Inequality & The Prosperity Gospel: Debunking the Prosperity Gospel

The prosperity gospel promises financial rewards for faith and giving, but this distorts Jesus's true message. It misinterprets scriptures like Jeremiah 29:11, Proverbs 3:9-10, and Malachi 3:10, which aren't promises of personal wealth. Biblical prosperity isn't about accumulation but shared abundance—the concept of 'shalom' meaning wholeness, peace, and justice for all. This false teaching harms believers by shaming the sick and blaming the poor, contradicting Jesus's example. True prosperity is found in wisdom, grace, relationships, and hope in Jesus, not material wealth.

Transcript

Friends, we're going to start a new sermon series today called Inequality in the Prosperity Gospel. If you have your Bibles with you today, I invite you to open up to the Book of Galatians, chapter 1, verses 6 through 24. If you don't have your Bibles, that's okay, you can follow along on the screen. But again, I highly encourage you bring your Bibles when you can. It helps to be able to highlight, go back and remember things and underline, ask questions, google things later on.

It helps if you have a record of that. So let's read together in the book of Galatians starting in chapter one, verse six. Here's what the word of God is for us today. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the Gospel of Christ.

But even if we, or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one that we preach to you, let them be under God's curse, as we have already said. So Now I say again, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God's curse. Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings or of God, or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin.

I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you have heard my previous way of life in Judaism, how I intensely, or how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing it in Judaism beyond many of my own age, among my people, and was extremely zealous for the traditions of of my fathers. But when God, who set me apart from my mother's mother's womb and called me by my grace or by his grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being.

I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus. Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him 15 days. I saw none of the other apostles, only James, the Lord's brother. I assure you, before God, that what I am writing to you is no lie.

Then I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report. The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy. And they praised God because of me.

So, friends, this morning, if I was to hand you a $100 bill now, you might have found these in your seats. These are not real. Don't try to spend these. If I was to give you a $100 bill and I said today, if you give that hundred dollar bill to the church, Jesus is going to bless you tenfold. Hallelujah.

What would your response be? Would you give that $100 bill if you were expecting to receive 10 times that in return? Hallelujah. Yes.

Wouldn't that be nice? Right? If that was just the way it worked. And it kind of sounds spiritual, right? We've all, I think, kind of heard in our past pieces of this gospel that says, if you bless the Lord, the Lord will just pour out rivers of blessing upon you.

It sounds spiritual. It even might sound a little faithful. It sounds like something we've all heard before from other churches or televangelists or from a Sunday school teacher that we had when we were growing up. But friends, this particular way of giving in order to receive, that is not the gospel. Today we're beginning a series called Inequality in the Prosperity Gospel.

And I fully believe that we live in a world that's kind of saturated with counterfeit messages. These messages are about money and success and blessing. And none of that comes from the mouth of Jesus. And perhaps nowhere is that more obvious than in the American church today through what we know is called the Prosperity gospel. So there's this kind of a lie that's taken root in churches across America.

And it's dressed up in religious clothing of scripture. It sounds like it could be found in the Bible. And this awful theology says things like, if you just have enough faith, God will make you rich. If you give to God, but especially to my ministry, Hallelujah. Or to my church or my television station, God will give back to you even more.

We've heard it, right? And it almost sounds just like that tone. I don't know why I turn into a televangelist when I say those things. Thank you. Maybe I missed my calling.

I'm just kidding. That's awful. Yeah. I need big eyelashes and to cry a lot. The problem is the result of that false gospel is that God becomes some sort of Like a spiritual vending machine for us.

You put money in and you get a bigger return out. You press a button, and out pops a blessing. And I will say that despite my cynicism of some parts of the church, in the church's past, the church's history, I do believe that this gospel that we call it today, this prosperity gospel, I believe that it began with good intentions. I think that our church fathers saw the needs of so many people throughout the world, and they wanted to make a difference. These pastors and evangelists saw the benefit of what it looked like to raise money for the poor and for the needy, that they sought to encourage faithful believers to give to the church generously so that their ministries can go out and change the world.

I think it came from a good place. I really do believe that. But sometimes even right motives can eventually get twisted. In the early 20th century, American Revival swept the nation with power and with promise. Movements like Pentecostalism emphasized healing, hope, and the nearness of God.

