2015: The year of exposing counterfeit faith Prosperity gospel is a doctrine that financial blessing is the will of God for Christians, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries will increase one’s material wealth
Prosperity gospel is a doctrine that financial blessing is the will of God for Christians, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries will increase one’s material wealth

Prosperity gospel is a doctrine that financial blessing is the will of God for Christians, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries will increase one’s material wealth

Reason Wafawarova On Thursday

Essentially prosperity gospel offers us an easily manipulated God. It places God on our side, not us on his side, and it eliminates His sanctity and His sovereignty. It gives us this vain God who can easily be manipulated through offerings and eloquent “words of faith.”

I hope you are poised for a promising 2015 dear reader, and I hope too that your Christmas was a good one.

I had prepared a scorcher of a piece on leadership and the succession politics in ZANU-PF for this week, but I have had to shelve it after a colleague urged me to start the year with a topic on something more important than our politics, the Christian faith.

If I was not part of Christianity already, I seriously would not want in, if the one to evangelise to me was to be one of the preachers from the prosperity gospel churches.

I am convinced that luring people to Christ in order to get rich is unethical, sinful, deceitful, deadly, and most certainly unholy and unacceptable to God. In describing our qualification for discipleship Jesus said those who do not give up everything they have “cannot be my disciples.” (Luke 14: 33). He did not say those who gather everything for themselves.

“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.” (1 Tim 6: 9). This was Jesus’ attitude towards greed for wealth.

It is hard to understand why prosperity gospel preachers choose to focus on developing a ministry that makes it harder for believers to go to heaven, and easier for them to go to hell. Equally hard to understand is why these church founders would want to develop ministries that encourage ruining of people’s lives.

Elementary understanding of the Christian faith is enough for someone to question the motive behind someone taking the focus off Jesus, and turning it towards riches and miracles.

The problem we have in churches across the world today is that an average believer or churchgoer is functionally illiterate: they can read but they don’t.

That also generally describes an average African, and that is why our politicians can get away with so much unaccountability.

Here are some quotes from some world-renowned prosperity gospel preachers. “Being poor is a sin”: Robert Tilton.

“If we please God we will be rich”: Jerry Savela.

“God wants his children to wear the best clothes, drive the best cars, and have the best of everything; just ask for what you need”: Kenneth Hagin.

Our local prophets do not have to be any complex. They just chant excitable declarations and our church crowds simply go into bouts of inexplicable hysteria. “I declare millions of dollars in your life! I declare to you a husband this very year! Let everyone at your work place be demoted, and let you only be elevated,” and all such vacuous declarations are quite common on a normal Sunday service in many of our prosperity gospel churches.

Paul tells the church to stay away from “men of corrupt minds who are destitute of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain.” (1 Tim 6 vs 5).

But why is prosperity gospel so attractive as to gather to a preacher hundreds of thousands of followers?

Essentially prosperity gospel offers us an easily manipulated god. It places God on our side, not us on his side, and it eliminates His sanctity and His sovereignty. It gives us this vain god who can easily be manipulated through offerings and eloquent “words of faith.”

Secondly, prosperity gospel derives its strength from greed and guilt. There is this cycle of greed and guilt, where the longer it takes for promises to come the more one feels guilty of lacking in faith, or of not being good enough a giver in church. The greed for material returns coupled with this guilt will create an addiction that leads to cultic fanaticism.

Thirdly, prosperity gospel thrives on the ability of the preacher to instil fear in his audience. It is important that all believers are smitten with religious fear so that they do not dare question the “anointed one,” or “the man of God.”

Fourth, stewardship does bring prosperity, and some people actually prosper, mainly because they follow good business principles taught in some of these churches, but their testimonies will be used as church propaganda to exalt the name of the church leader, so everything will be attributed to the “anointing of the man of God.”

Naturally the message of prosperity appeals to the flesh, and it capitalises on the natural desires for health and wealth. The message promises the desires of our sinful hearts, and no more do we find the call to repent from sin, no more do we find the call to deny oneself, no more do we find the call to pick up one’s cross, no more do we find the call to follow Jesus, and no more do we here of the call to die for Christ.

I today write to call on the person who has bought into the prosperity gospel to forsake his belief that appeals to the flesh in exchange for a belief that appeals to the soul and the spirit. For the soul and the spirit faith means a gift God has given for one to believe that His word is true, and that His Son is the Christ. (1 Cor 2: 14).

