There Is Power in a Name – Part 1

I want to share with you a very interesting figure in Scripture: Jabez. He appears only very briefly in Scripture, yet his story contains a series of very profound lessons

about the power of prayer, the power of envisioning new possibilities in the Spirit, the power of positive confession, the power of declaring our dreams before God and making them a basis for God’s goodwill and favor in our lives, and how one man’s faith and cry can change his destiny and even change generational curses that would have condemned him to a very different, very dark fate, but who, through a confession of faith and through envisioning possibilities in God, ends up with a completely different future.

In First Chronicles, chapter 4, we find a mention of this fascinating figure. Verse 9 of First Chronicles, chapter 4, says: “And Jabez was more distinguished than his brothers. His mother named him Jabez, saying, ‘Because I gave birth to him in pain.’ And Jabez called upon the God of Israel, saying, ‘Oh, that You would bless me and enlarge my territory, and that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil so that it would not harm me.’ And God granted what he asked.”

As we see here, Jabez’s story begins in a very negative way. He is a man born with what seems like a sign of pain on his life. His mother’s labor when she gave birth to him was painful and seems to have involved a great deal of crisis and danger. Wanting to remember that moment, his mother gave him a name that alluded to his painful and sickly birth.

And yet we see that Jabez offers a transformative prayer, and that is what I want to talk about with you today. Prayer in faith, and ministry to a person by people who are anointed and full of faith, have the power to transform our feelings and our bonds.

God can work directly and sovereignly upon our wounds, our emotions, and our circumstances, miraculously change our attitudes, and launch us in a new direction—all of this when we use the power of prayer.

The Lord Jesus Christ has said that if we ask, we will receive; that if we knock on God’s door, He will open it to us; and that if we seek earnestly, God will guide us to find what we need.

The apostle James also says that often we do not receive because we do not ask. Asking and expecting an answer from God is a privilege of every believer. Yet often we do not use that privilege because we do not have enough faith or because we underestimate the importance of prayer. And this account of Jabez, in a very compact, very eloquent way and in just two verses, vividly illustrates the power prayer has to change a man’s destiny.

As we have said before, the destiny awaiting Jabez was a negative one, but his prayer completely changed the course of his life. Jabez is born with a sentence, so to speak, hanging over his life. Without realizing it, his mother had condemned him to a painful life, because that name had become something like a prophecy that would follow him all his life. We must be very careful about the names we give our children, and even about the words we use when addressing them and the prophecies, so to speak, that we pronounce over their lives, sometimes without realizing it.

This woman was completely unaware of what she was doing. She thought instead that she was marking Jabez’s origin with a reminder of the pain she had experienced when she gave birth to him. But she did not realize that she was also condemning him to a life of failure, pain, and difficulties, because that is what this passage suggests, and I will develop this further a little later.

But at this point in my reflection, what I want to point out to all of us is that there is power in a name. Scripture is full of people whose names were changed as a sign that their identity had changed as well.

Take Abraham, for example. When God makes him fruitful and turns him into a father of multitudes, when He also changes his condition and makes him spiritually fruitful, He changes his name from Abram to Abraham, intending to signify this new destiny, this new condition of being the father of a whole multitude, an ancestor, an apostle of faith. God wanted to change his name to signify that his very personality had changed as well. There are moments in a human being’s life when God bestows what is like a different name upon them; this is certainly one of those cases.

We also have another passage: when Benjamin is born, Rachel dies as a result of giving birth to him. Rachel gives him the name Benoni, which means “son of my sorrow,” but his father very wisely changes his name.

It says: “Rachel called her son Benoni before she died, but his father called him Benjamin, which means ‘son of the right hand.’”

In other words, notice how interesting this is, isn’t it? Isaac realizes that when his wife gives their son the name “son of my sorrow,” she is, as it were, marking him with that star of sadness. So Isaac very wisely changes it to a name that is its complete opposite: “son of my right hand.” It is a name that suggests blessing, that suggests possibilities. The one who sits at the right hand is a favored person, a person of rank, isn’t that so? So Isaac wanted to change his son’s name, his destiny, by giving him a more positive name, didn’t he?

So we see here that names are very important, and that is why the name this mother gives Jabez matters in this account. In our next segment, we will see what happens in this regard, and we will expand on the name of a name. May the Lord bless you, and until our next segment.