OH, THAT YOU WOULD ENLARGE MY TERRITORY!
The next part of the Jabez prayer—a plea for more territory—is where you ask God to enlarge your life so you can make a greater impact for Him.
From both the context and the results of Jabez’s prayer, we can see that there was more to his request than a simple desire for more real estate. He wanted more influence, more responsibility, and more opportunity to make a mark for the God of Israel.
Depending on the version you’re reading, the word territory can also be translated coast or borders. For Jabez and his contemporaries, that word carried the same emotional power as the words homestead or frontier did for generations of American pioneers. It spoke of a place of one’s own with plenty of room to grow.
In Jabez’s time part of Israel’s recent national history was Joshua’s conquest of Canaan and the partitioning of the Promised Land into chunks of real estate for each tribe. When Jabez cried out to God, “Enlarge my territory!” he was looking at his present circumstances and concluding, “Surely I was born for more than this!” As a farmer or herdsman, he looked over the spread his family had passed down to him, ran his eye down the fence lines, visited the boundary markers, calculated the potential—and made a decision: Everything you’ve put under my care, O Lord—take it, and enlarge it.
If Jabez had worked on Wall Street, he might have prayed, “Lord, increase the value of my investment portfolios.” When I talk to presidents of companies, I often talk to them about this particular mind-set. When Christian executives ask me, “Is it right for me to ask God for more business?” my response is, “Absolutely!” If you’re doing your business God’s way, it’s not only right to ask for more, but He is waiting for you to ask. Your business is the territory God has entrusted to you.
He wants you to accept it as a significant opportunity to touch individual lives, the business community, and the larger world for His glory. Asking Him to enlarge that opportunity brings Him only delight.
Suppose Jabez had been a wife and a mother. Then the prayer might have gone: “Lord, add to my family, favor my key relationships, multiply for Your glory the influence of my household.” Your home is the single most powerful arena on earth to change a life for God. Why wouldn’t He want you to be mighty for Him?
No matter what your vocation, the highest form of Jabez’s prayer for more territory might sound something like:
O God and King, please expand my opportunities and my impact in such a way that I touch more lives for Your glory. Let me do more for You!
When you pray like this, things get pretty exciting.
