God desires that His people prosper
By Apostle Frederick K.C. Price

Prosperity comes in many different forms. There is social prosperity, mental prosperity and professional prosperity when God blesses the work you are doing on your job. Once you marry, you can also experience marital prosperity.

There is parental prosperity in terms of raising your children, and physical prosperity in terms of your health. No Christian has a problem with any of these ways through which God can prosper us. No minister, theologian, or church denomination will tell you that any of these areas of prosperity are bad or of the devil.

When it comes to financial and material prosperity, however, that is an entirely different ballgame. When you begin to talk about those two forms of prosperity, you become a target. All the worms come out of the woodwork, and you might even have people talk about you. But I know the true reason these attacks come. Satan knows that if he can keep Christians poor, he can hinder the proclamation of the Gospel. And he has done a good job of keeping Christians poor, up to the present time.

It costs money to proclaim the Gospel. It costs money to build or rent a church building, to provide a pastor for a congregation, to equip a church sanctuary. Christians need an environment in which they can hear the Word, fellowship with one another, and grow in the knowledge of God.

It costs money to send missionaries to a place where no one has ever gone before with the Gospel. Also, in many of the places where these missionaries go, there is not enough financial sustenance to take care of them. Therefore, their home base or home church has to take care of them. That costs money. Who else is going to pay for the spreading of the Gospel but the children of God? Our outreach ministries are going to be based upon our financial ability to support and send those who have the call on their lives.

Satan’s strategy of poverty

Satan knows that if he can keep us poor, keep us barely making it, keep us struggling to provide for our own individual households, then we will have limited resources to give to the Church. By our poverty, he can prevent us from sending out those who need to carry the message of Jesus Christ to others. Can you see that? It’s a conspiracy. A person cannot give what he or she does not have, especially when the person does not know how to get it.

The world’s system is not designed to aid your financial independence, not if you are a child of God. It will allow a few of Satan’s kids to get wealth, so that others will think they are going to become wealthy, too. But the enemy certainly does not want the Church to become financially prosperous. That is why he has so cleverly infiltrated theology. The very people who should be supporting one another are attacking one another. We have enough opposition coming from Satan, and we do not need any coming from our brothers and sisters in Christ. When a minister or another Christian speaks about money, non-Christians and Christians alike get on the person’s case. They automatically think the minister is a crook or charlatan.

Granted, there may be some charlatans in the pulpit, but there are crooks everywhere. They are found in government, stealing from us and ripping us off. What can you say about that? Can we stop the government from operating? There are crooked doctors, crooked lawyers, crooked wives, crooked husbands, crooked children and crooked parents. There are crooks everywhere, not just in the pulpit.

I can handle what the world says, but it becomes a bitter pill to swallow when your Christian brethren criticize you for talking about prosperity. Nevertheless, we must talk about money. This is especially true if you have a television ministry. It costs the same amounts of money to be in Christian media that it does to be in secular media. However, it would take me years to go around the world and physically teach the Word to as many people as I can reach in one hour via television. Television is the cheapest way to reach the greatest number of people in the shortest length of time, although it costs megabucks to do so.

The bottom line is, no matter what medium a person uses, spreading the Gospel quickly boils down to dollars and cents. Therefore, if anyone ought to be sympathetic to the idea of material and financial prosperity, it ought to be Christians. We need to know how to operate in God’s financial plan. As we prosper financially, God prospers in terms of our relationship to him. If we are poor, God is poor by our poverty.

Economically and financially, our world is getting worse. Yet, all the resources we need are available. Some folk are getting those resources and squandering them on the things that bring glory to Satan. Christians need to learn how to prosper, so that the Church can bring glory to God.

You determine your prosperity

God wants you to prosper. Until you are convinced of this, you will never prosper. When you realize that Jesus and His disciples were not poor, but rather that they had wealth, you will begin to understand that you do not need to be poor to serve Him.

Joshua 1:8:

"This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success."

You can see it in the Word: God wants you to prosper. And the people He was speaking to were sinners. This is Old Testament, so they were not even His children; they were His servants. If God wanted His servants to prosper, you must know He wants His children to prosper.

There was a time when I did not think God liked me because I am black. It looked as if all the black folk I knew did not have very much. I thought that God just arbitrarily decided that He was going to prosper a particular man or woman, and put another man or woman on welfare. When I discovered what the Word of God said in scriptures like Joshua 1:8, I got happy. I found out at last that it was up to me whether I prospered, and that it had nothing to do with my color.

It was up to me to meditate on His Word day and night. It was my responsibility to never let that Word depart from my mouth, and to observe to do it. After I did that, He said I would make my way prosperous. When I discovered what God said in Joshua 1:8, I decided that I was going to be prosperous. I was going all the way. If you are willing to do it God’s way, you can prosper. It's your fault if you do, and your fault if you do not.

The last part of Joshua 1:8 states, "and then you will have good success." This implies that there can be bad success. An example of bad success would be when you have 12 million dollars in the bank and you are driving a Rolls-Royce, but your wife is making out with the gardener, the cat raped the canary, and both of your kids are on drugs. You are up all night worrying about who is stealing from you. You cannot eat because your stomach is so ulcerated, plus you have palpitations of the heart and high blood pressure.

Good success would be having 12 million dollars in the bank, driving a Rolls-Royce, being surrounded by a loving family, enjoying a relationship with Jesus Christ, and being filled with the Holy Spirit.

Psalm 1:1-3:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful;

But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night.

He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; And whatever he does shall prosper.

No evidence God likes poverty

Whatever he does shall prosper! This means that you should prosper in your marriage. You should prosper in raising your children. You should prosper in your sex life, in your professional life, in your business, in your ministry, and in your friendships. Whatever you do should prosper.

If God wanted His people poor, there should be plenty of evidence of that in the Bible. But I see just the opposite. The overwhelming evidence through the scriptures is that God wants His people to be prosperous in every way, including financially.

Psalm 35:27:

Let them shout for joy and be glad, who favor my righteous cause; and let them say continually, "Let the Lord be magnified, who has pleasure in the prosperity of His servant."

If God gets pleasure in our prosperity, He must have displeasure in our poverty. If that is true, then God is against poverty.

The Bible tells us out of the mouth of two or three witnesses, let every word be established (Deuteronomy 17:6). I have already given you three scriptures, so I have met the biblical requirement to prove to you that God wants you to prosper in every single area of your life. Now it is up to you to do something about it. The ball is in your court.

The covers have been pulled off Satan’s conspiracy to keep you poor. It is your obligation not to play into his game plan anymore.

The foregoing is an excerpt from Apostle Price's book, Dr. Price’s Golden Nuggets.