The Prosperity Gospel

INTRODUCTION

When I was thinking about us going through this Cults and Counterfeits series, I knew that I wanted us to study the cults of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormon church.

These are cultists who could knock on your door tomorrow.

These are folks you might see at Yorktown Market Days this weekend.

These are large organizations with lots of followers that tend to touch our lives in some way or another.

But beyond those two cults, which are like the Coke and Pepsi of Christian counterfeits, I have struggled with what direction to take.

There are is no shortage of false gospels out there being taught by liars and lunatics alike.

The world is never lacking a strong supply of lies.

Whenever the stock begins to fall, Satan is there with his delivery truck.

But what cults and counterfeits are actually impacting the lives of our people?

That is the pastoral question that I have been seeking to answer.

I don’t want to spend 40 minutes teaching about The Unification Church or Christian Science, only for you to go the rest of your lives, never meeting someone who is involved in those cults or even in danger of being involved in them.

Instead, I want to maximize the time by combatting lies that actually come into your orbit and disrupt your atmosphere.

So with that in mind, I have made two very specific choices for our next two talks.

I have selected two flavors of counterfeit, false teaching that are much more likely to impact our lives than Christian Science—a cult that has been declining in membership for years.

Instead, our next two talks pertain to subject matter that could find its way onto your TV tomorrow morning if you are not careful.

Our next two talks pertain to false teaching that is even readily accepted by many who called themselves Christians.

They may not even realize it.

Over the next two weeks, we will be talking about the Prosperity Gospel and the New Apostolic Reformation and the false teaching that these bastardized versions of Christianity have knit themselves to.

Tonight, we will focus on the Prosperity Gospel with its New Thought roots.

Next week, we will focus on the New Apostolic Reformation with its New Age practices.

Let me begin by reading a passage to you, which will frame our talk for tonight.

1 Timothy 6:3–10 ESV

If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain. But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 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.

THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE CHARLATAN

Godliness is a means to great gain.

There is no doubt about that.

True godliness will breed contentment in a person.

Even when their temporal blessings and securities are threatened or removed, they are steadfast in their contentment because it is focused on a reward that is beyond the horizon of this world.

The earth can rock back and forth and shake, but the godly person remains content because the faltering world is not the jewel box that contains their jewel.

Their diamond is in heaven. His name is Jesus.

He is reward of the godly—and it is a gain that the cares of the world cannot take away.

But Paul tells Timothy about false teachers who see godliness as a means to a different type of gain.

They do not see it as a means to heavenly reward, but earthly reward.

They preach a different doctrine in order to gather up treasure under the sun.

They preach a different doctrine to draw hordes of listeners with their teaching that scratches itching ears.

And in the end, their false gospel leads them and others into temptation.

This is because the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

When we adore riches, we make our hearts the board room for the devil’s strategic planning,

He comes in and starts conducting business and it produces all sorts of horrible fruit. Even the fruit of utter destruction.

When we speak about the Prosperity Gospel, we are talking about THIS sort of false teaching.

We are talking about a significant movement of error that has taken root, becoming incredibly popular in the Western Christian world, and also being exported out into the nations.

We are talking about a horde of men and women who call themselves “preachers” and “pastors” and “apostles,” and they have distorted the true Gospel of Jesus by deceiving others into thinking that Christ came and lived and died in order to give physical, material and economic prosperity to anyone who has true faith.

They are false teachers who love money.

And their love of money has led them into senseless and harmful desires, which pave the road to destruction.

And they are leading others down that same road.

They might be on Christian television, but they have done great harm to the name of Christ, just like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

In fact, they may be even more dangerous because on the surface, it looks more distinctively Christian than those other falsehoods.

Tonight I want to split this talk up into four sections:

What is the history of the Prosperity Gospel?

What are the doctrines of the Prosperity Gospel?

What is the state of the Prosperity Gospel today?

What is our response to the Prosperity Gospel?

THE HISTORY OF THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL

What is the history of the Prosperity Gospel?

When many people tell the story of the Prosperity Gospel, they start around the 1950’s and point to the ministry of the Pentecostal preachers like Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin.

