Here’s how to trigger a Christian: tell them God wants to prosper them or heal them. Then sit back and watch them manifest. They will shift, get uncomfortable, dart their eyes, and start gnashing (grinding) their teeth. It’s quite a sight to see, honestly. You could also tell them to meditate. You’ll get a good eye-roll from that one.
Here’s the thing about the biggest trigger word in Christianity: prosperity is Biblical. It’s okay to prosper. In fact, prosperity is your inheritance as a Believer. And I believe it’s true that in any area we are not prospering it is sin for us. 😲 Yep. But before you curse and shut down this page, let me explain.
It’s amazing how any new movement in the church does two things. First, the movement twists into a version that looks nothing like the original when the second and third-generation of “movement evangelists” champion it. For whatever reasons they seem to move further and further from the original truth and corrupt the message. Second, we eat our own. We see new ways of spreading the gospel work for other congregations and we immediately downplay the success, criticize the strategy, and throw shade by acting all religious about it. Because God-forbid, if people are coming by droves into the Kingdom, clearly it’s been built on heresy!
I’ll share a little church history of my own. I was raised in the Assemblies of God denomination. I am a Spirit-filled, tongue-speaking radical for Jesus. I believe in miracles, and I believe physical healing still happens today. It’s how I was raised. It’s who I was. It’s who I still am.
In my early adulthood, the church I spent most of my life in had a leadership change. The new pastor brought the purpose-driven church model to our congregation and he was, basically, lambasted for it. He had dreams of taking a very traditional church to a place they didn’t want to go. They thought they wanted to be seeker-sensitive but couldn’t let go of their traditions.
A seeker-sensitive church does its best to think like someone who didn’t grow up in church. They try not to sing songs with lyrics like, “are you washed in the blood of the lamb” for fear of sounding like an animal-sacrificing cult.
I get that. I’m even down with that.
I’ll never forget a church service that opened with the blowing of a ram’s horn. I thought to myself, “I could never ask the friends I used to party with to come here. They would freak out and run out the door!” Even I almost ran out the door! I had no idea what the blowing of the shofar meant, let alone what freaky thing was about to happen next, so how was I going to explain it to a non-Believer? I would have been okay with the shofar-show had the pastor or worship leader at least explained what had just happened.
But nothing. Just the shofar followed by worship songs where everyone sings along and claps. Where else does singing and clapping in unison happen other than preschool? We do all manner of things that are culturally strange. It doesn’t make them wrong, but it does make them strange to outsiders.
I fully embraced the seeker-sensitive model. I found myself working for over a decade in churches that were led by pastors who were licensed through the Assemblies of God but followed the seeker-sensitive model. We didn’t model speaking in tongues as part of the services. We believed in healing but altar time was few and far between. Speaking in tongues wasn’t not taught from the pulpit, but we didn’t disciple people in the use of spiritual gifts.
All of this made sense to me at the time because people tend to exploit the empowerment they’re given. You’ve seen these churches. These are the ones that haven’t had church unless someone was screaming tongues into the microphone and people were falling down all over the alter for three hours. Minimum. Chaos and disorder take over. But unless bonified miracles take place on the regular in these services, their growth eventually taps out. People grow weary of looking for miracles and not receiving them. They grow weary of “taking the Kingdom by force” and begging at the altar for God to change their circumstances. They grow tired of giving more than ten percent but still facing poverty regularly.
They grow tired of having answers but never any solutions. After decades of dedication to the message, they tire of not getting life to work.
This was me. For three decades I was caught between the promise that God wanted me to flourish in life but Him dangling the perverbial carrot of abundance in front of me until I was broken. I was d-o-n-e DONE. You can only take so much hope deferred. A sick heart has no ability to walk in Godly desires fulfilled.
But I still believed. Like Job, I thought God was allowing all of this pain to happen to me, though I never cursed Him or walked away. I never denied Him. But I did begin to pursue the truth. I wanted a gospel that worked. If Jesus said I could have it—if He died to give it to me, I wasn’t going to be denied it any longer. All I knew was that the doctrine I was raised on—the doctrine I led others with, had no ability to put my life back together when it fell apart. If Jesus wasn’t a total liar, something had to give.
The Prosperity Gospel attracts the broken, poor, destitute, and oppressed. It promises you can have whatever you speak; if you name and claim it, it’s yours! But you’d be surprised to learn it didn’t start out that way. The radical behavior of the prominent prosperity teachers of today is not the marker of those who championed the message of faith and grace. As I studied the writings of various prosperity teachers over the years, I discovered some very level-headed thinking! I found a path that led towards activating faith that moves mountains without screaming at the devil.
God is passion and love. But God is also logical.
Take Kenneth Copeland, for instance. His ministry started when he was broke and had thousands of dollars of debt. In eleven months, he was debt free and has never looked back. He outlines the principles he followed in his book, The Laws of Prosperity, written in 1974. Here are a few quotes:
“True prosperity is God manifesting Himself to us in His Word.”
“True prosperity is the ability to use God’s power to meet the needs of mankind in any realm of life.”
“When you make it your need to get salvation into the hands of the people, when you make it your purpose to feed the gospel to the unsaved, God will support what you do. This is true prosperity.”
“When you put the Word of God first in your life and it becomes your final authority, prosperity is the result.”
