Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain. And God granted his request. (1 Chronicles 4:10 )
Some years ago I was in a Christian bookshop in Cardiff, browsing the shelves, when I saw something that caught my attention – “Prayer of Jabez Plaque”. I thought, “Whatever is that?” I looked at it, read the prayer on it from 1 Chronicles 4, and thought, “That’s nice”. Then I looked around and saw a whole shelf of merchandise linked to this prayer of Jabez – book-marks, plaques, key rings – all sorts of things. I thought, “There’s something going on here.” Little did I realise that this was the biggest thing in Christian publishing and merchandising for a long time.
Prayer of Jabez coffee mug!
How strange! Until recently, hardly anyone had heard of Jabez. All we know of him is in a few verses in 1 Chronicles. Now he has suddenly become the centre of a vast enterprise . Bruce Wilkinson is the man behind it all. He wrote a book on the Prayer of Jabez which became an international best-seller, topping the New York Times best-seller list and selling nine million copies. It has been embraced by Evangelicals, Catholics, Fundamentalists, and even by non-christians!
A prayer or a mantra?
Here is the full text of this prayer from 1 Chronicles 4:9-10
Jabez was more honourable than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez, saying, I gave birth to him in pain. Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain. And God granted his request.
A recipe for success?
Bruce Wilkinson has taken this simple prayer from the Old Testament and used it as a basis for a whole philosophy of life. I think I can see why this is so popular, and why so many people use the Prayer of Jabez as a kind of good luck charm.
The Jabez Prayer is a cry to God for success and to be delivered from pain and evil. It is very natural to want to pray this kind of prayer. (And Jesus did tell us to pray to be delivered from evil.) But some people see the prayer of Jabez as a recipe for success in life - and not just spiritual success. Jabez prayed that God would increase his territory and God answered his prayer. Some people think in terms of increasing their material wealth.
Vain repetition?
Jesus did teach his disciples to pray for their daily needs, as well as for God’s Kingdom to come, and that they might be delivered form the power of the Evil One. So it’s not wrong to pray, asking things for yourself. But Jesus also warned his disciples against using any prayer as a kind of mantra – something you repeat over and over again, hoping it will bring success.
And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:7-8)
The trouble with much of the literature associated with the Jabez Prayer is that it encourages people to do just that. To keep repeating the same prayer over and over.
A formula for blessing?
In the preface to his book Wilkinson writes:
“I want to teach you how to pray a daring prayer that God always answers. It is brief – only one sentence with four parts – and tucked away in the Bible, but I believe it contains the key to a life of extraordinary favor with God … I challenge you to make the Jabez prayer for blessing part of the daily fabric of your life. To do that I encourage you to follow unwaveringly the plan outlined here for he next thirty days. By the end of that time you’ll be noticing significant changes in your life, and the prayer will be on its way to becoming a treasured lifelong habit.”
In other words, the claim is that if we just pray the Prayer of Jabez, word for word, every day for a month, then we’ll see Gods power released in our lives. Was it that Jabez stumbled upon the right formula for asking things of God? I don’t think so - prayer is not a matter of getting a technique right. Prayer is all about our relationship with God. It’s a matter of learning to wait on God and to experience his help and power in our lives. The working of that power might indeed bring worldly success and wealth, but then it is just as likely to involve a life of poverty or persecution. Indeed, to judge by the general tenor of Jesus’ teaching, you could say it is more likely to be the latter.
A pattern of prayer
Now, I’ve been negative so far in what I’ve said about how some people use the Prayer of Jabez but I don’t want to give the impression there is anything wrong with the actual prayer itself. Far from it, it is a gem of a prayer, and all the more precious in that it is set in the midst of all these dry-as-dust genealogies in 1 Chronicles!