For the prosperity gospel adherent faith means a tool one uses to place God in our debts and troubles. Faith is simply the currency we use to get what we want from God. This is the dangerous basis of the gospel of materialism.

The word gospel for the soul and the spirit means the good news of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection (1 Cor 15 vs 1-4). For the prosperity gospel adherent the word gospel means the good news that God desires us to be healthy, wealthy and prosperous. Quite true, but simply not the definition of gospel by any stretch of imagination.

Last year, I penned an article condemning fanatical journalism where some newspapers reported as “miracles” mere microphone declarations like “Let your male organ grow, first month grow! Second month grow, third month grow,” as reportedly was said by one of our famous prophets after a Botswana man had complained of a worryingly small manhood. I took exception to The Sunday Mail carrying a headline story that a man’s manhood had been miraculously enlarged, when even the paper’s own narration of events was so far divorced from the message behind the headline declaration.

A journalist member of that church did a right of reply article, furiously telling all readers to disregard my opinion, because in his view my opinion was an attack on his “father,” the supposed miracle performer. Well, we have not heard anything about what happened to the declared three-month growth of the less gifted Botswana man’s manhood, and neither did the miracle worker fulfil his other dramatic promise of that night; that in the first three weeks of 2014 he would visit a mortuary and raise at least a dozen people from the dead, with media personnel in tow.

But we must talk of how best to remedy the situation in 2015. It is important that we realise that apart from the grace of God, we all would believe and fall for the false gospel. The gospel appeals to the flesh, and of course all of us were born dead in sin. There is very important need for us to speak humbly with those who believe in the prosperity gospel and the so-called prophetic miracles, otherwise they will dig in and defend their heretic faith even to death.

While we condemn the misleading of believers through the doctrine of prosperity gospel, we must of necessity affirm what is true about the same prosperity gospel.

No doubt about it, prosperity gospel as preached in the “churches of the prophetic” is a counterfeit gospel designed to fundraise for the wealth of the church founders. However, the thing about counterfeits is that they have to look enough like the real thing if ever they are to be believable. This is why we need to affirm what is true about prosperity gospel.

Prosperity gospel as preached in our prophetic churches today is based on the theistic worldview. It is a correct assertion that there are blessings from following Jesus Christ (Mark 10 vs 29-30). This is based on the firm belief that God hears and answers prayers, and it affirms the truth that God rewards faith. It is neither helpful nor accurate for anyone to pretend or to suggest that prosperity gospel is completely devoid of truth. What we need to confront are the lies and flaws so rampant in the prosperity gospel as preached in the modern day church.

The first blatant lie we need to confront is that the quantity of one’s faith determines what one receives from God. The Bible is very clear. It is the object of our faith, not the amount that matters. If we have great faith in idols, or in wealth, that will not save us; if we have even small faith in Jesus Christ, he will save us. (John 14 vs 1-14).

Prosperity gospel provides no help when suffering inevitably comes our way (John 16 vs 33). If we believe that our faith will exempt us from suffering, one day we will conclude that God lied to us, that he does not exist, or that we simply did not have enough faith, none of which is true.

We have read about this believer who is taking a “man of God” to the courts because he was made to believe that by “seeding” his $300 000 Bentley he would manipulate God into “multiplying the value a hundred fold.” No need for guesses that no hundred Bentleys popped up from thin air, and the believer is suing his own pastor for “deceptive investment.” He wants his car back from the pastor, who was the anointed recipient of the “seed”.

Ordinarily the rest of all sane Zimbabweans must dismiss this man with raucous laughter for his apparent dimwittedness, but like I said we must be humble in the way we handle victims of the prosperity gospel.

We must hold out the hope of the biblical gospel, for we do not deserve any good from God. God is just rich in mercies, and He justifies us through faith in Jesus.

The greatest news is that in Christ our sin is forgiven, and we have been adopted into the family of God.

With that knowledge we will stay clear of idolising material things, or getting unnecessarily discouraged when we do not receive material things in life.

Above all Christians must live generous lives, showing that our greatest joy is found in God, not in material gains. That way we will show that Christ is the greatest treasure, not Bentleys, and that we value him and his work more than anything else.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome.

REASON WAFAWAROVA is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.

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