Exposing the Prosperity Gospel Controversy...

0:00 What does the Bible say about prosperity? Hello, everyone, I'm Stephen Strang. And today on the Strang Report, we're going to deal with that in a balanced kind of way by a man I greatly respect. His name is Dr. Mark Rutland. He is the former pastor of Calvary Church in Orlando. And then he was president at Southeastern University in Lakeland when it really took off, and later president of Oral Roberts University. He's been a friend for many years. And when Benny Hinn was attacked on social media for many things, one of which being the prosperity gospel, and then when he backed down and apologized and was still attacked, I thought it would be useful to be able to discuss it with someone who's very balanced, very respected, and in his own right, a theologian.

0:49 You don't want to miss my conversation with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland, I want to talk to you today about what a lot of people call the prosperity gospel. It's the whole theology behind giving and receiving and so forth. And Benny Hinn and others have been attacked for teaching this. And over time, at Charisma Magazine, we've covered some of the extremes. But I want to talk to you today about a biblical approach.

1:30 Could you explain what you believe about God blessing his people? Now, Steve, the problem theologically is almost always the same, no matter what subject you approach and its balance. So take, for example, the issue of sin in 1 John. I write these things unto you that you sin not. But if you sin, you have an advocate with the Father. However, if you sin, then the truth is not in you. However, if you say that you've never sinned, the truth is not in you. So 1 John kind of gives us a model of the complexity of theological balance. Well, the same thing is true with prosperity and blessing.

2:14 God is a God of blessing. He says, in blessing, I will bless thee. He enjoys blessing. He wants to bless. The error comes where people say, if you're not blessed, you're doing something wrong. If you're not blessed, you're not a Christian. And they turn blessed into rich. And it can become a gospel of greed rather than the celebration of the goodness of God, a God who's about doing exceedingly abundantly above all we could ever think of or ask. God's not a penurious God. He's a good, blessed, wonderful God. But we have to keep balance with it. You know, I think you put it in perspective when you said greed.

2:57 I think that's where it becomes a problem. Yes. There are people, you know, we're not gonna call names, who use it because of greed. You talk about sin. It's one of the main sins. And I remember something that Oral Roberts told me. And of course, you succeeded Oral Roberts as the president of Oral Roberts University. But he grew up desperately poor during the Depression. And he said, unless you come from that kind of background, you can't appreciate the hope that God might want to prosper you. And there are people who have a poverty mentality.

3:38 And even some of the people who reject the theology, in my opinion, and I wanna hear what you have to say, is that they reject a whole lot of what Pentecostals and Charismatics believe. This among them, yet the critics that I know personally, they're very glad to live at whatever prosperous lifestyle they can afford, but they will attack prosperity. So help us understand this. Yeah, I read a wonderful piece by John Wesley, wrote in the Armenian Magazine in the 1700s. And he dealt with the whole issue of balance on it. He said, look, when you line your life, I'm paraphrasing.

4:21 When you line, when one lines one's life up with the biblical principles of frugality and modesty and hard work, God blesses. And that life is blessed. So in the blessing, he said, the problem is, sometimes you can lose your faithfulness to God in the midst of the blessing. So he said, how do we resolve this? And he had a three point thing. He said, earn all you can. There's nothing wrong with that. He said, earn all you can. He said, money is useful. It's useful in all kinds of ways. Earn all you can. Then he said, save all you can.

5:02 That's a biblical principle to be, to save money, to save up like the, go to consider the ant, okay? And then he said, the resolution to that is, give all you can. Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can. So the answer to the prosperity dilemma, it seems to me, and it seemed to Wesley, is that the result of prosperity, the outcome of it should not be to accrue, but to give. So any pastor who's not praying for his people to be blessed, you should pray for your people to be blessed.

