Total Mileage: 2,218
Song of the Day:"Greystone Chapel" (Johnny Cash)
Book of the Day: The Prayer of Jabez (Bruce Wilkinson)
I already know that after a summer of travel and reflection and meditation, I will probably have much more to say on the subject of prayer, but I’ve been thinking about it a good bit lately. In particular, there was an incident this past year where, in a facebook post, someone I know from Duke made a disparaging comment about a contemporary theologian, comparing him to The Prayer of Jabez. My own reaction to the post was a visceral cringe, and I realized that the Prayer of Jabez reference conjured up some pretty bad memories for me. I promised myself that, when I got back to Memphis, I would give that book a second look and see if my negative association was really merited. I know what you’re thinking: “Why would you wait until getting back to Memphis?” To use my parents’ copy of course! I have paid for books with which I disagree in the past, but I still try to avoid paying for a book that I only plan to read once. On to business though . . .
The prayer of faith will save the sick . . . (James 5:15a)
Of all the things about Christianity that took a little getting used to again following my brief flirtation with agnosticism in college, prayer was one of the hardest to wrap my mind around. I fully understand the idea of taking quiet moments to commune with God, to pray for guidance or patience or comfort. Where I struggle is with prayer requests, particularly with the idea of somehow putting God in a headlock and demanding something. Even now, when participating in public intercessory prayer, I find myself saying things like, “Our hearts desire ________, but still let Your will be done, Lord, and lead us mercifully through whatever lies ahead. Actually, you know what? Just give us peace of mind, okay?” Some translations of the book of James tell us pointblank that our prayers can heal sick people, but aside from the fact that the Greek can be interpreted in pretty different ways, I had an experience early in my life that still makes me wonder if there is more at play here.
When I was seven years old, my sister passed away after a year-long struggle with a particularly virulent case of pneumonia. I was not really at an age where I could explore the theological ramifications of this event, and frankly, I don’t even remember all that much of it. Sometimes I wish I could remember more. Sometimes I’m grateful that I don’t. Regardless, even though I was too young to understand what was happening, as I grew up, I saw my family and my community continue to wrestle with how this could have happened on God’s watch when we were all praying so hard. My family is still eternally grateful to Dr. Joey Rosas, the pastor who stood by us through the process and had the guts to admit, “Honestly, I’m confused, and I’m hacked off, and I have a lot of questions for God.” My parents still talk about it, and I learned immensely by seeing the comfort that gesture brings them to this day. In that one display of genuine human sympathy, Joey Rosas taught me more about grief counseling than any classroom ever could, and I will never be able to thank him enough for his honesty and vulnerability in that moment of connectedness. He wasn’t the only one with questions though, and a lot of church members came up with a lot of possible answers to how this had happened:
“It was God’s will, and she’s in a better place now.”
“God answers our prayers in different ways-- sometimes ways we don’t like or understand.”
“Maybe we just didn’t pray hard enough.”
It’s that last one that really worries me. Yes, the first two are copouts, and Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking features a great story about a grieving mother who actually backhands a rookie pastor for saying them, but still, the last one is where the real heresy lies. It was a truly unsettling concept that we could pray incorrectly, and my family’s uneasiness was only amplified when, five years after my sister’s death, the world was introduced to the best-selling phenomenon: The Prayer of Jabez.
Jesus said to [the devil], “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matthew 4:7)
In middle school, word reached my ears of a magical prayer that God could not refuse. Church members and people at youth camps started telling me that there was a set prayer that would force God to grant all your wildest dreams. Promotion at work? No problem! Ace that test at school? No sweat! Resolve your marital issues? You got it! Help you quit smoking? Sure! All your problems could be answered with a simple one-sentence prayer from an obscure character in the book of 1 Chronicles. If you prayed this prayer and really meant it, God couldn’t say no! It was like you had God in a legally-binding contract, and now you could twist the Almighty’s arm to make absolutely anything happen! It worked for Jabez. It worked for the author. It could work for you! All you have to do is say the following prayer every morning:
And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying,
“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,
that I may not cause pain!”
So God granted him what he requested.
(1 Chronicles 4:10 NKJV)
Having read The Prayer of Jabez for myself now, I sincerely believe that this is not the main message of the book. While I do believe that Bruce Wilkinson’s theology of blessedness is a little suspect, and some of his illustrations did make me pretty uneasy, and his language of “challenging God” reminded me of Jesus’s words to Satan mentioned above, I don’t think Wilkinson intended for his book to turn God into Santa Claus. Just like the recent Love Wins controversy, the book’s content was actually far less inflammatory than the frenzied, fanatical, and fundamentalist led us to believe. In fact, I believe that the entire Jabez controversy can be attributed to a few readers’ inability to grasp what Wilkinson really means by the phrase “enlarge my territory.” When Wilkinson talks about territory, he’s not talking about spoils. He’s not talking about money. He’s not talking about wealth. He’s talking about asking God to expand the territory in which we minister, asking God to widen our influence and reach more people with the good news. The Prayer of Jabez isn’t really about materialism; it’s about evangelism. Wilkinson may be keeping a running tally of the souls he’s won (which I’m not totally okay with either), but that’s quite different from tallying the cars in your garage. Still, the book is not without its flaws.
And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:5-8)
Given how Jesus talks in the gospels, I can’t help but chuckle a little at the concept of a magic formula for prayer. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is very blunt about doing things humbly without presumption or fanfare or even expectation. He speaks sardonically about the proud “receiving their reward,” with the implication being that people who pray haughtily in public will be punished for it later. For a long time, I refused to pray in public at all after reading this verse for fear that a vocalized prayer would violate Jesus’s command. It took the intervention of a few spiritual mentors to get me comfortable with it again, and I still think back to the line about “heaping up empty phrases” when I hear people try to smuggle entire sermons into their prayers (something of which I have been guilty a few times as well). Jesus tells us to keep our prayers simple and honest and never to shout them out to get the world’s attention.
I feel like this is an area where Wilkinson set out to help people by providing a short simple prayer that you could memorize easily and say to yourself as needed to make your mind more receptive to God’s promptings, but after the book’s release, the readers’ response was to create a whole new complicated system of correct and incorrect prayer. I feel like the fault for this might lie in Wilkinson’s unfortunate choices of his examples. I understand an author’s desire to share success stories. I’m pretty much writing as a memoirist this summer, and I think it’s totally reasonable to want to share successes and celebrations with readers, but I know that there’s a limit. In Wilkinson’s case, his examples always strike me as being just a bit too magical, and I can’t help but wonder if his hindsight is wearing rose-colored glasses. Throughout the pages of Jabez, Wilkinson recounts incidents where he prayed the prayer and then suddenly had a chance to minister to someone. They would just fall into his lap right out of the blue. I don’t think Wilkinson would call me cynical for suggesting that there are always people around him who need help, and it’s not that the prayer so much made people magically appear as it just made Wilkinson more sensitive to his surroundings. This is not magic; it’s mental conditioning to act more Christlike, and it’s a wonderful thing-- it’s just been mislabeled as an undeniable prayer request.
Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. (Matthew 6:9-11)
In the second chapter of the book, Wilkinson makes a great point and then a very dubious one. Right off the bat, he tells his readers that God knows what is best for them, and that we have to trust God to deliver. Wow. That alone should derail Jabez enthusiasts who try to treat the prayer as a wish list. In fact, Wilkinson pretty much dispels that idea himself by saying,
“Notice a radical aspect of Jabez’s request for blessing: He left it entirely up to God to decide what the blessings would be and where, when, and how Jabez would receive them. This kind of radical trust in God’s good intentions toward us has nothing in common with the popular gospel that you should ask God for a Cadillac, a six-figure income, or some other material sign that you have found a way to cash in on your connection to Him. Instead, the Jabez blessing focuses like a laser on our wanting for ourselves nothing more and nothing less than what God wants for us.”
I like it! I like it a lot! Okay, I have my hesitations about the “laser” comment, but the overall spirit of this passage is that Christians ought not to be hung up on the material. We must trust that God will meet our needs and that God knows fully what those needs are. This also squares perfectly with a later section of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:19-21, where Jesus explicitly says not to bother storing up earthly treasures, and later still, in Matthew 6:25 and following, He says not to worry about our daily needs because the Lord will provide for us. Wilkinson is reiterating the Sermon on the Mount pretty perfectly at this point, but the problem comes on the very next page when Wilkinson launches into a parable.
