Does God Want You to Be Rich

I usually don’t borrow material for my blog from other people (I save that for sermons), but I just have to share from Mike Cope’s Septermber 21 blog comments. His comments are based on the cover story in Time entitled, “Does God Want You to Be Rich?” The article is an extremely fair and balanced discussion of the health and wealth movement in American Christianity that sees prosperity ("health and wealth") as a goal and motivation of the Christian faith. Mike begins his article like this--

The basic movement of the gospel is clear (Phil. 2:5ff): self-denial and self-sacrifice rather than self-fulfillment. We follow one who had no place to lay his head, who warned us that life does not consist in the abundance of things, who told a wealthy man to sell all and give to the poor, who insisted that we cannot have two masters (God and $$). Followers of Christ in other cultures have often lost all as a result of their faithfulness to him.

But walk into Christian bookstores and there is a different gospel. The gospel of Joel Osteen.

And does it sell! Your Best Life Now has sold over 4 million copies. It finds a welcome audience in the consumerism of America. The authors of the article write:

“What remains is a materialism framed in a kind of Tony Robbins positivism. No one exemplifies this better than Osteen, who ran his father’s television-production department until John died in 1999. ‘Joel has learned from his dad, but he has toned it back and tapped into basic, everday folks’ ways of talking,’ says Ben Phillips, a theology professor at the Soutwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. That language is reflected in Your Best Life Now, an extraordinarily accessible exhortation to this-world empowerment through God. ‘To live your best life now,’ it opens, to see ‘your business taking off. See your marriage restored. See your family prospering. See your dreams come to pass . . .’ you must ’start looking through the eyes of faith.’ Jesus is front and center but not his Crucifixion, Resurrection or Atonement.”

You really need to read Mike’s blog and the article in Time. The question "Does God Want You to Be Rich" is a loaded question, but an important one. What does God want for us and our money?