Freed from the hurts of the past

Before I go on to the life of Solomon, I’d like to touch on two more stories found in the early part of I Chronicles.

Here we find the life of a man named Jabez.

We hardly know anything about him.  We don’t know his occupation.  We know nothing about who he married, or if he had children, or how long we lived.

What we do have are two things.

First, he was an honorable man.

Second, he was left with a name that probably left him open to ridicule and shame.

Apparently, while his mother was giving birth to Jabez, she suffered great pain.  And so she named him Jabez, which sounds like the Hebrew word for pain.

Can you imagine growing up with that name? I can imagine the boys he grew up around with, saying to him.  “You’re such a pain!  Get lost.”

Growing up, I wonder how loved he felt by his mother.

“Does she really love me?  Does she only see me as a person who brought pain into her life?”

And perhaps it was in the midst of his hurt and feelings of rejection by his mother and the people around him, that he cried out to God,

Oh, 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)

And it says at the end of the verse that God granted his request.

How about you?  Are you suffering from the hurts of the past?

Perhaps you grew up feeling rejected by your father or mother.  Perhaps you grew up isolated from the people you went to school with.

You don’t need to continue to live in the hurts of the past and let it affect your present and future.

Give your hurts to God.  Give your life to him and ask for his presence and blessing in his life.

And if you do, you’ll find all the love and acceptance you missed when you were growing up.

But don’t let it stop there either.

Instead, take the love and acceptance you’ve received from God, and pass it on to the people around you, who like you, have suffered from the hurts of the past.

As Paul wrote,

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.  (2 Corinthians 1:3-5)