SPACEThis study is about a man who was notable only for the fact that his prayer for himself was answered. Nothing interests me more than how to get prayer about my personal and spiritual needs answered. Jabez knew how to pray for himself. Let’s examine how he did it.
SPACEThe only mention of Jabez in Holy Scripture is these two remarkable verses in I Chronicles 4:9-10:
SPACE“And Jabez was more honorable than his brethren; and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, Because I bore him in sorrow. And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, oh, that thou shouldst bless me indeed, and enlarge my border, and that thine hand might be with me, and that thou wouldst keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me. And God granted him that which he requested.”
SPACEWhat was it about Jabez and his prayer that resulted in an answer to his prayer? It’s important to get that clear because often we feel that some persons get their prayers answered because they are so special. We tend to feel that people like that are very unique…..that there is something in their make-up that puts them in line for God’s blessing. That is far from true; period! It certainly is not true of Jabez. And its not true for you and me. Thank God!!
SPACEThe Bible does say that Jabez was “more honorable than his brethren.” But what made him more honorable? Let me just say it right out and then we’ll examine it in detail for personal application. Jabez’s claim to fame was his prayer; nothing else.
SPACEA seminary professor friend of mine and I discussed Jabez over lunch one day. He said, “Jabez was nothing without his prayer.”
SPACEIt’s true. Jabez was a “nothing man” except for his prayer.
SPACETake his name. Names reflected character in Biblical days. His mother named him. That in itself was different, unusual, probably had a bad connotation. Fathers named children in those days. Further, she named him Jabez: “because I bore him in sorrow.”
SPACECould she have named him because there was no father there to name him? Had his father died before his birth? Was he an illegitimate baby? We don’t know. But something of sorrow was associated with his birth.
SPACEThe name itself could be translated “pain.” Was her’s the pain of a child born without a father? If so we have a child born with two strikes against him. Born behind the eight ball. A little nobody. A pain. But he prayed.
SPACE“And Jabez called on the God of Israel.”
SPACEThat ‘s what made him more honorable. He was a man of prayer. Look at his prayer:
SPACE “Oh, that thou wouldst bless me indeed.”
SPACE Being blessed is one thing. We all are. Being blessed indeed is another. It’s the difference in being blessed and really blessed.
SPACE What is the specific blessing he wants?
SPACE “I want you to enlarge my borders.”
A friend thought he was praying to gain weight. It was gain alright but not that kind.
SPACE He is praying for increase in the size of his holdings He is praying for real estate! He is praying for growth; that kind of growth. “Increase my coastline” it could be translated.
SPACE He then prays for guidance.
SPACE “That Thy hand would be with me and upon me.”
SPACE Jabez had a desire for the good things of life. God’s good things. But he also had a heart for God. He didn’t ask for God’s blessings without Him.
He wanted in his life what God could bring into it with His presence.
He wasn’t asking for God to be “hands off” on blessings.
SPACE Then He prays for godliness.
SPACE “That thou wouldst keep me from evil, and that it may not grieve me.”
SPACE No wonder he got God’s attention! When I hear, as I sometimes do, one of our young men pray, “Lord, make me a Godly man,” how my heart swells with desire along with him. How much more our heavenly Father is touched with the feeling our infirmities when we pay as Jabez. “Lord, keep me from an evil life. Keep me from the consequences of an evil life. Keep me pure. Make me a Godly man.”
SPACE “And God granted him that which he requested.”
SPACE That’s Spirit controlled self-concern….i.e. godly selfishness…. Just as “the Spirit lusteth after us,” for Himself and the Father and the Son: so we ought to have a spirit directed selfishness in which we desire that which can come from God alone.
SPACE This prayer forms itself in my mind as I write this: “Lord, I want you. I want what you have.” We could use a bit more of a “Jacobean attitude.” That is, an attitude like Jacob who between the grunts and groans of wrestling, holding on to God’s messenger blurts out, “I won’t let you go until you bless me!”
SPACE That’s the gist of it. Now let’s look at the prayer in detail to find the practical (that which can be practiced) applications for you and me right now.
SPACE In his prayer for growth he prays that God would bless him indeed. Let’s come at what he means by examining this statement in another context. The psalmists call us to “bless the Lord”. When we bless the Lord, what do we do? We look on Him as one worthy of honor, glory, and praise.
