There are multiple ways to get rich. Let’s look at some ways to do it quickly. 1-You can rob a bank and take the money of people who worked hard for it. 2-You can work for the enemy and sell yourself into the entertainment industry, music or film. OR 3-You can combine the first two by starting a church and preaching the prosperity gospel. I realize how harsh that sounds. So today we will explore why I believe this to be accurate. I think the first two are pretty self explanatory, so I’ll talk about the third one for a couple of minutes. Let me break down how the prosperity gospel works. It normally starts with a sermon on a verse like this: Proverbs 10:22 “The blessing of the Lord makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.” Our first thought is “Um, yes please. I want to be blessed by the Lord and be rich.” Also, that no sorrow part would be awesome. That all sounds great, sign me up. How do I get started making that happen? And so, immediately our thinking is off, because it’s self centered. But that’s the attraction to this message. I’ve heard a guy who is probably the most famous prosperity preacher use this next verse multiple times to set up his premise of prosperity.
Luke 4:18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.” He would read that verse and say. “You know what’s good news to the poor? You ain’t got to be poor no more.” And there’s the hook. Now he has your attention and you want to know more. If you are broke, this is a very attractive message. But, do you believe the “good news” in this verse is money? In Hebrew, the word “poor” is also means “afflicted.” The prosperity gospel says, if you give money to the church or the pastor, God will bless you with money in return. So if you want to prosper financially, you just have to give more. Here is the problem with that. It’s partly true, but a partial truth is still false overall. Next week we will look at the major difference between the baby and the bath water. We have to throw out the error of the partial truth, while keeping and honoring the baby. The prosperity message works pretty much every time it’s preached...yes, that’s the truth. But only for the one preaching it. The preacher is the only one who becomes prosperous with the prosperity message. Let’s break it down. Here’s how it works. The pastor preaches that if you give according to what you want to get, then God will multiply it back to you abundantly. So you give more than you have, sometimes even putting the donation on a credit card, because you trust this pastor and you want to be a part of the blessing that is on his ministry. Then the pastor uses the money that comes in to live a luxurious lifestyle. He then points to his own lifestyle to prove that the prosperity message is true. The real test of wether or not the prosperity message is true, is this: Are lots of people coming into that church broke and then quickly becoming wealthy? Or is it just the pastor?
Have you been going to a prosperity church and following the teaching? Are you now wealthy? No, why is that? But you’re not allowed to ask that question. I asked that question once, and of course, the pastor didn’t have an answer. That is the problem. One of the other things I’ve seen taught is that you must celebrate when someone else get’s their blessing, or you won’t get yours. If you don’t celebrate, you’re just showing that you are jealous and God won’t honor your jealousy. It’s just a manipulation and control tactic. I know this sounds harsh. The guy I mentioned who says the good news to the poor is that they don’t have to be poor any more has a ministry net worth of several hundred million dollars. During one sermon, he bragged that he lives in the largest house in his state and that it is the largest house of any preacher in America. How large is it? 40,000 square feet. You cannot question this extravagance. You are supposed to celebrate it with him. Really? Is that true? Clearly he is winning the financial game, but do you know who looses in that game? Thats right, the people who gave to his ministry. This is a huge distortion of what the Bible teaches about giving and wealth. The people who give to him are doing so in order to get wealth themselves. They are not giving to the work of furthering the gospel of Jesus. Their motive is wrong. So, what does Proverbs 10:22 mean when it says the blessing of the Lord makes rich? God is the one who makes people rich, it’s not their own doing. God blesses their labor. And sometimes God allows wealth to those who do not serve Him. It’s like what Andy said last week. God placed evil kings on the throne in Israel and also other nations as a way to discipline His disobedient children and bring them back to Him.
Today, God is in control of who is president, in order to move His plan forward. Sometimes it’s a good guy and sometimes it’s a not so good guy. But they are there according to God’s will. It is the same with the wealthy. King Solomon wrote this Proverb. He was talking about what God did for him, which was to bless him with riches that were from The Lord, because he didn’t desire it or ask for it. Remember what he asked for? He asked for wisdom to lead God’s people. Knowing that you haven’t set your desire on money, is a factor in God granting you wealth. He knows if you desire money more than you desire Him, there is a spiritual problem in your life. Most of the verses about being rich are in the old testament and were written in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes by Solomon. Who was Solomon? The richest guy who ever lived. But again, that was not his desire. Here is a little more of what he wrote. Proverbs 11:28 “Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf.” Proverbs 22:1 “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.” Proverbs 30:8 “Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me,” Ecclesiastes 5:13 “There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their owner to his hurt,” But what about our favorite prosperity verse?
