3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
This is the evil, unspoken danger at the heart of the prosperity doctrine. They are not preaching that God wants to make you wealthy so that the world will be reached through your generous giving, but that you can have the big cars and huge homes that they enjoy. You can see by their lives what motivates their message. The fruit of their message is demonstrated in their lives. Are they living lives of sacrifice, of death to self-desire, or are the living for self without sacrifice? If the message is true, then it must be a universal message, one that can be preached, received and practiced everywhere. If they get cars and swimming pools, then shouldn’t those in the poorest countries also get these same things, since the same God is over all? This is nothing more than selfishness packaged for Western ears. When God’s favor is equated to your bank balance and accumulation of things, that message fits well with the American Dream. No adjustment to your thinking needs to take place. No yielding to the Spirit’s call, no giving of self. I think that the more we get, the more we need to give. We need to do this so that we don’t get focused on the stuff. When pleasure is our focus, we are not focused on eternal priorities. Pleasure is a temporary, temporal focus. Someday, pleasure as we know it will cease. It will be replaced by a pleasure that will last forever, one that defies explanation or understanding. Our minds can’t even conceive what heaven is like. It is just too good. And yet if we are focused on the momentary pleasures of this life, we will miss out on the eternal pleasures of the next.
The Arnold Journey 