The “Gospel” of Prosperity

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We’re going to be in 2 Corinthians chapter 4 this morning. 2 Corinthians chapter 4. And over the last few weeks, we’ve been discussing some of the false gospels that are prevalent in our society because studies indicate, as I’ve talked to you about already, that there’s a large number of evangelicals who don’t understand themselves what the gospel is.

And that’s problematic because if you’re not familiar with the word evangelical, it’s a group, it’s a subset of Christians that we would fall into that’s characterized by certain beliefs. We believe in the Bible as the authoritative, inspired word of God. We believe in salvation by grace through faith.

We believe in the need for each person to be born again. There are some basic beliefs that lump us all together. It’s not just a Baptist thing.

There are many denominations that would be considered evangelical, but we’re all characterized by these certain basic beliefs. One of those is the gospel, because there are denominations that don’t hold to that view of the gospel. So when that’s what makes us evangelical, and there are people in evangelical churches, a large percentage, who don’t understand what the gospel is, there’s trouble in River City.

We’ve got a big problem. The reason that’s such a problem is because we no longer live in a 1950s Bible Belt culture. we can’t take for granted that people outside in the community understand the gospel or really know anything about God’s word and the trouble is compounded by the fact that many within the churches can’t even go and tell them because they don’t understand themselves and as I’ve said I don’t know that that holds true for Trinity but just on the off chance that it does I doubt that it does but just on the off chance that it does as I started thinking more and more about these findings I thought we need to address this because it never hurts to make sure we understand the gospel.

And it never hurts to make sure we understand the need, that there’s more need now than ever before to be able to go and share the gospel with people who need to hear it. And so two weeks ago, I talked to you about the so-called gospel of unconditional acceptance. And that false gospel comes from a distorted view of God.

It says that because God is loving, and He is loving, but because He is so loving, they overemphasize the love to the expense of everything else. Because He is so loving, He’s okay with your sin. He doesn’t care whatever you want to do.

Well, we looked at what God’s Word says in 2 Peter 3, where it says, The Lord is not slack concerning His promises, as some men count slackness, but as longsuffering. To us, we’re not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. The reason God doesn’t immediately judge sin is not because God is negligent.

It’s not because God accepts the sin. It’s because God is giving us an opportunity to repent so that we don’t perish, because those are the two options. And how you can reconcile that in the Bible with a view of God that says, God’s just okay with your sin makes no sense to me.

They can’t both be true. So I’m going to go with what God’s word says. Then last week we talked about the gospel of moralism, which is sort of the opposite.

that it comes from a distorted view of man that says, you know, if we just try a little harder, we could be good enough for God. And I think this is probably the most prevalent of all the false gospels that we’re going to talk about. I think they’re all the religions of the world are based around the idea of you’ve got to do something.

Now they disagree about what that something is, but they all say you’ve got to do something in order to get to heaven or paradise or to be reconciled with God, whatever they’re aiming for, the idea is you’ve got to do something. And there are too many people that sit in the pews of too many churches and understand the message as being, if I could just do better, if I could just try harder, maybe God would love me. But we looked at what Romans chapter 3 said last week, where it says, therefore by the deeds of the law, there shall no flesh be justified in his sight.

It is impossible for us to be good enough to be reconciled to God. And these aren’t just differences. I know some people might think, well, why worry about it?

Some people believe this, we believe that, who cares? And from a certain standpoint, I feel the same way. In the sense that I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe, I don’t want you dead because you believe something different, I don’t want the government to force you to agree with me, those sorts of things.

But at the same time, we can’t just ignore this and say, well, we believe one thing, you believe something else, and it doesn’t really matter. It does matter because these aren’t just trivial secondary issues. We can disagree on the timing of the second coming.

We can disagree on lots of things. But there are some things that we can’t disagree on and still be sharing the same faith. These are not trivial secondary matters.

These are the very heart of the gospel. If we start messing around with what the gospel is and we change it into something else, it’s not Christianity anymore. And the Apostle Paul wrote about this in a couple of places.

Romans 1. 16, he said, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. The very message of the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.

The message of the gospel is what God uses to enable people to hear and trust and be saved. And so if we change that, what we’re doing is undermining the power of God under salvation. Now, God can, from a certain standpoint, we can’t undermine God.

He can do what he wants to. But what I mean is we’re changing the message, and we’re putting up a stumbling block for people in the way of that gospel if we start changing the message. And Paul wrote about that, too, in Galatians 1.

8 when he said, but though we are an angel from heaven, meaning it doesn’t matter if it’s us, it doesn’t matter if it’s an angel from heaven. He says, if they preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. And then so that we don’t think Paul was just speaking rashly, and sometimes we get worked up and we say things we don’t mean.

