Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (4th January, 2026), continuing our journey through some of the prayers of the Bible, in all their richness and rawness.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends’
― Janis Joplin[i]
‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’
― Jesus[ii]
READ: 1 CHRONICLES 4:9-10
GENEALOGIES & GENIES
… and so on, and so forth …
Name after name.
Line after line.
Generation after generation.
Nine whole chapters of genealogies—this is how Chronicles “dramatically” opens, grabbing our attention and glueing us to the page.
It’s up there with some of the great movie introductions, like Saving Private Ryan and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
No. Not really.
Browsing it feels like opening the ancient equivalent of someone else’s contacts list and scrolling aimlessly. Because of this, the start of Chronicles can feel like the place where Bible reading plans go to die.
But these names and lineages are not padding. They are the scaffolding of identity, an ostracised community’s anchor –a community who are returning to a land, having to start over again, resettling and rebuilding.
1 Chronicles was written after ancient Israel returned from seventy years of exile in Babylon.[iii] Many of the people hearing this text for the first time had never seen their homeland, never walked Judean soil. They were raised in a foreign culture, speaking with foreign idioms, shaped by foreign imagination—maybe even given foreign names[iv]—trying to remember a way of life that lived only in stories and songs.
It’s a little bit like why we have photo albums, so we can point out old relatives.
In much the same way, the chronicler is not interested in giving these unanchored exiles dry information but re-placing them into a heritage. What we are reading is a handbook of belonging — recounting origins, worship, and covenant — stitching a displaced people back into a shared story.
These names matter—it’s a way of saying that exile did not erase them and that their lineage still belonged in the sacred archive.
But there is more here than an ancient version of Ancestry.com.
Tucked away in the middle of names we can’t pronounce, there are a small number of micro stories that break through these nine chapters.
In what we’ve just read, for example, there’s the story of Jabez and a prayer he once prayed, all summed up in the space of two verses:
“Jabez was more honourable than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez, saying, ‘I gave birth to him in pain.’ Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, ‘Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.’ And God granted his request.”
1 Chronicles 4:9-10, NIVUK
Some of us will recognise this prayer, not from Chronicles itself, but from a popular Christian phenomenon: the so-called Prayer of Jabez book. In 2000, an author called Bruce Wilkinson brought these two verses to the attention of millions of people as a sort of universal prayer formula to unlock God’s blessings and receive anything you ask for if you pray with enough faith and persistence.
The preface opens with the bold claim, ‘Dear Reader, I want to teach you how to pray a daring prayer that God always answers!’ — as though God is obligated to answer it every time for every person in every situation. What follows is a misreading of 1 Chronicles 4, paired with stories of people who claim success came simply by repeating Jabez’s prayer like a magic mantra, month after month, even for years.
Spilling beyond the covers of a book, Jabez’ words also became embossed on stationary and engraved on pendants, and marketed like a charm, of sorts.
If this hasn’t been obvious so far in this series on prayers in the Bible, let me be clear: Praying is about relationship, not formulas.
Sadly, we love our formulas—because they give us the illusion of control, over life and even over God. Sure, it would be easier if God were a cosmic vending machine that we punched the codes into. But God’s not a machine—He’s a Person. And not the genie type, either, like we’ve seen in Disney’s Aladdin.
You know; the kind that grants wishes—the being with ‘ultimate cosmic power’, along with ‘tiny weeny living space’, and who also has to perform whatever we ask.
This still comes as a shock to us, but it’s worth remembering. But God’s not a genie.
Sadly, many people (even Christians!) abandon praying when they discover God isn’t here to grant wishes, and prayer isn’t how we rub his lamp.
Imagine, for a moment, the chaos that would ensue if God were bound to grant our wishes whenever we said the right words. Bruce Almighty didn’t even come close! The world is already fractured by human free will—now picture that same free will wielding God’s power on demand, with God reduced to our lap dog.
Again, prayer is not meant to put God on a leash.
I say this not only as a pastor, but as someone who has tried and failed.