There was this focus on making sure that people that wanted to know about Jesus could know about Jesus and his eventual return. And many of these faithful people thought that Jesus return was imminent, like it was happening right now. And their desire to tell the world of Jesus proved a need to travel all around the world preaching repentance and that the end was near. These fiery preachers needed resources so they could purchase their plane tickets, their bus passes. They needed money to rent out stadiums and civic centers to preach the gospel to everybody that they knew needed Jesus.

These evangelists also recognized the need for television equipment and staff to publicize what they were doing in town to get the word out about salvation that comes through Jesus. And while the desire might have been holy and founded in good intentions, eventually these preachers lost the plot. And quietly, in the background of ministries, a new idea began to take root. That faith wasn't just for the soul. Faith could unlock wealth and health and manifest success in your life.

And we've heard of popular preachers and televangelists like Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin, who kind of initiated this movement called the Word of Faith Movement. And they believe and they taught that just by saying the right words and giving the right amounts of money, you could essentially activate God's blessing for your lives. And from the mid-1900s, faith became transactional. You give something to get something. Prayer and tithing became tools for personal gain.

It was no longer about a relationship with Jesus. It was about securing salvation and becoming financially blessed. By the 1980s, televangelists with their shiny suits and bolder promises of millions through their multimedia companies and their television stations, that if people would just sow these seeds, God would multiply them with blessing.

What was being preached was no longer a gospel of grace. It was something different. This movement in American evangelism became a spiritualized version of the American dream. If you invest enough, if you work hard enough, God will reward you with financial blessings.

Though it wore the mask of hope, the prosperity gospel preached a false God, a God who rewarded the rich and shamed the suffering. And for some reason, that prosperity gospel has spread like wildfire. It didn't just stop here on the borders of America. The false gospel of prosperity spread across the globe. Church Our God is not a vending machine.

The grace of Jesus has never been for sale. And blessing can't be bought, no matter how much we give.

While God may not trade 10% of what we have for great riches and blessing, God does have plans to use our resources to better the world. We've all heard of tithing, right? We know that word. We first learned about tithing in the Old Testament. And just in case anybody may not be familiar with the word tithe, Tithing literally means 10% or a tenth of one's income.

Giving a tithe is a biblical principle of giving back 10% of what we've earned to the church in order to sustain corporate worship and to help with the physical needs of others. Scriptures like Leviticus 27:30 put some rules and requirements around tithing. So let's read together some of the book of Leviticus. One of my favorite books, Leviticus 27:30, 33 says this. A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord.

It is holy to the Lord. Whoever would redeem any of their tithe must add a fifth of the value to it. Every shepherd's rod will be sorry. Every tithe of the herd and flock, every tense animal that passes under the shepherd's rod will be holy to the Lord. No one may pick out good from the bad or make any substitution.

If anyone does make a substitution, both the animal and its substitute become holy and cannot be redeemed. In this scripture, God is kind of putting some stipulations on how people give in order that giving be done with pure intentions. So there shouldn't be substitutions of lesser valued animals or lesser value crops, because that leads to greed. Doing things like this means that your heart wants to keep the best of what you have for yourself and not offer it to God. Ancient tradition in this particular area of the world and ancient faith requires the best parts of what we have be used to benefit others.

This kind of giving keeps away greed and envy. And later on in the New Testament, we see that Jesus was being asked to make a judgment call about an inheritance between two brothers. Instead of just giving, you know, his opinion and encouraging an older brother who gets a larger portion of the inheritance to really split that up and do it better by his younger brother, he turns it into a teaching moment for people who are in earshot. We can find this story in the book of Luke, chapter 12, verses 13 through 21. It says, Someone in the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.

Jesus replied, man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Then he said to them, watch out. Be on your guard against all kinds of greed. Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions. And he told them this parable.

The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, what shall I do? I have no place to store all these incredible crops. Then he said, this is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain.

And I'll say to myself, you have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy. Eat, drink and be merry. But God said to him, you fool, this very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?

This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.

In this parable, Jesus warns us that accumulating wealth without cultivating a relationship with God is foolishness. The rich man's fatal error wasn't that he had a bunch of stuff. It was his assumption that those things provided security. But it is God who gives life. Jesus kind of reframes this question from how much do I have to who am I becoming?

