Are Health And Wealth Essential To Happiness?

Are health and wealth essential to happiness?

If anyone teaches a different doctrine . . . he is puffed up with conceit . . . imagining that godliness is a means of gain. . . . But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. 1 Timothy 6:3-5, 9-10

He that serves God for money will serve the devil for better wages. SIR ROBERT L’ESTRANGE

PROSPERITY THEOLOGY teaches that God will bless with material abundance and good health those who obey him and lay claim to his promises. “We don’t have to wait for God’s blessing in the life to come,” it promises. “He’ll send it to us here and now.”

I don’t want to be uncharitable, but I will be blunt: I believe prosperity theology, with its practice of twisting some Scriptures while ignoring others, is straight from the pit of Hell. Centered on telling people they deserve whatever they want, this worldview treats God as a genie or a cosmic slot machine: insert a positive confession, pull the lever, catch the winnings.

God’s blessing on financial giving is turned into a money-back guarantee of a hundredfold return that will look like whatever we want or claim. Prayer degenerates into coercion by which adherents “name it and claim it,” pulling God’s leash until he increases their comforts.

It isn’t unspiritual to desire health over sickness, wealth over poverty, and success over failure. But if the source of our happiness isn’t God, then health, wealth, and success become our false gods. God becomes a mere means to an end.

“Faith” becomes a crowbar to break down the door of God’s reluctance rather than a humble attempt to lay hold of his willingness. Sadly, claiming that God must take away an illness or a financial hardship often means calling on him to remove the very things he’s permitted and designed to make us more like Christ.

When hard times come, people should lose their faith in false doctrine, not in God. In contrast to jewelry-draped televangelists, Paul said, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22, NIV).

When righteous Job lost everything, even his children, he worshiped God, saying, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” We’re told, “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing” (Job 1:21-22, NIV).

In contrast, when advocates of the prosperity gospel lose their health and wealth, they lose their happiness, demonstrating that the true object of their faith wasn’t God.

Our prayers are to be earnest, unapologetic requests for what we desire, uttered in willing submission to whatever God wants. True faith doesn’t insist that we say, “I’ll conquer this cancer.” Rather, we can affirm, “I know God can heal me, and I’ll ask him to do so. But I trust him. I pray he’ll accomplish his best whether through sickness and death or through healing and ongoing life.”

Some will write off this kind of prayer as lacking in faith since it acknowledges the possibility of death. But aside from the return of Christ in our lifetimes, which is possible but far from certain, we’ll all die. Every single one of us. (Seriously, do you know any 120-year-old faith healers?)

What we need is not faith in faith, but faith in God, the true God of the Bible, who will keep his promise of resurrection and eternal life.

As Easter worked in reverse to make Good Friday good, so our resurrection will work in reverse to bring goodness out of our most difficult days. Faith is a sort of forward memory in which we trust God’s promise of eternal happiness and experience a foretaste of that happiness in severe difficulty.

There’s an important difference between the health-and-wealth mentality and happiness. The primary source of our happiness isn’t our circumstances but our God, who promised he’d be with us always and who commands us to rejoice in him.

By focusing only on resurrection triumph and ignoring God’s call and empowerment to take up our crosses and suffer hardship, we’re robbed of a biblically grounded and reality-based trust in God, who guarantees that all sorrows will end and that although we have present sorrows, our Savior simultaneously promises us both eternal and present joy.

A life focused on God allows us to rejoice in whatever health and wealth he entrusts to us as stewards but reminds us that he doesn’t promise these as permanent conditions in the present world. We’re called to give away God’s money to help the needy and to fulfill the great commission (see Matthew 6:19-21; see also 1 Timothy 6:6-10, 17-19).

Some Christians are also called upon to sacrifice their health through long hours of labor or by enduring persecution. We should be willing to lay everything on the line for Jesus because our life focus is on God, not self, health, or wealth—and not happiness either, in any form other than happiness in God, which is his command and calling. It’s not that material things are inherently bad; they just can’t keep their promise of happiness. Only God can.

If our happiness is grounded in God, we won’t lose the basis for it, because nothing will separate us from the love of Christ (see Romans 8:37-39).

An Iranian Christ-follower spoke at our church. His dear friend in prison, who’d been separated from his family for three years, writes, “They say I’m the happiest man in this prison, and I believe they’re right.”

The gladness of God’s children isn’t the pasted-on, fake-it-till-you-make-it “joy” of the health-and-wealth gospel, but the deep and resonant happiness of someone who knows that the God with the nail-scarred hands loves him and is truly with him even in prison.

Lord, please forgive us for treating you like a vending machine or a genie, thinking we can get whatever we want whenever we want it without regard to your glory and sovereign plan. Teach us that we’ll never be truly, deeply, and lastingly happy until we recognize that you give us everything we need because you are everything we need . . . and nothing will ever separate us from your love.