THE
JABEZ SYNDROME
May the Holy Spirit speak to your heart as you
read this word. Jesus made the promise that if you seek you shall find. If you
are seeking for something particular, ask Him and He will lead you to His
answer for you. This message will speak to you if you feel that you have never
been able to be who you really are, or if you are under a burden of words
spoken over you or about you. May the Lord Bless you and guide you.
We find this man Jabez in the Bible in 1
Chronicles 4:9, 10. He is from the Tribe of Judah, but nothing is said
of his family connections other than his mother and brethren. He lived about
1400 years B.C. In later life he was an eminent lawyer and so prominent that he
had a town named after him. The scripture gives only a short account of this
man, but reveals a powerful operation of the Spirit of God on his life. He
stands as a type of any person in similar circumstances, and I share it with
you if you need Jesus to heal you from hurts in your soul just as Jabez had. Do not just intellectually
read this but allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you. Most of us have hurts deep
within us bought about by people or the circumstances of life but often they
lie deep within us and like Jabez,
we are grieved and are never able to be free. Only Jesus Christ can set us
free.
V9 tells us that his mother bore him in sorrow
and pain, and because of her negative emotions she called those over him by
naming him Jabez, literally “he
makes sorrowful”. In Biblical times people’s names denoted their nature, so
here we have his mother labelling Jabez
as a man who causes sorrow and pain. This would have seared into his soul as he
matured and understood what his mother had done. She had put on him a burden in
revenge for the sorrow and pain that the childbirth caused her. Of course it
was false as he was not consciously guilty as a baby for the pain of the birth.
But here we have a man carrying this identity of himself into his adult life as
a result of what was falsely said of him. It says that she called him Jabez because “I bare him with
sorrow”. This was about her not her son.
In the book of James chapter 3 it says
that the tongue, or words spoken, can kindle a great fire. The tongue is a
fire, a world of iniquity. It can set on fire the course of nature, and is set
on fire of hell. An ungovernable tongue no man can tame, it is unruly and full
of deadly poison.
Maybe like Jabez,
evil, false, unkind, or ungodly words have been spoken over or about you that
you may have heard of or not even be aware of. These can have a lasting
negative effect on your soul and can prevent you from being the true person
that you are. They can effect relationships with people and be a barrier in
your walk with the Lord. I have counselled many people caught in the “Jabez Syndrome” and it is alarming to
see the reality of what I am speaking of in people’s lives and the effect on
their outlook on life and more particularly themselves.
BUT OUR PRECIOUS SAVIOUR HAS AN ANSWER FOR YOU.
There was a very popular ministry particularly
in the Pentecostal churches concerning the “healing of the memories”. Most
people have hurt and bruised emotions of some sort and whilst I am not
questioning the work of the Holy Spirit, I think that there has been a lot of
“flesh” in this area.
Let me open to you what the Lord showed me in
the Jabez Type, and if you have a
need, allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you. Blessed be the Name of Jesus.
Now, back to 1 Chronicles 4:9, 10.
There was something about Jabez that was his strength. It says that he was more honourable
than his brethren. It could mean that he had a higher social standing, but I
believe that it was to do with his heart to the Lord. He had the understanding,
boldness and faith to cry out to the Lord himself.
The Lord will honour this type of heart. It
is not so much that God has favourites in people, but that some people favour
God more!
Jabez in his oppression, called on the
Lord. Note that his mother “called a name on him saying” and he “called on the
Lord saying”. He didn’t attack her, nor did he seek somebody to pray over him,
not that this is wrong. This man WANTED TO BE FREE from the words called over
him, which were affecting his soul. He
had boldness to call on the God of Israel! He spoke five things:
What a Glorious Saviour. We read that God
caused to happen that which he requested. Blessed be the Name of Jesus. You see
Jabez stood up and spoke words of
Faith to the Lord which the Lord honoured and brought to pass in his life
because that which he asked was from the heart of God. Grief is the effect of sorrow and he wanted
to be free.
His Faith triumphed over his name. His Spirit
triumphed over his soul. He had carried this lie around in his life until he
cried out to the Lord.
Whoever you are reading this word, I want to
ask you to look into your soul. Are there words, hurts, bruised emotions or
evil intentions that you have been dragging around in your life? Do you have
grief which you have never been able to shed? Sorrow is destructive. The Bible
says in Ecclesiastes 11:10, to “remove sorrow from your heart”, and in 2
Corinthians
You cannot carry grief and sorrow, and grow in
the Lord. These emotions oppose Faith and will burden you. You can be like Jabez. Cry out to the Lord. Tell him
the emotional burdens and request that He deliver you. The word “request” which
Jabez used, literally means “demand”.
This is the type of heart which pleases God. Some of you reading this have struggled for a
long time with the Jabez syndrome.
There have been issues in your soul which have held you back and which have
even depressed and oppressed you.
I want to lead you to freedom in the Name of
Jesus. We are told in Isaiah 53:4 that when Jesus was dying on the
Cross, He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. Beloved, we
are hanging on to things that Jesus has already dealt with. They went under His
Blood and He arose Triumphant with our victory. Jabez realised this in his faith and he didn’t even have Isaiah’s
prophecy to read when he cried out to the Lord.
I was speaking with a Christian friend Bill
recently, who works in a physically demanding job. He said that he developed a
problem in his knee and at the age of sixty this should have been a problem for
his ability to work. I listened to a childlike faith as he told me that he
simply said to the Lord, “this is your bad knee Lord, not mine”. The problem
went and his testimony challenged me. Too often we labour over our problems
with the Lord instead of acting with the faith which a child would use and just
claim what our Father has promised us.
Our Father God has told us that His Son Jesus
has already carried our griefs and sorrows on the Cross 2,000 years ago. If you
need to be free of emotional burdens of the past, and the damaging effect of how
people may have treated you, the Lord would say to you:
“My child, I
am your loving Saviour and although you have not physically seen Me, yet I come
to you by My Holy Spirit. I know your need before you tell Me, and I longingly
wait for you to simply ask Me to Bless you and set you free. I died for the sin
of the world, for your emotional and physical healing, and carried your
poverty. I plead with you right now to simply believe this and with the faith
which I have given you, ask Me and you will receive My Blessing as I grant what
you request of Me.”
Beloved as I write this I feel in my spirit
that there are some who will read this have lived with a feeling of isolation
and that nobody loves them or cares about them. If this is you, then I want to tell
you that I passed through a similar period in my life. Circumstances caused me
to think this and I convinced myself that it was true. I lived in a little flat
on my own and would walk around crying out and asking “will somebody love me”. So
I understand your feeling. During my period of distress I hung on to a simple
word in the Bible, “I will never leave you or forsake you”. At my lowest point
I knew that Jesus loved me. I knew that even if everybody deserted me, He
wouldn’t and He honoured My clinging on to this word.
I wish that somebody had shown me about Jabez in the past to encourage my
faith, but I share it with you. May you be encouraged and strengthened in your
faith to call out to the Lord. He will never leave you or forsake you. He loves
you. Ask Him right now to bless you, enlarge your boundaries, keep you by His
hand, keep you from evil, and deliver you from grief. He will grant you by His
Love and Mercy. Bless you.