All good. But fast forward to today…
The prosperity gospel is suddenly something you can use to kill a manmade virus and demand a vaccine come forth. The problem is, both the virus and the vaccine are killing people now. That doesn’t seem like a God-inspired solution.
And He isn’t the prince of war. He’s the Prince of Peace.
Twisted. Exaggerated. Manipulated, and exploited. For what? For gain. What is gained? A crowd of followers who think screaming at a defeated enemy will bring health and wealth.
The truth is, God gives us the power to create wealth so He can establish His covenant in the earth (Deuteronomy 8:18). We SHOULD have wealth. God wants us to control the wealth of the world. It’s not hard to understand why He doesn’t want evil men to control it. He wants wealth used to spread the Gospel of Peace to the world, not immorality.
But how can that happen if Christians don’t know how to prosper?
The bottom line is this: wealth doesn’t come to us by screaming at the devil or by thinking or speaking it into existence. All manner of Christian books has been written about taking every thought that crosses your brain captive, controlling your thoughts, positive self-talk, and speaking Bible affirmations. Yet we aren’t any wealthier or healthier than other people groups.
This problem is not a mind or speech problem. It’s a heart problem. The prosperity gospel has all but ignored the Bible’s instructions on our personal responsibility to minister to our own hearts. It is out of the heart that the mouth speaks. In other words, you will speak out whatever you believe to be true in your heart. This is why it’s so important to guard whatever enters our hearts. You can recite positive self-talk out loud all day but if your heart doesn’t believe is it true about you, you’ll never be able to see it activate in your life.
The same is true for your thought life. Your thoughts are generated by the belief in your heart. You can’t think your way into changing your thoughts. You must change the belief in your heart to change your thoughts and your speech.
According to scripture, the heart is the seat of your identity. It is where you hold your beliefs about who you are. Unless those beliefs are aligned with the finished work of Jesus, you won’t be able to prosper in life the way Jesus’ demonstrated you could.
This week on the podcast, I break down what it looks like to take your land. Your land is any solution that solves a problem in your life. Your land is moving from lack to prosperity, whether it’s prosperity in health and finances or in relationships and careers.
The glaring difference between the truth of the Bible and how the prosperity gospel has perverted the truth is this: you cannot take your land by force. Your land can only be taken by faith and faith only comes after rest. We are never told to strive to be prosperous. In fact, the only thing we are ever told to strive for is to enter into rest. Adam started from a position of rest. It was only when he wanted to be his own source that the striving began. The land was never cursed by God. It was cursed because of Adam’s belief he could be his own source. Our land is never placed back under the curse by God. It is only subject to the curse of the world’s system when we refuse to take it by the yoke Jesus longs to give us. His yoke and easy and light, not toilsome and difficult.
We become like the god we believe in.
We never have to behave like a prince of war when we have the Prince of Peace.
I mentioned that not prospering is sin for us. Sin isn’t just direct defiance of the ten commandments. Sin is when, in any area of our lives, we function in a way that isn’t God’s best for us. What is God’s best for us? Whatever Jesus died to give us. This is why prospering in our hearts, relationships, finances, physical and mental health, and spirituality is so important! We want to be functioning in the freedom we have been given!
A final thought regarding my church upbringing. I need you to know, I had to repent for my buy-in on the seeker-sensitive movement. Just like any movement, it wasn’t all bad. But not discipling people in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, not teaching them how to operate in words of knowledge, have faith for miracles, how to attain physical healing, the purpose of speaking in tongues and why it’s so important, words of wisdom and the like is never okay. These abilities should be like breathing for the Christian. Throwing them out because we’re afraid we can’t control the people is nothing short of the Catholicism control tactics.
But on the back of that repentance, I had to repent for having an “us and them” mentality toward church leadership. I participated. Wherever I went, there I was.
Three different people gave a word of knowledge that I had spears in my back from the accusations and anger church leaders threw at me. And wouldn’t you know it, I had unexplained back pain for several years. I knew in my heart these words of knowledge were almost right. The prophecy is subject to the prophet’s preconceived notions about God. I know no one’s judgment of me can cause debilitating pain unless I have somehow come to an agreement with them.
The sin for me was believing I wasn’t the perpetrator and that they were. And yet, by taking a paycheck, I was just as guilty. I led the flock away from the healing power of Jesus by refusing to teach the full Gospel of Peace, even while I operated in the supernatural in my own private life.
Not okay.
And wouldn’t you know it, the minute I repented, the debilitating back pain left immediately.
I agree with the prosperity gospel that God’s will for physical healing is always yes and amen because of Jesus. How our healing comes is where the prosperity gospel and I are miles apart.
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Wow!! The story of Elijah in the cave has had so many interpretations. As one Rabbi said, "The interpretations of this episode in Elijah's life are endless, and none has achieved definitive status. The story, as we shall see, is too complex for that. Each reading leaves a thread or two or three untied...".
I couldn't agree more! I too have felt there were too many untied threads in the common narrative we've accepted. Not to say that I haven't received ministry from our understanding of Elijah. I have lost ground to my fair share of Jezebel's. But based on what we now know about the original Hebrew language of the Bible, it's challenging to affirm Elijah was a fragile prophet who suffered from an identity crisis.
This message challenged me! I hope you will listen, even if just to consider a different possibility and discover a model for a faith that moves mountains!
