[I pray] that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might.
(Ephesians 1)
There’s a dangerous idea, growing more popular and widespread every day, that the spiritual riches of God (as Paul describes above in Ephesians 1) aren’t enough to satisfy us. Instead, we should pray for material wealth and success, and expect God to deliver it in response to the obedience and faith we display (usually by giving money to a church or televangelist).
Millions of people, desperately seeking contentment and comfort, believe they’ll find it when God showers financial blessings upon them. But instead, dark clouds build over their souls as they slowly realize that it’s not happening the way they expected. They don’t know it, but they’ve become enslaved to greed and power as they try to manipulate God into giving them what they want.
Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of watching God deliver a family from this deception. Nathaniel and Shatoyia Bradley had a ministerial role in a church that taught the prosperity gospel. To them, God existed only to fulfill their ambitions and dreams. But two months ago, they say God “smacked” them and made them realize how far they had strayed from him. Once their eyes were opened to Christ’s sufficiency, they felt like they were meeting Jesus for the first time.
Recently Nate was deployed with the Air Force to Iraq, but Shatoyia was gracious and courageous enough to let us interview her about their experiences. Their prayer is that many more people will be delivered from the subtle deception of the prosperity gospel.
[flv width="476" height="270"]http://www.harborhawaii.org/video/Shatoyia.flv[/flv]
(Click above for a video of the interview)
How did you first get involved in churches that emphasize prosperity?
We left a Baptist church and went to this non-denominational church. From our first impression, we didn’t know that they were big on the prosperity gospel, but after we got there we picked up on it, and it drew us in.
What was it that drew you in?
We were a couple that wanted to have the American dream, so when the pastor started teaching about business, and that God wants you to be prosperous, and how to get wealth God’s way, we were blown away. We were thinking, “Wow, so God wants us to be rich and have all these nice cars and a big house and vacation homes?”
We had heard preachers talk about it on TBN, but this was the first time we actually paid attention because we were seeing people that we could feel and touch, and they were living this type of lifestyle. Both of us came from a background where his family struggled and my family struggled, so we weren’t used to having nice things. To see people say that God would bless them with these things if they would seek him first, it blew us away.
We already wanted to have money, but we never thought that it was something that God wanted us to have and would freely give to us just by us asking and believing.
According to this church, what did God require in order to give you all these things?
They really stressed tithes and offerings a lot. I can remember the pastor teaching that the tithes opened the window, but it was the offering that poured out the blessing. He would teach from Malachi about us robbing God. He told us that when we didn’t pay our tithes and offerings, that God would curse us.
It made us afraid, so we started giving money… even when we would give money and we’d look at our account and we had overdrawn our account. We just felt like if we didn’t do this, God was going to curse us, and we weren’t going to get all these things that we wanted to have. It was scary!
So what was your view of God at that point?
I viewed God as the source for everything I needed and wanted. Whatever I wanted out of life that was positive and good, God wanted it for me as well. God was everything I wanted him to be. If I was going to sacrifice and do all these things, then God had things he was going to give me in return.
What made you start to question these beliefs?
There was a situation where [the pastor] was trying to manipulate us into leaving the military so we could stay at the church. That’s when we started to question everything that we had learned at the church. We felt like he could also manipulate us into believing that the Scriptures meant something that they didn’t really mean.
We left the church, but we started watching a lot more TBN. Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar. We thought maybe it was just that one pastor. Maybe [the preachers on TV] were preaching the right thing, and that’s why so many people were following them. We started reading their books and buying their tapes.
But it got to a point where we just felt a void. We felt that God was becoming less of a priority, and pursuing wealth and possessions was becoming more of a priority. That’s all we talked about, that’s all we thought about. We had this book where we put all our dreams, and we had these things that we would recite every day:
By the first day of January 2008, we will have in our possession $10,000 a month that will come to us in various amounts from time to time… We believe that we have this money, and we can feel it in our hands. We are now awaiting a plan from God by which to accumulate this money, and when we receive that plan we will follow it.
You really recited that every day?
We would say that every day, but it seems like we were trying to speak them into existence more than we were getting God’s guidance on if that was his will.
My husband and I were getting farther apart. We were arguing with each other, talking about money all the time. We had pictures of the house we wanted to buy, my husband had pictures of the cars he wanted to have, but we felt such a disconnect from Jesus the more we pursued all of these things. One day, God just smacked both of us.
I was in Georgia trying to start a business and my husband was here in Hawaii. It was a certain day, we had been on the phone arguing for hours, and at that moment both of us said to ourselves, “We are not in God’s will.”
My husband said, “Buy a ticket and just come home, and we’ll figure from here how to get back on track. We’re going to forget all this stuff about prosperity and trying to find wealth and possessions, and we’re just going to get back to seeking God, and find out what God really wants from us.” We knew that it was more than just him wanting us to follow these commands so that he could dish all this stuff out to us.
What happened next?
We started reading the Word more, we started asking God to fill us with his Holy Spirit more. We started listening to John Piper, and one of the first things that I saw when I went to his website was, “Satisfied in Jesus Alone.” We started to seek that, and to pray about being satisfied in Christ alone.
From there we found Harbor Church, and the first Sunday that we went, the church was giving out the book, The Treasure Principle. We started reading the book, and it was a tough pill to swallow. Here we were, thinking that God blesses you with material possessions and wealth so that you can enjoy it. This book was talking about God blessing us not to increase our standard of living, but to increase our standard of giving.
The more we went to the Bible to look up the Scriptures that he was explaining in the book, the more sense it made to us. If the ultimate thing we should be doing is bringing glory to God, how more can you bring glory to God than to denounce everything that seems valuable to you, and say, “Jesus is more valuable to me than pursuing money and wealth.”
He is my only source of joy, and he is the ultimate authority over everything. He’s left us as stewards of these things, so he’s going to hold us accountable one day for how we use all these things. How could we just hoard everything for ourselves, and not think about storing up treasures for ourselves in heaven?
From there, it wasn’t hard for us to just give it up. It wasn’t hard at all, because for the first time we felt joy and we had peace, and we felt like we were finally in God’s will. We had never felt that way, and it felt like we were experiencing Jesus for the first time.