shepherding the shepherd

from PreachingToday.com

‘God Granted His Request’

Here was a prayer handed to the whole beleaguered nation on a silver platter. Handed to us, too, and all our churches, a fore-prayer of the one Jesus taught us. To ask God to bless us is to pray for grace, for God to freely give us more than we deserve and what we could never earn. For us, all the blessed promises of God are now Yes in Christ.

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Free from Harm

A false security system got Israel in deep trouble. “They were taken captive to Babylon because of their unfaithfulness” (1 Chron. 9:1). When God eventually allowed them to return to their homes they needed to reconnect to his protection. That’s why the Chronicler taught them Jabez’s prayer…

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The Hand of God

God’s hand connotes something more active than God’s presence. God’s hand “shattered the enemy.” It is also our hiding place. When Moses blessed Israel for the last time he said, “All the holy ones are in your hand” (Deut.33:3). Jesus promised, “no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:28-29).

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‘Enlarge My Territory’

Pain, or for that matter, success, sin, or fear, can define and confine us or our church to a kind of walled compound. Beyond is the land of God’s promises, all “yes” in Christ, but we haven’t taken what God assigned to us. That changes when we pray.

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Pain Relief

Jabez’s prayer was the turning point of his life. It’s all we need to know about him. I suspect it wasn’t one single prayer, but a prayer that grew in depth and confidence with repetition. That’s how good prayers often work.

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‘Everlasting Splendors’

Remember how C. S. Lewis said that the ordinary people we take for granted are those who will become either “immortal horrors or everlasting splendors”? It was those “everlasting splendors” that I’d think about as they stood to sing on a Sunday morning.

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