Roberts, Hagin and others were leaders in the “healing revival movement,” where they promised miraculous cures to anyone who had enough faith.

And Roberts was the one who figured out— “I can put this on TV.”

He used “tele-evangelism” to encourage people to sew a seed of faith into his ministry and that God would give it back to them seven-fold.

But in truth, to understand the Prosperity Gospel movement, you have to understand the mindset that had infiltrated American religion.

The Prosperity Gospel did not come about in a vacuum.

It grew out of the error-filled soil of the New Thought Movement—a religious hodge-podge that stole from Christianity, Hinduism, transcendentalism, Darwinistic naturalism and good old-fashioned optimism.

NEW THOUGHT

The New Thought Movement was a philosophical movement of the 1800’s.

New Thought was all about promoting interest in and the practice of a true philosophy and a way of life and happiness.

And New Thought teachers said that through right thinking you can manifest your greatest dreams and desires.

This would include being able to fend off sickness or be healed of sickness.

The grandfather of the New Thought Movement was a man named Emanuel Swedenborg.

He was a Swedish scientist and inventor.

Swedenborg claimed to have spent a year having regular conversation with the Apostle Paul, claimed to have several hundred conversations with Martin Luther and even had a meeting with Moses.

He taught God was a mystical force.

He rejected Christ as God.

And most importantly, he said that the human mind was so powerful that it had the ability to control the physical world.

He may sound like a loon, but remember that he was a mathematician and an astronomer.

People took him seriously enough that he was widely read in the United States.

And then a host of leaders came after Swedenborg and contributed to the unfortunate flourishing of the New Thought movement.

There was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.

If Swedenborg was the grandfather of the New Thought Movement, Quimby was the father.

He taught that sickness was a disturbance of the mind, not the body.

Right reasoning in the mind can eliminate sickness from the body.

Quimby also claimed the ability to miraculously heal people with hypnosis.

After this, there was Ralph Waldo Trine—the most successful evangelist of the New Thought Movement.

Trine’s New Thought book called In Tune With the Infinite: Fullness of Peace, Power and Plenty sold millions of copies in 1897 and was translated into 20 different languages.

You can see how this pop philosophy was taking off as the 1800’s was turning into the 1900’s.

And then finally, there was Norman Vincent Peale—the most popular New Thought leader, who pastored in NY City (I use the term pastored loosely).

Peale’s church was actually from the strong Dutch Reformed tradition—Calvinistic, conservative and biblical.

But he traded all that in for a “practical and specific message that would really work when needed.”

So he produced writing that sounded Christian, but underneath it was just New Thought.

You can hear it in the title of his most popular work— The Power of Positive Thinking.

Peale’s book sold 15 million copies and it continues to sell 3000 per week.

If you gather up all that the New Thought Movement taught in a summarizing fashion, you might just say it this way:

New Thought adherents believe in a distorted view of God—rejecting the biblical revelation of who God is

New Thought adherents believe there are universal laws governing the universe that can be harnessed

New Thought adherents believe that the mind can change the reality of the physical universe

New Thought adherents believe humans are basically good

New Thought adherents focus on health and wealth

And New Thought Adherents believe salvation is a self-generated experience with God where you channel God’s energy and use God’s laws as a way to get health, wealth and happiness.

NEW THOUGHT AND PENTECOSTALISM

Now—as the New Thought Movement is going from fringe philosophy under Swedenborg to material for a New York Times bestseller under Peale, there is another thing happening on the landscape of American spirituality.

Pentecostalism comes about and gains credibility in the world of American religion.

It starts with a man named Charles Fox Parham, who convinces a bunch of college students in Kansas of two things:

There was second baptism of the Holy Spirit they needed after their salvation

That baptism is evidenced by speaking in tongues

Parham himself was a mess, but one of Parham’s colleagues, William Seymour, took Parham’s teachings to the world.

He led the Asuza Street Revival in California from 1906-1909 and the Revival launched Parham’s teachings and Pentecostalism into the limelight.

A few years later, the Assemblies of God denomination began and Pentecostalism had announced itself as a player in Western evangelicalism.

But when a man named EW Kenyon came along, he officiated a wedding.