Just so we know that he wasn’t doing that, that he really meant it, he repeated it in the next verse and said, I’ll tell you again, if anybody preaches to you any other gospel than what you’ve received, let him be accursed. What the gospel is is a big deal. It matters what we believe about the gospel. I submit to you that nothing matters more than what we believe about the gospel.

So this morning I want us to look at another of the false gospels. In case you or anybody you know is caught up in these beliefs, we can have a biblical response to these beliefs and understand what God’s word really teaches. We’re going to talk about the gospel of prosperity.

You may have heard of prosperity teaching or prosperity teachers before. they are all over television and many of them are quite prosperous themselves one man was looking for his followers this year to give him 21 million dollars because God wanted him to have a new private jet and not be bothered by the little people on commercial planes dude you’re in ministry your job is the little people okay Jesus talked about doing unto the least of these that is your job and sometimes we forget that in ministry But some of these prosperity preachers are quite prosperous themselves. And I don’t speak about them because I’m jealous.

I speak about what they teach because it’s an affront to the gospel. We’re going to look at that today. What is the gospel of prosperity?

I’ll give you the definition that I’m using today. The gospel of prosperity teaches that God is obligated to reward Christians with material benefits as a result of our faith or obedience. Let me give you that again in case you’re taking notes.

There’s a blank in your bulletin. The gospel of prosperity teaches that God is obligated to reward Christians with material benefits as a result of our faith and obedience. So what that means is the gospel of prosperity says that we can work God like a mathematical formula.

We can work God like a business contract. That if I do X, he is obligated to do Y. As long as I fulfill my end of the bargain, then God owes me something.

And according to my Bible, that’s not the way any of this works. Now, unlike any of the other false gospels that we’ve studied up to this point, the prosperity gospel doesn’t really teach another way into a relationship with God. Now, the first one we looked at said, you’re already in a relationship with God.

You don’t have to, there’s nothing to do because God’s not bothered by your sin. That’s different from what the Bible teaches. The one we looked at last week said, well, you get to a relationship with God by just trying harder.

Just be good enough and he’ll love you. This one doesn’t really so much teach a different way into a relationship with God. What it does is it distorts the relationship itself.

It distorts the whole nature of our relationship with God once we’re there. And a lot of times it relies on Old Testament scriptures that talk about prosperity, that talk about God’s promises to give good things to his people, to increase their herds and their flocks and their lands and all these sorts of things. But what we need to understand is that in the Old Testament, in the Old Testament, God often promised to prosper the nation of Israel as a whole.

When they obeyed his commands, he promised to prosper them. He told Israel that if they would be his people, he would be their God. He would take care of them.

He would protect the nation. As they followed him, as they obeyed him, as they trusted in him, he would protect the nation, that they would never be wiped out, that they would continue to prosper, they would continue to grow, things would go well for them. That doesn’t mean that no individual Israelite ever got sick, that no individual Israelite ever died, that no individual Israelite was poor.

That meant God was prospering the nation as a whole. And if we look at the Old Testament, if we look at those promises where God says, if you obey me, I’ll do this. Those are promises to the nation of Israel.

And if we don’t look at scriptures in their context, and we start looking at everything as though it was written to us, we can get off base real quickly. Now, all of the Bible was written for us, but not all of it was written to us. That’s an important distinction we’ve got to remember.

So these promises that God made to Israel, we can look at them, and if we divorce them from their context, we can say, well, there, God says, you know, that he’ll prosper me if I obey him. So if I just believe in God, if I just do what he says, God has to give me a Mercedes. Well, if you want to take that as a promise to you, God might give you a couple dozen goats or something because he was promising to increase flocks.

But no, we can’t divorce those verses from their context. We have to look at them and say, who were these things written to? What was going on here, these don’t translate as blanket promises that we as individual Christians can take and say, if I’ll just obey God, I’ll never have any problems. If I believe hard enough, if I have enough faith, then God’s promised me a life where he’s going to prosper me, where I’m going to have all this wealth, I’m going to have a healthy life, I’m never going to have any struggles.

It’s not a promise that individual Christians will definitely experience health and wealth if they check all the right boxes in life. Now, as a rule, it generally works out better for us if we’ll follow godly principles. As a general rule, that God has not promised us that we’ll have a perfect life of ease.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is focused on how to reconcile sinful men to a holy God. And as a result, we can relate through the gospel, we can relate to God as a father who adopts us and brings us into his family. That’s what the real gospel is focused on.

