Sep 10, 2023

John Hyde

The Prayer of Jabez became the rage in Christian circles some ten years ago, “O, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm, so that I will be free from pain” (1 Chronicles 4.10). The author testified how this obscure Old Testament prayer had changed his life. Other people added glowing reports in his bestselling book how this prayer became their key to unlocking God’s blessings. He urged readers to pray this prayer every day for a month to receive big blessings from God. Far be it from me to disparage this biblical prayer but the “name it and claim it” attitude that has come to be associated with the Jabez prayer ignores the full breadth of Scriptural teaching on prayer.
This Jabez prayer had a deep impact on a missionary named John Hyde (1865-1912). John seemed ill-suited to lead a mission to India. He was withdrawn, intensely private and partially deaf, which made learning a foreign language formidable. But John’s forte was prayer. He became known as “Praying Hyde.” He skipped meals and sacrificed sleep to intercede for people. John’s ministry of prayer became a catalyst for significant evangelism and renewal in India.

Jabez asked for God’s blessing, prayed for enlarged territory and entreated God to lead him by the hand. Jabez wasn’t praying for more real estate. He asked God to deliver on promises already made to him. This prayer challenged John to become bold to pray, “Give me more souls, O Lord, or I die.” The prayer also taught him to trust God when answers to prayer weren’t forthcoming. Early in his ministry in 1898, John was laid up for seven months with typhoid fever and accompanying depression. He wrote in his journal about the impact of the Jabez prayer had in his own life:

For a long time after my illness last May, nervous weakness kept me in the hills, though I wished much to go back to work…All during the year, the prayer of Jabez recorded in 1 Chronicles 4.10 kept flooding my soul with its melody…”Enlarge my borders,” it sang, day after day, for weeks on end…The answer was an illness straitening and limiting my strength and efforts–taking me, keeping me from working for months, pressing home lessons of waiting, impressing the great lesson, “Not my will, but Thine be done.” But with the waiting and straining came spiritual enlarging. How often God withholds the temporal or delays it, that we may long for and seek the spiritual…”I wait for the Lord and in his word, I hope; my soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen wait for the morning” (Psalm 130.5-6).

Rev. Dr. Peter James served 42 years as the senior of Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, VA — 21 years in the 20th century and 21 years in the 21st century. He retired in 2021 and now serves as Pastor-in-Residence at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Even as a pastor, prayer came slowly to Pete. Read Pete’s story.