Ozier muhammad biography bible verse
May 20,
THE CLOSE READER
Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz?Jabez's obscurity makes him ideal for the narrative of conversion and redemption.
By JUDITH SHULEVITZ
ur text today is ''The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life.'' This inexpensive, shirt-pocket-size volume (Multnomah Publishers, $) has sold more than four million copies in the past year, and is the best-selling book in America right now.It has attracted a prodigious following among people who have chosen to repeat every day the one-sentence prayer that gives the book its title. (''Oh, that you would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, and that you would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!'') Jabez enthusiasts have risen up in churches and private homes and on the Prayer of Jabez Web site () to testify to the changes the sentence has wrought in their lives.
National publications have made note; experts have been consulted; videos have been made; a sequel has been published, and others, including ''The Prayer of Jabez for Teens'' and ''The Prayer of Jabez for Women,'' have been commissioned. ''The Prayer of Jabez'' has also been taken up by the mighty.
The author, an Atlanta-based evangelical minister named Bruce Wilkinson, who was one of the leaders of the Promise Keepers movement, was recently invited to the White House. What makes ''The Prayer of Jabez'' so appealing? The easy answer is that the book differs slightly from other how-to guides.
Ozier muhammad biography bible verse Its existence has provided secure housing to a community who would have struggled to find it otherwise. But they insisted, and I accepted it based on their asking me and the love that I have for the pioneers here. They are stopping 1, to 2, young men every day, the vast majority young African-American and Latino men. So the area was a natural choice for him when he was looking to do a personal project on religion.Wilkinson has resurrected the once ubiquitous and now mostly forgotten genre of the published Sunday sermon. ''The Prayer of Jabez'' follows the rules that have governed American preaching since the Puritans came to the New World. It contains Scripture, doctrine and a practical application of both. The style is plain but fiery.
The Scripture consists of two verses from the Old Testament book of I Chronicles, a little-studied text otherwise made up of tedious genealogical lists.
Prophet muhammad biography Salisbury William Randolph Hearst Jr. I was called to preach and what that means is that I believe that the Holy Spirit moved in me before I realized what I would do. March 1, Credit European Pressphoto Agency.Wilkinson reads the verses closely and cleverly. They tell the story of an Israelite commoner whose mother gave him the unhappy name of Jabez, which the Bible tells us comes from ''pain.'' (This is a folk etymology; the name is actually an inversion of the letters in the Hebrew word for pain.) Despite his inauspicious start in life, Jabez begs God ''to enlarge his territories'' and winds up being ''more honorable than his brothers.''
That is all we know about him, but for Wilkinson's purposes, we don't need to know more.
Jabez's obscurity, textually and socially, makes him an ideal vehicle for the traditional American Christian narrative of conversion and redemption. Jabez is a biblical everyman, vaguely discontented with his lot and ripe for a turn toward God. As Wilkinson puts it: ''Things started badly for a person no one had ever heard of.
He prayed an unusual, one-sentence prayer. Things ended extraordinarily well.''
Wilkinson breaks Jabez's prayer into four parts and turns them into steps to be taken toward the good life. And then -- this is the point at which he turns a little snake-oil salesmanish -- he promises that if you take the steps, results will be yours within days.
Those steps require remarkably little effort. If you ask for God's blessing (Step 1), he will enlarge your territory -- that is, in the modern American context, grant you success (Step 2). Wilkinson defines success in different ways at different points in the book. Sometimes it seems to consist in being a skillful evangelist.
Muhammad ali biography boxer: In addition to the photographs, he conducted audio interviews as well. So the area was a natural choice for him when he was looking to do a personal project on religion. Its existence has provided secure housing to a community who would have struggled to find it otherwise. A God who diverts his awesome supernatural force for the sole purpose of giving a jump-start to your personal and professional development may seem disconcertingly crass.
That's how Wilkinson measures his own success -- in numbers of converts and the speed at which he converts them. For other people success manifests itself in wealth and worldly esteem. ''If Jabez had worked on Wall Street,'' Wilkinson writes, ''he might have prayed, 'Lord, increase the value of my investment portfolios.' ''
Because of remarks like these, Wilkinson has been accused of preaching prosperity theology.
This is a serious charge, since the phrase is more commonly associated with the teachings of ministers who grow fat off the pennies of the poor.
(The Rev. Jerry Falwell, for instance, once called the disgraced televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker prosperity theologians.) Wilkinson denies the charge, and it does seem a crude way to characterize ''The Prayer of Jabez.'' Though the prayer certainly enjoys brand extension, it is a prayer, not a con game or a pyramid scheme.
Wilkinson has a revival-meeting manner that makes it seem as if he's offering a tit-for-tat with God -- you pray to him; he'll make you rich -- but he also says that the Jabez prayer requires an acceptance of God's will whatever its form, not the presentation of an itemized demand.
On the other hand, Wilkinson makes God's will awfully easy to accept, since he says God wants us to be successful.
Indeed, Step 3, Wilkinson says, is to realize that God wants us to take entrepreneurial risks, to pile on more than we think we can handle. If we truly believe in him, he'll back us up. (In Jabez-speak, his hand will be with us.) Is it really God's business to help us avert bankruptcy?
Ozier muhammad biography bible verse today The Jabez prayer grants the supplicant full access to the American cult of success, an adoration of power and material satisfaction untroubled by any sense that the world may be a tragic place or the fear that the enlargement of one's territory might leave others' diminished. And sometimes preachers forget to speak to those issues that people deal with daily. Meant to New York. Download as PDF Printable version.Wilkinson says yes. God doesn't want you to fail. He empowers because he is power itself. In fact, the reason to avoid sin (Step 4) is that it separates you from his energy current: ''It is as if the electric lines to your house in Phoenix were severed and you were cut off from the immense power generators at Hoover Dam.''
A God who diverts his awesome supernatural force for the sole purpose of giving a jump-start to your personal and professional development may seem disconcertingly crass.
But a deity who sounds like a motivational speaker at a business luncheon may also be the right deity for an era when megachurches sprawl across the land and more traditional houses of worship are going into genteel decline. The Jabez prayer grants the supplicant full access to the American cult of success, an adoration of power and material satisfaction untroubled by any sense that the world may be a tragic place or the fear that the enlargement of one's territory might leave others' diminished.
That such upbeat theologies of convenience should have mass appeal is neither particular to our time -- think of Norman Vincent Peale, whose best seller, ''The Power of Positive Thinking,'' was ''The Prayer of Jabez'' of its day -- nor all that deplorable. It's useful to have these ideas spelled out, rather than at work in the culture but unexamined.
Ozier muhammad biography bible verse images Many readers clearly find Wilkinson's worldview to be similar to their own. And it is our realities that really at the end of the day make us human, those emotions. The MAAM Metropoliz — Since gaining official acceptance, a former salami factory turned art squat has become a fully-fledged museum. I am like a social worker in my congregation, and I also work with issues in the community like violence and drug addiction.Many readers clearly find Wilkinson's worldview to be similar to their own. Those who don't can indulge a voyeuristic fascination with the church of what the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in , called the American idolatry. He, however, found it disturbing. ''The Gospel cannot be preached with truth and power if it does not challenge the pretensions and pride, not only of individuals, but of nations, cultures, civilizations, economic and political systems,'' Niebuhr wrote.
''The good fortune of America and its power place it under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation.''
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