Jeremiah 29:11 “11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Does that not say it all? Yes it does, but who is he talking to? You? We want to take that verse personally, but the challenge again is the context. Jeremiah is very clear about who this is for. Jeremiah 29:1 “1 This is the text of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets and all the other people Nebuchadnezzar had carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.” You mean to tell me that there was a specific group of people this was written to centuries ago, and I might not be part of that group today? Yes, that is exactly what I’m telling you. Are you an Israelite who was in exile in Babylon? No? Then this was not written to you. Let’s read the verses in context that come next. Jeremiah 29:11-14 ““11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.” God is telling them that even though He sent them into exile because they had turned away from Him, He still had plans for them. He had not abandoned them.
He was just waiting for them to call on Him and seek Him with all their heart. He promised to bring them out of the captivity. But I don’t want you to lose heart. You see, just because a verse is written to another people at another time...does not mean that we can’t take anything away for ourselves. We can always take the same principles that God established and put them to work in our lives today. The principles are the same for us and them. The context and thus the principle we can apply in Jeremiah 29 is that God wants those who have rejected and abandoned Him to return and seek Him. He wants to restore you to the relationship you used to have with Him, no matter how far you’ve drifted. Ok, back to our topic for today. What does it mean to be rich? Is it always about having a lot of money? That’s how we use the word rich in America. But its meaning carries a broader definition. To be rich means to have an abundance of something. So you could be rich in sorrow, you could actually be rich in poverty, if you have an abundance of poverty. You could also be rich in joy, you could be rich in mercy. Being rich, prosperous and blessed does not always mean having a lot of money. When we read the bible we should know what the word rich is referring to. If God is rich in peace towards us, does that mean He is somehow obligated to give us money in order for our life to be peaceful? No, of course not. God has an abundance of everything we could ever need or want. Let’s look at what the New Testament says about desiring to be rich. It’s the desire we have to guard against. 1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”
Hebrews 13:5 “5 Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Loving and craving money is the problem in these verses. In Matthew 19, Jesus has just finished telling a rich guy how to have eternal life. He said to go sell everything he had and give it to the poor. Then he could come and follow Jesus. Of course they guy just walked away, proving he didn’t really want to hear the truth, he just wanted Jesus to reinforce what he already believed. Jesus then says this. Matthew 19:23-24 “23 And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Let’s briefly talk about what the whole camel and needle thing was about. Jesus didn’t say it was impossible for a rich person to go to heaven...only more difficult. There were multiple gates in a city wall back in those days. Some of them were very small meant for people to walk through. This opening was referred to as “they eye of the needle.” As travelers approached the city with their camel burdened with their possessions they couldn’t fit through one of these small openings. So how could someone get into the city leading their camel without going around to one of the main gates? They had to unburden the camel of their possessions. Without all their stuff packed on the camel could fit through the eye of the needle.
Jesus is saying if you want to get into the kingdom, you have to be willing to unburden yourself of your stuff...especially if you have a lot of stuff. Because being in the kingdom is more important than keeping your stuff. The rich guy didn’t think so. We see multiple warnings about what can happen to us if we have too much money. So are we supposed to all be poverty stricken as Christians? Has God called us to take a vow of poverty? Some of us, yes. But all of us? No. You see, it’s just like healing. Not everyone gets healed on this earth and likewise not everyone will have wealth on this earth. Does that mean that God loves the healthy and wealthy more than the sick and poor? No, of course not. Some people are sick because they refuse to live a healthy lifestyle. Their sickness is because of their own bad choices and they want pray that God will rescue them from the consequences of their bad decisions. And also, some people will never have money in this life because they continually make really bad financial decisions that have ruined their credit and drained their bank account. They want to pray that God will rescue them from the consequences of their bad decisions. Would it make sense for God to keep giving them more of His resources if they willfully continue to waste it on themselves? The answer is clear, as we see in James 4. James 4:1-3 “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2 You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
Our passions are our problem. As humans our flesh wants what it wants. We look out for number one, we are motivated by what’s in it for me. That is not supposed to be our focus. But let’s consider something. If God gave us everything, and by everything, I mean all the money we wanted, what kind of people would we be? Do you think that would make you a happy, well adjusted person, with appropriate expectations for this life? If a parent gives a child everything they ask for, how would that child turn out? You would have the most spoiled, arrogant, selfish and self destructive person imaginable. Is that who God wants us to be? Does giving us what we want produce the fruit of the spirit in our life? No, it does not. Strength, character and endurance are produced by resistance, not comfort. God wants us to be growing and maturing in the spirit, not spending our time focused on earthly things. Colossians 3:1-4 “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” Wouldn’t it be great if we could just set our mind on spiritual things and not worry about all the earthly things? That is what this next verse is talking about. Matthew 6:31-33 “31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
God is saying He understands what is stressing you out...it’s the stuff you need. He wants you to focus on Him and allow Him to deal with those things. How does that sound? Are you ready to do that today?
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