Welcome. Today we’re going to be talking about the teachings and ideas about if a Christian should be well off financially and well loved by the world around them. Is this a natural state for a Christian to be in? Or does our faith make us natural objects of ridicule?

The answer is a bit complicated. There are those that will reject God, the Word, and you right to your face. There will be those that belittle you for being a ‘Bible-thumper’ or ‘Jesus freak’. The world in general is not geared towards the true faith. We will show how this is pointed out by even the Bible in just a moment.

God will bless you if you serve Him. He may even bless you financially, but He will never lay riches upon you to the point that it will cause you difficulty in keeping your faith. A Christian can be well off financially, but it is difficult to balance wealth management with the mindset God requires of us towards money.

First let’s cover what the truth concerning money.

Here’s some instructions: (Mat 6:19)  Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. (Mat 6:20)  But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.

Money is easily destroyed and not always so easily replaced. Coins get lost and paper tears and rips, but the treasures you lay up for yourself in Heaven with the Lord are not corruptible. Heaven is the only place that is perfectly and completely safe for your treasures.

Focusing on wealth on earth just leaves you open to being robbed or taken advantage of. Heaven is not a place that can be infiltrated, so no thief can reach your riches up there.

This is not to say that it’s not possible for a Christian to do well for themselves in the world, that’s totally possible, as long as you are worried about the treasures in Heaven more than the riches on earth.

Why? (Mat 6:21)  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. If your treasures are here, then your heart is here and not with God. If your treasures are in Heaven with the Lord then your heart is with God in Heaven. You are going to be concerned about what is most important to you.

If that is godly things, then your heart will reflect that. But if it is worldly things, then that will be reflected too. (Luk 12:16)  And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: (Luk 12:17)  And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? (Luk 12:18)  And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. (Luk 12:19)  And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. (Luk 12:20)  But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? (Luk 12:21)  So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

If you are not rich towards God in faith, and care only for your money, you may just find out that you wont get to spend a dime of it because the time of your passing has come, and all that which you have gathered and cared so much for is no longer yours, but someone else’s and not only that, you never got to enjoy your wealth or even put it to good use.

(1Ti 6:7)  For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. So it is foolish to stack your treasures here where you can lose it all, will lose it all when death comes making the rounds. If you are rich in God though, not only do you have the blessing of the Lord here in any number of forms in which the Lord might grant it, you also have the security of knowing that your ‘treasure’ so to speak will go with you when you die, your faith and love for God will continue with you. And the Lord will say ‘welcome my child, I’m so very glad to have you here with Me’.

(Mar 8:36)  For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Money does you no good after you’re dead. It doesn’t matter how rich you were if you end up losing your own soul over your greed. There is no bartering in the afterlife. There are no banks in either Heaven or Hell. Your material goods are about as meaningful as Shakespeare is to a gnat.

(Act 8:20)  But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. If God wanted money, He’d have all He desires. He doesn’t want money. Some of you might say I’m wrong, but God Himself, the being, doesn’t need or want money. God’s churches, here on earth, need money for their survival. They need to take care of the basics of operations, and then would like to have money to send to help missionaries and for other non-essential projects. But God Himself doesn’t need your money, nor is he impressed by how much you have.

Those that put money first are committing idolatry against God, and it really breaks God’s heart when those that love money first try to buy their way into His graces with their spiritually worthless slips of paper and hunks of metal.

(1Ti 6:9)  But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. Now we’re starting to get into why the prosperity gospel is so far off base. God does not want you to be led away from him for any reason.

(2Pe 3:9)  The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Because God wants for all of us to come to repentance, He surely would not send a great deal of financial prosperity to you and lead you ever closer to being rich enough to drown in destruction.

Many of the prosperity people might say that this only applies to people that are mega-rich and does not apply to those below that billionaire level. I would argue against this. It is wholly possible to come to this mindset that leads to perdition as 1st Timothy tells us without being extremely wealthy at all. I would offer that people in the upper middle class are probably just as ate up by these snares and lusts as the multimillionaires and billionaires are.

(1Ti 6:10)  For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. Both the billionaire and the middle classer can have a love for money, and this love is the root of evil. Money itself isn’t bad, it is just a thing, but those that seek more, that bow to the dollar, they are serving evil.

You see that those that covet after money err from the faith, and pierce themselves through with many sorrows. What this means is that those that go after the money get further and further away from the truth and the faith.

