PRAYING LIKE JABEZ (4)

1. Praying Like Jabez

a) Oh that you would give me increasing abundance, expanded influence, spiritual anointing, and
supernatural protection. (1 Chronicles 4:10)

b) It is evident that God was the first option of Jabez, not his last resort. His reverence for God was demonstrated in his humbling himself before God. His will was totally yielded to God for his glory. Jabez would say that his competence and sufficiency came from God. It is obvious that his delight was in God and his abiding place was in God. He hungered to know the nearness of God. The ultimate blessing was God’s gifts of abundance, influence, anointing, and protection that Jabez enjoyed in knowing Him.

c) Prayer

i) I don’t want to make plans and ask You to bless them, because You chose me and appointed me that I should respond to Your bidding (John 15:16). Instead, fill my vision with Yourself and beckon me where You are truly in Your plans to redeem the time.

ii) Enlarge Your harvest through the seeds of my life sown in the ground to die (John 12:24-25). I await Your manifestation and timing, confident that the righteous yield of Your Spirit has its times and seasons of greatest “ripeness” which You have marked out for me

iii) Let me be not even a breath away from You, my whole life directed toward Your person and Your presence. You have numbered the very hairs of my head (Matthew 10:30). How foolish I would be to let go of Your hand and run my separate way, ahead of You, much less away from You!

iv) Guard my heart, and set a watch over the door of my lips (Psalm 141:3, Isaiah 6:5-7). You have established around me the blood shield of the perfect Sacrifice which has neutralized all the hurt of hell assigned against me.

v) And God answered his request. It is Your greatest delight to give me unveiled openness before You (Isaiah 58:9a), as I abide in You and behold You as You are, not my religious caricature of You, and as I mirror the character of Your Son (2 Corinthians 3:18).