5:42 God bless them, prosper them. May they have raises, may they have meaningful jobs, may they have meaningful employment, may they have more customers than they had last year, may they have creative ideas in business, may their entrepreneurial impulses be blessed. I pray for them to be blessed. I also pray for them to be more generous, not just the my ministry, that's where greed can enter in. If you wanna be blessed, you have to bless my ministry. But to say, I pray that you will be generous, that you will give more, because you earn more, you can give more. That seems to me to be the balance that resolves the thing. You know, Steve, the problem is not just on those who exploit others for prosperity, it's donors who exploit ministries for prosperity.

6:31 They turn ministries into the kind of biblical slot machine. I'll give this amount of money, and I hope that three cherries roll up, and I get my return. So sometimes they spread their giving out over ministries to see which one will give them the return. That's also greed. So it can be greed from the ministries, it can be greed from the givers. You know, that's very keen insight, and you're one of the few Christian leaders I've ever heard say that. And I remember years ago, there was a fellow, we don't need to name names, he's really not in ministry anymore, but he had a thing about a vow.

7:11 He had to give a thousand dollar vow, and people would give thousands of dollars to his ministry, and I believed it was a gambling impulse. It's like when people go down to the convenience store and buy a lottery ticket, they know they probably won't hit the jackpot, but they know that some people hit the jackpot. And I think that when people give, they know that there are people who are blessed. They, I'm gonna guess a lot of them probably sincerely believe the Bible and want to believe all the scriptures that would indicate that, and they know it might happen, but they're taking their chance, they're rolling the slot machine like you said, and we have to teach people biblically.

7:57 Now let's talk about some of the principles that are mentioned often during offering time. You know, the measure that you give, you'll receive. Well, I personally believe that, that if you're generous in a large measure, you'll receive generously, but it also can be used to manipulate people to give a hundred dollars instead of $25 or whatever the amount might be. Help us to understand, not only that scripture, other scriptures like blessing Israel and people being blessed, there's scriptures all through the Bible that indicate that God does indeed want to bless his people.

8:38 Yeah, God is a good God, a loving God and a God who blesses. We enjoy blessing our children. In fact, I've probably blessed mine more than I should have, and we enjoy blessing our grandchildren. I've kept Cracker Barrel's store in business buying stuff for my grandkids. I enjoy that. That's not something that grieves me as a father and a grandfather, but I don't want my children and grandchildren to manipulate me. And so I want my children to be generous, to give. I don't wait to see what they give me on Father's Day to decide whether or not I help them financially.

9:20 So I think we take some of our most unworthy attributes and impose those on God, that God says, okay, $100, or I withhold the blessing. That's not God, and it's not characteristic of God. Having said that, as I said earlier, balance is the issue. Unto whom much is given, much is expected. That we give according so that the widow's might is that she made a generous gift. She was generous, not by amount, but by her heart and by the liberty of her giving. So somebody might give $1,000 in response to a manipulative offering request, and actually their motive eliminates the blessing.

10:12 Whereas someone might give generously out of their need and God's response to their heart. So to me, the goodness of God is what's in question here. Not that we manipulate God, we dare and we won't, he will not be manipulated, but every attempt to do so is that which eliminates the fun of it. Look, what I think we ought to concentrate on is the joy of giving, the delight. You know, my favorite story of giving in the Bible is none of the truisms that you quoted earlier. It's the story of building the tabernacle in the wilderness where Moses makes the request, bring me things to build the tabernacle, and the elders come to him after a while and say, tell them to stop, tell the people to stop.

11:04 We can't take anymore. That's what I want. I want that spirit of generosity that's neither doling out pennies to God, neither is it trying to manipulate God by giving, but is the open-hearted, open-handed, joyful giving that I just delight in it. Wouldn't you just once, just once like to see a pastor step on the platform and say to the people, okay, no more today, no more today. That's what Moses did. He said, stop giving, stop. We can't build it, we can't build anymore with this.

