Good morning.  Today we will be taking a look at a prayer from the Bible.  It is a bold prayer, that would be amazing if we could all be so bold as to pray it.  Not only is it a life changing prayer, but it is also a prayer that I believe impressed God Himself.  This is also the only time we ever hear of the guy who prayed this prayer.  Go ahead and turn with me to I Chronicles 4:9-10.  This morning, we are going to take a look at the power behind these 2 short verses.

Let’s read this together.  I Chronicles 4:9-10 says, “1”

Before we get started, let’s open with a word of prayer.  Let’s Pray!

What a pain!  Has anyone ever said that about you?  I’m sure that more than a few people have said that about me from time to time.  Well at leas I am in good company.  Because it was said about the person we are looking at in this scripture today.  Jabez’s name in Hebrew literally means “pain”!  His mother delivered him in great pain and she never let him forget it.  She named him Pain so that he would always remember what he had done to his poor mother.

Now, you might say Jabez came from a dysfunctional family, with a controlling mother who was an expert at causing guilt from her children.  But in spite of all that, he overcame the obstacles created by his upbringing.  The Bible says that he was an honorable man.  In fact, it says that he was more honorable than the rest of his family.  But why was that?
We find Jabez buried in a long list of genealogies, so and so was the father of so and so, and so and so was the father of so and so, and it seems like it goes on forever.  In fact, this list goes on for 9 chapters in the book of I Chronicles.  You are so bored by the time you reach Jabez that you almost skip right over him.  But he is there like a shining star in this long list of anonymous characters.  It is significant that what Jabez is remembered for is not some outstanding achievement in life, but a prayer.  He did not win a great battle or erect a great building.  He simply prayed a short prayer.  But out of all the people in this 9 chapter list of characters, he alone is lifted out because of the prayer that he prayed.

So what is so unusual about this prayer, and why have people been talking about it and writhing books about it for centuries?  Let’s look at the prayer piece by piece in order to discover why God was pleased enough with his prayer to have it forever recorded in scripture.  His prayer was in four parts: 1) He prayed that God would bless him.  2) He prayed that God would enlarge his territory, or his borders.  3) He prayed that God’s hand would be upon him.  And 4) He prayed that God would keep him from evil.

The first point we will consider is this: Jabez Prayed For God To Bless Him.

He sought God’s blessing on his life.  He was not worried about being selfish, he wanted God’s best and believed that God wanted to give it to him.  He remembered his ancestor Abraham, when the Lord said to him in Genesis 12:2, “…I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing…”  Jabez sought the blessing of God that he might be a blessing to the world.

The Bible tells us that our whole reason for existence is to be a blessing to God and a blessing to the world.  That’s it.  You are not here for you.  You are not here for a career.  You are not even here for your spouse and family.  The world does not revolve around you.  Your whole purpose for existence is to be a blessing to the world.

Now there is nothing wrong with praying for God to bless you, if it is for the purpose of being a blessing.  It is not wrong to pray for wealth, if you are wanting to bless people with your material blessings.  If you want to have more so that you can give more, then that is an acceptable prayer.  If you want to be able to give more to missions or an outreach program so that people will come to know Christ, then by all means pray for material prosperity.  If you want wisdom so that you can help other people then pray for wisdom, for the Bible tells us in James 1:5 that, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”

But if you just want more wealth in order to spend it on yourself, your prayer will probably not be answered by God.  If you want wisdom so that you can feel smarter than other people, then chances are, your prayer will not be answered by God.  If you want success, or you want to be a leader, so that you can lord it over others, your prayer will not be answered by God.  But if you want to serve others with more talents and resources, then pray for those things in order that your life may be a blessing to God and to others.

Jabez also remembered his ancestor Jacob who wrestled with God.  When God told him to release him, in Genesis 32:26, Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”  And from that point on Jacob entered the promise land and prospered so that his descendants blessed the whole world with unbelievable spiritual blessings.  Through Jacob and his offspring, God’s Messiah came into the world.  God wants to bless us, but we have to want the blessing.  We need to wrestle with God and not let go until He blesses us.  But again, it has to be for the right reasons.

The problem is that apathy has gripped us so much that we don’t seek God’s blessing anymore.  We have so much already.  Our plates are so full.  Besides, we are too busy to be blessed with anything else.  Blessing means responsibility.  Serving God by serving people takes time.  If God gives me more, I have to do more, and I just want to relax.

You can spend a whole year and you can go through the entire Bible.  But all of that does no good unless you are using what you have learned.  If it is not creating a new passion within you to know God better and serve Him more effectively, then it has not done its work.  If you are not closer to God this year than you were at the beginning of last year, then somehow you have missed the blessing.  You need to pray that God would bless you and bring a new fire in your soul; a new passion for God; a new zeal for serving Him; a new desire to have your life be a blessing to the world.