But the gospel of prosperity twists the word of God to support its focus on receiving these tangible blessings from God. That I want a full bank account. That I want my chart at the hospital to look good.

I want all these numbers in line. There’s not a promise that all those things are always going to work out. And so as a result, instead of relating to God as this father who adopted us, even though we didn’t deserve it, and who loves us even though we didn’t deserve it and who forgives our sins.

We start relating to God as someone who will do things for us if we find the right formula to make him. He becomes sort of like the genie in Aladdin. That if we rub the bottle just the right way that he’ll come out and he’ll grant us all of our wishes.

That is not the God of the Bible. That’s not how our relationship with God works. And the teaching of the prosperity gospel says that if we don’t receive all those blessings, so if you’ve been taught this and you haven’t received your Mercedes yet, if your bank account is not full and overflowing, if your health is bad, it means you just haven’t believed hard enough or you just haven’t obeyed enough.

And folks, it’s a manipulative system. It’s a manipulative system all the way around. The preachers who preach this are manipulating their followers so that they can get money and they’re teaching their followers to manipulate God or try to because God can’t be manipulated.

Think about that for a minute. If our idea of dealing with God is God, I scratch your back, you scratch mine. I obey in this way.

I believe in this way. I give this amount of money and now you’re suddenly obligated to do something for me. That’s not a relationship that’s manipulation.

And it doesn’t work that way. It’s a manipulative system and it’s based on what we think we deserve from God. And it’s focused on earthly riches that don’t last anyway.

God promises. We need to understand this. God promises to meet our needs.

But he doesn’t promise to give us everything we want. Many of you already know that. You’ve experienced that in life.

God gives you what you need, not what you thought you wanted. I wish it was the other way around, but it’s not. And he promises to be with us in times of trouble.

He never promises that we’ll avoid those times of trouble altogether. So let’s look at what 2 Corinthians chapter 4 says about this gospel of prosperity. Starting in verse 7, we’ll go through verse 9 first. It says, but we have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. We are perplexed, but not in despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken.

Cast down, but not destroyed. So if you look at this at the very beginning, he’s talking about treasure. And I want to start out by explaining the treasure that’s contained in the earthen vessels is not gold.

It’s not silver. If you look back at the beginning of chapter 4, he’s talking about the gospel and that you and I bear the gospel in ourselves. God has entrusted this precious treasure, this message of the gospel to us, not to hoard and not to hide, but to take out and share and multiply.

But the earthen vessel that this treasure is hidden in is us. You and I are clay pots. Now, there are some beautiful clay pots out there, but ultimately, clay pots have a few weaknesses.

Number one, they’re very fragile. That’s why any of the pottery that we’ve bought is out of the reach of the children, at least for now. Charlie’s climbing now.

Pottery’s fragile. You drop it, it breaks. Also, just a regular clay pot wasn’t all that expensive, at least in their time.

I mean, relative to other things. It wasn’t necessarily all that fancy. Now, there were some fancy ones.

But he’s talking about earthen vessels. He’s making it sound just plain Jane. And so what this means is the Christian is a frail clay pot tasked with carrying this invaluable treasure of the gospel.

We’re not promised to be decorated, jewel-encrusted gold chalices. We’re called earthen pots, earthen vessels. Jesus never promised us wealth.

He never promised us a life of ease. If you go through these verses, Paul talks about being this earthen vessel. He says so that the power is of God and not us.

He said because it’s all about demonstrating the power of God, not about demonstrating our worth. And he goes on in the next couple of verses in 8 and 9 to talking about what it was like to live that life. And by the way, as we get into this description, this is everything Jesus promised us.

In John 16, 33, Jesus said, These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation. There’s a promise for you.

You shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. So as Peter, why do I keep saying Peter?

As Paul describes this life of difficulty, it’s nothing unexpected. It’s what Jesus promised us we would have. But he said he’s troubled, he’s distressed, he’s perplexed.

He’s in, excuse me, some of these things he’s not. Let me just take them in order. It says, first of all, that he’s troubled.

Verse 8 says he’s troubled on every side. That word troubled, I looked it up. I did some studies on these Greek words.

And the word troubled is similar. It’s what they would use when they’re describing pressing grapes in a wine vat. And if you’ve ever seen that done, you know how they make wine out of the grapes?

They stomp all over them. They stomp all over them. And so it’s really traumatic for the grave, right?

So he said, basically, life is, circumstances are stomping all over us. But he says we’re not distressed. I think I’d be pretty distressed if the idea life is stomping all over me.

Have you ever felt like life was stomping all over you? I’ve been there about three times. And it’s not a pleasant thing, but he says we are not distressed.

