The Prayer of Jabez Revisited

First Chronicles 4:9-10 could be forgiven for being called the text that roared, once Bruce Wilkinson got his hands on it and wrote a little book called The Prayer of Jabez. This book, which was released in 2000, sold nine million copies in its first two years in print (over seventeen million now), becoming one of the best-selling Christian books of all time. But what exactly does 1 Chronicles 4:9-10 say that caused such a sensation?

In the midst of apparently innocuous genealogies we find these two verses: “Jabez was more honorable than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez…