The Bible & FINANCIAL FREEDOM
Gods Plan For Your Money Has
4 Ingredients, Not Just 2

The Missing Ingredients In the "Prosperity Gospel", by Marc Speed

(Note from Marc: Please forgive me for failing to put the apostrophe in "God's Plan" above - I did that to get search engine traffic from people who search it without the apostrophe.)

The “prosperity gospel” is a very controversial issue in the church today. Some say it’s “of the devil” while others preach it wholeheartedly. Who’s right? Or is the truth somewhere in between the extremes?

The prosperity gospel as it is popularly preached, has some things right. The parts it has right are very valuable for every believer to know. Those who malign the prosperity gospel often suffer because they reject these correct Scriptural teachings. In this article I’ll point out a couple of the really valuable pieces of wisdom that the "prosperity gospel" teaches its listeners, which will help you to live out God's plan for your money.

On the other hand, the typical “prosperity preacher” has one thing completely wrong (see my article on The Rarely-Heard Truth About Tithing), one thing out of balance (which I will explain), and it is missing two key ingredients (which I’ll explain too).

Because of this, the prosperity gospel preached in the typical "prosperity church" or by the popular "prosperity preachers" has mixed outcomes as far as the results it brings in the lives of those who try to live it out. The good parts of it bring good results (good fruit) in its listeners and practitioners. On the other hand, the out-of-balance and wrong parts of it, combined with the fact that it’s missing two key ingredients in its “success formula”, often bring frustration to its practitioners...a frustration they rarely voice in church settings because of fear they might be viewed as “lacking faith” or “less spiritual”. The problem is not that they lack faith, it’s that they are not being taught correctly and completely.

First let's take a look at the good parts of the prosperity gospel.

Those who preach the prosperity gospel are not just pulling all their ideas out of thin air – there is quite a bit of Scriptural backing for the idea that God wants His people to prosper. For example,

Proverbs 10:22 says, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow to it.”

Proverbs 8:18 says, “Riches and honor are with me (wisdom), enduring wealth and righteousness.”

Proverbs 3:16 says, “In her (wisdom’s) left hand are riches and honor.”

3 John 2 says, “Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers.”

Is financial freedom Gods plan? (Again, forgive the lack of apostrophe in "God's", I have the unenviable task of pleasing both humans and search engines in this article...) Sure it is. Just read the verses above.

I could add many other Bible verses that declare God’s general desire for His people to prosper. This can get out-of-whack, of course, like in one church I attended where the unspoken attitude was, “The more money you have, the more faith-filled, spiritual, and Godly you are”. That attitude has no basis in Scripture. But suffice it to say, aside from those who take it too far, there are plenty of Bible promises that apply to us today when it comes to God’s desire to see His people well taken care of and well provided for financially.

There is also some significant Scriptural backing for the much maligned “word of faith” movement, which preaches that the words we speak are very important because they have creative power. For example,

Proverbs 18:21 says, “The power of death and life is in the tongue.”

And Jesus said in Mark 11:23, “(Whoever) should be believing that what he is speaking is occurring, it shall be his, whatsoever he may be saying.” (Concordant Version)

In Old Testament days, the blessing of a father (words spoken by the father over a son) was much coveted – they seemed to recognize the creative power of the father’s words. For example, Jacob spoke powerful words over his sons (Gen. 49), and history has shown that these words have indeed come true for each son’s descendants.

When Jacob blessed Joseph’s two sons, he crossed his hands to put his right hand on the youngest (contrary to tradition), and the small furor this caused among the onlookers shows us how much importance was placed on the words of a father, and how seriously they took words – blessings or curses. Jacob’s blessing and the words he spoke over the two boys has come true (which is a great subject for another day). This demonstrates the amazing power of words.

I try to live out this Biblical wisdom by making sure I never say anything negative about my life in the present or future tense, while purposefully making positive statements about my life (“I am healthy, I am protected”, etc.) and regularly speaking Biblical promises in the first person (“No evil shall befall me, God gives His angels charge concerning me to guard me in all my ways” from Psalm 91, etc.). Try this for a while, and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes in your life and in your day to day attitude too!

Unfortunately many people, including many believers, ignore the power of their words. They ignorantly go around saying things like “I get sick every Christmas” or “I’ll never get married” or “things just never seem to go my way” – and guess what happens! They get exactly what they say! God formed the world with His words, and from Jesus’ statement in Mark 11:23, it seems He has given our words creative power too (to a point, of course), and He expects us to understand and use that power. This is a something valuable that many churches, preachers, and believers would do well to learn from the “prosperity preachers” they malign.

This is a great example of how important it is to obey the Bible’s command to “test everything and hold on to what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). Many believers throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to the prosperity gospel (and other issues too), and miss out because of it.

