TOP 4 END-TIME DANGERS OF PROSPERITY PREACHING EXPLAINED
Recently, world renowned televangelist
Benny Hinn had expressed regrets over his prosperity preaching over the years
in his ministry and how he said it was “grieving the Holy Spirit.”
Expressing
apology to his audience, he had said, “I’m sorry to say that prosperity has
gone a little crazy, and I’m correcting my own theology.”
As
a follow up to this, we sought to know what dangers are inherent in prosperity
preaching, which has taken over the gospel in most countries of Africa,
particularly Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, etc.
Below are top four dangers
of prosperity gospel that some gullible Christians sometimes fall prey.
1.
We equate struggles with weak faith
This thinking is a
hallmark of the worst kinds of prosperity gospel teaching, in which people are
told that their healing is contingent on the size of their faith. We obviously
reject that mentality as it pertains to that world, but in our world we very
often tell people who struggle to "have faith," as if it is some kind
of force field from trouble. As if Christians who "act right" and
believe strongly achieve some kind of higher level of existence less entangled
from struggles or suffering. We affirm this kind of prosperity thinking
whenever we repeat the trite dictum "let go and let God," for
instance.
The problem with this,
biblically speaking, is that we have numerous examples both in our own lives
and in the pages of Scripture of dear saints who were afflicted despite and in
their faith. We see in fact that faith is made precisely for the experience of
living in a fallen world, where if everything went smoothly and we never hurt,
we wouldn't need reliance on Jesus as much, would we? So when we tell others to
trust God in the midst of their suffering, we do well. He is sovereign and he
can be trusted to work all things together for our good. But when we tell
others to trust God to avoid their struggles, we promise something God himself
does not promise.
We do this, for instance,
every time we engage in pragmatic teaching that divorces the imperatives of Scripture
from the indicatives, every time we suggest that if Christians just follow
steps 1, 2, and 3, they can achieve victory or unlock blessings or become
improved or successful in certain areas of life.
But life is much messier
than that. And faith is much less formulaic. "In this world, you will have
trouble," Jesus said. And we contradict him when we imply or outright say
that people wouldn't face struggles if they just had stronger faith.
2.
We equate circumstantial blessings with spiritual maturity
There are numerous
biblical exhortations to wisdom, prudence, and hard work that speak to material
or other circumstantial blessings that result -- wealth, for instance, or even
physical comfort. And yet when we formulize these exhortations -- "Rich
people do rich people things," as one religious spokesperson has recently
claimed -- we suck the nuance out of biblical wisdom and the texts out of their
larger context.
For example, this happens
whenever we make blanket statements about the poor, urging hard work as the
alleviation for poverty. While it is certainly true that in many places and for
many people, hard work earns material blessings, it is not true that it always
does. Many poor persons work very hard, but for various reasons beyond their
control, their circumstances do not much change. We tend to "flatten
out" our considerations of wealth and poverty or success and failure, and
when we do so, we must take care that we are not claiming a kind of personal
superiority for ourselves that is evidenced by our material blessings. The
claim is subtle, not often believed explicitly, but it's a danger nonetheless.
As Brian Fikkert writes in his book with Steve Corbett, When Helping Hurts:
If anybody dares suggest to me that the poor are poor because they are less spiritual than the rest of us -- which is what the health-and-wealth gospel teaches -- I am quick to rebuke them. I immediately point out that the poor could be poor due to injustices committed against them. Yet, all of this notwithstanding, I was still amazed to see people in the Kenyan slum who were simultaneously so spiritually strong and so devastatingly poor. Right down there in the bowels of hell was this Kenyan church, filled with spiritual giants who were struggling to eat every day. This shocked me. At some level I had implicitly assumed that my economic superiority goes hand in hand with my spiritual superiority. This is none other than the lie of the health-and-wealth gospel: spiritual maturity leads to financial prosperity.
