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The Curious Prayer of Jabez:
An Incantation, A Mantra, A Means of Grace?
Mark A. Lamport, PhD
Professor of Educational Ministries
Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary
"Oh, that you would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, and that you would keep me from evil.",
Just twenty-six words from the Bible. Bruce Wilkinson extracted this brief passage from First Chronicles, now increasingly known among American Christians as "the prayer of Jabez", and wrote a book about the spiritual importance of this prayer. His treatise on this petition to God has since sparked controversy in many Christian circles.
In The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Though to the Blessed Life, Wilkinson claims that this prayer is the key to finding favor with God. Some have rushed to buy the book and begun repeating the mantra so they too can tap into Wilkinson’s discovery.
Much of the fascination with Jabez can be attributed to the American cultural spirit embedded in the prayer—with its emphasis on personal blessing and expediency. We are an extremely pragmatic people, and here is a five-second prayer seemingly guaranteed to work. Just too tempting to pass up. The prayer is seen as a way to get things. As one of my colleague says, "the Jabez prayer is like a sort of ‘spiritual quarter’ that can be placed in the ‘celestial vending machine’."
But the obscurity of this one-sentence plea found in First Chronicles is best balanced by the whole of scriptural teaching on prayer, and Jesus' own model of petition as recorded in the so-called Lord's Prayer. Yes, we are told to ask; yes, we are told to expect and have faith. But no, we are not promised a life of abundant reward, except in the spiritual realm.
The normal Christian life is not, as Wilkerson would have us believe, marked by a life of continuous miracles, again, except in our spiritual nature. The issue that makes many Christians react strongly (for or against) to a book like this is that it seeks to address a fundamental question: "What is the essence of a normal Christian life?" With each new theological fad we ask ourselves if we are missing out on some hidden Christian mystery that others have tapped into and that has escaped us.
There is only one thing that is easy when humans encounter the spiritual realm--the reception of God's free gift of salvation found in Jesus Christ. Advancements in our spiritual condition usually come with slow progress, and often great anguish. Promises offering simple cookie-cutter steps to joyful Christian living are just the kind of things shallow-thinking 21st century believers are prone to buy into--something concrete and manageable, something we can control and do in our spare time.
Christianity is hardly a "how-to" proposition, yet that does not stop many from reconfiguring it so. (Have you seen the televangelist-version of Christianity lately?) Any effort to tame the radical Christianity Jesus introduced and transmute it into Caucasian-American, middle-class drivel makes me squirm; it conjures my most vigilant efforts to silence it, even rail against it.
Patented formulas and follow-the-recipe-incantations guaranteed to deepen our Christian lives seem to titillate to the extent that current mystical talk-show host Jonathan Edward does--the widely admired spiritual medium who claims to receive messages from the dead. But the-three-easy-steps-to-blessing-Christianity actually lessens what God really wants from his followers--an increasingly reckless level of pure faith, a faith that the author to the Hebrews says may seem irrational and will certainly have no empirical evidence for believing, but is nevertheless a faith that may be certain because of God, and God alone.
Underneath the possibly ambiguous terms and seemingly grandiose claims is not heretical Bible teaching. Perhaps there is sloppy language. There are images presented that may seem out of place with for those with button-down evangelical or fundamentalist upbringings. But then again, maybe we should launch a vigorous campaign pleading with God to show Himself in atypical ways. Perhaps we should be bolder in our visions to serve Him in this perverse and corrupt generation. Perhaps we should move a lot closer to the edge in serving God and act in reckless abandon. This is after all is at the very nature of the theological concept of faith.
A follow-up book by Wilkerson was released soon after Jabez, as is routine marketing strategy for publishers, it is called Secrets of the Vine: Breaking Through to Abundance. Two words grip my attention in this title--secrets and abundance. Secrets seems to imply that by reading this book the normal Christian will uncover a "deeper life" and facilitate an immediate quantum jump in one's relationship with God. Abundance makes me think of the prevalence of "the health and wealth gospel" which mistakenly and tragically offers physical and financial reward merely because of one's Christian status in this world.
No such promise is made in the Bible; only spiritual reward is promised. Any junk-food diet of results-oriented pabulum which masquerades in the name of Christianity reduces the abstract nature of the gospel to a manipulative, more palatable version. Now, to be fair Wilkinson, I do not believe he is advocating a "prosperity gospel" but I can see how some could infer such from his phraseology.
Further, I can see why some Christians could misunderstand this little book. It is intended as a simple devotional-type book and not a theological treatise. Wilkerson's ideas are often presented in analogous terms that leave the possibility of wide range of interpretation by the reader.
God does delight in hearing from His children and acting upon their petitions. He is benevolent; he is sympathetic; he is not deaf. But neither is God our handmaiden necessarily beholden to respond to our requests. I do not pretend to know why things unfold in our world the way they do and why God does not seem to intervene as often as we would wish in the evilness of our day. I defy anyone to give an explanation why hate-mongers engineer and pull-off New York and Washington bombings. Was God there? Of course. Is He here? To be sure. As Francis Schaeffer penned in the title of his important book--"He is there and He is not silent." And although I believe that God is sovereign, I cannot neatly define nor describe its manifestations. Understanding the acts of God in our world is not programmable and not easily given to explanation. Beware the one that can.
The fact is, save the Bible, spiritual growth does not come from reading books or attending conferences. Increasing faithfulness to God and a more deeply held friendship with God comes incrementally, over time, in barely discernible ways, and in virtually immeasurable terms.
Another possible side effect of those believers who take Wilkerson's suggestion and constantly ask for increasingly bigger blessings and "enlarged borders" is that disappointment with God may hit from the lack of apparent results. And when results do not come, some in the Christian camps say it is because of our lack of faith that caused this disappointment. If God is merely waiting to award us more blessing than we can imagine, as Wilkerson says, and we do not give them, then we are the ones preventing the blessings on ourselves. And so we will work harder and prayer more fervently and still the things we prayed for may not come. Disillusionment is bound to show itself.
For those looking for insights into the Christian life and developing an ever-increasing faith in God, rather than the words of this little-known Old Testament Jabez, I would recommend thinking-Christians to wrestle with the profound writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (The Cost of Discipleship, Letters from Prison), A. W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy, The Pursuit of God) and C. S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain).
I have been in Bruce Wilkerson's home in suburban Atlanta and find him to be a genuine person of God, a man of deep prayer and firm biblical conviction. Wilkerson is the founder of Walk Thru the Bible, a very helpful means of familiarizing people with the main themes, key words and most important people in the Old and New Testaments.
Hopefully, this little book can do more good than potential harm. If the book can energize believers to pray more fervently for the advancement of God's kingdom and their increasingly faithful role in it, then God bless it. If the book unwittingly steers weak believers down the precarious path of formulaic attempts at developing a deeper spirit-life, or worse, convinces some that God will automatically pour out bucketfuls of blessing if they only ask, then may God save us from ourselves. I am more optimistic about the former proposition than the latter.
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