My question is about “Faith Churches”. I attend a church like this and the way things are taught you would think we all should be rich, full of health and walking on easy street. It sounds great but if it was as easy as they say you wouldn’t be able to keep people out of churches.
They give these great sounding prophecies about how great everything is going to be (in my state or this country) and it never seems to come to pass. To be honest it makes me mad anymore hearing the prophecies because I don’t have faith that what they are saying will happen, and they are always asking for money. Again, if all I had to do was give so and so 10% and I’d be getting 100X back you couldn’t keep people from giving.
I was wondering your thoughts on this kind of teaching?
The only ones I’ve seen who are consistently blessed by the prosperity gospel are those who teach it. It’s popular because it appeals to our greed and when it doesn’t work, it’s our fault because we “didn’t have faith.”
Oddly, the Bible does promise prosperity but only for those whose motives are right. The Prosperity Gospel as it’s commonly taught is based on wrong motives. Greed instead of gratitude.
In Luke 6:38 the Lord promised that we would be blessed in proportion to our giving, saying the measure we use in giving will be the measure He uses in blessing. When we give a little because we’ve been promised that we’ll get a lot in return, we’re not only being greedy, but we’re also telling Him to apply the same stingy measure in blessing us that we’ve used in giving to Him.
His word also says that we’ll be made rich in every way so that we can be generous on every occasion (2 Cor. 9:11). But we want to be made rich without being generous so we can have all the things the prosperity teachers have. That’s being selfish, not generous.
When we give generously to the Lord’s work out of gratitude for what He’s already given us, with no expectation of any additional return, then the blessings flow because we’ve shown that the Lord can trust us to pass along what we’ve been given.
James 3:1 says that those who teach will be judged more strictly. I believe that this will apply to the detriment of those who teach their distorted view of the prosperity gospel.