The Prayer of Jabez

Well, a while back when Kerry asked me to preach, he told me that he was going to ask Bill, Winfield, and Jack, and myself. I'm like, man, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're looking for me. But it's an honor to be here. I prayed about this a lot, what I was supposed to preach about. Okay, I'll remember that. I began praying about it, and one thing that's very important in my life with God and my relationship with Jesus is prayer. And God was impressing on me to speak about the prayer of Jabez.

We'll get into that here in just a minute, but prayer for me started at a very young age. I was raised in a Lutheran church, and it was a lot of things that I didn't hear about until, or didn't realize until after I met Jesus, years after I got out of the Lutheran church. And I'm not talking bad about Lutheran churches at all. I'm very thankful the way I was raised. But at a very young age, my granny told me that I needed to pray. And I don't know, I was probably maybe four or five years old, what I can remember, and I remember this one prayer. Every time I'd go see my granny and stay the night with her before bedtime, she says, okay, you need to pray.

So she'd make me fold my hands on the side of the bed, and I remember praying this, God, please protect mom and daddy, granny and granddaddy, and protect all the dogs and the cats and the chickens, amen. That was my prayer. When we would gather for our family meals every day, whether it was breakfast, lunch, or supper, before we took a bite out of any of the food, we sat there and folded our hands, come Lord Jesus, be our guest, let this food to us be blessed, amen. We're inviting the Lord to be our guest. In later years, I got to thinking, I don't want him to just be a guest while I'm eating. I want him with me all the time, you know. So prayer is very important to me.

So I'm going to start off, why do you pray? These are questions. When do you pray? Who do you pray for? And what do you pray for? And guys, my eyes, there's dust in the air from yesterday, so don't worry about that. Anyway, but those are the who, what, when, where, and why of prayer.

Why do you? Who do you? When do you?

And what do you? Webster's Dictionary says, Prayer is an address or a petition to God or a God in word or thought.

Prayers come in all forms. There are long prayers, there are short prayers, prayers that are very specific, and prayers that you have no idea where the people that are praying are going with them. Believe me, I've prayed some of them myself, you know. There's one particular prayer today that I want to talk about.

It's found in 1 Chronicles chapter 4. It is a prayer that was prayed by a man named Jabez. Maybe some of you know about that, some of you read it, studied it, and maybe you haven't. It hadn't been too many years ago that I first heard about it. I didn't ever really study the Old Testament too much and didn't realize that was in there. But it's about this guy that he pops up and says a short prayer, and then you really never hear much about him after that.

So 1 Chronicles 4, 9 through 10. There was a man named Jabez who was more honorable than any of his brothers. His mother named him Jabez because he had been at birth, he was so painful. He was the one who prayed to the God of Israel, Oh that you would bless me and expand my territory. Please be with me in all that I do and keep me from all the trouble and pain. And God granted him his request. So what do we know about this Jabez fellow?

Here's a little bit about what I learned about him. He was a member of the honored nation of Israel. He was a worshiper of the one and only true God, the God of Israel. Not a God of any pagan nation. His birth was associated with a peculiar and unusual pain and sorrow. He was named by his mother, not his father. He was named that due to the terrible pain.

In the Hebrew, it's pronounced Yabet. It means pain or sorrow. He was more honorable than his brothers. He was a man of prayer. He was an ambitious man. He desired more territory, influence, and greater responsibility. Now that I know a little bit about him, let's look at his prayer.

There's four things that he prayed, and they are very specific. And I want to look at each one of those today as we go along. You see, I believe God wants us to take our prayers to new levels. So the first one he had was, Bless me, Lord, number one. You see, Jabez asked God for a blessing. What is a blessing? To bless in the biblical sense means to ask for or impart supernatural favor.

