So what is so special about Jabez? His prayer goes something like this…

I find praying prayers like this really hard – I think because I would often rather the attention be on someone else rather than me, even when talking to God. But I think there is something here that I need to get hold of. As a worship leader I believe that it is pretty hard to lead people in worship if worship is something I don’t know anything about. In the same way I think it is pretty hard to be a blessing to others if we do not ask for and experience God’s blessing on our lives.

Now when I talk about asking God to bless us I do not mean it in the ‘pray for it and God will give it to you’, name it and claim it style. How God blesses us is completely up to Him – and to be honest that is His department and I’d rather leave Him to it. However I think this is a whole attitude thing – if we really are serious about blessing other people then we need to ask God for His blessing on our lives. I believe it is an active part of being spitiually healthy – which is a great gift we can give to the people around us.

I think the main point I am trying to convey is that it is not selfish or wrong to prayer for blessing on our lives when the motive for it is to bless other people from it. A little bit of Jabez in my prayer life? I’ll let you know how it goes…

As an aside – does anyone actually know where Jabez comes from? If you read 1 Chronicles 4, Jabez is first mentioned in verse 9 quite separately from the family tree lists! I am sure he must be related to someone in 1 Chronicles 4 – have I just missed it?

This is the famous story of Jesus healing the paralysed man who was brought by his friends to Him. An old favourite with Sunday school teachers because of the great story that; to reach Jesus they had to dig a hole in the roof of the house and lower the man through!

Of course, Jesus heals the man physically after he has forgiven his sins and dealt a cutting blow to the scribes. I must have read or heard this story a thousand times and yet God seems to continually use it stimulate my thinking.

They paralyse man could not bring himself to Jesus. He needed his friends to do this. But his friends could not take him directly Jesus either. They had some obstacles; some barriers to remove first. And this is what has been highlighted for me in my latest reading.

We don’t know if the man wanted to see Jesus or if his friends had just thought that it was a good idea for them to meet. So to me this seemed that the friends were the ones that were trying to instigate this introduction.

The first obstacle in their way was his disability. They had to physically make the effort to take their friend to a place where they could meet Jesus. The second obstacle was the crowd which they successfully negotiated by going to roof. This only created 2 more problems. Firstly they were now high up above Jesus and secondly there was a roof in the way!!

We know that they overcame these two and eventually introduced their friend to Jesus where he received his healing. So what am I babbling on about? Our job is to introduce our friends to Jesus. But to do that we need to remove the obstacles, some of which could be out own making, and lead them to actually meet him. We need to not introduce our friends to our religion, or some other distorted picture but we need to introduce them to Him.

What those obstacles are I’m not sure. They are probably different in each case. And how we remove them is another big question. But I think if we check our thinking to make sure our evangelism is focused on introducing people to the person of Jesus we may go a way to answer some of those other questions.

This is certainly something I’m doing at the moment. What do you think? Am I talking rubbish or does this hit a nerve?

Anybody who has been in Christian circles for any real length of time would have herd the question of evangelism thrown around. What we say. When we say it. Who we say it to. Do we need to say anything at all? etc, etc, etc…

I’m not going to get into the above debate now. Jesus led a perfect life which challenged all he met and he also preached the word wherever he went so that is probably a suggestion in itself that we need to be doing both; living the life and speaking the word, but that is by the by. In Mark 1 I noticed something about how Jesus went about his preaching. Or more specifically where he was preaching.

When Jesus went to a new town he went to the synagogue to teach. I think that one of the main reasons he did this was because he knew that the spiritually aware people would be at the synagogue (of course I�m sure not all the people there were such).

This model was also followed by the apostles. The first place they tended to go to preach the gospel were places where ‘spiritual’ people gathered. For example, in Acts 16 it was the riverside where they assumed people would gather for prayer (needing the water for ceremonial washing). Another example is in the very next chapter; Acts 17 talks about Paulââ?¬â?¢s visit to the Temple of the Unknown God. He simply went and told them who that God was.

So what is my point? I guess my question would be, should we be focusing our attention, for want of a better word, on people who are spiritually awake. I’m not for a second suggesting that we should become people who just wander around preaching at everything that moves. I am a firm believer that relationship and community is the way that God intended us to evangelise the world. Love people first, not because you want to ‘make Christians’ but simply because you love people. But maybe the people we should be pushing more with the ‘hard sell’ could be those we often try to avoid.

The spiritualist, the witches, the astrologers, members of other faiths, etc. These people are spiritually awake. They are aware that there is something beyond themselves. They have belief but their belief is misguided (maybe that is who Paul is talking about in Romans 1:16).

Obviously we need to discern through the Holy Spirit who we should talk to when and about what. But I wonder if those who are ripe for the truth are actually so obviously searching that as Christians we run scared.

Other posts in the Bible Study series.