In the parable, a man goes to Heaven and finds all the stockpiled blessings that were never shared with the world. When the man turns to Simon Peter and asks him how this could be, Peter informs him, “Well, you never asked for them.” This parable frustrated me considerably. I haven’t looked into the scriptural justification for it, but the notion of a God who stockpiles and hoards and withholds blessings just strikes me as a little offensive. Yes, I understand that Matthew 7:7-11 tells us that we can ask from God and receive, but that doesn’t mean that the reverse --don’t ask, and God will withhold-- is also true. I feel like the God that Wilkinson is painting here is awfully petty, and I don’t think the Lord withholds blessings in quite the way Wilkinson is suggesting. After all, doesn’t Jesus begin the Sermon on the Mount by saying, “Blessed are the poor. . . . Blessed are those who mourn. . . . Blessed are the meek. . . .” (Matthew 5:3-12) These are not blessings that must be requested; they flow freely out onto the world, and we rejoice at their arrival! John 3:17 tells us that Jesus was sent to save the world! 1 John 2:2 tells us the same thing! Romans 5 speaks of the great reconciliation which Christ offers us freely! Even though people are still given the choice to refuse the Lord’s blessing, ours is not a God who readily withholds grace. Grace and blessing are given freely because God’s storehouses are infinite, and the Lord knows when those blessings are needed in our lives. So no, I don’t believe that a blessing is withheld just because it is not requested.
Oof, started preaching for a second there. Where was I?
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. (Matthew 6:12-13)
Okay, I really liked what Wilkinson had to say on temptation and trial. He highlighted the fact that we so often ask for help through temptation, but why don’t people just avoid it entirely? If you’re going to pray regarding temptation, why not just go ahead and surrender yourself fully, and ask God to take it away? Sometimes, a desire to confront and overcome temptation really stems from our own pride in our perceived steadfastness, when maybe it’s better just to avoid a source of temptation entirely. Wilkinson suggests the following prayer:
“Lord, keep me safe from the pain and grief that sin brings. For the dangers that I can’t see, or the ones that I think I can risk because of my experience (pride and carelessness), put up a supernatural barrier. Protect me, Father, by your power!”
I think it’s a pretty good sentiment, and it helps hit home the theme of dependence on God that recurs throughout The Prayer of Jabez. Even though the book was used to justify people praying for personal prosperity, Jabez is actually very much about altering your mindset to be dependent on God. The objective is to help readers seek after God’s plan for their lives and pursue the call set before them. It is about asking God to help you develop an awareness of the world around you and the many needs it contains. The only “expansion of territory” in the book is really a request for God to make us aware of where we can serve, not what we can conquer and possess. It is a prayer that the Lord will use us to minister to the world’s needs, and that’s something I can get behind.
The Prayer of Jabez remains a mixed bag though. It bothers me that Wilkinson relies so much on personal examples and that he always seems to be the hero of his stories. It bothers me that Wilkinson paints the image of a God who hoards blessings and makes us say please to God. It bothers me that Wilkinson seems to be judging the worth of his ministry by his number of converts rather than simply trusting in God that he is going down the right path. These things are all very problematic, but they are not the crux of the book, and they are not worth getting hung up on. No, this book is about relinquishing your will and letting God work through you, and I regret that this isn’t the part of the book onto which so many people latched when it was first released. Jabez isn’t some magic prayer to cure all your woes, but a lot of people interpreted it that way. Maybe instead of looking for the one set of words that will put a bigger car in our driveway and enough cash in our wallets to fill it with gas, we should just focus on the prayer that Jesus gave us:
Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed by Your name.
Your Kingdome come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from the time of trial,
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory
Forever.
Amen.
I still struggle with prayer requests, but I take solace in seeing them as requests for comfort and fortitude from God regardless of how a situation pans out. I see them as relinquishing our concerns and admitting dependence on God, even if our will for the request doesn’t quite sync with God’s. It takes a lot of time and discernment to figure out God’s will sometimes, and sometimes that knowledge is something to which we’re simply not entitled. We’re left with a lot of questions that can’t be ignored but also can’t be fully answered. In those times, maybe that’s where repetition of the Lord’s Prayer comes in. Maybe there’s comfort to be found in just being thankful. Maybe there’s comfort to be found in just trusting that God has our best interests at heart. Maybe instead of such personal and difficult requests, there is peace in just saying to the Lord, “Your will be done.” As Erin once put it to me, the prayers of all creation rise to Heaven in whispers of praise and thanksgiving, and the Lord whispers back in words always felt but too seldom taken to heart:
Peace and grace and love to you, my children.
Be at rest. Be at peace. Know great joy.
I am with you.
Be at rest. Be at peace. Know great joy.
I am with you.
I worry sometimes that fads like the Jabez prayer deny the real power of this discipline. Of course, the power of prayer is something which I’m still exploring and seeking and coming to understand. There are still so many questions, and there is still so much more to learn, but there is also peace along the journey. There is comfort to be found in fellow travelers and in God and in all the little miracles along the way, and for those of you praying for me as I go,
Thanks.
Peace and Blessings,
Tom
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