God has a wonderful plan for your life.

Jesus offers you the Best Life.

God wants you to be happy.

The Prosperity Gospel.

“Who among you, if your child asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if you child asks for an egg, will give him a serpent? If then you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!”

All of these statements are true. The problem with those who think that God promises them cars, and houses, and clothing, and luxuries is that they believe that God promises too little. They have never tasted and seen that YHWH is good, and so they want little things, unimportant things. They want faded happinesses, broken toys, mud pies, cardboard houses, rocks and snakes.

To deny the above statements is to diminish the worthiness of Christ. It is to diminish the loveliness of Jesus. It is to diminish the joy of knowing Him. It is to deny that He is our life and our glory.

“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how shall He not, with Him, freely give us all things?”

“You make known to me the paths of life. In Your presence is fullness of joy. At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

“Whatever things were gains to me, these I have counted loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them trash, that I may be found in Christ, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, a righteousness that is from God through faith. I want to know Christ, to know Him in the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of participation in His sufferings, being made conformable to His death in order that somehow I might attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption…”

“But God, because of His great love with which He loved us even while we were dead in transgressions and sins, made us alive together with Christ. (By grace you have been saved). He seated us with Him in the heavenly places in order that in the ages to come He might display the amazing riches of His grace in glory in kindness to you…”

“You give them to drink of the river of Your delights, for with You is the fountain of life, and in Your light we see light.”

“Even the young lions do lack and suffer want, but they who seek YHWH shall be in lack of no good thing.”

“YHWH God is a Sun and Shield. YHWH gives grace and glory. No good thing will He withhold from the righteous.”

“I want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am that they may see My glory which You have given Me because You loved Me before the foundation of the world.”

This is all true! None of these promises are any less good than they sound (to say such a thing would be to say that God is a liar). “Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has it entered into the mind of man, what God has prepared for those who love Him.”

Those good things start now. They do not wait until after death. There is no Better Life than Jesus. To suggest such a thing is to insult the Son of God and to make little of the sacrifice of His blood. To let those who choose say that the Best Life Now is cars and fancy foods and houses and clothing, and whatever else, and not insist that Jesus Himself is the Best Life, now and forever, and all these things are rubbish compared to Him, is to let it be thought that Jesus is not even real!

Do you really think that the Father sent His Son to die on the cross so that His children can not be happy? Do you really think that He has either no plan for your life or one that is less than perfectly wonderful? Do you really think that there is anything better than life in Jesus? Do you really think that any earthly wealth is prosperity comparable to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus? Really?

If so, you don’t know Jesus. If so, you have not experienced His love. If so, you have never encountered the Risen Lord. If so, I cannot imagine why you would call yourself a Christian, not only for the sake of truth, but for the sake of your own life.

“Anyone who loses father, or mother, or sister, or brother, or houses, or lands for My sake will not fail to receive a hundred times as much – fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and houses and lands – along with persecutions, and, in the age to come, eternal life.”

There is no contradiction between the statement that God wants you to be happy and the statement that, if you are a Christian, you will be persecuted and you can expect that you might be tortured or killed (among other varieties of persecution). Jesus is that amazing. He is that lovely. He is that worthy. Nothing can separate His children from His love. Nothing can prevent Him from satisfying them with happiness from the rivers of delight at His right hand.

 

Copyright 2018 Raina Nightingale