This parable is a powerful reminder. It's an accountable sorry. It's a counterpoint to prosperity theology. It reminds us that true richness is found in being rich toward God, not in building bigger barns. There's another important teaching about contentment, and it comes to us from Paul's writings in the book of First Timothy, Chapter 6, verses the second, second part of 2 through 19 says this.

These are the things you are to teach and insist on. If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, they are conceited. And understand nothing. They have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions, and constant friction between people of corrupt mind who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain. But godliness with contentment is great gain.

For we brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

But you, man of God, flee from all this and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses, in the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Jesus Christ, who, while testifying before Pontius Pilate, made the good confession. I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time. God, the blessed and only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen, to him be the honor and might forever Amen.

Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant, nor put their hope in wealth, which is uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.

He says, for the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierce themselves with many griefs.

Money is not evil, friends. It's the love of money, the worship of money, that becomes a kind of idolatry for many people. So now we see and understand a little bit better Jesus understanding of wealth and the use of money. And we've also seen Paul's perspective on wealth. Let's consider some very recognizable verses in Scripture that I think are sometimes misquoted or misunderstood by prosperity preachers in order to get a little grease in the palm right the first scripture I want to share with you.

I bet you'll recognize it comes from the book of Jeremiah. It's from Jeremiah 29:11. It says, For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future. We've heard that.

Yeah.

The problem is Jeremiah is speaking to a group of people in exile, not to an individual person who's hoping to get a new Lexus. And even still, the word that Jeremiah uses here is inappropriately mistranslated into prosper. Right. The word there you will probably recognize. The original Hebrew word is shalom.

Everybody say shalom. You know what that means? Peace. That is not the same word that we get when we read the word prosperity.

We're going to talk about that a little bit more later, but here's a spoiler. Shalom doesn't mean wealth. It means a type of peace that's different from normal peace from war. We'll talk a little more about that through a proper interpretation of Jeremiah's passage. God is telling his people that God's thoughts are always of a peace that is bigger than us.

It's a promise of a hope, hopeful future where people will find themselves in God's peace. Not rich, not with tons of money and stored up grain. That's not what God is saying. Jeremiah was prophesying to a people in the midst of the Babylonian exile. The Israelite people would have thought that God in that moment was far away.

And God is saying again, I've got plans that in the future there will be a peace that you've never experienced in your whole life.

And they couldn't even understand a future with hope. A future they would be back home in their homeland, able to raise their own gardens and have a wall of protection and worship in their own temple. They would have not expected that that's what God is talking about. Not a fully funded stock portfolio. It could be dangerous when we rely on poor interpretations of scripture.

Right. One word makes a huge difference in how we see that scripture.

The next scripture I want to bring to your attention is Proverbs, chapter 3, verses 9 and 10. It says this. Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops. Then your barns will be filled to overflowing and your vats will brim over with new wine. Oh, man, that sounds good, doesn't it?

Yeah, this sounds really, really good. Everybody likes wine. New, not so much, but wine is great. The prosperity Gospel says here that if you give to the Lord. The Lord is going to make you prosperous.

You'll have so much stuff that your vats will be overflowing and your barns will be full. You know who has barns and vats? It's not poor people.

This is not saying that God will change your situation if you give to the Lord. This is God saying something very different. Often prosper. Preachers use scriptures like this to convince people to give of their wealth, to give even in their poorness, to just give. Because God will bless you in a way that you've never experienced.

But that's a perversion of what's happening here.

People that have barns and vats are not the people who are just barely scraping by. Vats are used to store things like olive oil and wine. And to own vats for such storage implies you've got a lot of grapevines, you own vineyards, you have a lot of olive trees. This is implying that you have to be faithful in your wealth. Wealthy people give to God.

God will make sure that things are done right. The promise of Barnes filled and vats brimming is poetic imagery of how God provides. It's not a guarantee of luxury. It reflects the general principle that generosity and trust in God leads to flourishing, but not always in material ways. These passages, along with many other scriptures like it, are actually directed to those who already have wealth.

Barns and vats equal abundance. The call is to honor God with what you already have, not to give in order to get more. Don't give in order to have barns and vats. It's a challenge to the wealthy to be generous with their dollars, not a promise to the poor that when they give, they in turn will become rich. Another misused scripture is found in the book of Malachi.