The heart of Christian prayer is not our way of taking or flexing control; it’s our way of letting God take His place.[v]
But there’s more …
Packaged and promoted to the privileged, the Prayer of Jabez was retold as though Jabez were simply one of us — a modern-living, upwardly-mobile, comfortable Westerner looking for more (a bigger house, a better car, greater career prospects, etc.). But Jabez didn’t pray for prosperity; his prayer wasn’t shaped by modern materialism. He prayed from pain, and his story is being retold to a community that knew dispossession firsthand, were land wasn’t about excess, but simply existence.
When already-prosperous people — especially in comparison to most of the world — borrowed the prayer, it drifted into something smaller and self-serving. It warped into a theology of entitlement. A prayer that once protested pain was repurposed to pursue pleasure, and the cry for God’s presence mutated into a consumer chorus, another remix of the old Janis Joplin lyric, “Lord, won’t You buy me a Mercedes Benz…”[vi]
To say it plainly, with kindness and honesty: The prayer wasn’t the problem. The misreading was.
This text was misappropriated, flattened, commercialised, universalised, and weaponised into a theology of personal gain. But Jabez is not a prototype of prosperity teaching.
It is a prayer from a man carrying a real wound, praying to a real God, in real covenant context, with a heart leaning toward God’s purposes — not self-advancement.
LIKE ONIONS …
Jabez’ prayer is a good prayer.
And to get to the heart of it, we need to approach it in the same way that we see onions and are encouraged to see ogres (according to Shrek): it has layers.
As an outer skin, we’re told a few things: Jabez is more ‘honourable’ than his ‘brothers’; he’s called Jabez, and his mum named him as such because she ‘bore him in pain.’
We don’t know anything else about him. With the exception of chapter 2 of this same book (where there is a town called ‘Jabez’), he turns up nowhere else within the scriptural story.
It could be, as others have rightly noted, that what we have here is an ancient Hebrew pun. That’s not to say Jabez didn’t exist. But many people have noted that these two verses contain a lot of word play.
The word Honourable, for example, is related to the same word we use when talking about the felt presence and glory of God. When used of God, it’s describing the idea that, at times, there is an undeniable and measurable heaviness to God’s presence. Like when you sit down on the couch, putting your weight down, indenting the cushions and creaking the woodwork. In the Hebrew, the word Honourable carries this sense of weight and heaviness.[vii]
And so, to say he’s ‘more honourable’, ‘heavier’ than his brothers, could be a way of saying, ‘he was a big baby.’ And as such, his mum called him ‘pain.’
I’m sure that there are a few mothers that can relate.
Our son, Corban, had a big head. That’s all I will say.
But let’s stop there, and go down another layer…
Because, Jabez doesn’t actually mean pain.
It’s a purposeful misspelling—an anagram, really. To be truly called pain, he should have been called Jazeb, not Jabez.
Why point this out? Because the unusual spelling of his name shows us that Jabez’ mother was intentionally putting distance between her son and the source of her trauma—he was born within it.[viii] She wasn’t labelling her son ‘a pain in the neck.’ She was naming the world he entered, not the child she held.
As another example, as Christopher Heard notes: ‘The only other personal name given an etymological explanation in the genealogies of 1 Chronicles is that of Peleg, son of Eber, “for in his days the world was divided” (1 Chron 1:19, deriving Peleg’s name from פָּלַג (“to divide”)). It hardly seems likely that the Chronicler believed that the world was divided because Peleg was named Peleg.’[ix]
Her world was a world of pain.
We can only guess at her pain…
Some commentators state that Jabez could have lived during the period described in the book of Judges.
If I could have chosen a biblical era to live in, it would not be the era described in Judges. It was an era of mayhem (‘of everyone doing there own thing’), full of inter-tribal warfare, genocide, rape—to name a few—and concludes with the poaching of unmarried women.
Maybe his mother, and her clan, suffered because of this.
It’s also odd that we’re not told who Jabez’s dad is? If you didn’t fall asleep when we read through the names, you would have noticed that Jabez is not connected to any of the names listed around him.[x]
I’m not claiming a virgin birth. But maybe the lack of a father’s name indicates something more sinister.
Again, it’s speculation.