He married New Thought lies with Pentecostal Christianity.

He became famous for lines like, “You can speak the right words to bring about a new reality” and “What you confess, you possess.”

And the unholy union he presided over between New Thought and Pentecostal Christianity produced a hellish lovechild—the Prosperity Gospel.

A couple of young preachers named Kenneth Hagin and Oral Roberts latched on to Kenyon’s teachings and made the advancement of them their life’s work.

Hagin’s ministry exploded in popularity with his teachings about how you can speak words of faith to manifest health, wealth and happiness.

But as popular as he was, Roberts’ ministry was even more important to the cause.

Oral Roberts truly became the Michael Jordan of Prosperity Christianity.

His ministry was one of the first to realize the potential of television as a medium for spreading the gospel, and his programs reached millions of viewers. The faith-healing evangelist became so influential that he started his own school, Oral Roberts University. At the height of his influence, Roberts oversaw a ministry that brought in $110 million in annual revenue.

Joe Carter

Most notably, Roberts invented the “seed-faith” scheme that has been employed by countless false teachers after him.

He said that you “sow a seed of faith”—to his ministry of course, not your local church.

Then you “expect a miracle.”

Then you “harvest a miracle.”

Simple as that.

TRINITY BROADCASTING NETWORK

The Prosperity Gospel chugged along for 20 years through the ministry of these men through some television programs and purchasable teaching materials, but in 1973 something happened that was game-changing.

Paul and Jan Crouch gifted the world the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Suddenly, the Prosperity Revolution was going to be televised.

TBN became the antenna that sent the Prosperity Gospel out to the world.

With this network, what Oral Roberts pioneered, the Crouch’s perfected.

It is hard to imagine that any one medium is more responsible for the Prosperity Gospel gaining a mainstream foothold in the religious West.

It gave a ready-made platform to men and women who get on TV and say that if you claim any sort of health, wealth and happiness with enough faith—it will be yours.

It provided a stage for false teachers to confused Americans with a damnable view of the atonement.

It broadcast the theology that makes God into a means to get money and money into a god.

For forty years, it has been home to people like Joyce Meyer, TD Jakes, Rod Parsley, Creflo Dollar, Paula White, Jesse Duplantis and Joel Osteen.

What NBC was to Carson’s Tonight Show, TBN has been to the devil’s Prosperity Gospel.

IN THE TIME SINCE

Those names that TBN have platformed have become the “who’s who” of the Prosperity world.

They represent multi-million dollar organizations that profit from money given, books published and worldwide speaking tours.

And they enjoy the fruits.

Joel Osteen reportedly pays himself $54 million per year from church receipts.

He drives a $270,000 Ferrari.

His mansion is 70,000 square feet.

Kenneth Copeland flies around in a GulfStream V private jet he bought from Tyler Perry.

He is worthy $760 million.

Joyce Meyer has a $23,000 marble-topped toilet in her house.

She also flies around in a private jet that she purchased for $10 million.

Her husband drives a $107,000 Mercedes.

You might wonder, “How have they made so much money?”

They have made so much money because their false teaching has become pervasively mainstream.

In 2017, Lifeway Research found that 52% of Americans say that their church teaches that “if you give money, God will bless you with prosperity.”

The walls have been breached.

Prosperity teaching has established itself as one of the greatest counterfeit gospels of our age and this is incredibly dangerous because, as opposed to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, it parades itself as looking much more like the churches many Americans attend.

THE DOCTRINES OF THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL

So with that history laid down, what do adherents of the Prosperity Gospel actually believe?

What are the doctrines of the Prosperity Gospel?

That can be a bit hard to nail down since there is no official “Prosperity Gospel Confession of Faith,” but there are some general themes that can be found in almost all Prosperity teachers.

I am going to give you the four pillars of the Prosperity Gospel.

I have gotten these from Ligonier Ministry’s Field Guide to False Teaching.

1. Jesus died to purchase physical benefits in this present age for those who believe.

Here is what this means--

Prosperity preachers do not talk about Jesus’ death in terms of a vicarious atonement.

They do not talk about His death as a Substitute who is absorbing the wrath of God for His people.

