There is power in a name - Part 1

I want to share with you a very interesting character in Scripture, it is Jabez who appears very briefly in Scripture and yet contains a series of very profound teachings about the power of prayer, the power to envision in the Spirit new possibilities, the power of positive confession, the power to declare our dreams before God and turn them into bases for God's goodwill and favor for our lives, and how the faith of a man and His cry can change his destiny and can even change generational curses that would have condemned him to a very different destiny, very dark, but that through the confession of faith and through the visualization of possibilities in God ends up having a totally different future .

In First Chronicles chapter 4 we have a mention of this fascinating character. It says in verse 9 of First Chronicles chapter 4: "And Jabes was more illustrious than his brothers, whom his mother called Jabes saying: to birth with pain. And Jabesh invoked the God of Israel saying: oh if you would give me a blessing and expand my territory, and if your Hand were with me, and would deliver me from evil so that I did not harm me, and God granted him what he asked. "

As we see here, the story of Jabes begins in a very negative way, a man who is born with as a sign of pain in his life, the birth that his mother had when she had him was a painful birth and seems to be one of a lot of crisis, and much danger. Her mother, wanting to remember that moment, assigned her a man who alluded to her painful and sick birth.

And yet we see that Jabes makes a transforming prayer, and that is what I want with you on this day. Prayer in faith, ministering to a person by anointed and faith-filled people, has the power to transform our feelings and our attachments.

God can operate directly, sovereignly on our hurts and our emotions, our circumstances and miraculously change our attitudes, and launch us in a new direction, all 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 us, that if we seek intensely God will guide us to find what we need.

The apostle James also says that many times we do not receive because we do not ask. Asking and waiting for an answer from God is a privilege of every believer, however many times we do not use that privilege because we do not have enough faith or because we underestimate the importance of prayer. and this text by Jabesh in a very tight, very eloquent way and with two simple verses graphically illustrates the power that prayer has to change the destiny of a man.

As we have said before, Jabez's destiny was a negative destiny, but his prayer totally changed the course of his life. Jabes is born with a sentence so to speak about his life. His mother had inadvertently condemned him to a painful life because that name had become a kind of prophecy that would follow him all his life. We have to be very careful with the names we give our children, even with the words we use to address them and with the prophecies so to speak that we throw over their lives sometimes without realizing it.

This woman was totally ignorant of what she was doing. She thought rather of marking the origin of Jabes as with a reminder of the pain she had experienced when she had it but she was not realizing that she was also condemning him to a life of failure, of pain, of difficulties because that is what it suggests. this text and at some point later I will develop this.

But at this point in my meditation what I want to point out to all of us is that there is power in a name. Scripture is full of characters whose names were changed as a sign of a change in identity as well.

There we have for example Abraham that when God makes him fruitful and makes him a father of multitudes, when he also changes his condition and makes him spiritually fruitful, he changes his name from Abram to Abraham, wanting to point out that new destiny, that new condition that he He has to be the father of a whole multitude, an ancestor, an apostle of the faith, and God wanted to change his name to indicate that his personality had also changed. There are those moments in the life of a human being when God imparts him as a different name, certainly this is one of the cases.

We also have another passage, when Benjamin is born that Raquel dies as a result of Benjamin's birth, Raquel gives him the name Benoni, which means: "Son of my sadness" but his father very wisely changes his name.

It says that: "Rachel called her son Benoni before he died, but his father called him Benjamin, which means: son of the right hand."

In other words, note that it is interesting right? that Isaac realizes that when his wife is giving that name to his son as "son of my sadness" as she is marking him with that star of sadness and Isaac very wisely changes him to a name that is totally opposite: " son of my right hand "is a name that suggests blessing, suggests possibilities, the one who sits on the right is a favorite person, is a person who has rank, right? So Isaac wanted to change the name, the destiny of his son, giving him a more positive name, right?

So we see here that names are very important and that is why the name that this mother gives to Jabes is important in this story. In our next segment we will see what happens regarding this and we will develop on the name of a name. May the Lord bless you and until our next segment.