The most accurate sign that you are a growing Christian is that there is within you a growing desire to have your life be used by God.  The thing that irritates me the most about our current culture is our preoccupation with ourselves.  It is all about us.  We want more, and we want it faster, better, and cheaper.  Our lives become shallow and self-centered when we are worried about how we look, what we have, and who might have more.  So many people never have a purpose larger than themselves.  This is why Jabez prayed the second part of his prayer.

Jabez Prayed That God Would Enlarge His Territory.

Jabez was from the tribe of Judah, which was the ruling class among the Hebrews.  To increase his territory meant that his people would have more area to live in and that he would have more people to serve as a leader to.  He was not thinking of himself, he was thinking about the welfare of others.  A leader is a servant of other people.  Jabez wanted to be used by God more than anything else.  My question for you is this: Is that your prayer and desire?  Is there a longing, a passion inside of you, to be used by God no matter what it takes?  Are you living only for yourself at this time, or are you wanting God to use your life in this world?  Do you want to be blessed by God to be a blessing?

If so, then pray for God to enlarge your life and your area of influence.  Ask Him for something so big that you cannot possibly do it by yourself.  Ask Him to enlarge your territory.  Pray that He would give you a new responsibility or a new ministry that you can do to serve Him and to serve others.
You know, as I think about one day being a father, not only do I pray that my kids don’t turn out like me or Nellie, I pray that God would give them spiritual gifts in order that they might be used by Him in this world.  I pray that they would have a passion for serving God and that He would give them the necessary tools to serve Him.

But guess what, I am also praying that prayer for you all.  I do not want this church to be a country club with a steeple on top.  I want us to be God’s people, being used by Him in a world that needs Him desperately.  I want us to live for more than ourselves and our own interests.  I pray that our lives would be used up in serving God by serving the needs of others.  I want to be a part, and I want this church to be a part of what God wants to do in this world.

In a time of great discouragement, God spoke through the prophet Isaiah and said in Isaiah 54:2, “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes.”  Well, I believe that God wants you to see beyond the circumstances.  He wants to enlarge your life if you will join Him by praying for and believing in His blessings.

The third thing to consider is this, Jabez Prayed For God’s Hand To Be Upon Him.

Jabez knew that what he was praying for was bigger than what he could accomplish by himself.  He was praying for something so big that only the hand of God on his life could accomplish it.
What would you pray for if you knew that you could not fail?  What is God speaking to you about which you have been ignoring?  What have you dreamed about, but dismissed because you thought it was an impossible dream?  I encourage you to begin to pray for the hand of God to be upon your life so that you can accomplish something great for Him.  Hopefully, it will be something so great that when it comes to pass, you and everyone else will have to say, “This had to be the hand of God, because there is no way I could have done this on my own!”

But the final part of Jabez’s prayer is the most important.  We need to consider the fourth part of his prayer.  Jabez Prayed That God Would Keep Him From Evil.

Now the NIV translation misses the point here I believe when it says, “Keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.”  The New King James puts it like this: “Keep me from evil that I might not cause pain.”  It is actually a play on words.  His name meant pain.  He had caused pain, but he did not want to cause any more pain.  He wanted his life to be a blessing.  He wanted to be protected from the harm of evil, but he also wanted to be kept from sinning, because he knew that sin causes pain.  It brings pain into the world.  It brings pain into the life of the one who commits it.  And it brings pain into the lives of those whom the sin was committed against.  But most of all, sin causes God pain.

Do you remember what the world was like just prior to the flood in Noah’s day?  The Bible says that, “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”  Then it says, “The Lord was grieved that He had made man on the earth, and His heart was filled with PAIN.” (Genesis 6:5-6).

You see, sin brings pain to the heart of God.  If you don’t believe that, you need to take another look at the cross.  We miss the pain of God and the pain of the cross.  We wear the cross as jewelry.  But the cross was an instrument of torture.  Sin caused God real pain.

And if you think you can get by with sin without there being pain in your own personal life, you are mistaken.  It will be like a disease eating its way through your life.  It will strip you of God’s blessings and destroy your effectiveness.  It will tear apart your relationships and leave you very alone.  It will leave you beaten, and it will alienate you from God.  Pray that you will be kept from evil and from the pain it inflicts.  Because if you do, you will experience the blessings of God and feel His hand upon your life.

God is in the blessing business, for He says to us in Isaiah 43:1-3, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.  For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”

Take hold of the promises of God and do something great for Him.  Go ahead and ask Him for the moon, and He will give you the sun and the stars as well.  You see, God wants to bless us.  Sometimes I think we forge that God is a loving God and that He desires to bless us.  So, God wants to bless us, all He is waiting for is for us to want Him to bless us and for us to ask Him to bless us.  Remember this though, we need to ask God to bless us so that we can be a blessing to both Him and to others.

Jabez prayed that God would bless him, that God would enlarge his territory, that God’s hand would be upon him, and that God would keep him from evil.  These were not blessings that Jabez wanted just for himself, they were blessings that were going to benefit others as well.  When we pray for God to bless us, it needs to be so that we can return the blessing to Him and to others as well.

Let’s Pray!