Prosperous or Pressed and Perplexed?
By Audrey Stallsmith
I’ve been getting a sense of “deja vu all over again” recently, since I’ve been working for a disabled Christian woman who likes watching one of the prosperity gospel channels on TV. I had a very similar job years ago, as mentioned in my earlier article “How Much Is Too Much?”
At least the people on this particular channel aren’t as crass as some of those I saw on the other. Although they don’t brag about their expensive clothes, they still assume that all Christians should be healed of their diseases if their faith is strong enough. I notice that they don’t explain why everybody eventually dies anyway!
I can imagine how hard those TV shows must be on people who are obviously Christian but obviously not being healed. Unlike the patient mentioned in my former article, the one for whom I work now has cognitive problems. So she may have gotten beyond being bothered by people questioning her faith. Still, I imagine there are many other believers out there who are convinced that, because they are still sick, their faith must not be strong enough.
What the prosperity people apparently don’t take into account is that, though God always hears our prayers, He often says “No.” Paul presents a more realistic picture of the Christian life in II Corinthians 4:8. “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but not crushed and broken. We are perplexed because we don’t know why things happen as they do, but we don’t give up and quit.(TLB).”
One of Paul’s troubles—his “thorn in the flesh”—apparently was a physical problem, though I actually heard one of the women on the aforesaid TV channel insist that it couldn’t have been. She held that it must have been a spiritual issue instead.
But the apostle said, “Three different times I begged God to make me well again. Each time he said, “No. But I am with you; that is all you need. My power shows up best in weak people.” (II Corinthians 12:8-9 TLB)
Also, because our weaknesses make us more dependent on God, they often strengthen us spiritually. And He is more concerned about our spiritual condition than our physical well-being. After all, we will lose all our physical problems once we have new bodies in heaven, but we aren’t going to make it to heaven if our rude good health causes us to drift blithely away from God.
Granted, there are real healings, but those seem to be the exception rather than the rule. And, as Joni Eareckson Tada pointed out in one of her books, they don’t often happen in the wheelchair section of those healing events. Looking back on the accident that disabled her, she eventually concluded that it was a blessing, because she had been distancing herself from God at the time it happened.
Of course, suffering doesn’t automatically make us saintly, since it causes some people to revert to bitterness against God rather than dependence on Him. But all our attempts to become self-sufficient definitely don’t make us better people since they tend to separate us from the other people in our lives as well as from God.
The strength which may fool us into believing that we don’t need Him or anybody else can be the financial as well as the physical type. Such was made plain when Jesus said “It is almost impossible for a rich man to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 19:23) I notice they don’t mention that verse too often on the prosperity channels!
Our true prosperity, after all, lies not in money but in other things. Although we are told that often enough, it can take a crisis to convince us. As Dad commented at the time of Mom’s funeral, “Family matters most.” Not just biological family but our Christian family, headed by our Heavenly Father, which supports us through the dark times.
Because none of us really are self sufficient. Any invincibility we may believe we have built up is an illusion. Even the Nazi leaders of World War II, who murdered thousands of others, eventually would succumb to the ravages of time themselves. What most struck the Nazi hunters about men such as Eichmann was how small and vulnerable those former monsters actually were.
And frightened. They knew they eventually would have to answer for their crimes, whether to Mossad in this life or to God in the next. Although the infamous Dr. Mengele never was caught, his heartless experiments on other people’s bodies eventually caught up to him when his own body betrayed him, pulling him down with a stroke while he was swimming.
No matter how long and carefully we manage to stretch out our lives, our bodies eventually will let us down too. Then they either will return our souls to the One who made them or to the darker power we may have chosen instead.
As George MacDonald noted, “The one principle of hell is—‘I am my own.’” So, when we struggle to make ourselves independent of God, He can only preserve our freedom of choice by letting us go. But, when we insist on separating ourselves from Him, we are choosing a downward path to a place where there is no real unity. Just as there was no real unity among the Nazis, each of whom was fighting for his or her own personal advancement.
They couldn’t quite believe that their kingdom had fallen apart with the death of Hitler. They even made plans to reconstruct it again later. But their seeming invincibility had deserted them when the power structure with which they had maintained it fell apart. Once people no longer were afraid of them, they had to begin being afraid themselves.
Not that they ever were really invincible. They actually were as weak as everybody else, since they, too, couldn’t have survived without all that God has given us. The plants and animals provided for our food, for example, or the life that originally was breathed into us. Our tries at making it on our own are about as convincing as those of a rebellious child who runs away from home to be independent of his parents, lugging with him clothes and food provided by those parents.
Fortunately, many of us don’t even make it to the end of the block before we run back to our Father, even if only to yell at Him about how bad we have it. We need to remind ourselves that those children who are too far away from Him to communicate with Him at all have it much worse.