That word distressed in Greek means to be squished into a narrow strait. So what he’s saying here is that the world, because it resents Jesus Christ and because it resents the gospel of Jesus Christ, was trying to stomp all over those who were following him, trying to stomp them out and stomp out the gospel. But what happens when you stomp down on the grape is it squeezes out underneath.

So he says they’re trying to stomp on us so they can contain the gospel, but what it does is it squeezes out. And God spits us out some other way. So we don’t always come out of the trampling the way we thought we would, but there’s always a means of escape.

God always has another plan, and we squeeze out some other way. So he says, I’m troubled, but I’m not distressed. And I’m still not a Greek expert, but I love what little I’ve learned in these classes because I read these words, and you read them in English, and you’re like, oh, okay, I know what those words mean.

And you go and look at what they mean in Greek, and they give you a whole broader shade of meaning where Paul’s painting these incredible pictures that I think we can relate to that. I think we’ve all had times where we’ve been stumped on, and yet God set us out in some other direction from it. He says, I’m perplexed.

We are perplexed, but not in despair. Perplexed means we’re at a loss because there’s no options left. And you probably have been through those times, even as a believer, where you felt like, I have no good option here.

I felt that way election day of 2016. There are no options here. No, I’m just, don’t be mad at me for that.

It’s a joke. But we all get in places in life where there are no good options left. And there’s no move left for me to make.

And it can lead us to despair if we’re not careful. But Paul said, I’m not in despair. That word in despair means beyond all hope.

So what Paul was saying was he had been so beaten down by circumstances that at times it looked to him like there were no options left, and yet he was never at a point where he had no hope left. It’s just because I can’t see the option doesn’t mean that God isn’t making a way forward. He said, I’m persecuted.

In my Greek classes, this word dioko has been the bane of my existence. Because it has two meanings. It means pursued or persecuted.

And they both kind of go together because in the early days when people were persecuting the Christians, they were chasing them down like animals. They were hunting them wherever they could go. Why it’s the bane of my existence is because every time I translate it in an assignment as persecuted, they want pursued.

And every time I translate it then as pursued, they want persecuted. But just understand that this word persecuted has both of those meanings. And it means, like in the early churches, that they were being hunted down like animals.

That’s something we don’t really relate to as much in our world. There are Christians today who are being persecuted and being hunted down like animals for no reason other than their followers of Jesus Christ. I’d say to you, the prosperity gospel is an affront to them too. It’s an insult to them.

He said we’re persecuted, but he said we’re not forsaken. That word forsaken means kind of like it sounds. It means we’re not abandoned.

Yeah, we may be persecuted. We may be run out of town. We may be hunted down for the sake of the gospel, but God is always with us.

Jesus is always with us. The Holy Spirit is always with us. He promised to never leave us or forsake us.

We are cast down. That means thrown down to the ground, but not destroyed. That’s quite something for a clay pot, to be thrown down to the ground, but not be shattered into a million pieces.

And there are going to be times in the Christian life when we are thrown down to the ground, when our circumstances just take us and throw us down, but because God holds us together, we don’t get shattered into a million pieces. We’re never utterly destroyed because God takes care of us. I love that description he gives us.

Let’s look at verses 10 and 11. It says, Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.

So the gospel cannot possibly be about making life wonderful on earth. When we’ve been promised that we’re going to have this trouble, Jesus promised it, Paul described it, and here we’re told that we’re going to suffer with Christ. He says we are always bearing in our body the dying of the Lord. And he says at the beginning of verse 11, For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake.

He said, we’re constantly being turned over to those who want to kill us. Now, in some cases, that was a theoretical thing. In some cases, Christians were literally being delivered over to death.

And so we are promised that we’re going to have trouble. We’re promised that we’re going to suffer with and for Jesus Christ. And by following Jesus’ example, though, in enduring this suffering to fulfill the Father’s will, we get to show evidence of the new life that we have in Christ. Because when we fulfill his will and we endure patiently, we demonstrate how he has changed us and point people to Jesus. When we’re persecuted and we just endure it with patience, we don’t turn away from what we believe.

We don’t give in to our sinful fleshly instincts, but instead we do what we know God would want us to do. When we are patient and we endure in those times of difficulty and persecution, what we do is not show how great we are. My goodness, I don’t show how great I am ever because I’m not.

What we do is show the work of God in us and how much he’s changed us. And so when Paul was being persecuted, he looked at it as an opportunity to suffer for Christ because he got to show people. As they’d look at this and say, how are you able to endure this?