OK, we’ve talked about the good things the “prosperity gospel” has to offer, now let’s look at the bad.

One thing most “prosperity preachers” have completely wrong is the issue of tithing. I’m not going to go into it here, but you can read my article The Rarely-Heard Truth About Tithing for the details.

Next, let’s talk about something that’s partly right, but which the “prosperity preachers” usually preach in an unbalanced way – the “give and you shall receive” principle. Jesus outlined this principle in Luke 6:38. Where many prosperity preachers go wrong is they act like the only form of “giving” is “giving in the offering plate”. There are many other ways you can give which will cause you to receive. The most obvious is going to work. You give your time, effort, and expertise, and you receive money. If you give more time, you get more money. If you give more effort, you usually get more money. If you give with more expertise, you usually get more money. Simple.

Yet many preachers completely ignore this more common facet of “giving and receiving” and act as if plopping money in the offering plate will automatically cause money to rain down from heaven on you. I’m not saying God doesn’t ever “work” this “principle” that way, I’m just saying that there are a lot of other types of giving that actually cause most of a person’s receiving in life.

To illustrate the absurdity of this type of unbalanced preaching, all we have to do is set up an experiment where Person A goes to school for a decade to learn to be a brain surgeon and then goes to work for fifty hours a week for thirty years, and puts nothing in the offering plate, ever, while Person B drops out of high school, flips burgers for thirty years, and puts half his paycheck in the offering plate every week. Who will end up with more money?

Because of this type of unbalanced preaching on the part of “prosperity preachers”, many of their listeners become frustrated when they give generously in the offering plate but seem to have little improvement in their financial lives. People who experience this frustration don’t talk about it much in “faith/prosperity churches” because they realize it will be perceived as admitting “I’m a loser”, but I guarantee you there are many of these people in every faith/prosperity congregation. But their failure to get rich is not because they’re failing to work the pastor’s “prosperity formula” hard enough or give in the offering plate enough, it’s because the pastors’ “prosperity formula” is incomplete. It’s because there are a lot of other types of giving that God expects us to do in order to receive blessing into our lives, besides giving in an offering plate.

I’m not trying to discourage giving in the offering plate, I’m just trying to encourage balance and common sense.

Let me illustrate with a true story – and then I’ll give you the two missing ingredients in the “prosperity gospel”.

When my wife was still my fiancée, we were both attending different “prosperity churches” (if you’ll allow me to use that term). However, I’d been doing a lot of studying and learning on my own in the Bible about Scriptural principles of success as well as reading success books, etc. I was getting a good dose of common sense downloaded into my brain. I remember one phone conversation during this time in my life when my fiancée said, “Honey, I’m frustrated because I’ve given so much money in the offering plate, and I’ve tithed faithfully and given so sacrificially so often – I’ve given thousands and thousands of dollars to the church over the last few years – and yet it doesn’t seem to be coming back to me at all. What’s wrong?”

I replied, “Honey, our preachers aren’t exactly telling us the whole truth about what it takes to succeed financially. Think about it – if all you had to do to increase your income was plop money in the offering plate, do you know what you’d be? A spoiled brat.”

She said, “Wow – you’re right! I never thought of it that way!”

Then we prayed and asked God to bless us financially and to increase our incomes as we worked hard to increase our value to society. And guess what? It worked.

Yes, God can supernaturally open up opportunities for you as you give money to the church and speak words of faith over your life. And sometimes He can even supernaturally bring you cold hard cash in a tight spot, although in my experience this more commonly happens to baby Christians as a faith-building nice gesture from God; don’t expect that to be a common method of getting money to come into your hands as you mature! (A life lived with wisdom will usually avoid desperately-needy situations.) However, giving money to the church and speaking words of faith over your life are not all there is to it. The “prosperity gospel” is missing two key ingredients in the “formula for success”.

Before I tell you what these two missing ingredients are, let me quickly address those of you who say “there’s no such thing as a formula for success” and “it’s all about a relationship with God”. I see where you’re coming from, but God has given us many principles of wisdom in His Word that He expects us to use. Over and over in Proverbs, for example, we are told to “get wisdom” – which obviously means “learn how to do things in a smart way” or “learn the principles of success in every area that is practical for you, and use them”. Yes, success for a Christian obviously includes a close relationship with God, but that’s not all there is to success. I personally spent many years of my life as a passionate worshiper of God but immensely frustrated in other areas of my life because I did not understand the principles of success.

Another thing that I’ve often seen happen is that a believer will kind-of get stuck in “baby Christian” mode – where miraculous things seem to happen regularly as God is building the new believer’s faith – and the person has trouble “graduating” to maturity – where he knows what to do and just does it with faith and wisdom, without having to get an instruction from God or a miracle every 10 minutes. If they don’t get a miracle all the time, or get good results with little effort, they think something is wrong. In actuality God is just trying to get them to be a grown-up Christian who the vast majority of the time just knows what to do and does it! My point is simply that praying and being “all spiritual” without learning and acting on principles of wisdom is naïve.