So what are we asking for? So what we are asking for is the wonderful unlimited goodness that only God can give us. Proverbs 10.22 says, The blessing of the Lord makes a person rich, and he adds no sorrow with it. So what Jabez was asking for and what we should be asking for is wanting for ourselves nothing more and nothing less than what God wants for us. Sometimes that's hard to understand. There may be times I want more than for what Brian wants, not what God wants. But I've learned to turn loose and say, God, I want what you want for me.

You see, when we seek God's blessing as the ultimate value in our life, we are throwing ourselves entirely into the river of His will and the power and purpose for us. All our other needs should become secondary to what we really want, which is to become wholly immersed in what God is trying to do in us and through us and around us for His glory. When we sincerely seek His blessings, our life will become marked by miracles. I want you to remember that. Think about, have you seen any miracles in your life? Have you prayed for something and it's really happened? Our life becomes marked by those miracles.

I've seen a lot of miracles. We get out of the way and let God do what only He can do, and we pray for exactly what God desires, those miracles will happen. You see, Jabez's name meant pain. And back then, the meaning of a name meant a lot, and you carried that name with you throughout your life, wherever you went. Your name represented who you are. But you see, Jabez knew God had more for him than just pain. He wanted God to bless him in spite of what his name meant.

He had the faith and knew God would bless him if he just asked. He had the faith. What's our faith like? Do we pray a prayer saying it's almost like you're begging God and then, well, if it happens, it happens, you know? Well, no, speak that life into it. Speak that truth. James 4.2 says, You want what you don't have, so you scheme and kill to get it.

You are jealous of what others have, but you can't get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don't have what you want because you don't ask God for it. It goes back to that faith. If you have faith in God, why not rely on Him? Ask Him for what you want. He knows your wants. He knows your needs.

The only way that we will ever experience all that God has for us is by asking Him to bless us. Think about all the blessings that we may miss out on because we didn't ask for them. We need to ask every day for God to bless us. He loves us and wants to bless us. But we must live for Him. The second point that Jabez prayed was, Enlarge my territory. Here's a question that we must ask ourselves.

Am I thinking too small for what God wants to do in my life? You know, I used to didn't think God could do much for me. I lived a rebellious hellion life for a lot of years. Got to the point where I tried to take my life one night because I was done. But God had something. When Jabez prayed to enlarge his territory, he was thinking more than just land. He was probably thinking about the influences in his life.

The will that God wanted him to do. Jabez wanted God to give him more opportunities than just the plot of land that he had inherited. And just like Jabez, we should all want that God has for us. Your territory could look a lot different than the person sitting next to you. You could ask God to give you favor in key relationships. You could ask for favor to enlarge your business relationships. You could ask God to enlarge and to be able to minister to those that come in contact with you through your business or your work or whatever.

That happens to me a lot. There's people walk in my office a lot of times and sit down just to talk. And we get started talking about God and sharing the love of Jesus with them. Lots of opportunities. And you wouldn't realize that happens in an old diesel truck repair shop, but it does. I ask God a lot in prayer to give me the opportunities and to be a blessing to others that I meet. I was sharing with Winfield a while ago.

The other morning I stopped at Sonic to give me a sausage and egg sandwich. And the young man that brought it out to me, I don't know what come over me, but I just asked him.

I said, you know Jesus? And he's like, well, my girlfriend is a believer, but I'm not real sure about any of that. And I got to share a few minutes with him and told him God is real and he needs you and he wants you. I look forward to going back and visit with him some more. But there's an opportunity that you could open the door for somebody that may be lost and get to help them see Jesus. I give God the glory for these blessings. It doesn't matter what our gifts and abilities are.

Our calling is to do God's work on earth. And when we begin asking for more influence and responsibility with which to honor him, God will bring those opportunities and those people into your path. There's a lot of you that got in here this morning that God crossed our paths at different times. And I'm so very thankful and blessed for that. You can trust that God will never send someone to you whom you cannot help by leading in strength. God always intervenes when you put his agenda before yours and go for it. Ooh, sometimes that's tough.