The prosperity gospel people oftentimes fall into this snare, finding themselves teaching doctrines that are not Biblically sound and falling into troublesome times. Now the trouble might not be as apparent, the sorrows are not always open, but sometimes they are.

This is where we see men getting prosecuted for fraud, tax evasion, embezzlement, not to mention going through bitter divorces, getting caught in sexual affairs, and being the subject of various ‘expose’ type news reports.

These things may well have came from the erring from the faith by the love of money. Then their money backfires on them. (Jas 5:3)  Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

This gospel of prosperity I keep mentioning is a teaching that states that basically a faithful Christian will be prosperous financially, sometimes to the point of having as much money as your faith will allow, with no limits. The teachers nearly all seem to own mansions and private jets, possessions in the millions in which they claim is because of their proper walk with God and their faith. All the teachers I have heard also mention having to plant a ‘seed’ of faith, which translates out to giving money to their ministries, of course.

Then you are encouraged to keep giving to keep getting, and if you don’t start making huge financial boons, you either need more faith, or your ‘seed’ donation isn’t big enough.

I’ve slogged through many hours both intentionally and unintentionally listening to these teachers and their false message. The message ends up putting what you can get from Jesus financially higher than anything else. There is little talk on salvation and eternal life, and for the need for Christians to do good works and spread the gospel, there is only talk on what one needs to do to get richer, and how the teacher or pastor is able to afford some 20 million dollar jet because their faith is so strong.

(Col 2:8)  Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. The gospel of prosperity is about money, not the Lord, with money being something of this world. This means they are focusing more on the world than they are on the Lord. This is where the train jumps the tracks.

The gift of eternal life is the true offering of God to every single one of us that will accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. God is not in the banking business, He’s in the ‘salvation’ business, the ‘life’ business.

This teaching though, the prosperity gospel, is well embraced by the world. When you look at popular, large scale preachers or teachers, you nearly always find that they teach one of two things, word-faith, or gospel of prosperity, both of which are hugely popular to the world, but are not based on anything Biblical.

The individual teachings will be covered deeper at a later time. I want to move here to the idea that being highly popular with the world is normal for true Christians.

We have these televangelists and others who supposedly represent Christianity running around giving advice and being sought after for their wisdom as they mix the earthy invention of psychology with Biblical references and the crowds eat it up, with not even the militant atheists complaining.

This is because the pop psychology part is overriding any form of godly message. The faith is not being held up as truth, and Jesus becomes an example, or an analogy for some idea or something. This is an abandonment of God and the Bible, but the teacher or minister doesn’t seem to mind as they are greeted warmly by people of all faiths and all walks of life, and generally thought well of.

Then they drive home in their high end cars, or fly off in their jets, humming happily to themselves maybe never thinking about how their message has strayed from the Bible.

The Bible itself tells us that people that love the world aren’t going to love us, not while they are in the world still. If they become saved, which is the ultimate goal, then they will love the word, but before they are still in the lusts of the flesh which is not godly.

(1Jn 2:15)  Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. This verse really drives it home for me. If you love the world, the love of the Father is not in you. That means if you love that jet, or that SUV, or that gold watch or that guest spot on television or the recognition fame brings, the love of the Father is not in you!

And like we’ve said just a minute ago, it’s awful hard to have those gold watches and diamond rings and not love them, not be spoiled by them and thereby ensnared.

We are actively told NOT to love the world, so how can we be popular with the world and be a big splash and yet not love it? How can we be the hit of our office at work where everyone just thinks the greatest of us and not be of the world?

When I was a kid working at a burger joint, I met a thirty year old guy with a wife and a handful of kids. He was working his tail off trying to make ends meet. But what made him different from everyone else is that he loved God enough to talk about God to his coworkers. I don’t remember what denomination he was, or if what he said was Biblically sound, but he did something far beyond what I did, he opened his mouth and witnessed and talked and shared God with everyone.

Do you know what everyone said to this guy? They laughed at him, they mocked him, they ignored him. He did not let it get to him, or if it did, he never let on, he just kept about doing what he was doing.

I was unkind to that man even though he was my elder by about fifteen or so years. I also picked on him a bit for it. But now I realize that he was right, he was the one that had it down. He was not of the world, he was of his faith, and that and his Lord mattered to him so that was what was on his lips. I hope by some miracle he’s actually listening now. If I saw him, I think I would apologize and let him know that now I see what he was doing, and I would encourage him to keep on trucking with it too.

