Letting Go of Prosperity

— by Amanda Lawson

As faith driven entrepreneurs, we’re no stranger to the temptation to give into the prosperity gospel: that if you do well, God will reward you with good things and that if you are receiving good things, God must be pleased with you. The danger is the potential for a faith-shaking identity crisis. Letting go of the prosperity gospel is one of the healthiest, most freeing things a faith driven entrepreneur could do. 

One of the biggest problems with the prosperity gospel is that it essentially eliminates grace and strips God of the authority to give us our identity. Let’s go one at a time. If “good” outcomes 100% of the time imply right actions and “bad” outcomes 100% of the time imply wrongdoing, there is simply no room for grace. The prosperity gospel is deeply entrenched in legalism and as faith driven professionals who truly want to succeed and grow, the perception of control that comes from legalism can be a major temptation. It often seems so much easier to point to a specific action or decision as the reason for an outcome. And if we can control the actions and decisions—regardless of the outcome—we take some level of comfort in the autonomy. 

It’s much easier to consider grace in our non-work lives, I believe partially because it’s much easier for us to offer grace to people in our personal lives than it is to our coworkers. The stakes seem higher at work, which is a problem in and of itself, to be considered another day. When we think about the prosperity gospel, we typically, if not universally, think about it first in the context of our professions. Interestingly, it seems as though when we consider the true gospel, we almost exclusively view it in light of our personal lives. So we end up holding two very different, frankly, mutually exclusive gospels. It’s no wonder we struggle to integrate our faith and work. 

Trying to hold both prosperity and truth is exhausting—because we aren’t meant to—and in addition to manipulating our perception and acceptance of grace, it confuses our identity. Times of success can then lead to pride and arrogance, while times of struggle and failure can cause us to think that God is mad at us, threatening to take from us. At its core, the prosperity gospel leads us into a false assumption of power, making our actions—and the “results” we see—the determinant of our relationship with God. So when things are going well in our work lives, God is pleased, our identity feels secure (though not in the right way), and our relationship with Him is good. Under this false assumption, the counter is also true: when you are struggling or facing trials, God must be mad at you, you run the risk of losing yourself in your failure, and God would not want to associate with someone so broken and wrong. 

Fortunately, the prosperity gospel is a false gospel. The truth found in the literal Word of God is that our identity is secure in Christ—from the moment we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts (Romans 10:9)—and that it is no longer we who have to earn right-standing but we who learn to live in what Christ freely gave (Galatians 2:20-21). We cannot earn our identity, nor can we lose it. Even our identity is an expression of God’s grace. 

If confidence in our identity and acceptance of grace weren’t already more than enough, letting go of the prosperity gospel enables us to integrate our faith and work more fully and can have a significant impact on our relationships with everyone we encounter. Understanding our identity as rooted in Jesus means that we can follow the advice of both Isaiah and Peter to fear the Lord rather than men (Isaiah 8:12-13, 1 Peter 3:14). When we face failure, we don’t live in fear of losing our identity or covering of grace, which means we respond differently when called to account on our mistakes; we recover faster, we don’t overreact, we accept the truth, repent, and move forward—whether in a professional or personal setting—we represent the redemption and humility and grace of the true gospel of Jesus Christ. 

This truth changes how we interact with the people in our lives as well. When we are the bystander or collaterally affected by someone else’s mistake, we view that coworker, boss, spouse, sibling, or child the way God’s Word describes them: loved and recipients of grace. 

Doing this requires that we first understand who we are, which necessitates our knowing the gospel, reading the Word, spending time in prayer and listening to the God who is desires deep relationship with us. When we live and work from that place, we find ourselves in an entirely different, beautiful, holy version of prosperity that comes from the only true gospel. It is freedom to live fully integrated, to let the gospel permeate every part of our lives so that we fulfill the call that is on every believer—whether a financial/professional success or not—to be a minster of reconciliation and ambassador of Christ through all the earth. 

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