Or why are you so calm during all this? Why are you this? Why are you that?

He could say it’s because of the work of Jesus Christ. And that gave him a springboard from talking about how Christ had made him different to talking about what Christ could do for them if they would only trust him as their savior. Now let’s look at verses 12 through 14. It says, So then death worketh in us, but life in you.

We, having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken. We also believe and therefore speak, knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise us up also by Jesus and shall present us with you. So Paul described again the willingness of Christians to suffer even to the point of an earthly death.

And why did they do this? They did this so that others would have the opportunity to find eternal life in Jesus Christ. He said, we’re willing to suffer even an earthly death so that you can find eternal life. And they were able to do this.

They were able to have this incredible witness in the first century churches because people could see that they believed in Jesus Christ. They were so confident in him and in the change that he’d made in them willing to suffer even to the point of death. Let me tell you what, if God blesses you with millions of dollars, I’m not knocking you, hey, I’m glad that he blessed you in that way, but if God blesses you with millions of dollars and homes and cars and all, you know, everything that you could want, nobody’s going to be impressed that you’re willing to serve God under those circumstances. Nobody’s ever going to look at you and say, wow, how is it that you still have stayed faithful to God after all these years with the way he’s treated you?

Or everything you’ve had to go through. Well, I think we would all want to serve God if he was giving us that kind of return on our investment. But these people were willing to endure suffering, willing to endure even death out of their love for Jesus Christ. And that made the world take notice and say, how is it that you stick to this?

How is it that you still believe? How is it that you still trust God with everything that you’ve gone through? And they could point to the change that Jesus had made in them.

Suffering builds our testimony. Willingness to suffer builds our testimony. And by the way, if you’re sitting in here this morning and you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, I’m not trying to talk you out of it by talking about how much suffering there is.

It doesn’t mean that we’re all going to suffer the same amount. Jesus did promise you would have trouble. He didn’t promise an easy life.

He also didn’t say that we were all going to die like martyrs. I’m sure whatever suffering we have done would be cute to the Christians of the first century. My point is not that we’re all going to be beheaded for our faith.

That’s not what he promised. It’s just to understand he doesn’t promise a life of ease. And I think we’ve done a lot of people a disservice by saying, oh, I came to Christ and life’s been wonderful ever since.

And when they get a few days into this Christianity thing and life’s not wonderful, and they think, well, maybe it didn’t take. Maybe I didn’t do this right. Or maybe it’s not real. We’ve done a lot of disservice to people when we’ve given them the idea that Jesus makes everything in life wonderful.

And our calling to suffer for Christ is accompanied by a promise that the Father who raised Jesus up, we see this in verse 14, the Father that raised Jesus up will also raise us together with him for eternal life. So we don’t have the promise that we’ll have a wonderful life on earth. What we have is the promise that when this sometimes good, sometimes really stinky life is over, that we have eternity with Christ to look forward to.

We have that hope of the resurrection. So look at verse 15. It says, for all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might be through the thanksgiving.

Hold on, excuse me. Let me try that again. For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God.

So what Paul’s pointing out here is that the real object of our Christian life is not to get stuff. It’s not to have a wonderful life. It’s not to have a time of ease.

The object of the Christian life, the goal here, is to help others come to faith in Christ and to glorify God. And sometimes we have to suffer for that to happen. Sometimes we have to put up with things we just rather not have to put up with.

But we do those things and we glorify God and we give others the opportunity to come to faith in Jesus Christ. The He reconciles men to himself through, and women, by the way, I’m using men in a general sense, but he reconciles men and women to himself through an act of his grace. The real gospel glorifies God. The gospel of prosperity glorifies man with riches.

I need to move quickly. We were a little late getting started this morning, and I see we’re running short of time. Verse 16 says, For which cause we faint not, though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

How are we able to do this? Because enduring suffering all the time for the cause of Christ is not something that we in our human flesh can do. The reason we’re able to do it, the reason we’re able to persevere through things that would be humanly impossible, is because God gives us sufficient strength for each day.

He strengthens us day by day. It says there that our inward man is renewed day by day. We are given the strength we need for that day to make it through by God’s grace.

And we can endure trouble, not because we’re looking for riches here on earth, but because our hope and our joy come from Jesus Christ, and not our circumstances, not our bank account, not our last doctor visit, but our hope and our joy come from a relationship with Jesus Christ, and that is something that our circumstances can never steal from us. Now let’s look at the last two verses of this passage. It says, for our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

He says, there’s something bigger than what you experience here on earth, whether it’s the sufferings, whether it’s the abundance, whatever you’re going through, there’s something bigger. He says, ou