GOD WANTS ME TO PROSPER

Pastor Dave Roberts calls it “Bumper Sticker Theology,” pithy one-liners that condense “truth” about God down to bite size chunks.  The only problem is that usually these one-liners aren’t truthful; catchy but not truthful. One of those bumper stickers reads, “God wants me to proper.”

Some folks quickly jump to Jeremiah 29:11 for their defense, “’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.’” Many people read these words and conclude that God is here to make our lives easier, to increase our status materially, and to be our personal “blessings ATM machine.” This is not what Jeremiah is saying, however.

In Jeremiah God tells His people that they were going into captivity.  It would be a most difficult time.  They would be away from their holy land.  They wouldn’t be able to come near Jerusalem. Their homeland would be devastated.  The coming years were going to be tought. Doesn’t sound like Prosperity, does it? 

Down in a foreign place, Babylon, they would live and move and have their being.  Jeremiah tells them to adjust and make peace with it.  They were to go about their days, however, always remembering that their lives and times were in the hands of God.  In the captivity they were to go about the business of living.  They were to set up homes, raise their children, allow their children to marry and have children of their own.  He called them never to give up, to look forward, to hang tough, and to remember their God.  This captivity was not to be the final chapter in their lives.  God was in their midst, and no matter what they might experience they were to live with their eyes fixed on God and to pursue the hope that always comes when God is present.

The problem with a bumper sticker theology that says, “God wants me to prosper,” is that it lays aside what God means by prosper and replaces it with the good old thinking that generally is western, monetary, and fully expressed in the realization of the American dream.  We want God to prospers us so that we become healthy and wealthy.  Therefore, surely, that’s what God must mean when He seeks to prosper His people.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it tends to reduce God down to our understanding and we being to think that what we think is what God thinks. From this comes the bad theology that if you are not healthy and wealthy, you’re not “in” God.  You have a spiritual problem.  If you are really spiritual God becomes “Johnny-on-the-spot” with His prosperous blessings.

What if God has bigger plans for you than health and wealth?  What if God wants to enter down into your story and walk with you everyday as you live in the realities of your life?  What if God doesn’t keep you from facing tribulation but establishes Himself as your God in it?  What if God doesn’t keep you from dying at the end of your days but promises to walk through the valley of the shadow of death with you so much so that He prepares a feast before you in the presence of your enemies?  What if in this very real and dangerous world we are invited to walk by faith in a God who is holy and faithful and truthful and gracious and compassionate, a God who meets us right where we are and who “emptied Himself of all but love and bled for Adam’s helpless race”? 

What if there is more to life than wealth, more to life than health, more to life than dying with the most toys in hand? What if God wants to prosper us with the abiding presence of His own Holy Spirit, to walk with us into our days, covering us with the reality of His own divine life, and embracing us in the majesty of His divine grace and peace and mercy and love?

What if God were to so establish His life in our lives that the truthful testimony of our lives would be that even though we are “afflicted in every way” we are “not crushed, perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; stuck down, but not destroyed” (See 2 Corinthians 4:8-9).

What if God’s prosperity was so powerful that we could truthfully say, “We do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.  For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison… (See 2 Cor. 4: 16-17)?

What if God’s prosperity was so powerful that we could truthfully say, “Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place” (2 Cor. 2:14).

What if God’s prosperity was so powerful that the foundation upon which we live and move and have our being will never give way so that even if the rains fall and the floods come and the winds blow and slam against us we won’t fall because we have been founded on the Rock of Jesus Christ (See Matthew 7:24-25)?   

Isn’t it true that we don’t need God’s money; we need God?  We don’t need God to give us the American dream; we need God. We don’t need perfect health; we need God.  God has promised to be with us day-by-day.  Isn’t that enough?  And, if it isn’t, can we at least concede that there are untold millions of people on the planet who don’t live in America, don’t know what the American dream is, who don’t know what a health insurance plan looks like, don’t have a bank account and who are looking to find where their next meal is coming from, and that millions of these people live and move and have their being in Jesus with a faith that makes ours pale in comparison.  

May God meet your needs, embrace you in His love, forgive you of your sins, fill you with His Spirit, empower you for life, and take you home to heaven when you die.  Now, that’s prosperity. With this is mind, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being” (Ephesians 3:16).