God Wants You to Prosper
By Dr. Frederick K.C. Price
Prosperity comes in many forms.
There is social prosperity and mental prosperity, and there is professional
prosperity, when God blesses the work you are doing on your job. Once you
marry, you can also experience marital prosperity. There is parental prosperity
in terms of raising your children, and physical prosperity in terms of your
health. No Christian has a problem with any of these ways through which God can
prosper us. No minister, theologian, or church denomination will tell you that
any of these areas of prosperity are bad, or of the devil.
When it comes to financial and
material prosperity, however, that is an entirely different ballgame. When you
begin to talk about those two forms of prosperity, you become a target. All the
worms come out of the woodwork, and you might even have some people talk about
you. But I know the true reason these attacks come. Satan knows that if he can
keep Christians poor, he can hinder the proclamation of the Gospel. And he has
done a good job of keeping Christians poor up to the present time.
It costs money to proclaim the
Gospel. It costs money to build or rent a church building, to provide a pastor
for a congregation, to equip a church sanctuary. Christians need an environment
in which they can hear the Word, fellowship with one another, and grow in the
knowledge of God.
It costs money to send
missionaries to a place where no one has ever gone before with the Gospel.
Also, in many of the places where these missionaries go, there is not enough
financial sustenance to take care of them. Therefore, their home base or home
church has to take care of them. That costs money. Who else is going to pay for
the spreading of Gospel but the children of God? Our outreach ministries are
going to be based upon our financial ability to support and send those who have
the call on their lives to go.
Satan knows that if he can keep
us poor, keep us barely making it, keep us struggling to provide for our own
individual households, then we will have limited resources to give to the
Church. By our poverty, he can prevent us from sending out those who need to
carry the message of Jesus Christ to others. It’s a conspiracy! A person cannot
give what he or she does not have, especially when the person does not know how
to get it.
The world’s system is not
designed to aid your financial independence – not when you are a child of God.
It will allow a few of Satan’s kids to get wealth, so that others will think
they are going to become wealthy too, but the enemy certainly does not want the
Church to become financially prosperous. That is why he has so cleverly
infiltrated theology. The very people who should be supporting one another are
attacking one another. We have enough opposition coming from Satan, so we don’t
need any coming from our brothers and sisters in Christ. When a minister or
another Christian starts talking about money, non-Christians and Christians
alike get on the person’s case. They automatically think the minister is a
crook or charlatan.
Granted, there may be some
charlatans in the pulpit, but there are crooks everywhere. They are found in
government, but what can we say about that? Can we stop the government from
operating? There are crooked doctors, crooked lawyers, crooked wives, crooked
husbands, crooked children, and crooked parents. There are crooks everywhere,
not just in the pulpit.
I can handle what the world
says, but it becomes a bitter pill to swallow when your Christian brethren
criticize you for talking about prosperity. Nevertheless, we have to talk about
money. This is especially true if you have a television ministry. It costs the
same amounts of money to be in Christian media as it does to be in secular
media. However, it would take me years to go around the world and physically
teach the Word to as many people as I can reach in one hour via television.
Television is the least expensive way to reach the greatest number of people in
the shortest length of time, although it costs megabucks to do so.
The bottom line is, no matter
what medium a person uses, spreading the Gospel quickly boils down to dollars
and cents. Therefore, if anyone ought to be sympathetic to the idea of material
and financial prosperity, it ought to be Christians. We need to know how to
operate in God’s financial plan. As we prosper financially, God prospers in
terms of our relationship to Him. If we are poor, God is poor by our poverty.
Economically and financially,
our world is getting worse. Yet all the resources we need are available. Some
folk are getting it and squandering it on the things that bring glory to Satan.
Christians need to learn how to prosper, so that the Church can bring glory to
God.
God wants you to prosper. Until
you are convinced of this, you will never prosper. When you realize that Jesus
and His disciples were not poor, but rather had wealth, you will begin to
understand that you don’t need to be poor to serve Him.
Joshua 1:8:
“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate
in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is
written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will
have good success.”
You can see it in the Word: God
wants you prosper. And the people He was speaking to were sinners. This is Old
Testament, so they were not even His children; they were His servants. If God
wanted His servants to prosper, you must know He wants His children to prosper.
There was a time when I did not
think God liked me too well because I am black. It looked like all the black
folk I knew did not have very much. I thought that God just arbitrarily decided
that He was going to prosper a particular man or woman, and put another man or
woman on welfare. When I discovered what the Word of God says in scriptures
like Joshua 1:8, I got happy. I found out at last that it was up to me whether
I prospered, and that it had nothing to do with my color.
It was up to me to meditate on
His Word day and night. It was my responsibility to never let that Word depart
from my mouth, and to observe to do it. After I did that, He said I would make
my way prosperous. When I discovered what God said in Joshua 1:8, I decided
that I was going to be prosperous. I was going all the way. If you are willing
to do it God’s way, you can prosper. It’s your fault if you do, and your fault
if you don’t.
The last part of Joshua 1:8
states, “and then you will have good success.” This implies that there can be
bad success. An example of bad success would be when you have $12 million in
the bank and you are driving a Rolls-Royce, but your wife is making out with
the gardener, the cat rapes the canary, and your kids are on drugs. You are up
all night worrying about who is stealing from you. You cannot eat because your
stomach is ulcerated, plus you have palpitations of the heart and high blood
pressure.
Good success would be having
$12 million in the bank, driving a Rolls-Royce, being surrounded by a loving
family, enjoying a relationship with Jesus Christ, and being filled with the
Holy Spirit.
Psalm 1:1-3:
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in
the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; But his delight is
in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be
like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its
season, whose leave also shall not wither: and whatever he does shall prosper.
Whatever he does shall prosper! This means that you should prosper in your
marriage. You should prosper in raising your children. You should prosper in
your sex life, in your professional life, in your business, in your ministry,
and in your friendships. Whatever you do should prosper. If God wanted His
people poor, there should be plenty of evidence of that in the Bible. But I see
just the opposite. The overwhelming evidence through the scriptures is that God
wants His people to be prosperous in every way – including financially.
Psalm 35:27:
Let them shout for joy and be glad, who favor my righteous cause; And let them
say continually, “Let the Lord be magnified, who has pleasure in the prosperity
of His servant.”
If God gets pleasure in our prosperity, He must have displeasure in our
poverty. If that is true, then God is against poverty. The Bible tells us, “by
the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established” (2
Corinthians 13:1). I have already given you three scriptures, so I have met the
biblical requirement to prove to you that God wants you to prosper in every
single area of your life. Now it is up to you to do something about it. The
ball is in your court.
The covers have been pulled off Satan’s conspiracy to keep you poor. It is your
obligation not to play into his game plan any more.
[This article is reprinted from the Ever Increasing Faith Messenger
November/December 1998]
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