What if your birth name defined your entire existence?

What if every time someone called you, they reminded you of the worst moment of your life?

Well, buried in the genealogies of First Chronicles is a man whose mother named him pain.

It seems outrageous.

The story of Jabez should have ended in obscurity, lost among thousands of forgotten names.

Instead, God paused the narrative to spotlight this unlikely hero.

Today, on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindall illustrates how one desperate prayer from J-Bez

transformed his life and why the answer to that prayer matters for your future today.

We're engaged in a series of messages on great stories in the Old Testament.

My motivation for bringing this series came from an observation I've made over the last number of years

as I have been with people of all different ages and in all different places.

And that is that I am discovering that parents these days seem to be not as faithful in telling the stories from the Bible as they once were.

I don't know, maybe it's the presence of television, perhaps it's the speed of our lives

and the number of involvements we have with our schools and with our neighborhoods and our

communities. But for whatever reason, I'm discovering that many of the young adults that I'm with often

are not familiar with the great stories that come from the scriptures.

In case you wonder if that's true, stop and think, parents of the last time you sat down

with one or more of your children and told them, deliberately told them

a story from the Bible. Just as we are becoming less and less acquainted with the great hymns

from our hymnals, so we are becoming less acquainted with the great stories from the Bible.

Now, the stories don't have to be long to be significant or great.

Neither do they have to be that complicated, but there is something about the genius of a story

...