What is Prosperity?

Over the past several decades, an interesting phenomenon has been gaining more and more momentum across the United States and many other parts of the world. This phenomenon has gone by many names, but most people will know it by one of a pair of such names: Name It and Claim It theology or simply the Prosperity Gospel.

For those who may not be familiar with the concept, the Prosperity Gospel teaches that when a person donates enough money or simply has enough faith — a term that's grossly misused in such circles, but we'll get into that later — God will grant any and all worldly riches and successes such a person desires. And by contrast, when things don't go your way financially or in any other way here on Earth, it must mean your faith is lacking or you need to be giving more to your local church. This giving is often referred to as "sowing a seed," which is really little more than a convoluted way to make the concept sound more biblical.

Is the Prosperity Gospel really biblical, though? Well, the short answer to that question is no. For a bit more in-depth response to that question, read on.

Most prosperity preachers will uses verses from the Bible such as Jeremiah 29:11 and James 4:2, among many others. When they find such teachings seemingly supported in the Bible, it can be hard to really refute them, but once we look at these verses in a bit more detail, it quickly becomes easy to see the misuse and outright abuse committed by prosperity preachers. In Jeremiah 29:11, for example, prosperity preachers neglect to inform their listeners of the fact that the verse was written as a promise to the Israelites to deliver them from captivity and not a blanket promise to always create prosperous lives for every believer.

In James 4:2, prosperity preachers take it one step further. Rather than simply ignoring the context surrounding the verse, such preachers omit nearly the whole verse, simply quoting the last line, "You do not have because you do not ask." These tactics create a dangerous culture in which modern believers are led to the false assumption that what God has promised in the pages of Scripture is financial prosperity in this life.

In reality, however, it doesn't take much searching to figure out that this mindset couldn't be further from reality. Throughout the New Testament are examples of what's really meant when the Bible talks about prosperity. In many cases, the Bible even condemns the obsessive pursuit of money and earthly success prosperity preachers push. A few of those examples can be found in Matthew 16, Mark 10, Luke 12 and other passages.

If you have or ever do find yourself falling into the grips of prosperity teachings, don't be discouraged. At one point or another, most people will probably be exposed to it in some way and it is undeniably alluring. I was brought up in a form of it myself and I can attest to the fact that the allure can also be incredibly damaging. Throughout my childhood, I was told by people in the church in which I grew up that my disability and all of the issues associated with it were my fault on the basis of exactly that type of theology.

I was constantly told God must be angry with me and that I must have some sort of sin in my life that I simply wasn't admitting. There was never any explanation given for that, but it was simply drilled into my head that it had to be the case, simply because my life wasn't going as well as it could. As I've mentioned in a few other blog posts and my book, Nothing Worth Doing Is Easy, that broke me, almost to the point where I couldn't go on.

It was only after I spent years studying Scripture independently that I realized what real prosperity was, in a biblical sense. If anything, it became clear to me that if a person is living a truly devoted and right Christian life, it not only won't get easier and more prosperous, but it will simply get harder. The beauty of it all is, though, it doesn't matter how great life is here on Earth, the Christian will always have something exponentially better ahead. To put it bluntly, death for the true believer is a win.

That's what real biblical prosperity is. We were never promised pleasure and wealth in this life and in fact, the Bible says in many different places that we'll suffer more than we ever prosper here, but once this life is over, the eternity to which we look forward will be orders of magnitude better than anything any human can ever imagine.