I think that for many of us, brought up in the Presbyterian Church, nurtured in a Calvinistic way of looking at things, there is no danger of getting bogged down in prosperity teaching. The danger is the opposite. Perhaps some of us have been taught to believe that it is wrong and selfish to pray for ourselves, that you should never ask things for your own benefit. I have heard that view expressed. Well, the Jabez Prayer can perhaps help us to see that it is not wrong to ask things for ourselves. ( Although we should be able to see this from the Lord’s Prayer.) If we put God first in our lives surely we do have the right to believe that he will provide all that is needful for us to serve him.
What then can we learn from the Prayer of Jabez?
1) Jabez was more honourable than his brothers
The word could mean more “distinguished”, or even more “honoured”, than his brothers. However I think it might mean that he had a greater concern for the honour of God. He asked great things from he Lord because he believed that the Lord was a great God.
Once there was a philosopher in the court of Alexander the great. He was of outstanding ability, but was very poor. So he asked Alexander for financial help, and was told to draw whatever he needed from the Imperial Treasury. So he asked the treasurer for an amount equal to about £30,000 in our money. Of course the the treasurer refused. But Alexander said, “Pay the money at once. This man has done me a singular honour. By the largeness of his request he shows that he has understood both my wealth and my generosity.”
One hymn writer says:
Thou art coming to a King;
Large petitions with thee bring.
For his grace and power are such
None can ever ask too much. (John Newton
Jabez also had that kind of faith. Have we?
2) His mother had named him Jabez, saying, I gave birth to him in pain.
She had named him Jabez because he had been born in pain – she had had a terrible time in labour. Jabez, in the Hebrew language, means “he causes pain”.
Such a name would have been seen as a very bad omen in those days. The Hebrews had an almost magical understanding of the effect of names. To be called Jabez ( he causes pain) was almost like a curse. But by his faith Jabez turned the curse into a blessing. That’s why he is mentioned in 1 Chronicles.
3) Jabez cried out to the God of Israel
He cried out to the God of Israel no doubt in his concern to avoid making a disaster of his life, and thus fulfil the meaning of his name. He was also concerned for the honour of God. He cried out, “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory!”
In these words we are reminded of the prophet Isaiah:
Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. (Isaiah 54:2)
In Christian terms this can be seen as a prayer for the extension of God’s Kingdom. Both texts have been an inspiration to many pioneer missionaries, eager to extend the Kingdom of Christ. Do we cry to God like this?
“Oh that you would extend the borders of your Kingdom Lord! Oh that more people would come to know Christ’s love and power! Oh that the people of this city would turn to you! Oh that the Church would grow in numbers and in spiritual depth!”
Do you pray like that for your city, for your church, for the members of your family? That they will come to know God?
Jesus taught us to say: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done”. Do we pray that way.
4) Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.
Matthew Henry comments: He prayed that God’s hand might be with him. God’s hand with us to lead us, protect us, strengthen us, and to work all our works in us, is a hand all-sufficient for us”.
“Free from pain” – this is a very natural thing to pray for. Jesus teaches us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
“Do not bring us to the time of hard testing” is an alternative translation.
Jabez was very concerned that he might suffer harm and pain because of his name.
Matthew Henry comments: He prayed that God would keep him from evil, the evil of sin, the evil of trouble, all the evil designs of his enemies, that they might not hurt, nor make him a Jabez indeed, a man of sorrow. God granted that which he requested. God is ever ready to hear prayer: his ear is not now heavy.”
5) And God granted his request
This is the whole point of the passage. Jabez and his prayer feature in the book of Chronicles because something amazing happened in his life. This prayer is spiritual dynamite! Not in the way that some people would want to use it - as some kind of mantra to be recited - but as an inspiration to faith.
In the nineteenth century John Hyde the missionary was inspired by this verse to start a life of faith and prayer that resulted in him being known by the nickname “Praying Hyde”.
Are we also prepared to be inspired by the Prayer of Jabez?
[Sermon preached in Park End Presbyterian Church, Cardiff, June 16th. 2009]
