Book Review: Prayers Jabez Didn't Pray

Title: Prayers Jabez Didn’t Pray

Author: Kenneth C. Hill

Publisher: Hearthstone

Date: 2002

ISBN: 1-57558-118-3

Length: 285 pages

Quote: “With more than six hundred fifty prayers from which to choose, it was difficult to find the proper mixture of prayers.”

Bruce Wilkinson’s Prayer of Jabez had been a huge seller at the turn of the century. Kenneth C. Hill, a vice-president of Southwest Radio Church Ministries, thought the world needed a book on all the other answered prayers in the Bible. As he admits in the foreword, the great thing about his book is that it presents a survey of the different kinds of answered prayers the Bible recommends to us, each with some more recent commentary and a hymn or poem that expresses a similar thought. (And if you’re an ear thinker like me, you will love this book’s sound track! Someone ought to record it.) The frustrating thing is that even a full-length book can’t discuss all of the prayers in the Bible with the attention Wilkinson’s short book gave the short prayer of Jabez. Hill’s expositions upon twenty prayers are brief.

The prayers chosen are those of Moses, Samson, Hannah, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Job, David, Isaiah, Daniel, the Syrophoenician woman who asked Jesus for healing, the rich man in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the apostles, Paul, the saints and angels in the Revelation, and Jesus Himself. Surprisingly, “The Lord’s Prayer” is not discussed first, last, or at greatest length, though it’s the one given to us as a general example; and the prayers are not discussed in either the order they are printed in the Bible, or in what is believed to be their chronological order in history.

Hill was the pastor of a church in Kingsport, Tennessee, and the manager of the Christian-content radio station in Bristol, so in addition to being a meaningful study of prayer this book belongs in any collection of Local History.