Of course, this kind of
realization may not strike you or me anywhere (we think) close to home. But we
can still fall prey to taking credit for our blessings even if they are the
direct circumstantial result of our hard work. When we forget that God can
withhold any blessing he pleases even from hard working people like us, and
that many hard working people like us nevertheless still struggle with poverty
in many contexts, we make an implicit elevation of ourselves. We become the
champions of our stories, not God. This happens, in fact, every time we disobey
his commands to generosity. A refusal to be generous with others who do not
have is a way of admitting we believe what we do have ultimately is
ours and not a gift from God.
We must praise God, from
whom all blessings flow. When we get up on our high-horse about why we have
what we have and others do not, we aren't just making a statement about the
rewards of hard work -- we are often making a statement about our
self-righteousness.
3.
We promise blessings in exchange for works
Perhaps the most egregious
example of this still found in many churches comes in the midst of giving or
fundraising campaigns. One church promises a tithe-back guarantee if God does
not bless your family in exchange for your commitment to financial giving.
Others gather up testimonies about how those who committed to regular financial
giving were later financially rewarded.
Sometimes it's not about
money at all. We engage in all kinds of works-righteousness promise-making when
we tell people that God "rewards" acts of blind faith or good works.
And of course, the Lord does reward his children for their obedience -- it's
just not often in the way expected or promised. Many evangelicals engage in a
kind of spiritual talk that owes more to ideas of karma or The Secret, in
which "good energy" put into the world returns with good energy back
to you.
I was sharing the gospel
with a guy I'd just met last week when he told me he was in fact a Christian
and attended a local church (who is pastored by an acquaintance of mine). I was
grateful for the fellowship when I learned this, but I was discouraged a bit as
he made statements like, "Everybody's good by nature; we just have to find
our purpose." He went on to say that once someone finds their purpose and
follows it, God blesses them. He had a testimony himself of helping numerous
poor families in his inner-city neighborhood and made a straight line
consequence of receiving material blessings, as if God was rewarding him for
his good works.
Biblically speaking, good
works are the outflow of the unilateral blessing of Christ, not the leverage
toward blessings besides him.
4. We equate suffering with punishment
I remember at my last
pastorate as our little church endured one season of suffering after another,
numerous precious brothers and sisters falling ill and too many of them even
passing on to glory. The feeling was eerie. It became such a strange season of
mourning for us that a few people sometimes wondered aloud if God was warning
us about something or even punishing us about something. It felt, at times, as
if God was "picking on us," even if we knew intellectually that
wasn't the case.
I have counseled numerous
individuals in varying stages of anxiety, pain, and grief. The most common
question asked is why? "Why is God allowing this?" "Why is God
doing this to me?" "Why do I have to go through this?"
Of course, there are some
answers to the why question in the Scriptures, but they speak mainly to the
reality of living in a fallen world, a creation marred by sin, yes, and thus
disordered and broken. We get sick and die because of sin, but not because of
specific sin. I mean, of course if you engage in sinful behavior that has
physical consequences, there is a direct link between actions and results, but
I'm speaking generally to the kind of suffering every human living in this
world inevitably undergoes. Jesus was asked about the man born blind --
"Was it he or his parents who sinned?" And the Lord's response undoes
the cause-and-effect thinking. "This man's blindness is not the result of
his sin, but rather that God might get the glory through him."
If you're a Christian, you
should know that your punishment has already been taken by Christ on the cross.
The wages of your sin have been paid, perfectly and utterly satisfied by Jesus.
You may suffer some earthly consequences for your bad decisions, but the
punishment from God is done. There is no condemnation for those who are in
Christ (Rom. 8:1).
We must stay on guard that
our colloquial spirituality does not betray a disordered theology. Each of us
is prone innately to make more of us and less of God, sometimes even in the
name of God. But the gospel is a great antidote to even these more subtle kinds
of prosperity gospel. The good news reminds us that God loves us despite our
weakness, blesses us despite our failures, comforts us despite our suffering,
and favors us despite our sin. Christianity is fundamentally about God's grace,
not our exertion.
So let's repent of the
prosperity gospel lite, knowing that "he must increase; we must
decrease."
The article was first
published by For
The Church, an online Christian platform. All rights reserved.
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