A Gospel of Prosperity?

Randall L. Ridenour, Guest Speaker
21st Sunday after Pentecost

We can learn a lot about the deepest human desires by knowing what people pray for. I don’t mean the prayers that we say in church, because, to be honest, we are often more worried about how they will sound than how they express our deepest needs.
So, if you want to know what the deep desires of humans are, listen to the prayers of those that don’t care about impressing the people who hear them. That is, listen to the prayers of children.

I, like everyone else, occasionally get those e-mails from well-intentioned friends that begin, “I usually don’t forward e-mails, but this is just too good. . . ” Most of the time, they really aren’t that good, but this one was. It was a collection of cards supposedly written to God from children. Here are some samples:

Dear God,
It rained for our whole vacation and is my father mad! He said some things about you that people are not supposed to say, but I hope you will not hurt him in anyway.
Your Friend (but I am not going to tell you who I am)

Dear God,
If we come back as something, please don’t let me be Jennifer Horton, because I hate her.
Denise

Dear God,
I bet it is very hard for you to love all the people in the world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do it.
Nan

Dear God,
My brothers told me about being born, but it doesn’t sound right. They are just kidding, aren’t they?
Marsha

Dear God,
Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother.
Larry

Dear God,
Thank you for my baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.
Joyce

Dear God,
Please send me a pony. I never asked for anything before. You can look it up.
Bruce


We can divide these prayers into two categories. First, the ones that deal with relationship issues among family, friends, or, in the case of Jennifer Horton, enemies. The second category is prayers for material blessings. Joyce is thankful, but she would have been more thankful had God been considerate enough to give her what she actually asked for. Bruce, on the other hand, has showed great self-control in the past, and given his remarkable self-constraint, feels that he is owed that pony.

And why not? Hasn’t God promised to give us what we ask for? In Jesus’ own words, “Ask and ye shall receive,” or as we hear in the classic stewardship sermon, “Give and it shall be given to you. A good measure, shaken together, running over. . . Surely God wants his people to be happy. We read the testimony of Scripture, God wants to bless his people. The lectionary Psalm for today is Psalm 34: “I sought the Lord, and he answered me. . . O taste and see that the Lord is good.”

What better testimony could there be to the power of the Gospel than the blessings poured upon the people of God? Wasn’t Job rewarded at the end of the book by having family restored, and possessions doubled? The Prosperity Gospel This attitude can be found in an old, but ever-growing, tradition in the church. It is known by various names: the prosperity gospel, positive confession, the word of faith movement, or simply “faith.” Those of us who are a bit more cynical call it the name it-claim it movement. It’s had several leaders in the past few decades, including Paul and Jan Crouch, owners of Trinity Broadcasting Network, Kenneth Hagin, Robert Tilton, Kenneth Copeland, Paul Yonggi Cho, and others. Their claim is that through faith, we can have anything we want— health, wealth, and success. To gain these things, we simply have to ask for them by the spoken word.

In his booklet How to Write Your Own Ticket with God, Kenneth Hagin claimed to have been told this in a vision by Jesus himself, “Then the Lord Jesus Himself appeared to me,” said Hagin and and instructed him to write down a simple four-step formula, and that “if anybody, anywhere, will take these four steps or put these four principles into operation, he will always receive whatever he wants from Me or from God the Father.” That includes whatever you want. The formula is simply: ”Say it, Do it, Receive it, and Tell it.”

According to Kenneth Copeland, “All it takes is 1) Seeing or visualizing whatever you need, whether physical or financial; 2) Staking your claim on Scripture; and 3) Speaking it into existence.” Are people listening to this? Is it possible for anyone to take these teachings seriously? It seems so, and I think you can find it in the teachings of Joel Osteen, the now best-selling author and popular pastor of Lakewood Church, which meets in the 18,000 seat Compaq Center in Houston. Note a few of his sermon titles:
• Enlarge Your Vision
• Holding Onto Your Dreams
• Financial Prosperity
• Faith to Change Your World Do All You Can to Make Your Dreams Come True

The word “Gospel” is the word used in place of a Greek term meaning “good message” or “good news.” The prosperity gospel is certainly good news to those who hear it, otherwise Lakewood Church would not have baptized 18,000 people last year. So, it is good news, but is it the good news of Jesus Christ?

If the prosperity gospel is true, and I could have anything I asked for, then after reading the gospels, I’m not sure that I would ask for wealth. Jesus’ teachings on wealth are anything but comforting.

In first-century Palestine, there were two groups of people, the rich and the poor. These major groups were composed of several sub-groups. The rich included the four high-priestly clans. They gained wealth from the offerings presented in the temple and controlled the extensive commercial activities associated with temple life.

Another group was the family and associates of Herod. Herod and his family, by some estimates, owned more than half of the land that was under his control.

Other wealthy people included what remained of the older Jewish aristocracy and rich merchants. To be considered truly wealthy, a person had to own land. So, as these people became wealthy, they would buy land, but would rarely farm it themselves. Instead, he would rent it to tenant farmers, while he lived and conducted his affairs in the city, primarily Jerusalem. Hence the parables about tenant workers and absent landlords. This system led to a practice of abuse of tenant farmers and laborers, but was considered perfectly legal by the wealthy. This practice in turn led to constantly increasing resentment of the wealthy merchants, and it is no surprise that one of the first things to occur during the Jewish revolt in the late 60’s was to burn the debt records and kill many of the aristocrats.