Put his agenda before mine? Yeah. But if you do that, man, it's amazing. If you pray for God to expand your borders, you will recognize his divine answer. And then you will have that front row seat in a life of miracles. There it is again. The third point is, let your hand be with me.

Jabez prayed, let your hand be with me. We have all heard the term, the hand of God or the hand of the Lord. This is a biblical term for God's power and presence in the lives of his people. In Joshua 4.24, it says, he did this so all the nations of the earth might know the Lord's hand is powerful. And so you might fear the Lord your God forever. Isaiah 59.1 says, listen, the Lord's arm is not too weak to save you, nor is his ear too deaf to hear your call. In Acts, we read the success of the church was because of the hand of God.

Acts 11.21 says, the power of the Lord was with them and a large number of these Gentiles believed and turned to the Lord. Jabez was certain that God's hand was upon him and it was necessary for blessing that he couldn't imagine and life of honor without it. 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 the availability of the hand of God to accomplish his business, God's business. God is watching and waiting for you to ask for the supernatural power he offers us. We should pray every day for God's hand to be upon us. With God's hand, there is a move of the Holy Spirit working through and in our lives.

We know the power is associated with the Holy Spirit. Man, I'll tell you, when you get in, when the Holy Spirit comes over you, and I was sharing with Carrie earlier, the Lutheran church I raised in, it was never referred to as the Holy Spirit, it was referred to as the Holy Ghost. But they didn't teach much out of the book of Acts, so I didn't really know much about the Holy Ghost. I just knew as a child that I was supposed to be scared of ghosts because they were scary, but yet there was a cartoon on TV called Casper the Friendly Ghost, so when they referred to the Holy Ghost, that's the first thing I thought of was the friendly ghost, and he is. Holy Ghost is friendly. Holy Ghost loves you. When you start receiving what Holy Ghost has for you, wow, makes me crazy.

Y'all seen me get crazy before. In Acts 1.8, it tells us that you will receive the power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere, in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, everywhere. We can tell them about Jesus. You see, there is power in the hand of God. We need God's power working through us so we can do His will. The fourth point is keep me from harm. You would think after everything Jabez prayed so far that he would be through, but he wasn't.

He had one more request. His request was for God to keep him from harm. You see, when we ask for God's hand to be with us, we're praying for supernatural power to work through our weakness. In asking God to keep us from harm, we are asking for supernatural help to protect us from Satan's proven ability to make us lose. Satan wants us to lose. God wants us to win, and all we've got to do is ask for God's help, and it's there. We have the power of victory over Satan.

Success brings with it greater opportunities for failure. Success brings with it greater opportunities for failure. You see, as God continues to work in your life, the more you can expect to be under attack from the enemy because the enemy doesn't want none of that. If there ever was a time that you're not under attack, then that would be a time to be concerned. That would mean Satan isn't concerned with you anymore. You're no longer a threat to him, and that's the way I was for a lot of years with him. I walked with Satan instead of God.

I wasn't a threat to him, but he allowed me all the ungodly things that I could imagine until it came time. Satan wanted my life, and I almost gave it to him. You and I are redeemed and commissioned for the front lines. That's why it's important that we pray to keep us from harm. We need God's protection working in us so that we can continue to do his will. We are in the battle for the Lord, and we must continue to fight to be who he wants us and who he has called us to be. The best way to avoid sin is to avoid temptation, and that is why we need to pray that God would keep us from harm.

In the prayer that Jesus taught in Matthew 6 13, he said, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Through Christ, we can declare victory over the enemy. That is why we need to declare every day, God keep me from harm. It is through Christ that we can live in triumph, not in temptation or defeat. And to me, it's pretty cool in the last sentence of verse 10 that it says, and God granted his request. We read in verse 9 that Jabez was more honorable than his brothers. Do you think that God liked Jabez more than his brothers?

I don't believe so. I don't think so. But I know one thing, Jabez asked of God, and I believe that God favors those who ask. He holds back nothing from those who want and earnestly long for what he wants. In the last few years, that's been one of my main prayers every night. I ask God, and I tell him that I want more of him. I want to be more like Jesus every day.

