Paul Couldn't Afford Your Gospel

For years I was bothered by the prosperity gospel, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what the issue was.

I don't have a problem with God blessing someone financially or materially, He's done it plenty of times. Abraham, Solomon, Job, for example. I don't think wealth is a sin and I don't think poverty is a halo.

I also don't think wealth is guaranteed. If it were, there are a lot of believers around the world that should have a serious grievance to file with heaven.

So I argued about the money, like everyone else does. Asking, does God promise it? Does faith unlock it? Is it a blessing, or a trap?

Then one day scrolling through social media, I saw a link to an article on the topic and it hit me. The word bothered me more than the money ever had.

They call it a gospel.

Gospel means good news. And in the New Testament, the good news has a specific content. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). God is reconciling the world to Himself. A dead man can be made alive.

That's the news.

So here's the question I can't shake. Why would the Church ever preach a gospel that doesn't lead to salvation?

The prosperity message can promise you a raise, a house, a healed credit score, and a better car. Follow its logic all the way to the end. It stops at your funeral.

Every promise it makes has an expiration date.

Paul had already done that math. "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable" (1 Corinthians 15:19).

Most pitiable. That's Paul's verdict on a hope that ends at the graveside.

Jesus talked about wealth too. He just kept pointing it somewhere the thief can't reach.

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal" (Matthew 6:19-20).

I am using the word wealth here on purpose, because the prosperity crowd has trained the church to hear it one way. Wealth means the bank balance. Wealth means stuff.

Scripture uses the language more broadly. Jesus warned about the man who "lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God" (Luke 12:21). James says God chose the poor of this world "to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom" (James 2:5).

The wealth Jesus offers is life. Eternal life, in Him, and it doesn't wait for heaven to start. "He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life" (John 5:24). Has. Present tense.

So both messages claim to pay out now. The difference is what's still standing when this life is over.

A favorite verse of prosperity preaching is John 10:10, the "life more abundantly" verse. But read one verse further: the Good Shepherd gives His life for the sheep. The abundance in that chapter is purchased with a death, and it's measured in life.

There is a church in Scripture that called itself wealthy.

Laodicea told Jesus, "I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing."

Jesus told them they were wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. Then He gave them financial advice: "I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich" (Revelation 3:17-18).

Laodicea had a balance sheet and a self-image to match. Jesus looked at the same church and saw a beggar.

That's the conversation the prosperity pulpit is still having with Him. It points to the balance sheet. He points to the gold He sells.

I need to be fair here. The prosperity message generally comes wrapped in Scripture, and some of that Scripture is real.

"It is He who gives you power to get wealth."

That's Deuteronomy 8:18, and you'll hear it quoted often in sermons about seed and harvest. But you typically won't hear the rest of the sentence: "that He may establish His covenant which He swore to your fathers."

The wealth had a purpose clause. It served the covenant.

"God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance."

That's 2 Corinthians 9:8, and it usually stops right there. Paul didn't stop there. The abundance is "for every good work." A few verses later he says you're "enriched in everything for all liberality."

Enriched for giving.

Read the verses, but finish the sentences. The money was always headed somewhere else.

To be clear, God blesses ministries with money, and thank God for it.

Jesus' own ministry ran on it. Luke tells us a group of women "provided for Him from their substance" (Luke 8:3). Paul thanked the Philippians for the gifts that kept him preaching.

Money that carries the gospel around the world is a gift from God. Money that becomes the message is something else entirely.

When a ministry spends its wealth sending the gospel to people who've never heard it, the wealth is doing what it was given to do. When a ministry spends its wealth sending a message about wealth, it's selling the funding and calling it the gospel.

Somebody will say, "But we're preaching this to millions." I believe you. The message travels.

Look at where it lands, though. Every promise in it ends with the hearer getting something. The hearer gets blessed, the hearer gets healed, the hearer gets the breakthrough. The message goes out to millions and it stops at each one of them.

The real gospel turns every person who receives it into someone who carries it.

The real gospel is good news you carry to someone else, and the prosperity version is good news you keep for yourself.

Paul gave Timothy a warning about men "who suppose that godliness is a means of gain." Then he corrected the math: "godliness with contentment is great gain" (1 Timothy 6:5-6). He also added four verses later: ^10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” 

He'd lived it. Paul preached the gospel through hunger, cold, shipwreck, and prison. By prosperity standards, he was a failure with poor confession habits.

By heaven's standards he was one of the wealthiest men who ever lived.

Hebrews lists believers who wandered in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, tormented. Then it adds a line I can't get past: "of whom the world was not worthy" (Hebrews 11:37-38).

Any gospel that can't be preached to them can't be the gospel. It has to be good news in a prison cell in Iran, in a refugee camp, and at a graveside. Paul called that "a different gospel" (Galatians 1:6-7): a counterfeit wearing the original's name.

Here's what finally settled it for me.

Imagine you got it, all of it. The house, the cars, the ministry jet, the overflow they promised you from the stage.

And all around you, the world kept dying. Your neighbors, your coworkers, the cashier you see every Tuesday. They went into eternity without Christ, and you had the money, the platform, and the microphone, and you spent them telling people how to get more.

"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" (Mark 8:36).

I'd ask the church the same question: what will it profit you to gain the world while everyone around you loses theirs?

If God has made you rich, good. Now you know what it's for.

If He hasn't, you're no less loved and no less called.

Either way, you're holding the only news that outlives the people who hear it. Your wealth is safe where He's keeping it.

Go spend your life telling someone.