Billy Ray Cyrus had other singles besides Achy Breaky Heart in the early 90’s. Paul Reubens has appeared in movies playing characters other than Pee Wee Herman, just like Jim Varney was not always Earnest. James Best was a television, film, stage, and voice actor, as well as a writer, director, acting coach, artist, college professor, and musician. But you probably only know him as Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane. Sometimes a person becomes so well known for one thing that people are unaware of anything else.

Bruce Wilkinson published The Prayer of Jabez in 2000. When something sells well they can usually find ways to sell more of it and soon there were Prayer of Jabez t-shirts, wall plaques, calendars, prayer journals and so forth. The other side of that coin is anytime something becomes real popular real fast – refer back to Billy Ray Cyrus on this point – there is pushback. I think there was some misunderstanding regarding Jabez and people that had not read the book told others why they should not read the book either. In his defense Wilkinson uses Jabez as an example, a model of prayer, that teaches some lessons on how we should pray, no different than when Jesus said “pray in this manner.” Neither prayer causes magic things to happen when we repeat some secret words, but that was an oft repeated criticism I heard back in the day. Wilkinson makes that point in his book but as they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The Prayer of Jabez is a little book that you could probably get through in a day. In 2001 he published Secrets of the Vine, about a conversation Jesus had with his disciples sometimes referred to as the Olivet discourse. Then 2002 gave us the third book in the series A Life God Rewards. The post I wrote earlier this week on God’s judgement reminded me of Wilkinson’s book which I have not picked up in a while. All three books in this series take a short passage of scripture that we might otherwise quickly read through and keep going and says “Hey, let’s camp out here for a while.” Reading through your Bible in a year is great as far as reading goals but it’s not the same as studying the Bible. We need to do both things and study requires more time and attention. I found something of value in all three books. If you avoided Jabez because of all the hype, positive and negative, the world has moved on since then and I would recommend giving Wilkinson another shot. He has written more than 60 books even though most people only know about the one, which they likely didn’t read.