The Prayer of Jabez by Ps Jim Jung

“Jabez was more honorable 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.” (1 Chronicles 4: 9 – 10 NIV, underline added)

In his book, The Prayer of Jabez, Bruce Wilkinson delivered a very powerful message to his readers about the power of transformational prayer. Jabez is an historical biblical figure, with very little known about him other than his desperate cry to God regarding the circumstances of his life. Things started very badly for a person no-one has ever really heard of who prayed an unusual one sentence prayer which caused his life to dramatically change.

1.      Oh, that you would bless me

His mother named him “Pain” (or Jabez in Hebrew) because of the circumstances of his difficult birth. Every day as people spoke to him they reiterated the label that had been affixed to his life through an event he had no control over. In ancient times, names were given as prophetic titles over a person’s life. Your name defined your future. His family called him pain, his friends called him pain, and when he was bullied by the schoolyard thugs they too reiterated his name.

And so his prayer begins by asking God to change the atmosphere of his life with a supernatural infusion of heavenly intervention. We call it a blessing. God’s unmerited favour. Because he was about to ask for something he could never imagine he would ever inherit:

2.      Enlarge my territory

In our modern vernacular he was basically saying “surely I was born for more than this!” With great courage he asks God to increase the levels of influence, of territory, of his self-imposed limitations because he wanted to do more than simply go through life being known as a pain. He wanted to expand his borders and remove the fences that hemmed him in and begin to experience the greatness of what God could do through his life. He continues by asking:

3.      That your hand would be with me

Wilkinson writes: “If seeking God’s blessing is our ultimate act of worship and asking to do more for him is our utmost ambition, then asking for God’s hand upon us is our strategic choice to sustain and continue the great things that God has begun in our lives” (The Prayer of Jabez, p.49).

Perhaps Jabez realized what he was asking for and understood that without God this would never eventuate. “God I can’t do this alone, you must be with me all the way.”

4.      That you will keep me from harm (evil)

I think Jabez recognised the dangerous prayer he had prayed. He also understood that God was capable of answering such a prayer. In fact the scripture passage ends with the statement we would all want as an outcome, “And God granted his request.”

Have you had a label put onto your life that limits you from being all you could be? Are there self-imposed fences around your ability to break free because of things hidden in your past? Perhaps it’s time to draw courage, like Jabez did, and ask God to redraw new boundary lines for your life. It just may be that your prayer has an ending sentence like this: “And God granted the request.”