Now we reverse this when we pray. “Lord bless me.” I looked at Psa 103 … “I will bless the Lord….” and Psalm 34 “Bless the Lord at all times….” The same Hebrew word is used as is used by Jabez here in asking God to bless him.
Jabez said, “Lord, bless me. Ascribe to me the honor and glory due my name. Look upon me as a person worthy of honor.” That is confident praying that comes from a confident, intimate relationship with the Almighty.
SPACE What abandon and freedom in prayer! What, well, almost brashness. He asks God the Father to look upon him as a person worthy of God’s attention. Rather like the Psalmist in the 84th “Look upon the face of thine anointed.”
And God heard the prayer of Jabez!
A BLESSING RELATIONSHIP
Jabez came at God as though God were a blesser. Jabez was in a “blessing relationship.”
SPACE Few people pray like that. They are uncomfortable….in sin.
SPACE The sin separates, breaks fellowship, destroys a sense of acceptance and intimacy. But when our sins are forgiven up to date we can come with liberty, freedom and openness to the Lord as though He were a blesser. He invites us to come “boldly to the throne….”
SPACE It is God’s nature to bless.
SPACE And to never pray, “Lord bless me, really bless me,” is to ask God to ignore us and actually ignores a basic element of God’s character.
SPACE Jabez prays specifically for the blessing he wants. Remember when I said earlier he’s praying for real estate. He’s praying, “prosper me Lord.” Obviously God’s blessing of prospering has other connotations besides just more money.
SPACE Recently I had to go on an important teaching responsibility. My wife went with me. In our prayer, just before we drove off, we prayed for safety and protection on the highway. (An we often exclaim with thanksgiving when we return to our driveway after a long trip.) Then we prayed, “Lord prosper our going.” That prayer was not for financial gain in any sense of the word, but we need God to enlarge the investment of our lives in that particular effort.
SPACE What I meant was, “Lord, do something really worth our having given all this time.”
SPACE What personal blessing of God’s prosperity do you need in your life right now. Pray for it.
SPACE You might need to pray, “Lord, expand my activities and my talents, and what I am as a human being that I might be more effective in my career.”
SPACE Or, “that I might bless the persons in my neighborhood.”
SPACE Or, “that I might be a better Sunday School teacher reaching more people, and serving them better.”
SPACE Or, “prosper the investment of my life in my relationship with my family.”
SPACE Or, “Lord, enlarge my effectiveness as a human being.”
SPACE Pray for growth in influence. Dr. Vance Havnar gave me a prayer I pray from time to time. It goes like this, “Lord, give me a ministry where a little bit goes a long way.” And He’s doing it! And he has done it exceedingly, abundantly above all I have ever thought or imagined.
SPACE Did you hear about the prayer of the little pre-schooler whose bigger and older brothers and sisters could do “this and that”, none of which he could do. Everybody kept saying, “When you get big you can do this, and you can have that…
SPACE One night he was heard to pray….”And Lord, make me big…..Soon!”
SPACE I write in the front of my Bibles prayers by men whose lives have change the world. One such prayer is by Oswald J. Smith written by him in his early years:
“Lord, use me. Make me a soul-winner. Send me out as an evangelist. Let me see revival. Don’t let me settle down in an ordinary pastorate and accomplish nothing. I have only one life to live and I want to invest it for thee. Let me live for others. Enable me to win lost men and women to the Lord Jesus Christ. Let thy blessing rest upon my ministry.” (Consuming Fire, p. 15)
SPACE Jabez prayed also for guidance. “…and that thy hand might be with me to guide me…”
SPACE The blessings of God, without the guiding hand of God, and sometimes restraining hand of God, can do more harm than good.
SPACE You and I could name several people who have such blessings from God that they appear to be constantly standing directly under heaven’s open window. But there is little or no evidence that they even give God more than a thought to say nothing of a tithe.
SPACE Blessed, but not indeed. Blessed but empty. Blessed but disconnected from fellowship with God.
SPACE Think of the people you know…marvelously physically endowed with great athletic ability who never refer anything in their lives to God.
SPACE Or what of the envied people of wealth, blocked out from a true and intimate encounter with the Holy Spirit because of great possessions?
SPACE These sought after blessings of God have given them a false sense of security…. “trusting in uncertain riches;” forgetting that “the arm of flesh will fail you. Ye dare not trust your own.”
SPACE Having God’s abundant blessing is still poverty unless we have Him in our lives to guide the use of the blessings He has sent.