But perhaps, at the very least, Jabez’s mother is reflecting an ancient truth from Genesis 3: We are born in pain[xi] (no labour is a spa-like experience) and born into a pain-wracked world. We don’t enter a perfect, shiny world—but a broken, suffering one. Sadly, no one escapes a life touched by pain.
One way or the other, Jabez’s name is not about blaming or defining him, but describes the world he lives in—the same world we live in.
Why does this matter? Well, let’s go down another layer:
Why is Jabez more honourable than his brothers? Though he could have been a ‘big baby’, I do not think that this is some ancient, and revulsive, fat-shaming comment.
The clue is in the comparison with his brothers. Who even are his brothers?
We are not told about his Dad, and we are not told about his mother’s other children.
The reason for this is because when the text says ‘his brothers’ it’s not talking siblings. In the wider context of all these genealogies of ancient Israel, it means the other tribes, the neighbouring clans, the other territories.
As mentioned earlier, Jabez’s story is not the only micro-story that emerges among these names in the first nine chapters. There are a handful more (2:7; 4:39–43; 5:9–10; 5:18–22). I won’t read them, but what’s fascinating is that all but one of them are stories of violent expansion, land grabbed by force, borders widened by warfare, territory enlarged by pain.[xii]
Now let’s think, and piece this together:
What does Jabez pray for/want? Land.
What does Jabez not want? Pain.
Jabez, born in pain, into a pain-wracked world, surrounded by tribes enlarging borders through pain, stands apart from his brothers. There’s a contrast being made.
Why is Jabez more honourable? Because, unlike “his brothers,” he refuses to follow the path of violence. Others expanded by force; he will not. He wouldn’t carry their way forward.
Instead of violently seizing land, he asks God for it, putting it in his hands alone, and does not want it at all if it involves harm.
This is the heart of his prayer. Yes, he seeks pasture for his flocks and land to grow food—but he refuses to add more pain to a world already overflowing with it. He prays that God would keep him from evil, so the life he builds will not be a cause of sorrow to those around him.[xiii]
Far from being a genie-like prayer for material prosperity that God is obligated to answer, Jabez is asking to know and follow God’s methods in everything he does. His prayer is not a magic formula. It’s this:
‘God, let the place where my life grows reflect Your way, not mine.’
More than this, within the greater context, the Chronicler sets Jabez up as an admirable example for a people resettling and rebuilding after upheaval. The message is clear: rather than relying on the hand of violence, demonstrate the hand of God—the way, the practice, the justice of God—through your life, wherever you dwell.[xiv]
It’s a prayer and a model for expansion without warfare. Enlargement without theft. Acquisition without violence.
This prayer is not about controlling God’s hand. It’s about carrying it. ‘God, do your bidding.’
He’s not even asking for a pain-free life, as such. Jabez understands the pain-full world he lives in. Instead, he’s asking that, in this world that tastes of pain, let me taste of God.
To put it another way:
Jabez wants God’s presence to be with him in such a way that, whenever people encounter him, they encounter the handprint of God’s way, not the fist-print of human ambition.
In slightly more modern terms, it’s as if Jabez is saying:
‘Let your Kingdom come; Let your will be done.’[xv]
May my daily bread come from your hand …
May I embody forgiveness, and not retaliation or harm …
Deliver me from from the temptation to perpetaute evil …
For yours is the kingdom.
That’s a prayer God always answers.
Not, ‘Can I have a ten-bedroomed house with a Ferrari on the driveway.’ But, ‘May more of You be seen in my life.’
It’s a prayer God answers, because it’s a prayer that captures and reflects God’s intent.
GOD’S HAND, MY TENT
As I’ve sat with Jabez’s prayer, another passage on expansion has echoed in my mind — Isaiah 54. God tells his people:
‘Make your tent larger, stretch your tent curtains farther out! Spare no effort, lengthen your ropes, and pound your stakes deep. For you will spread out to the right and to the left … ‘
Isaiah 54:2-3a, NET
Isaiah speaks these words right after the promise of God’s Suffering Servant—passages that we, from a New Testament point of view, connect with the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. The point is that, as a result of the Suffering Servant’s achievement, the household of God would supernaturally expand and that God would encamp himself within humanity more tangibly.
