The prosperity gospel has become a lightning rod in many evangelical circles in the last ten years. Biblical teaching on this heretical distortion of the gospel reveals its true nature: it’s a way to use God to worship ourselves and achieve our own aims.
Religion columnist Cathleen Falsani said the prosperity gospel, “an insipid heresy whose popularity among American Christians has boomed in recent years, teaches that God blesses those God favors most with material wealth.” She goes on to say, “The gospel of prosperity turns Christianity into a vapid bless-me club, with a doctrine that amounts to little more than spiritual magical thinking: If you pray the right way, God will make you rich.”
But truth be told, deep down, we all love something about the prosperity gospel, don’t we? Our broken and autonomous hearts war against God’s Spirit within, in futile attempts to be lord of our own lives. When we look past our stated beliefs to the heart, most Christians must admit that we struggle to surrender our deepest desires to Christ—especially regarding sexuality. In many ways, we want God to help us make life work on our terms.
The Prosperity Gospel of Sexuality
The prosperity gospel of sex goes something like this: If I obey God, he will give me the things I desire sexually. This could mean an attractive and available spouse. It could mean fulfilling, passionate sex in marriage, or the removal of unwanted desires or shame from our past. Some of these are good things! However, most Christians have bought into the lie that we can earn our version of “sexual prosperity” by obedience.
This reveals the deeper question: Is Christ our prize?
In Luke 14:25–33, Jesus tells us about the cost of discipleship. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” Jesus provides utter clarity on the terms of discipleship. But he does not harshly coerce or entrap his disciples into his sheepfold. Rather, he invites them into an honest discourse about their desires, suffering, and the ultimate cost of being a disciple of Jesus.
Counting the Cost
Jesus goes on to say, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’” (Luke 14:28–30, my emphasis).
If you regularly bypass the conviction of God’s Spirit to engage in unholy relationships, behaviors, or thought patterns, have you considered stopping to count the cost of your surrender to Christ? Can you honestly remember a time when you considered life in Christ, the glories of God, and the gift of salvation against your competing desires?
Is allowing your sexual desires to rule your life working for you? As Psalm 16 says, “the sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply.” Brother or sister, do you know the pain of having run after another god? Perhaps the god of a toxic and co-dependent friendship, an out-of-bounds sexual relationship, or the self-worship inherent in pornography and masturbation? We can’t build our life on the foundation of our own desires, with ourselves as the lord, and truly live.
Deliberating with the King
Jesus turns us to another example in verse 31: “Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace” (my emphasis). Brother or sister, hear the wise counsel of Jesus. Are you willing to sit down and deliberate with God regarding your deepest desires?
The very same God invites, “Come now let us reason together, says the Lord; though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isa. 1:18). Will you reason with God regarding your desires that compete with allegiance to him? He invites you to do so! Our God knows our hearts. He sees how we’ve been broken, abused, or disappointed. He sees the cost many Christians will face for following Jesus in their sexuality. Our generous Lord will not ask of us something which he will not abundantly comfort in the riches of his kindness for all eternity (Eph 2:7).
Jesus, Our True Prize
The prosperity gospel gets something right. We do receive riches and benefits when we come to Christ. But the benefit and riches are found in Christ himself, as he offers himself to us as a faithful provider and the one who knows our deepest longings. In Christ, we will benefit from his love for all eternity.
However, in this earthly life, we will struggle to believe that our suffering has purpose or that God’s ways are truly better. God invites you today to honestly grapple with him, to bring your warring desires to him in surrender (even the good ones), knowing his ways lead to life and flourishing—even as we suffer and long for many things. As Helen Roseveare, who suffered deeply in her surrender and service to Jesus as a missionary, said at the Urbana Missions Conference in 1976,
“One word became unbelievably clear, and that word was privilege. He didn’t take away pain or cruelty or humiliation. No! It was all there, but now it was altogether different. It was with him, for him, in him. He was actually offering me the inestimable privilege of sharing in some little way the edge of the fellowship of his suffering. . . One has tried to ‘count the cost,’ but I find it all swallowed up in privilege. The cost suddenly seems very small and transient in the greatness and permanence of the privilege.”
A question often asked here at Harvest USA is a common one. “Why do people, Christians even, go back to a gay life after they have come for help?” It’s a legitimate question. For Christians who believe the Word, the Scriptures, and believe that faith in Christ makes one a “new creation,” the issue may seem confusing, but the answer must be honest and biblically grounded. Here is the second reason that could explain what might be happening here, as we have seen some common denominators over the years in our ministry.
The cost of obeying Christ seems too high a price to pay
For many people, the call to obey Christ and live within the boundaries of God-designed sexuality is just too difficult, and its benefits too intangible and not immediate enough. Unfortunately, this is the kind of society in which we now live. If anything seems too difficult or doesn’t produce immediate results, then it’s not worth the time and effort. The downside of life in a technologically-based society is the false, utopian ideal that everything should work or should be fixable—now! Growth that can only take place over time, and the very idea of struggle itself, is dismissed as unnatural.
I remember something Gail Barker, our first secretary at Harvest USA, said to me one day. Gail was telling me that while she was growing up in the 1940’s, life was difficult, and everyone just accepted the idea of struggle as a part of life. She went on to say that was why people enjoyed times of respite from struggle. There was an awareness that life was not easy, and therefore one came to appreciate, as a blessing, the times when life was not so hard. But those moments were brief, which made them so much more valuable. It is especially important for for those who desire to come out of homosexuality to realize this intertwining of struggle and respite.
God calls us all to obedience to his will, to what he knows is best for his creation, and that entails turning away from those things which seem to offer life but, in reality, lead to the death of the soul. Those who have embraced homosexuality have opened a Pandora’s Box and have found false comfort and counterfeit life in a mistaken attempt to make sense of a broken and fallen world. This is true for anything that anyone embraces outside of God’s design, not just for this issue. Sometimes, then, God’s call to all of us to live a life of holiness (that is, a life live according to God’s call, separated from the innumerable ways in which the world encourages us to live) seems not worth the price to pay. Like I mentioned in point number one, that price is nothing less than a death—the death that comes from leaving behind those things which once gripped your heart and felt good and affirming.
There is suffering involved in self-denial. The book of Hebrews reminds us that to walk in self-denial, in order to live fully engaged in a life with God, is costly. In Hebrews 11:24-26 we read that, “Moses . . . refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward” (ESV). To deny oneself immediate pleasure and gratification is only possible when you look ahead to a greater future, one that is only realized by immersing oneself in God and in the people of God.
Of course, to speak of a road of self-denial and suffering is an unattractive option to most people. Yet it will be the path, at least most strongly in the beginning, for the journey out of a homosexual life. That is understandable, as many who come to Harvest USA say that they can’t imagine a future life without sexual involvement with a person of the same sex.
But there is an answer here. Unless that person comes to see Jesus as the one who takes center stage in their heart, displacing all others and the idols of the heart which draw us away from following him, then there will be an overwhelming and unending ache over what has been left behind and what is being denied. Seeking to end that ache makes going back into sin that much easier and more attractive. Jesus has to been seen as more attractive, worth much more than the denial of the flesh. Self-denial is not displaced by nothing; it is replaced slowly, over time, by a growing relationship with Jesus, and it is in that relationship that the grace and power to live a whole new life comes. It is a life that has its own joys and pleasures, made all the richer in the knowledge that such a life pleases the One who redeemed you by his death for you. We have learned at Harvest USA that unless people grasp that there is a greater reward that comes with obedience, then they don’t make it.
Link to: Part 1., Part 3., Part 4., Part 5., Part 6.
