Biblical Prosperity

In Psalm 23, we read “I shall not want” and “my cup will be overflowing.” If a cup is overflowing it means there is more than enough to fill it. Sometimes I joke with people that they need to be careful if I am pouring a drink for them at a social gathering. I am getting such a revelation of more than enough, I just might keep pouring after their cup is full and overflow it. We find the same principle of overflow in Proverbs.

Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine (Proverbs 3:9-10).

Brimming over? This sounds a lot like what we read in Psalm 23 where cups were overflowing. An overflow of new wine sounds like a good thing to me. Overflowing barns? Remember Joseph who had the overflowing crops for seven years as the minister of agriculture in Egypt? He saved up enough to last for the next seven years of drought. I recall Jesus talking about a guy that had his barns overflowing in the New Testament. In both cases the barns were overflowing, but there was a different use for the surplus on each occasion. Expect surplus. But what do we do with the surplus…that is a question we must ask the Lord?

When Elisha helped the widow of one of his prophets with financial provision, he instructed her to gather as many containers as she could find for the oil that was going to be poured out. Let’s read the story.

A certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets cried out to Elisha, saying, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord. And the creditor is coming to take my two sons to be his slaves. ”So Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?” And she said, “Your maidservant has nothing in the house but a jar of oil. ”Then he said, “Go, borrow vessels from everywhere, from all your neighbors—empty vessels; do not gather just a few.  And when you have come in, you shall shut the door behind you and your sons; then pour it into all those vessels, and set aside the full ones.” So she went from him and shut the door behind her and her sons, who brought the vessels to her; and she poured it out. Now it came to pass, when the vessels were full, that she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not another vessel.” So the oil ceased. Then she came and told the man of God. And he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debt; and you and your sons live on the rest.”

The oil only stopped flowing when she ran out of containers.  This is a familiar Bible story, but here again is this principle of more than enough. How much oil did she have? She had more than enough oil, more than she had containers to fill. Her expectation of God’s blessing coincided with how much she received…so lets have really high expectation of God’s financial blessing. He loves us that much.

Now that we have defined from the Bible what “blessing” is, let’s look at what the Bible says “curse” is. Curse is defined in the next few verses in Deuteronomy 28. What we are going to find is that poverty is included in the list of curses.

However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.

     You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.

      You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them.

      The alien who lives among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower. He will lend to you, but you will not lend to him. He will be the head, but you will be the tail.

      Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you (Deuteronomy 28:15, 30, 38-39, 43-44, 47-48).

In these blogs we are biblically defining blessings and curses. We find that prosperity is a blessing from God and poverty is a curse from the enemy. We are laying this out as two very clear, distinct, mutually exclusive, separate definitions. This might seem elementary to some, but some Christians get confused about this and start to think that it is more spiritual to be poor and in lack. How can this be when we just read that poverty and lack are the results of disobedience and not obeying the Lord? We must allow the Bible to define these terms for us.

What is blessing? If we look at Deuteronomy 28, we find both Lordship and prosperity. The first verses speak to fully obeying God (Lordship) and the verses that follow define God’s blessings. Let’s study this together.

If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God: You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The Lord will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you. They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven. The Lord will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The Lord your God will bless you in the land he is giving you. The Lord will establish you as his holy people, as he promised you on oath, if you keep the commands of the Lord your God and walk in his ways. Then all the peoples on earth will see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they will fear you. The Lord will grant you abundant prosperity—in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your ground—in the land he swore to your forefathers to give you. The Lord will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands. You will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. The Lord will make you the head, not the tail. If you pay attention to the commands of the Lord your God that I give you this day and carefully follow them, you will always be at the top, never at the bottom. Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them (Deuteronomy 28:1-14).

If you obey the Lord, all these blessings will come upon you and accompany you. He will grant you abundant prosperity. The Lord will open the heavens to send rain on your land. If you lend to many and borrow from none, that means you have more money than what you could use for your physical needs. You have surplus to make available to others. God’s intention for the children of Israel was blessing, prosperity, freedom and healing. In many ways it is parallel to what we found earlier in 3 John 2. This is blessing. This is God’s heart for us.

If our thinking is ruled by thoughts of poverty and lack, some of what we are saying might be hard to swallow. If this doesn’t make sense right away, then put it on the back burner, meditate on it and let it cook for a while. See what God shows you. It is a good thing for our thinking to be challenged as we look at the Word of God. We have to allow the Word of God to change us. Listen to what God speaks to Moses and the children of Israel in Deuteronomy. Read these words…

He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers. He will bless the fruit of your womb, the crops of your land—your grain, new wine and oil—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks in the land that he swore to your forefathers to give you. You will be blessed more than any other people; none of your men or women will be childless, nor any of your livestock without young (Deuteronomy 7:13-14).

Does this sound like El Shaddai? “You will be blessed more than any other people.” The key word here is “more.” The next chapter states this even more clearly. Let’s continue to read in Deuteronomy 8:6-11.