Malachi, chapter three, 10. It says, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.

This prophecy from Malachi was a rebuke against injustice and neglect of the poor. This is not a promise of God flinging open the floodgates of wealth for you when you give. This is not a promise of cash back for tithing. Do you know what happened to tithes in ancient Israel?

They didn't just go to pay pastors, you know, so they could purchase their $34 million jets, or so they could buy the largest home in all of Louisiana at 40,000 square feet or to purchase $3,000 pairs of Nikes ties that came into the storehouse in Israel were used to support the priests from the tribe of Levi. Part of their Levitical requirement was that they became the priests over all the ancient Israelite worship, either in the temple in Jerusalem or in synagogues throughout the region. Where there were Jews, there needed to be people in to support worship together. The tribe of Levi was that tribe that was responsible for worship. So that means the members of this tribe could not own land.

And therefore they lived either inside the temple complex in Jerusalem or they lived in designated Levite cities around Jerusalem. So the tithes that came into the storehouse of the Lord were used to support these priests that couldn't earn a living for themselves. They had to spend their time in the temple leading worship. And these dollars were also used to bless the poor, the widows and the orphans, those who didn't have enough. The storehouse was a literal place in the temple where grain offerings were kept to support those who didn't have enough.

And Malachi's invitation here to test God. It's not a license to manipulate God into blessing individuals by giving more, but it's instead a call to trust in God's provision in the face of of what for some feels like scarcity.

When God's people trust enough in God to give what they have been asked to give, God then has the ability to use people's tithes to change lives drastically. Here in Malachi, what God is saying is that you don't give to get blessing. Malachi is talking about how the resources given will be so blessed by God that there will be an abundance to give to those in need.

The blessings promised in these scriptures are communal and covenantal. They're not individual and about wealth accumulation.

When you take scriptures out of context, you get this murky view of what God is trying to do. When we paint a clear contextual picture about restoring justice and provision in the temple, we see what God is getting at.

The Old Testament passages speak of honoring God with resources, but none of our scriptures that we've talked about today promise luxury to us as givers. Instead, these scriptures always present for us a principle of trust and of worship, not transaction. Malachi, when he gave this prophecy, the people of the land were withholding tithes and God was calling them back into faithful stewardship, not enticing them with riches.

And you know, as a youth pastor for 17 years, and now in my ninth year as a United Methodist pastor, I have heard story after story about people who practiced giving their resources. And it never usually worked out the way that they had always been told it was going to work out. I've heard stories of teenagers who would tithe from their babysitting money or from their dog work walking money or from, you know, selling their old comic book stash. These young people worked very hard to give something to God. They trusted God enough to give a tenth of what they earned to the church.

And then something dramatic happens. Maybe a parent has lost their job or their dog needed emergency surgery and they begin to regret giving to the church to begin with. It didn't work out like I was told. What do I do when I don't get the promises that the pastors I've heard preach about? And this can cause really big problems in faith.

And sometimes people take it as it's their own fault, why they've not received those blessings. Maybe I didn't believe enough. Maybe I gave with a stingy heart and God was showing me I needed to do better. Maybe if I just would have given more or if I would have given sooner, God would bless me. Maybe if I'd been a little more faithful, God would have kept my dog from getting sick or my parent from losing their job.

This is the damage of a transactional gospel. And I promise you that God wants the best for us.

God's love is bigger than dollars. God's love is there. In the midst of heartache and hardship. God doesn't want us to suffer. That's not the God that we believe in.

But that same God does want us to be generous with what we have so that lives can change, not so that we gain more personally, not so that we become wealthy. So because of all the things we've talked about this morning, we have to ask, if money isn't the measure of God's blessing, then what is?

To answer this question, we have to look to Jesus, who offers us a different kind of prosperity, a deeper, truer wealth. Have you ever heard the phrase, we are blessed to be a blessing?

When we are blessed enough to be able to give a tithe to God? God uses our tithes and our offerings so that the church and we, through the church, bless others. We are literally blessed so that we can become a blessing to our community and to our world. Biblical prosperity is not about personal accumulation. It's about shared abundance.

Scripture does talk about prosperity, but not in the transactional, materialistic sense. Instead, the prosperity that we have in Jesus is relational. It's redemptive, and it's rooted in the very presence of God, not in individual possessions.