(Tit 2:12)  Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; this is how we are to live, this is how that man I knew tried to live. We must deny the things of the world we would long to have, and instead focus our love and worship on the Lord.

(1Jn 2:16)  For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. Here’s another verse telling us that God is not of the worldly lusts, but is above such things.

But should we be worldly Christians? (Jas 4:4)  Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. That is pretty strong language there, and not much room is left for any kind of wiggling. In fact, there is no wiggle room, the verse is straight to the point with its message.

So what if you are not a friend of the world? (1Jn 3:13)  Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you. (Joh 15:18)  If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. (Joh 15:19)  If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. (Joh 15:20)  Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also. (Joh 15:21)  But all these things will they do unto you for my name’s sake, because they know not him that sent me.

So if the world is hating us because we’ve been called out by our Lord, right here in the Scriptures, then we clearly couldn’t be friends with the world, now could we?

Christ suffered to the point of death on the cross. He tells us here that the master is greater than the servant. If they hated and killed the master, they will hate and kill the servant. And they do these things because they do not know the love of the Father.

The world is not a friend of the true Christian. The world is what we are working to change, we are working to spread the gospel throughout the world, but the world itself hates us because it hated Jesus before us. The world persecuted Jesus, it will persecute us as well.

Many forget that the early church was filled with martyrs and that the blood of Christians flowed freely from the instruments of death and torture in the world.

There are places in this world like China and other nations where being a Christian is a serious issue. If you are Christian, you are facing danger of prison or worse. It is not some happy little label you use to fit in, it is serious business, which of course it should be.

But this business is the business of pain and persecution in those places. Would you still be Christian if you were stranded in China and knew being one could cost you your head? Would you still embrace the Lord if it meant embracing a prison cell? I pray that the Lord would brace me enough that I would. I pray that every Christian stand firm in their faith and not waver no matter the threat.

But you see, Christ preached the Bible as true as it could be, since He is the Word manifest in the flesh. Jesus was right on because His are the words that make up a good chunk of the Bible directly. And in doing so He ended up being imprisoned, beaten and crucified.

And He tells us that we are no greater than He, that we will not be given any more mercy than our Master was given.

I find that the prosperity people speak not of salvation, but instead speak of enrichment. This enrichment does not save one’s soul, but instead puts treasures where thieves can steal and moths can corrupt.

Let me appeal not to your pocketbook, but instead to your soul. I cannot take the Bible and promise you that you will be rich beyond your dreams. I cannot be like those handful of false teachers and brag that you can go from nothing to half a million a month budget just because you positively confessed for money.

I can take the Bible and show you where the gathering of riches tends to lead people away from God. I can show you that while being rich in the body may not come to you, richness in faith is widely available for you and you will have blessings far beyond anything to do with money.

I cannot help but find that these prosperity teachers repeat over and over and over again stories and messages about money. This brings me to think of (Ecc 5:10) He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.

I can tell you the Bible promises you the greatest gift of all: eternal life. What good is money really? It is not worth nearly what everyone thinks it is. It is nothing more than a tool, a necessary evil to run our society. But eternity, now that’s kind of a big deal. Having money for the twinkling instant that mortal life stacks up against eternity is nothing compared to a blessing and gift that lasts forevermore.

If you do not have eternal life through the Lord Jesus, I beg you to come to repentance now, since this might be the last chance you’ll ever have.

(Rom 3:23)  For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. We’ve all made mistakes, every last one of us. (Rom 3:10)  As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one.

Is there some kind of punishment for our wrongdoings? (Rom 6:23)  For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. We deserve death for our sins and mistakes, but God, He loves us so much more than that, so much that He offers eternal life through the Lord.

(Rom 5:8)  But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Even though we’ve messed up so bad, and we deserve death for our sins, God sends His love to us so that while we’re still in our rebellious and sinful state He still gives the life of His Son to pay for our crimes. He didn’t give Christ after we wanted to become cleansed, but instead before, when we were still in our worldly ways.

So what do you have to do to join Christ in eternal life? (Rom 10:13)  For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. (Rom 5:10)  For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

(Joh 3:16)  For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Receive the Lord as your personal Savior and accept the gift of eternal life, I beg you. Until next time, God bless.

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