Observe the commands of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and revering him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills. When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day.

Here we find similar words describing God’s abundant provision. Phrases like “you will lack nothing” and “when you have eaten and are satisfied” simply state this truth in a different way. When you “are satisfied” it means you have more than enough food to satisfy your appetite. It means a smorgasbord, an all-you-can-eat buffet! It signifies you have food left over. This is the pattern that God wishes to establish for us if we will let Him. As God challenges and changes our belief system, our thinking will change. If our thinking changes about finances, our actions will change.

Is the name El Shaddai found in every book of the Bible? No…but the  nature of a God of abundance is found in every book of the Bible…we have found specific Bible references to El Shaddai in Genesis and Exodus. Now let’s look in Leviticus.

I will look on you with favor and make you fruitful and increase your numbers, and I will keep my covenant with you. You will still be eating last year’s harvest when you will have to move it out to make room for the new (Leviticus 26:9-10).

Verse 10 is what we are looking for…“You will still be eating last year’s harvest when you will have to move it out to make room for this year’s harvest.” This sounds like more than enough to me. Last year’s harvest was more than enough to meet the needs of the year. The surplus will have to be moved to make room for the new harvest. Amen. Enough said.

If abundant blessing is really the heart and nature of God, we should find it repeated throughout the Bible. This is precisely what I want us to look at in these next few blogs.

Let’s go to Exodus 36:3-7. Please notice the term “more than enough” as it appears in the following scriptures.

They received from Moses all the offerings the Israelites had brought to carry out the work of constructing the sanctuary. And the people continued to bring freewill offerings morning after morning. So all the skilled craftsmen who were doing all the work on the sanctuary left their work and said to Moses, “The people are bringing more than enough for doing the work the Lord commanded to be done.” Then Moses gave an order and they sent this word throughout the camp: “No man or woman is to make anything else as an offering for the sanctuary.” And so the people were restrained from bringing more, because what they already had was more than enough to do all the work.

Did you get that? Moses ordered the people to stop giving! Moses started a building project, and the Israelites were asked to participate by giving offerings. The people gave so much that Moses had to actually issue a decree instructing them to stop. When is the last time you heard your pastor or any church leader say, “Stop giving…you are giving way too much?” I think most of us would agree the church today has not yet reached this stage of generosity.

Live long and prosper. That sounds too good to be true. Bingo! Though it sounds idealistic, I do believe the Lord wants us to live long and prosper. He has created us to bear fruit and he put us on this earth for that reason. Prosperity means meeting the right people at the right time, climbing the right mountain in the right season, fighting the right battle with the right weapons, having the right people around us with the right skills, being at the right place to see opportunity and having the right provisions there when we need them to fulfill our destiny. Then we can help other people fulfill their destiny. This is how to be a prosperous Christian.

In my first book on Biblical finance, Prosperity with a Purpose, I focused on giving a picture of God as El Shaddai, the God of more than enough. In the second book,  A Practical Path to a Prosperous Life, I focus on the practical tools to go beyond just knowing about El Shaddai.  The goal is to develop a prosperous soul as the Holy Spirit teaches you to prosper. Please find this resource at A Practical Path to a Prosperous Life on the DOVE Store website.

Most people would say they would like more of both time and money. At the core of this statement is a desire to be more fruitful and productive. This is a good and godly thing. We were created this way. The truth is there are many parallels between time and money. For example, we know it is better to invest money than to spend it. This would also be true of our time. It is better to invest time in people and projects that provide ongoing return than to spend it on things that are once and done.

What is your time worth? Many of us don’t put a monetary value on our own time. However we need to see that others do put a monetary value on our time. As an example, let’s say you are in the United States and plan to travel from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. If you buy a bus ticket it will cost you $150 but it will take you 36 hours of time to get there. If you buy a plane ticket it will cost you $500, but the trip will take 5 hours to get there. If other people assign monetary value to our time, maybe it would benefit us to do the same.

A family was building a home. It cost $10,000 more to construct a cathedral ceiling instead of a traditional ceiling in the house. This added $20,000 to the resale value of the house. It added beauty to the house. Now when people enter the house their eyes are drawn to look up as with any cathedral. Is looking up such a bad thing? Maybe one day as the homeowner is sitting and looking up he is inspired with an idea for a business. Now since they have more value in their home they can leverage that value for a loan to start a business that creates jobs.  The people who will work on those jobs will get paid and go home and feed their kids and pay their mortgage with the money.

Some would say it is a waste of money to build the cathedral ceiling. The wealthy think the poor waste money, and the poor think the wealthy waste money. Who is right? A businessman sees it as wasteful to take the time to change the oil in his car. I have to agree. He could be out starting businesses and creating new jobs for people. A prosperous person realizes trying to save money on little things is often a waste. Many times poverty minded people will try to do everything themselves and save money. But they never have enough time to finish so there are often broken-down cars and car parts in their yard or unfinished parts of their house as well. Have you ever driven by one of these?