SPACE In a fine little book, Prayers That Changed History, Dr. Earl Allen tells about a testimony meeting where the lawless, immoral, and drunkards were telling how God had transformed their lives. But there was one present who was beautifully dressed, attractive, with obvious refinement reflected in grooming and bearing. Near the end of the meeting this prim, smallish woman stood and gave the most startling testimony of all.
SPACE “Jesus saved me from a life of ease, luxury, and selfishness: and it took just as much grace to save me from my easy chair as it did to save these from the gutter.”
SPACE Talk about from the guttermost to the uttermost….that’s it! This woman was direct descendant of Jabez.
SPACE Now is the time for me to say, if I need to, if you sense that somehow you have moved out from under the hand of Him who blessed you; leave off the pursuit of His blessing a minute, a hour, a time until you get back under His guiding hand. Let this be your song for a while: “Take my hand precious Lord….”
SPACE The first segment of Jabez’ prayer is for godliness. He phrases it this way, “…that thou wouldst keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me.” Let me come at the meaning of this from an off angle before applying it specifically.
SPACE How radically different is the thinking behind this prayer from the mind set of someone planning to go into sin. Someone recently---knowing they were entering a relationship with someone that was wrong, even agreed it was wrong – just plunged on toward inevitable grief with this comment, “Well. God will forgive me.”
SPACE Whoa! I’m really uncomfortable with that. That comes close to, if it isn’t actually, looking lightly on what Jesus went through on the cross to provide for our forgiveness. It flies in the face of Paul’s utter rejection of that kind of thinking when he dealt with a similar question. “Shall we sin that grace may increase? God forbid!”
SPACE Now there is some truth in the statement that, “God will forgive me.” But there is a profound perversion; i.e. truth with a twist of error, that negates the truth. God is infinite in mercy, renewed every day, and His faithfulness is great; but He has no capacity to treat sin lightly. And anybody who goes into sin willfully, thoughtfully, looking lightly on the death of Jesus is going to come under the slow and fine grinding wheels of God’s judgment.
SPACE What a difference to Jabez’ mind set and prayer. He is not praying to get out of the consequence of his misdeeds. He is not praying to try to get out of something. He is praying to stay out of anything that might later eventuate in grief!
SPACE He is praying, “Keep me from evil, not keep me safe in evil!”
Some of us have had conviction of sin... now we need to pray for conviction of righteousness!
SPACE We all live near a great and wonderful city, a government center, where many young people after finishing their education come to make their fortune. Many of these men and women in or near our great city, away from home, in school or on their first jobs have come to anxiety and grief if not despair in a situation that was very doubtful from the beginning. And they want “out” so much. Pray Jabez prayer that “grief might not go on and on.”
SPACE Others, perhaps here this morning, are considering entering into something about which you have great doubts. the crowd has backed you into a corner on drugs. You haven’t smoked your first joint or snorted your first “line” of cocaine or popped your first ecstasy pill….yet; but you have sat around with that crowd too long. And the pressure to conform increases every weekend. Pray for yourself, put yourself in God’s hand, with this prayer: “Keep me from evil.”
SPACE Or, you have been flooded with the descriptions of the ungodly exploits of the office gang every Monday for so long. Actually, the very week I wrote this material a married woman told me, “Down at my office, all they talk about is who else’s husband they have been with; what other man they are with, and all their sexual exploits.”
SPACE So far God has given you strength and you are still seeing clearly in the midst of all the darkness, but you need now to pray, “Lord, let you hand be upon me that I’ll be kept from an evil life, so that I should not have to grieve about the consequences of evil that I might bring upon my life.”
SPACE Let me take this one step further. Perhaps you have already come into the grief of a life that ignored God’s guiding hand. What now? Here’s the story from one who has been there. I heard this personal testimony of Ann Criswell Jackson in a concert at First Baptist in Dallas, Texas.
SPACE “I got so far away from God. I bragged that W.A. Criswell’s daughter had not been to church in years. The things I introduced into my life were beginning to come back upon me. I was empty, hurting, afraid and devastated. And I remembered what my mother had said. ‘Ann, when you get out yonder so far from God that you are afraid; Honey, go to your closet, close the door, get on your knees and pray, ‘”Oh Lord, I’m sorry, forgive. Bring me back to yourself.’” She said, “I did just that.”
SPACE Then she sang with great anointing and authority.