I want everything he has for me, and I pray for that. And I pray that others will see him through me. I pray that he will put those people in my life that need to know him. And he's done that a lot. I want to share with you a couple of miracles and a testimony of my own, but first, I want to tell you about a few years ago, my mom was still alive. She lived up at Farwell. My little brother called me one day, and he said, he said, I'm taking my mom to Freona, to the hospital, and they're putting her on a helicopter to Amarillo.

She's had a heart attack, and I don't know how bad it is, but they're life-flighting her to Amarillo. So I get in the pickup, and I take off from Lubbock, and I'm headed north to Amarillo. And I'm praying. I knew, I was a pretty new Christian at that time, but I knew I needed to pray. So I love to pray in the pickup when I'm at that good prayer time, but I'm praying, you know. And I get up there about crests, and the Lord actually, like I heard his audible voice say, you need to read James 5.16. And I kept praying as I was driving, and I heard it again.

He said, read James 5.16. So I pulled over on the side of the road, grabbed my Bible sitting over there in the passenger seat, and I opened it up. And I read James 5.16, and it says, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. I read that two or three times, and then took off driving again. And I got to thinking about that, and I said, man, what's he trying to tell me?

Who else is praying for my mom? Because it says the earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.

So I began questioning God. I said, God, who else is praying for mom that knows about this? Because that says a prayer of a righteous person, and God, I'm not righteous. I know my sin. Who is this righteous person that's praying? And he told me, he said, the blood that was shed on that cross by my son, because of that blood, I see you as righteous. You are the righteous person.

And he was hearing my prayers. And yes, he granted them. Mom was okay. She got to go back home and live a few more years.

Praise God for that. There was another time.

New Year's Day, 2008. I was sitting at the house, not doing anything, just relaxing. I got up out of my chair to go get me a glass of water. And I stood up, and I started walking to the kitchen, and this pain hit me in my heart so terrible bad. I couldn't breathe. I didn't know what was going on. I realized I was probably having a heart attack.

Instead of being smart and calling an ambulance, you know, like you should have done, I'm there by myself. I called my son. He was in Abernathy. I called him. He drove from Abernathy to my house, picked me up, carried me out to the heart hospital. We get to the ER out there, and he tells them, you know, I got my pops out here, and I think he's having a heart attack. They come out and put me on a bed at the heart hospital.

So they called an ambulance and loaded me in an ambulance and carried me to Covenant. I'm in Covenant, get in there in the emergency room. They start doing all the same tests they did at the heart hospital, and they say, oh yeah, you're having a heart attack. Okay. So what are y'all going to do about it, you know? So I'm laying in this bed, and they're trying to decide this was New Year's Day. There wasn't a lot of doctors around, I don't guess, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do.

And how in the world Royce Regan heard I was in the hospital, I have no idea, but Royce came in there, and he laid hands on me and prayed for me and healed me right there. My mom was sitting over there in the other chair. She's a hard Lutheran, never had the Holy Ghost. Royce laid hands on her, and she laid out on the floor. I'm like, wow, this is pretty cool. You see, he laid hands on me through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Here's a miracle. There's nothing wrong with my heart. Nowhere. They didn't have to do anything, and it's in better shape now than it's ever been in my life.

But you got to believe. You got to believe. One more, and then I'll let y'all go today. I was shop foreman at West Texas Square Road, that area down there.

He'd brought his truck in. He would bring it in to get it worked on. He hauled cattle up here, the panhandle a lot. He and I got to be pretty good friends. He was probably 24 years old at the time, maybe, young guy, but he and I got to be pretty good buds. In March of 99, his mom also drove a cattle truck, and they would haul a lot from South Texas to the panhandle, maybe up into Kansas at times. She called me one morning at work, and she said, Brian, Kevin had unloaded at a little old town up here in the panhandle.

