His lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’
— Matthew 25:21 (NKJV)
Before the garden in our backyard was a place to kick field goals, it was a garden. And before it was my garden, it was my family’s garden. It had been tended, season after season, by people who understood that you don’t get a harvest without doing the work. You prepare the soil. You plant the seeds. You pull the weeds. You water and wait.
There was nothing glamorous about that garden. Nobody drove by and took pictures of it. It wasn’t going to end up in a magazine. But it fed a family. It produced real, tangible fruit, not because it was impressive to look at, but because somebody was faithful to tend it.
I think about that when I consider the prayer of Jabez. We love the part about enlarged territory. We love the idea of expansion, increase, and greater influence. But here’s what we sometimes skip over: Jabez already had territory. He wasn’t starting from nothing. He had an inheritance, a piece of land his family had passed down to him. And he had been faithful with it.
That matters. God doesn’t typically enlarge what you haven’t been willing to maintain.
In the parable of the talents, the master didn’t hand out new assignments to servants who buried what they’d been given. He gave more to the ones who had been faithful with what they already had. The principle is consistent throughout Scripture: stewardship precedes expansion.
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