The Prosperity Gospel Trap

I want to start today with a confession. I used to believe parts of the prosperity gospel. Not the whole thing, but parts of it. I used to think that if I gave more, God would bless me more. I used to think that faith was a formula. I used to think that God wanted me to be rich.

I do not believe that anymore. And I want to tell you why.

The prosperity gospel, for those who are not familiar, is the teaching that God wants you to be healthy and wealthy. That faith is a spiritual law that produces material results. That if you give enough, pray enough, believe enough, you will be blessed with prosperity. It is one of the most damaging false teachings in the church today, and it has corrupted the message of grace in profound ways.

Let me explain what I mean.

The Corruption

It starts with a kernel of truth. God does want to bless us. God does want us to prosper. God does want good things for us. Those are not lies. Those are promises.

But then the kernel gets twisted. God blesses us becomes God will bless you if you do X becomes God will bless you if you give X becomes give God your money and He will give you more money. The train starts at the station and ends up in a completely different destination.

The corruption is subtle. It uses the language of faith. It uses the language of blessing. It sounds spiritual. But underneath, it is a transaction. And transactions are not the gospel.

The gospel is not that God will make you rich if you give. The gospel is that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. The gospel is grace. The gospel is forgiveness. The gospel is unconditional love. The gospel is not a deal.

What Jesus Actually Said

Let me ask you something. What did Jesus promise His followers? Health? Wealth? Prosperity?

No. He promised them persecution. He promised them suffering. He promised them the cross. He promised them that in this world they would have trouble. He promised them that they would be hated for His name's sake.

Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus promise wealth. Nowhere does He say follow Me and you will be rich. The Beatitudes say blessed are the poor, not blessed are the rich. The first shall be last, not the first shall be first.

Jesus was not a prosperity preacher. He was a itinerant rabbi with no place to lay His head. He told His followers to sell their possessions and give to the poor. He said it is harder for a rich person to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

How did we get from there to the prosperity gospel? How did we go from a suffering Savior to a wealthy Savior? How did we turn the cross into a get-rich-quick scheme?

The Damage

Here is what the prosperity gospel does. It takes people who are already vulnerable, who are already struggling, who are already looking for hope, and it tells them they can have everything if they just give more. It preys on the poor. It exploits the desperate. It makes money the measure of faith.

And when the prosperity does not come, when the check does not arrive, when the healing does not happen, what happens to those people? They blame themselves. They think their faith was not strong enough. They think they did not give enough. They think God is punishing them. And that is spiritual abuse.

I have talked to people who have given thousands of dollars to prosperity preachers, who have been told their poverty is a sign of weak faith, who have been made to feel like failures because they were not blessed. It is devastating. It is wrong. And it needs to be named.

The Alternative

So if it is not prosperity, what is it? What is the biblical view of money and blessing?

It is this. God loves us. God provides for us. God meets our needs. But our needs are not the same as our wants. And prosperity is not the same as provision.

The goal of the Christian life is not to be rich. The goal is to be holy. The goal is to be like Christ. And Christ was not rich. He was poor. He gave everything away. He had nowhere to lay His head.

That is the model. Not accumulation. Distribution. Not grasping. Giving. Not prosperity. Sacrifice.

Tomorrow, we are going to talk about how to get beyond obligation. How to move from giving because we have to to giving because we want to. How to make generosity an act of worship instead of a burden.

See you tomorrow.