Of the people who were not wealthy, the best-off was clearly the small landowner. Palestine essentially had an agricultural economy outside the city, and the primary source of income was farming, which required land. So, those who owned some land were clearly better off than those who owned none. The problem is that those who owned land were always only two years away from financial ruin. After one bad crop, the farmer had to borrow money to purchase seed for the next year. If next year’s crop also failed, then he would lose his land to pay his debt. We know from records that the first-century had several bad droughts, so more and more land became concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer wealthy people.

The ones in the worst position were obviously those who owned no land at all, including tenant workers, laborers, and beggars. The poor lived on the brink even in the best of times. There were Roman taxes to pay, Pharasaic interpretations of the Law prescribed a tithe that ranged from seventeen to twenty-three percent of gross income. This put the poor in the position of a choice between religious piety and feeding one’s family.

This is the world into which Jesus comes. He is the son of a carpenter who neither inherited land nor acquired any himself. He took a special interest in the poor, the outcasts, and those on the fringes of Jewish society.

He never viewed possessions as inherently evil, but neither did he see wealth as something safe. It is something that easily becomes dangerous. It can function exactly like the idols in ancient Hebrew culture, it seduces the people away from total devotion to God. In the parable of the Sower in Mark 4.18-19, it is the deceit of wealth and the desires for other things that chokes the word.

In fact, surprisingly, one should not see wealth as a mark of God’s favor! It makes it difficult to enter the kingdom! Hence, the story of the rich young man ends with the claim “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Since the former is impossible, it implies that the latter is also impossible. The disciples are shocked, and ask, then how can anyone be saved. Jesus assures them that all things are possible with God.

Luke follows this same story with the story of Zacchaeus. The impossible does take place, Zacchaeus is saved, but he is not left rich. After Zacchaeus announced that he would give half his possessions to the poor and repay anyone that he has defrauded fourfold, Jesus proclaimed that now salvation had come to this house.

We misunderstand the teaching of Jesus when we think he is simply telling us to
keep wealth and possessions in their proper place, and giving God his proper due. The danger is that both God and mammon demand our service. Wealth must be preserved, one’s daily bread must be earned. Jesus rejects that there is no proper service to mammon: it is impossible to serve both money and God.

Jesus makes this point explicitly in the parable of the rich fool who has a bumper crop and decides now to take life easy, relax, eat, drink, and be merry. He has arrived, he has reached the American dream. He has attained the position that everyone would want. He has made it. But something is wrong. Most translations say something like, “You fool, this very night your soul is demanded of you.”

The implication, then, is that he will die that night. What’s the moral of the story? Don’t save? Spend it while you can?

My colleague, Dr. Bobby Kelly, who teaches New Testament Greek, pointed out to me that the Greek text is not passive voice, but active voice, with a plural subject. So, the translation should read, “You fool, this very night they demand your soul from you.” What demands his soul? It can only be the riches themselves. Both God and wealth make the same demands, only one can be satisfied.

What then is the solution? Is Jesus calling us to give up our wealth? I have no doubt that Jesus is clearly calling us to give up some of it. I also have no doubt that Jesus is demanding that we be prepared to give up all of it. To even be prepared to take such radical action requires radical commitment on the part of the disciple. How is it possible? Only because of radical trust in God. “Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Those who are convinced that their heavenly Father will indeed care for them are able to give freely. Those who are not convinced that God will care for them will need to ensure for their own security by serving Mammon.

The prosperity gospel has turned the gospel upside down. It is not that we should trust God so that God can further enrich us, but we should trust God so that we will be able to enrich others. The world that Jesus entered was a world of social dichotomies, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free, all instances of one basic distinction: the powerful and the powerless. Jesus came to usher in a new kingdom, a kingdom that breaks down barriers, a kingdom that rights social wrongs, a kingdom that values those that the world decrees to be worthless. In his own words, he came to “bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed to go free.” Yet after nearly 2,000 years of Christianity, our world looks much like the world of first-century Palestine.

October 31 is Reformation Day, a important day of remembrance in some Christian denominations, although not often noted by Baptists. On that date in 1517, Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Robert McAfee Brown, in his book, Spirituality and Liberation records a similar event. On June 16, 1985, pastors around the country read from their pulpits a statement acknowledging that these are troubled times and calling for prayer and action. A simple call to prayer, created an unbelievable furor, upset the social order, and was called an act of treason.

The country was South Africa, and the date was the ninth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, when government troops entered Johannesburg and opened fire on black children. The statement read, in part,

“We now pray that God will replace the present unjust structures of oppression with ones that are just, and remove from power those who persist in defying his laws, installing in their places leaders who will govern with justice and mercy. . . The present regime, together with its structures of domination, stands in contradiction to the Christian gospel to which the churches of the land seek to remain faithful. . .

We pray that God in his grace may remove from his people the tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to hear the cry for justice. . .

We pledge ourselves to work for that day.”

True Christianity is never a means of seeking one’s own prosperity and comfort. Instead, true Christianity is subversive, unsettling, and upsetting. In this, the prosperity gospel is simply another heresy.

On the other hand, there is something that the preachers of the prosperity gospel have right. The lesson of the blind man is that God asks us the same question that he asked him: “What do you want from me?” The blind man knew what he wanted from Jesus, and he knew that Jesus could give him what he deeply desired. How did he respond? Mark said that he followed Jesus on “the way” the term used for discipleship in the Gospels. The way does not always lead to prosperity. For Jesus and his followers, the way lead to Jerusalem and the cross. But the way, is the way of the disciple, as Jesus said, if any of us want to truly be his follower, we must deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him.