God’s mission was never simply to be a God who stays at the end of a phone line — but to be with us, dwelling among us, even in us.
So, this “enlargement” Isaiah describes is not about territory or luxury. It is about capacity — making room for God to inhabit humanity more fully, and that His kingdom would find expression through our lives.
It talks about tents—but it’s not really talking about tents, at all.
When Scripture talks about tents, it often means us:[xvi] The human life, the human body — fragile, yes, but chosen by God as His meeting place; designed by God to be his image bearing vehicle; inhabited by the hand of God, like a glove expresses the movements of the hand it encloses.
As with the Prayer of Jabez, some thinkers, both ancient and modern, also say the wrong things about our bodies and humanity, misapplying scripture to suit. Some have looked at our bodies as if they are a prison to our souls, something to be escaped from, a shell to be disposed of.
For centuries, philosophers, scientists and thinkers have tried to spilt us apart; attempting to draw a line between our tents and whatever it is that occupies them: Soul versus Body; Mind versus Matter; Ghost versus Machine; Consciousness versus Biology.
But Scripture knows nothing of this divide. We are human, and to be human is to be dust and breath, earth and spirit, intentionally stitched together by God — a living overlap of heaven and earth, a living parable of God’s grand plan.
God does not abhor our tents.
In the Old Testament, God’s presence dwelled in a tent called the Tabernacle, among his people.
In the New, God became flesh and ‘Tabernacled’ with us, as John describes in the opening of his gospel. God didn’t hover near humanity; he took up residence within it. He pitched His life in skin, sinew and bone.
And in the resurrection to come, we will not be floating Spirits, playing harps on clouds—but Humans; embodied people, with God dwelling with us in a renewed, pain-free world.
The problem is not the tent, as such. It’s the fragility of it. The protest in Scripture is never against having a body. It’s our mortality that is protested—the decay, the scarring, the weakness, the limits; the pain-wracked experience of life.
When Paul, in the New Testament, gets asked about what our resurrection bodies will be like, he affirms that we will have one, but he hasn’t a clue as to what they will look like, and he refuses to speculate. He basically shrugs and says: ‘We don’t know. But I do know this: we will take off mortality and put on immortality. We will take off corruption and put on incorruption.’[xvii]
When I read the letter of 1 John, I sense John was asked similar questions. His answer is briefer: ‘We haven’t a clue what the future will be like. But we do know that we will be like Him.’[xviii]
He’s describing humanity restored, looking and moving like the perfect humanity shown to us when the Eternal Son took on flesh.
Christianity, at its best, has never been a body-hating faith. It’s a body-blessing, creation-delighting, tent-affirming faith, that sees our bodies as instruments of worship to God.
What God has achieved for us in Jesus, is not about rescuing us from our humanity. He came to rescue us as humans, and to renew and expand our humanity into all it was designed for. And the glorious thing is that, although we still await the resurrection, we do not wait for the indwelling. In the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, this has already begun: God is with us, in us.
Again, the story of the Bible doesn’t split the life from the body. It describes us being a divinely interwoven tent of dust and breath; loved now, being renewed in Jesus now, and resurrected one day.
God doesn’t hate the tent. Rather, His intent — as expressed in Isaiah, as embodied in the Incarnation, and as shown in His action in the giving of his Holy Spirit — is to enter our lives, fill them and stretch them, making them a habitation for His self.
God’s hand finding expression through our humanity.
This isn’t something we do, by the way. It’s something God does through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
But, like Jabez, I recognise that God is still at work in my life, that I am a work in progress, and so every day I ask to see more of God’s hand finding expression through this piece of canvas.
I think that’s a good daily prayer. Fill the canvas, Lord. Touch the walls. Live in every corner of me. Make my life heavy with Your presence. Create within me a thirst and hunger to see you expressed through my life.
All of this reminds me of something Augustine once wrote, roughly a thousand years after Jabez’s prayer was first noted down:
‘My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see – this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you.’[xix]
I think Jabez’ prayer, and Augustine’s echo, are an encouragement to us in our utterances to God.
Not to encourage us to ask for a mansion.