They do not talk about Him who knew no sin being made to be sin, so that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Instead, when Prosperity preachers talk about the Cross, they say that He died to purchase complete physical healing for His people, both in terms of health and wealth.

They preach that Jesus died to save you from physical illness and poverty.

If you wonder where they might find cause for such a perverted teaching in the Bible, it comes from a twisting of two verses:

Isaiah 53:5 ESV

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

This is a verse that makes it clear that Jesus was pierced for our transgressions of God’s law and that He was crushed for our sins.

And yet, Prosperity teachers ignore that and jump to the end of the verse which says, “with his wounds we are healed.”

They take this to mean that Jesus died so that you could exercise faith and claim healing over your cold or your cancer, for that matter.

To get to this interpretation, you must ignore the context of Isaiah 53 in general and in particular, you must ignore the rest of v. 5.

The second verse that they love to quote in a twisted manner in John 10:10

John 10:10 ESV

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Jesus came to live and die, in order to give you abundant life.

Now, if you read this in its context, we know that the abundant life spoken of is the eternal life He provides for the sheep of His fold.

Just one verse before, Jesus says this:

John 10:9 ESV

I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.

And yet, Prosperity teachers will quote v. 10 and disregard the fact that Jesus is clearly speaking about the eternal life found in salvation.

They will say that the abundant life Jesus speaks of is a life free from suffering, sickness and want.

It is a life of health, wealth and prosperity in this age.

This is gross false teaching.

To take the death of the Son of God, in which He warred for our eternal life and won us the victory, and to relegate it as a means to keep you healthy and happy in this world, is degrading.

This teaching is not just wrong—it is an insult to the King of Kings.

Jesus did not die to atone for your sickness and your poverty.

He died to atone for your sin.

There is a world coming in which we will experience abundant life without sickness and without poverty—that is true.

But that is the age to come—not this age.

Prosperity teachers want God to be a vending machine that gives you all your heart’s desires.

This teaching turns Jesus’ priestly death into the buttons on the machine that you push to get what you want.

2. God has promised a vast material inheritance to all who believe in this life.

Genesis 12 is a crucial text for understanding God’s redeeming purposes in history.

In Genesis 12, God tells Abraham that the nations are going to be blessed through his seed.

Genesis 12:2 ESV

And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

We know that Jesus came from Abraham’s line—meaning, He is the Seed of Abraham.

Whenever people repent of their sin and trust in Christ, they are united to Christ, the Seed of Abraham, by faith and they become a part of Abraham’s offspring.

Through Christ, they are citizens of the great nation that God said He would bring from Abraham.

And one day, they will receive fullness of everything that God has promised to Abraham in Genesis 12 through Christ.

More than that, they will receive the fullness of every promise God has made to His people because they all find their Yes and Amen in Christ.

But Prosperity teachers say that Genesis 12 is important for different reasons.

They claim that it is referring to that which believers will experience in this life.

They say that Christians are Abraham’s spiritual children and heirs to the blessings of faith.

And the blessings that are promised to Abraham’s children are primarily material.

According to the Prosperity Gospel, the primary purpose of the Abrahamic Covenant was for God to bless Abraham materially and to make him successful. Advocates of the Prosperity Gospel reason that since believers are now Abraham’s spiritual children, they consequently have inherited the material blessings of the covenant.

Edward Pousson

To sum up what Pousson is saying—when faithful Bible teachers talk about the Abrahamic Covenant, they talk about God’s eternal promises coming true in Christ and a beautiful life in the age to come.

But when these false teachers talk about Genesis 12, they talk about your best life now.

When you hear Prosperity preachers peddling this teaching, they do it in terms of contract.

They present the Abrahamic Covenant as a sort of contract that binds God.

He must give you material blessing, if you believe.

Your prayers of faith punch the buttons of Jesus’ atonement on the vending machine and because of the Abrahamic Covenant, God is bound to spit out your blessing.

3. You give in order to get.

This sort of thinking about giving can be traced back to Oral Roberts’ “seed-faith” invention.

Prosperity teachers say that the only way to get riches is to give more money to the Kingdom.

But not just any place in God’s Kingdom.