So, “prosperity preachers” generally teach one or two of the primary principles of wisdom extremely well – they’re usually great at preaching about the principle of watching your words and they may even preach extensively about the principle of not sinning. But there are two huge principles of wisdom they usually fail to teach – two missing ingredients in the “formula for success”. Many “prosperity preachers” are teaching their congregations how to bake a “success pie” (a successful life), but are only telling them to use two ingredients – words of faith and not doing stupid sins!

The problem is, a “success pie” needs four ingredients to taste good (to “work”)! So many members of the congregation end up (quietly) confused and frustrated because they’re only using the two ingredients their pastor is preaching about – not sinning, and words of faith. (Yes, I know, prosperity preachers talk a lot about “giving” – in the offering plate – too, but their preaching on this is so out of balance that I’m not treating it as an ingredient; it doesn’t really work the way they say it works – “Give in the offering plate and money will come to you supernaturally!” – at least not as often or as steadily as they make it seem. If God did do it that way often and steadily, we’d all be lazy spoiled brats. So it’s not a true ingredient of success the way they preach it.)

So, when many members of the congregation don’t get results nearly as good as their pastor gets (financially, success-wise, fulfillment-wise, etc.), they get confused and think “Why isn’t this working?”

What they don’t realize is that their pastor is using all four ingredients in his own pie, but he’s only preaching to the congregation about two ingredients! Now, some members of the congregation experience success in their lives because they’ve learned from somewhere else how to use the two missing ingredients the pastor never preaches about. These members shout hallelujah and yell “Amen!” and smile big smiles every time the pastor preaches about everyone’s favorite, (and the easiest ingredient to put into practice), the “words of faith” ingredient. The other members of the congregation, who aren’t as successful and know it, still shout hallelujah and smile, but inside they’re thinking “There’s gotta be something I’m missing here, because it doesn’t seem to be working for me the way it works for pastor”.

Well, I’m here to tell you what’s missing. Here are the two missing ingredients in the “prosperity gospel”:

In addition to

1) “Faith in thought/attitude and word” and

2) “Staying away from stupid sins as much as possible”,

you also need

3) Knowledge/Expertise in an area that is valuable to mankind, and

4) Strong, consistent, persistent Action Toward A Goal.

There’s your four-ingredient “success pie” – or “success formula”, if you will. Any person who consistently speaks positive words of faith over their life, avoids stupid sins as much as possible, gains significant knowledge/expertise in an area that is valuable to mankind, and consistently acts towards their goals, will eventually “succeed”.

(I realize I’m using a shallow and not-necessarily perfectly-Scriptural definition of success here. I ask you to bear with me when I use the word “success” in this article, I’m purposefully not going into a full discussion of the true meaning of success; I’m just trying to make a point about how to improve your circumstances in life, and I’m using the word “success” to describe “improved circumstances”, even though I know full well that is not necessarily the true, complete, or only meaning of “success”.)

You see, the typical BMW-driving “prosperity preacher” does not just speak words of faith over their life and he doesn’t just try to keep himself from doing stupid sins. He doesn’t just plop money in the offering plate or “tithe” (the Bible doesn’t command the modern believer to tithe anyway, see my article on tithing on this website). This “successful” prosperity preacher is probably also an excellent leader, communicator and public speaker who knows how to give hope to their audience (he has expertise in an area that is valuable to mankind). And, he has probably taken strong, consistent, and persistent action toward his goals in life. Simple.

This is not rocket science, my friends. However, it is astounding how many people sitting in church Sunday after Sunday do not understand this four-ingredient general formula for success. They hear the pastor excitedly saying over and over, “If you just put these two ingredients in your pie, it will taste great!” But it doesn’t seem to work! I just told you why. You need to be good at something and work hard toward your goals too, in order to significantly or consistently improve your circumstances in life.

So in summary, the “prosperity gospel” does have something valuable to offer, but it is totally wrong about one thing (tithing), it is out-of-balance in another area (giving), and in general it is incomplete in that it is missing two essential ingredients in the formula for success.

Eventually I plan to release a new article, E-Book, and DVD on wise investing in this evil age. It will include information about King Solomon's simple investing strategy based on one Bible verse, which produced average yearly gains virtually identical to the stock market's average yearly gains, but with half the risk (the worst year was less than half as bad as the worst year for the stock market) over the last forty years. To be alerted when this E-Book & DVD are released, simply sign up below for my monthly newsletter "Timely Insight".

Thanks for reading.

- Marc Speed

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Is Financial Freedom God's Plan? Copyright 2010 Marc Speed

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