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.”
Note: To understand these profiles, you should first be familiar with the biblical concepts presented in The Practice of Tithing as the Minimum Standard of Christian Giving
The Situation: Bill and Donna are in their mid-thirties. Bill has steady work as a salesman, but there always seems to be too much month left at the end of their money.
Bill and Donna sincerely intend to put in the offering box whatever’s left at the end of the month. But, between house payments and bills and occasionally socking a little something into savings, there’s just never anything left. They ...
It’s one thing to trust God to provide for our present needs (Matthew 6:33). It is another to presume upon him by dictating (via choosing to go into debt) the demand for, amount of and necessary duration of his future provision.
For many people, spending money is an addictive behavior similar to alcoholism or gambling. With compulsive spending, the true enemy is within.
Heb 9:27 says, "It's appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment." Everything we receive reward for is what we actually did on earth.
Some of these are one-a-day questions, others could be asked several in succession. Decide according to your preference. You can ask these questions over a forty day period, ten days, or in a single setting, depending on whether you want to spread out the self-examination, or go for the cumulative effect. You can also read them through once, then go back over them slowly to digest them. It’s up to you.
Randy Alcorn has written twelve books (soon to be fourteen, with two more novels coming out in 2001), including the best-selling novels Deadline, Dominion, and Edge of Eternity. The royalties for those books all go into Eternal Perspective Ministries, which he founded and directs. But Eternal Perspective Ministries (www.epm.org) doesn't need the royalties to achieve its mission.
Fame puts us in the power position, a position of influence where people will listen to us and follow us. But fame also sets us up for failure. God gives 3 specific warnings of what the King, the most famous and powerful person in the nation, should not do.
Today countless children grow up begging and grabbing and clinging onto all the things money can buy. As adults, they rarely outgrow this shallow self-centeredness, but simply graduate to more money and bigger toys. Living their lives on earth as if this were all there is, they fail to prepare for their eternal future.
To say that churches should receive the firstfruits does NOT mean they should keep them. They should set the example for their people by giving more to missions and the poor than they keep.
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