You won’t hear them saying that you should give to Lottie Moon or Annie Armstrong.

You won’t hear them saying that every believer should support the ministry of their local church or provide for the reasonable needs of their pastors.

You won’t even hear them encouraging giving to other Prosperity teachers the way that you might hear Christian leaders encouraging their followers to give to good causes being led by others.

Instead, it is always about sewing a seed of faith to their ministry. Their organization.

And the quality of your blessing will be tied to the quantity of your giving.

The more you give, the more you get…as long as you have enough faith, which leads us to our next pillar...

4. Name it and claim it.

If we can thank Oral Roberts for seed-faith, we can thank Kenneth Hagin for “name it and claim it.”

Hagin taught that the combination of faith and spoken prayers could lay hold of physical and material blessings in this life.

This is where the Prosperity movement really borrows from New Thought.

Some call the “name it and claim it” belief system by the title of “Word of Faith.”

The teaching says that if you have enough faith, your prayer will compel God to prosper you in whatever way you are asking for.

If you have afflictions, it is due to a lack of faith.

If you have poverty, it is due to a lack of faith.

If you have sickness, it is due to a lack of faith.

Now here is the brilliance of their dirty little scheme.

When you combine “Give to Get” with “Name it and Claim It,” the Prosperity teacher always has a way to keep the rouse alive.

If you give a bunch of money to your Prosperity ministry and you stay poor, and you come to me complaining that you are still in poverty, here is what I will say— “Well, you didn’t have enough faith.”

Sticking with the vending machine illustration:

You put your money in.

You hit the buttons of Jesus’ atonement.

You claimed the promises of the Abrahamic Covenant.

BUT…your faith was weak.

IF you had just had faith, you would be rich like me.

Now—we can fix this. Sew another seed of faith. Believe harder when you put that money in and press those buttons.

Let’s keep trying it till it works! GIVE MORE! NAME AND CLAIM WHAT YOU WANT! DON’T GIVE UP!

All the while, I am not just lining my pockets with the money you are spending on your spiritual lottery tickets, but I am also lining them with all the others who are giving their hard-earned cash.

Can I tell you why this makes me so angry?

Like—when I hear a Jehovah’s Witness selling their story, I mourn and I pity them.

But when I hear a Prosperity teacher proclaiming “seed-faith,” I am angry.

Do you know why?

Because most of the people who listen to and give to these teachers are poor.

These charlatans and liars get on TV and make empty promises to desperate people in the name of Jesus.

And then, when those people don’t get the promised blessings, they are told it is because their faith is deficient.

The blame is put back on the poor man.

And then, that poor man will either keep bleeding himself dry to try and give enough to hit the divine lottery OR that poor man will grow bitter toward religion, thinking this is what Christianity is.

THAT is why I call it the hellish lovechild of New Thought and Pentecostalism.

THAT is why I say TBN has been the NBC for the devil’s gospel.

THAT is why I use such strong language.

This stuff is predatory and evil.

I have seen it in my own family.

This is a teaching that will meet the full weight of God’s wrath on the Day that He makes all things wright.

THE STATE OF THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL TODAY

What is the state of the Prosperity Gospel today?

I wish the Prosperity Gospel was like Christian Science.

Christian Science is a cult that has been on the decline for years.

In Kingdom of the Cults, which Walter Martin wrote a decades ago, he says, “I don’t even know how long these folks will be around.”

Unfortunately, the Prosperity Gospel is alive and well.

However, I do believe that it is changing.

The cynicism of Gen-X has posed a problem for Prosperity teachers.

The generation that grew up watching He-Man and listening to grunge music found these people to be laughable.

They aren’t giving their money to them the way Boomers and the Golden Generation did.

And that is okay.

The Boomers and the Golden Generation were giving plenty to keep the party going.

But now, there is a new crop of Prosperity teachers on the scene.

It’s not the old guard.

That was Joyce Meyer and Kenneth Copeland and TD Jakes.

Go to TJ Jakes’ web site and there is this big GIVE button you can click on.

Millennials and Gen-Z aren’t going for that.

These are the social media generations.

They are pretty wise to things that are transparently after your money on the internet.

So now it is being repackaged in different language.