I can't even think of it now. He'd unloaded cattle this morning, and he was hurting really, really bad, and they carried him to a little local clinic, and they said they couldn't handle him there. They were taking him to Amarillo. She said, Would you just pray for him? I said, Sure. She was leaving South Texas, headed to the panhandle as well. She got about halfway up, and she said, Brian, it's not looking good.

They got him into Amarillo, and he has a kidney stone. That was the pain and terrible pain he was having. They realized they were going to need to go in and see if they could do something with that stone. Kevin had never been under anesthesia in his life. They put him under anesthesia, and he was allergic to it. His body temperature hit 107 degrees in a matter of seconds. He was on the operating table when that happened, and he kicked himself off of the operating table.

He went into convulsions and busted the back of his head open. They got him into a bed and put him on a bed of ice to try to pull his temperature down. When she called and told me that he was in ICU and to keep praying because it didn't look good at all. She was halfway to Amarillo then. So I finished out the day at work praying. And then I left work that afternoon and I drove to Amarillo, and by then she was there and Kevin's wife was there as well. Bear in mind that Kevin and his wife hadn't been married but a couple of years, and they had just lost their baby at birth about three months prior to this.

And that was pretty hard for Kevin because he nearly lost his wife in the hospital, but they lost the baby, and so he buried his baby daughter by himself. So he'd been through that, and now this was happening. So I get to the hospital that evening and his mom and his wife was there, and I said, where's Kevin at? And they said, well, he's back in ICU. They've got him all, you know, tubes and things all over him. They can't get his body to respond to any kind of pain or anything. The doctor's telling us that he may have like a 10% chance to live, and if he does live, he'll be a vegetable all his life and there would be no chance of ever having any children of any kind.

But it was all bleak, and I looked at his mom and his wife and I said, I don't believe that. I said, I want to go see him. Well, he's in ICU and you can't go but certain times of the day, and I said, no, I'm going to see him. So I went through the doors and walked into that room where he was at in ICU, and there was a nurse in there monitoring him, and she said, who are you? And I said, I'm a friend of Kevin's, and I come to see him. And before she could say anything, I reached down and grabbed his right hand like I was going to shake his hand, and I said, Kevin, what are you doing here? His left eye opened, and the nurse got all excited, and she called the doctor in there.

The doctor came in and said, what's going on? And she said, his left eye opened, and he's like, what? They'd been trying to get him to respond to anything and he wouldn't.

What'd you do? And I said, I've done this, and I grabbed his hand again, and I said, Kevin, what are you doing here? And his left eye opened again. And I began to pray over him. Five days later, Kevin walked out of that hospital. They had told him he'd be a vegetable all his life. They told him he would never father a child.

He walked out of that hospital. The only thing that you can tell if you even knew it this day is by that little scar on the back of his head. If you didn't know what that was from, you would have no idea there was ever anything wrong with him. Not only that, but a year and a half ago, his daughter graduated Texas Tech. Praise God. I asked Kevin yesterday, I called him, I said, is it all right if I share part of your testimony? He said, please do.

He said, I wish I was there. Kevin is actually in South Florida today. Yesterday, a cousin of his got married, and him and his wife are down there at the wedding. Today is Kevin's birthday. He's 52 years old today. But through that, Kevin didn't know the Lord back then. In 2007, I got to sponsor him and my son and my best friend, all three, on a walk to Emmaus.

Those three guys never had met each other, but I got to sponsor them all three on a walk to Emmaus at the same time. And they're friends. And then in April 20, 2008, Kevin and I got baptized together. I got to show him the Lord. So you never know who God's going to put in your life and for what reason. But the miracles, you see, they spoke that over him, that death. They spoke that he would be a vegetable.

I rebuked that. I knew that wasn't right. I spoke life over him. What power do you have with Holy Spirit? Get you a dose of the ghost and let's go with it. I love you guys. Thank y'all for hearing me today.