Rabbi Schneider — Blessings
God bless you and Shalom, beloved ones. My name's Rabbi Schneider. Welcome today to this important broadcast of Discovering the Jewish Jesus. We're continuing our series today called capturing God's heart, as we've been doing a study on the great prayers of the Hebrew Bible.
I'm gonna continue today with a very well-known prayer called the Prayer of Jabez. I'm gonna begin reading now from the Book of 1 Chronicles, chapter number 4, verses number 9 and 10. Hear the Word of God:
Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, and his mother named him Jabez saying, Because I bore him with pain. Now Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, Oh that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my border, and that Your hand might be with me, and that You would help me and keep me from harm that it might not pain me. And God granted him what he requested.
What a beautiful, pure, child-like prayer. Can't all of us relate to this prayer? I mean these were just simple, pure, child-like, heart issues. And you know what, beloved? God answered that prayer.
And when you and I pray to the Lord with a pure heart, these simple things as Jabez prayed, we can be assured that God is gonna answer those prayers and that his goodness towards you and me will be the same as it was towards Jabez.
Do you know the Bible tells us that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, get this now, is toward us. And you know the Scriptures begin in almost every letter that Paul wrote the same way.
Paul says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then he says peace to you. He says, grace and peace to you, Paul said, from God the Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
What this means is that God's favor is on you and me. And God wants us to believe that he loves us. He wants us to believe that his favor is on us. He wants us to believe that when we ask him for good things he's gonna give us good things.
Jesus said, if you, speaking of you and I, know how to give good gifts to our children, he said how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those that ask him.
So right now, Father, in Jesus's name we break off every wrong concept that we have about you. Father, we break off every thought that's making us think that we're condemned before you. We break off every lie that's telling us you're mad at us. We break off every deception from the devil that makes us think that there are bad things up ahead for us.
Father, we declare today that you love us, that we're your children, that you desire for us to prosper and be in good health according to your Word, even as our soul prospers, that you're our daddy, and that you're gonna do for us, Abba, even what you did for Jabez.
Many of you know when I just said that name, Abba, that's the Hebrew word and it means daddy. You know the Bible tells us that we've been given the spirit of adoption by which we cry out, get it now, Abba, daddy, Father.
Do you ever call God your daddy? Let me give you a little witness test here. If you look at your prayer life, if you listen to yourself pray, let me ask you this question.
When you listen to yourself pray, do you address God as God, or do you address him as, get it now, as Father, as Abba, as daddy, or as papa?
Now some of you, if you're honest, every time that you pray you never say Father, you never say Abba, you never say daddy, but every time you pray, I'm just trying to help you, you always say God.
And you know, God is our God, but our God came to us in the person of Jesus, get this now, so that he could become our Father and so that we could know him, get it church, as daddy, as Father. We've not received a spirit, beloved, of, of isolationism, but we've received the spirit of adoption by which we cry daddy, Father.