My Hope Is In the Lord

Excerpt from What's the Difference Between Living for the Kingdom and Living for the American Dream? by John Piper

How does what you're saying accord with the prosperity gospel–the belief that external signs of wealth are a key testimony to the world of God's blessing?

It doesn't accord. We must reject the prosperity gospel. It's just dead wrong. The world is not impressed by the prosperity of Christians. What the prosperity of Christians says to the world is nothing redemptive.

I'm not saying that all prosperity is necessarily wrong. I'm just making the point that the prosperity of a Christian says absolutely zero about Christ to the world. Christians who simply follow the American trend of "moving up" financially and materially causes the world to simply say, "They're just like us! They love the same things we love and do the same things we do." This has zero witness to the world.

The person who follows the prosperity track must find other ways to testify to the world about Jesus, because their wealth, health, and prosperity are not saying anything redemptive.

My way of remedying this lack of witness is to identify that the prosperity gospel is wrong. Don't go that direction! Don't believe that prosperity is our evidence to the world that we belong to the King. It doesn't work that way. In fact, if you look in the New Testament you'll see that the things that bear the clearest witness to our faith are the occasions when we're willing to suffer for him.

A little child can understand that. Something is valuable to you to the degree that you're willing to suffer in order to have it, not to the degree that it gives you other things that you really like. God is not shown to be valuable because he gives us other things that we like more than God. God is shown to be valuable when we're willing, for God's sake, to let certain things go which we wouldn't let go if he wasn't so precious to us.

Our testimony to the world works precisely opposite to what the prosperity gospel says. When Christians are willing to suffer for the cause of the unborn, for racial justice, and for spreading the gospel, then the world is going to say–just like it does in 1 Peter 3:15–"Where is your hope?"

Our answer will not be, "In houses, cars, and lands." Rather, we will say, "My hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is going to take me to himself. To live is Christ and to die is gain. I'm here on earth to spread the gospel. I'm going to keep my life as wartime as I can in order to maximize my effect for showing Jesus as valuable, not things as valuable."