kind God promises. If you want to have a bigger vision for your life, be a gimper for God. Gimper always does a little more than what’s required or expected. 

 In the 1 Chronicles 4:9 we read the briefest of the Bible biographies: ‘ Now Jabez was more honorable than his brothers’. Jabez wanted to be more and do more for God and God granted his request. Why? let's read his story in the 1 Chronicles 4 chapter. ‘’ And Jabez was more honourable than his brethren: and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, Because I bare him with sorrow. And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that thine hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested’’.

Things started badly for a person no one had ever heard of. He prayed an unusual one-sentence prayer. Things ended extraordinary well. Jabez’s simple, sincere and sensible prayer released something miraculous in his life. 

When was the last time God worked through you in such a way that you knew that God had done it? When was the last time you saw miracles on a regular basis in your life? 

In Hebrew the word “Jabez” means “pain” or “he causes pain”. All babies arrive with certain amount of pain but his mother chose to memorialize it in son’s name. In Bible times name and a man were so related that a name was taken as a prophecy about child’s future. 

Jabez found a way out. He prayed the biggest request - Oh, that You would bless me indeed! 

We hear word ‘blessing’ very often. We ask God to bless the Church, kids and even food that we eat. To bless in Biblical sense means to ask for a supernatural favour. We are asking for the wonderful unlimited goodness that only God has the power to give. As we may read in Proverbs 10:22 “The Lord’s blessing is our greatest wealth, all our work adds nothing to it”. 

Important thing about Jabez’s request - he left it entirely up to God to decide what the blessings would be and where, when and how Jabez would receive them. This kind of trust in God’s good intentions to us has nothing in common with asking God for a new apartment, а car or high income. When we seek God’s blessing as the ultimate value in life, we are throwing ourselves entirely into the river of His good will and power and purposes for us. You start praying for exactly what God desires. 

If you don't ask for God’s blessings you will lose them. "Ask" - promised Jesus "and it will be given to you" Matthew 7:7. "You do not have because you don't ask", said James in James 4:2.

Perhaps you are one of those Christians who thinks that once you are saved, God’s blessings sort of drizzle over your life, аnd no matter what you do. God’s blessing is limited only by us. God’s nature is to bless. Jabez was blessed only because he asked. Through this simple believing prayer you can change your life. 

2.

The next part of Jabez prayer - a plea for more territory - is where we ask God to enlarge your life so you can make a greater impact for Him. Jabez looked at his circumstances and concluded: Surely I was born for more than this’’. We may change words and pray - " Oh God, please expand my opportunities and my impact in such a way that I touch more lives for your glory. Let me do more for you’’. 

Yes it is unusual to hear anyone prays - God bless me. Also " God, please give me more ministry’’. Most of us think our lives are too full already. But as your opportunities expand, your abilities and resources supernaturally increase too. 

Whatever our gifts, education, job might be our calling is to do God’s work on Earth. But many of us shrink from living out our faith to others. We often think this way:

My abilities + experience + training + my personality and appearance + my past + the expectations of others = my assigned territory. 

Sure, we say, we want God to work through us, but we really mean by us or in association with us. God works through normal people who believe in a supernormal God. 

God’s math looks like this:

 My willingness and weakness + God's will and supernatural power = my expanding territory. 

To pray for larger borders means to ask for a miracle. Do you believe miracles still happen?  

3. 

The third is a request for God’s hand to be with us and keeping us from evil.

Dependence upon God makes heroes of ordinary people like Jabez and you and me. How? We're forced to cry out with Jabez's third desperate plea: "Oh, that Your hand would be with me!" With that, we release God's power to accomplish His will and bring Him glory through all seeming impossibilities.

God's power under us, in us, surging through us is exactly what turns dependence into unforgettable experiences of completeness. "Not that we are sufficient of ourselves," wrote Paul, "to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant" (2 Corinthians 3:5-6).

 The "hand of the Lord" is a biblical term for God's power and presence in the lives of His people (see Joshua 4:24 and Isaiah 59:1). In Acts, the phenomenal success of the early church was attributed to one thing: "The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord" (Acts 11:21). A more specific New Testament description for God's hand is "the filling of the Holy Spirit." The church's growth bears powerful witness to both the necessity and availability of the hand of God to accomplish the business of God. Consider the natural progression from more blessing to more territory to the need for supernatural power. When Jesus gave His disciples the Great Commission—"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations...and lo, I am with you always" (Matthew 28:19-20)—He was bestowing on them both an incredible blessing and an impossible task. Into all the world and preach? Certainly a disaster in the making! After all, He was commissioning such unreliable cowards as Peter, who had already proved that a girl by a campfire could get him to deny he'd ever heard of Jesus! Yet when He sent the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:8), Jesus touched these ordinary believers with greatness, filling them with His miraculous power to spread the Gospel.

The early church was known as a community who spent hours and even days in prayer together, waiting upon God and asking for His power (see Acts 2:42-47). They were longing to receive more of God's "hand"—a fresh spiritual in-filling of God's power that would turn impending, certain failure into a miracle and make their extraordinary assignment possible. Paul told the Christians at Ephesus to make it a priority to be "filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:19). 

When was the last time your church got together and pleaded for the filling of the Spirit? When was the last time you petitioned God regularly and fervently, "Oh, put Your hand upon me! Fill me with Your Spirit!"? The rapid spread of the Good News in the Roman world couldn't have happened any other way.

4. 

The final request of his prayer was that God would keep him out of the fight: "Oh...keep me from evil."

 The further along in a life of supernatural service you get, the more you'll need the final plea of Jabez's prayer. You are going to experience more attacks on you and your family. You are going to become familiar with the enemy's unwelcome barbs— distraction, opposition, and oppression. But in the model prayer Jesus gave his followers, nearly a quarter of its fifty words ask for deliverance: "And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one" (Matthew 6:13). Nothing about spiritual insight or special powers. Not a word about confrontation. Without a temptation, we would not sin. Most of us face too many temptations—and therefore sin too often—because we don't ask God to lead us away from temptation. 

That's why, like Jabez, we should pray for protection from deception:

Lord, keep me from making the mistakes I'm most prone to when temptation comes. I confess that what I think is necessary, smart, or personally beneficial is so often only the beautiful wrapping on sin. So please, keep evil far from me!

God favours those who ask. He holds back nothing from those who want and earnestly long for what He wants.