So when scripture talks about God's blessing through giving, as I mentioned earlier, it's using the word shalom, Right? This word is not meant to be about a financial blessing, but instead refers to wholeness, peace, justice for everyone, a sense of communal rightness. Shalom is the soil, not the spoils. It's the place where we plant our seeds of scriptural obedience so that they can grow and mature. In Scripture, shalom means harmony and flourishing in every dimension of life.

Physical, spiritual, relational, communal. Biblical prosperity isn't about accumulating wealth. It's about living in alignment with God's design. Where justice reigns, where needs are met, where relationships are restored. When God blesses us with shalom, he's not promising gold watches.

God is, in that moment, cultivating a life where everything is in its proper place and everyone has what they need to thrive spiritually and physically. Prosperity is a byproduct of God's shalom. It's not the goal of shalom. And the early church had a vision and understanding for this idea of what God's shalom looked like. Right?

We've read it a number of times over the last few weeks since Pentecost. It comes to us from the book of Acts, chapter 2, verses 44 through 45 says this. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Jesus even said in scripture that we read earlier In Luke chapter 12, he says, watch out, be on your guard against all kinds of greed.

Life does not consist in abundance, possessions.

A truer understanding of wealth is not about what we keep. It's about what we cultivate in others through what we've been blessed with in Jesus. Prosperity is not about getting more stuff. It's about becoming more whole. It's peace in the storm, joy.

And the trial enriches the riches of grace that no thief can steal. Our founder, John Wesley, once said, gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can. He didn't mean that we do that so we can hoard money and possessions. He meant that we should do all these things so that we have the ability to bless others. Our Methodist mission is to make disciples who transform the world, not to buy a nicer version of the world that we live in.

But what happens when we ignore the gospel understandings and instead follow this false gospel of prosperity? What happens when churches preach wealth as blessing and poverty as failure? The answer is easy. The gospel then stops healing people and begins to be a weapon used to wound.

I want to be clear when I say this prosperity gospel doesn't just mislead people. It actually hurts people. It shames the sick. It blames the poor. It tells people, if you just had more faith.

But as a reminder, the Jesus that we follow never even had a place where he could lay his own head.

A gospel that shames the suffering is no gospel at all. Even this morning, we've talked about what it looks like to live in a world where there's homelessness. We have homeless people everywhere in Tulsa and other cities around the world.

Our Methodist social principles say that we affirm the inherent worth of all persons.

This means that we don't judge them based on their bank account, their lack thereof. But we are called to work to dismantle the systems that deny people their dignity. And I want to remind you that not all homeless people are there because of a situation. Some of them are there by choice. Some of them live in poverty and homelessness because that's the way they like their lives.

Our friend Bruce, who we see up and down Brookside, will never have it any other way. He doesn't want to be housed. He likes his life the way it is. But there are others that don't. And there are systems that oftentimes keep those people in poverty.

And our job as believers in Jesus is to break down the walls of injustice so that others have enough.

So over the next couple of weeks, we're going to look at what it means to participate in God's economy of enough and the systems and situations that create inequality and keep people from experiencing true shalom and justice. So this morning before we leave, I want you to ask yourself, what are the things that make me rich? Is it the shalom of the Bible? Is it this peace that Jesus talks about? Is it wisdom?

Is it the grace of God that makes me feel wealthy? Is it my relationships? Is it the hope that I have in Jesus?

And finally, I want to ask you this.

How will you invest in someone else's richness this week?

So, friends, if you don't have one of these in your seat, you probably have one close by enough where you can grab one. But these are a super sweet Jesus bill that I had Chat GPT create for me this week. And I like their version of Buddy Christ. I think that's pretty neat. But you can see here that it's got our community Brookside logo on it and it has the scripture, Matthew 6:21, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

So, friends, I invite you to take this home with you, make it a bookmark for the book you're reading, put it somewhere where you can see it occasionally and be reminded that it's not in the things of this world that we find ourselves to be wealthy friends. We have a gospel and an economy of God that tells us prosperity isn't what matters. It's our relationship with God that matters. And things come of that. The way we treat others, the way we invest in others.

My prayer today is that each of you will leave today richer in spirit than you came in. May you spend every ounce of grace you received in this service on others. And in the name of the one who is poor in possessions but rich in mercy.

Amen. Let's pray together.