Here is Mike Todd, whose church has 2 million YouTube subscribers.

You say you’ve been blessed by the Lord going in and coming out, and yet you are still on welfare. Somewhere along the way your faith became language. You have language, but no results.

Mike Todd

Now, Todd is one of these guys who is using props in every sermon and he is super charismatic and talks like he is on TikTok.

In fact, he has 1.3 million followers on TikTok.

He doesn’t look like Jesse Duplantis or Creflo Dollar.

There is no suit. His book cover looks like an internet meme. SHOW BOOK

See—Mike Todd knows he can’t show up on TV asking for money. Gen-Z won’t fall for that.

But if he can re-package the same message in new language, with snazzy graphics and sermon props, then he can still make just as much money.

“Seed-faith” may be out, but people will still buy the books and the music.

People will still come to the YouTube channel and that ad revenue will be rolling in.

People will still pay thousands to have him speak at the conference.

Reportedly, Todd costs $10-20k per appearance.

Its the same gimmick—just a different wrestler under the mask.

Todd is just one example of a modern, me-centered, Prosperity teacher.

Others would include Brian Houston, formerly of Hillsong Church, who wrote a book called, You Need More Money.

In the book he encourages readers to stand before the biggest house on their block and claim that God will give them a house like that.

Houston has covered himself in shame in a couple of different scandals, but until recently, he was a sought after teacher and the music from his churches is still sung in churches around the world.

Or there is Steven Furtick of Elevation Church, who is very similar to Mike Todd in presentation and promotion.

That being said, unlike Todd, if you go to Furtick’s personal website, you can bypass Elevation Church and give straight to Furtick himself.

Furtick’s net worth is $55 million.

If you could spare a few pennies, his ministry could really use your assistance.

I could go on in terms of the teachers who are still poisoning the air with this false gospel, but I just want to drive home the point that though Prosperity teachers of old may be going out of style, the devil will always find a way to keep with the trends.

There is a new, more subtle prosperity teaching out there which scratch itching ears with only one goal in mind—making the purveyors of it rich off the backs of its listeners.

WHAT IS OUR RESPONSE TO THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL?

What is our response to the Prosperity Gospel?

So understanding the history, the beliefs and the current state of the Prosperity Gospel, let’s close by talking about the remedy. I won’t go long here.

But here are four things that the church must be vigilant about now and in the future in order to keep pushing back against this demonic teaching.

1. The church must teach the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Jesus did not die to heal your diseases and fill your wallet.

Jesus died to save you from the wrath of God and fill you with His Spirit and ultimately to bring you to Himself forever.

A Gospel that robs the Cross of this purpose is a Gospel that cannot save.

A Jesus that does not atone for sin is a false, fictional Christ, that cannot save.

The church must be vigilant to teach the true Gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected in order to show how worthless and inferior the counterfeit Prosperity Gospel is.

2. The church must teach a good theology of suffering.

Many people seek out a false gospel that teaches it is never God’s will for you to suffer because no one has ever taught them the purpose God has for the believer in suffering.

Suffering is a tool that God uses to sanctify us and draw us closer to Him.

Suffering is a tool God uses to glorify Himself in our lives as we share in the suffering of Christ.

Suffering can be a tool of God’s discipline when we are straying from Him.

A theology that has no place for suffering is a theology that has no roots in the revealed Word of God, which constantly reveals suffering to be a reality of this fallen world that God uses for His own purposes.

3. The church must teach a good theology of money and giving.

The Bible gives no connection between spiritual wealth and physical wealth.

You can be godly and be poor.

You can be ungodly and be rich.

You can be in poverty and sinful.

You can be a faithful Christ-follower and be wealthy.

The Bible also makes no guarantee that your worshipful giving to God will result in physical health and wealth.

The church doesn’t like to talk about money, but we have to.

In avoiding the topic, you leave a vacuum that Prosperity Teachers are more than ready to step into.

Good verse-by-verse expository preaching will end up touching on the topic of money at a normal frequency because there is teaching about it all throughout the Scriptures.

Good preaching on money will combat the bad and take way the opportunity for the false teacher to bend the ear of faithful Christians and deceive them.