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 4:10, NIV (initial caps added on You and Your)
The notion was that "bless me, enlarge my territory, let Your hand be with me, keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain" was God's universal will for His people. Heaven forbid that God's people should have pain or go through struggles!
I can't explain exactly why God answered Jabez' prayer, but I'm sure one of the reasons was not so that people in the early 21st century prosperity movement would get hold of this prayer and suddenly begin to acquire nicer cars and bigger houses. No, surely God's primary reason for answering this prayer was because doing so served His own purposes.
People do get blessed in the overflow when God's purposes are served, but "bless me, bless me" needs to stop being the focus. Be blessed through my life, Lord -- let YOUR territory be enlarged through me! These are much better prayers, I think.
I bring this up because this is a very timely topic for me. I'm at the tail end of a long period of what I can only describe as quite spectacular failure. I haven't exactly failed AT a task, I've failed in the way I've managed it. It's been very humiliating to watch myself stumble repeatedly and not know how to get my familiar footing back. OK, I'm not getting any younger -- this may be part of it. But I think the Lord had an agenda in all the stumbling He knew I would do. He allowed me to see that I had for a long time depended on my own gifts to pull me through. He seemed to find it necessary for me to see what life would be like if I couldn't entirely rely on these gifts. Anything apart from God that we put our foot down upon, blithely expecting it to hold us, is a potential idol. We will guard our rights to that territory until God chooses to whip it right out from under our feet.
As we fall increasingly in love with Jesus, the only territory that begins to matter to us is His territory. Are all His dreams for my little world coming true? Is He able to walk freely across every moment of my day, to accomplish whatever He has set out to do?
I know that I cannot currently answer "yes" to these things. He has allowed my own foolishness to break me to the point where I see that there can be no compromise -- I must do whatever it takes to enable Him full, unencumbered access to the "land" I call my life. I will reap the benefits of this, because He will remake me in the process. Others will be blessed and healed as well, as He touches their lives through my own. But the most important thing is the blessing and honour it will bring to Him. For He is King. He is everything.
Have Your way in me, Lord Jesus.