But for more of the manifest presence of God in our pain-wracked world, exhibited through the tents we currently possess.
PRAY
God, bless us — not at someone else’s cost.
Enlarge us — not for empire, but for your dwelling space.
Put Your hand on our tent — so Your practice moves through our lives.
Keep us from harm — make us people of justice and generosity, not invasion and grasping.
Stretch our cords, strengthen our stakes — so You can live here visibly, tangibly, richly.
Make us weighty with Your glory.
Amen.
‘We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.’
― 2 Corinthians 4:7 (NIV)
‘Christ be with me; Christ within me; Christ behind me; Christ before me; Christ beside me; Christ to win me; Christ to comfort and restore me.’
― Attributed to St. Patrick
ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES:
[i] Janis Joplin, Mercedes Benz, from her album Pearl (1971).
[ii] Matthew 6:10 (NIV)
[iii] Sometime after 516 BC
[iv] Especially considering the name changes to the latter kings of Judah whilst being vassal kings under Babylon (in 2 Kings); or the renaming of Daniel and his cohorts (see Daniel); or the name given to Esther (see Esther).
[v] I’m also tempted to rattle on about how ‘gnostic’ it sounds in its idea of some kind of formula to unlock greater revelation and greater blessing. But I won’t. All I’ll say is a summary of what Paul espouses to the church at Colossae: ‘In Christ, the mystery of God has been fully revealed, so root yourself in Him.’ Following God won’t shield us from suffering. Sometimes He leads us straight through pain, not around it—because the prize of prayer isn’t a wider kingdom of our own, but deeper conformity to Christ. His goal is to make us like Jesus, not to make our lives bigger.
[vi] Ibid. Btw, I’m not knocking the song—it’s a great song, that makes a similar point to what I am making. Joplin’s lyric are a parody of materialism and the illusory happiness promised (but rarely delivered) by the pursuit of worldly goods.
[vii] The Hebrew word נִכְבָּד (nikbad) means respected, honoured, etc., and stems from the root word כָּבַד (kaved), meaning ‘to be heavy’. In its noun form, the word is כָּבוֹד (Kavod) (honour, glory), a word used to describe both the glory of men (Joseph, Genesis 45:13) and also God (Exodus 24:26).
[viii] The Hebrew word עצבי (atzbi, pain) is rearranged to spell יעבץ (yabetz, Jabez). Also, instead of saying “my pain” (which would be עצבי, atzbi) Jabez’ mothers states בעצב (b’otzev), meaning in pain, so the pun doesn’t quite work. But, it’s close enough for the needed word play to work.
[ix] Christopher R. Heard, Echoes of Genesis 1 in 1 Chronicles 4:9-10: An Intertextual and Contextual Reading of Jabez’s Prayer (The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 4. https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2002.v4), p. 5
As a further example, in 1 Samuel 4, the name Ichabod means “the glory has departed.” The name comments on the moment—the loss of the Ark, the national crisis—rather than condemning the child himself. Very similar to Jabez: the name reflects context, not personal blame.
[x] All we know, as testified here and in 1 Chronicles 2:55, is that he is part of the family of Judah.
[xi] Genesis 3:16
[xii] Even the other story, of Achan in 2:7, is still a story of taking what doesn’t belong to you.
[xiii] Sure, there’s more study required to argue this point thoroughly, and so I refer back to Christopher R. Heard’s article referenced above.
[xiv] Again, as Christpher R. Heard insightfully notes, ‘The story of Jehoshaphat’s “non-battle” against hostile forces (2 Chron 20) further underscores the Chronicler’s preference for nonviolent land acquisition (or, in this case, retention). When faced with enemy attack, Jehoshaphat prayed to God for help, which God granted; Judean territory was spared the incursion, but without the Judean army’s violent participation in any battle.’ (Ibid)
[xv] Matthew 6:10
[xvi] 2 Corinthians 5:1–8; 2 Peter 1:13–14
[xvii] My very, very rough summary of Paul’s wonderful argument in 1 Corinthians 15.
[xviii] Again, another rough paraphrase of 1 John 3:2
[xix] St Augustine (354-430), Confessions, Book 1.6
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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