11:46 And that's generosity combined with accountability. The task was done. And it's beautiful to me. That's my favorite story. By the way, I preached that story once and the place where I preached it told me not to ever preach it again. They said, don't ever preach it again. I said, don't preach on generosity. They said, not like that. Well, that's funny. You know, I wanna talk about how people can put into perspective some of the attacks that have come. And recently we've been talking about the ones against Benny Hinn, the things that he's been attacked for. There are a lot of different ministries that could be attacked for some of the same things.

12:29 I believe that he has tried to walk some of this back. He said he's repented, he's sorry. And I personally believe him, but that's not really my point. There are those who've attacked. I mean, John Wesley himself, who you mentioned earlier, was attacked terribly. And this was long before the days of the internet. I heard a story about my own grandfather, who was a Pentecostal preacher during the depression. And he had a cessationist pastor in town attack him on the radio, telling him that he should drink poison to see if it killed him or not. And, you know, radio was sort of the internet of the day.

13:09 So these attacks have been going on, but with social media, they can get followers and then people can comment on it and on and on and on. So how should people do this? You know, Benny has, like I said, walked it back. I'm not here to judge his heart, but there's all kinds of people that didn't believe him before and they don't believe him now. How should we, not only with Benny, but when there's attacks against Christian leaders, how should we in the body of Christ respond? Yeah, I guess there are those people who feel that they're called to some kind of prophetic thing to denounce people.

13:50 I just, I don't feel the need to defend people and I certainly don't feel the need to attack people. I've been attacked for stupid stuff. I pastored a great church in Orlando years ago, you remember, and one friend of mine challenged me to have my people say the name of Jesus a hundred times in a worship service. I kind of feel like I need things. So I had them 10 at a time, you know, 10 throughout the course of the service to say the name of Jesus a hundred times. And this guy with a nationwide radio ministry denounced me by name that I was trying to manipulate my people into some kind of a seance type thing by repeating Jesus over and over and over again.

14:35 I could make them, you know, check out their brains and no longer would judge what I had to say. I just wanted to say Jesus. So it kind of taught me a lesson about attacking people. I just, I've holstered my guns, Steve. I don't do that. You know, you make me think, when you mentioned the church in Orlando, it made me think of a wonderful story that I hope you'll repeat of where a Baptist church gave a very generous gift that was a huge surprise. I think that's a good way to end this podcast. Yeah, it was actually the reverse. We were trying to turn the ship at Calvary, you know, it was bankrupt when I went there.

15:20 And a few weeks after that, I felt motivated to send Dr. Jim Henry and First Baptist Church an offering. And I went to, we were so broke. I went to the elders and asked them to talk me out of it. And instead they said, let's do it, let's do it. And so they said, and let's do it right. They said, take the offering for First Baptist before you take yours. Let's not give them leftovers. And I took the offering and Monday morning, they came in and said the offering for First Baptist was $19,000. And they said, what do you want me to do? I said, write a check and send the security guard over to First Baptist with it and do it quickly.

16:04 I'm feeling weak. A little while later, I got a wonderful call from Jim Henry, he was weeping. And he said, look, I've been struggling with a certain decision. I think the decision was to run for the president of Southern Baptist Convention. But he didn't say that, he said, I'm struggling. He said, I just never thought the confirmation would come from a Pentecostal church. I said, no, me neither, Jim. But I thought that what I said in my mind was deep within, let's be honest, I'm being honest. I thought they would take an offering and send it back.

16:46 He never did. But it was a huge turning point in the finances at Calvary. From that moment on, we never looked back. We paid off a million dollars a year on the dead-iron heritage. And that was the turning point. I'm not saying, here again, don't turn stories into doctrine. I'm not saying that every Pentecostal church in America, if you'll give $19,000 to the local Baptists, they gotta pay your building off. I'm just saying it was a moment of release and joy. The people laughed. They gave the offering with joy. And I said, I want you to know where we're gonna send it.

17:29 We're gonna send it to First Baptist, the most prosperous church in Orlando. And it still is. It still is. It didn't make any sense to me. But somehow it opened the valve. And it just was a tremendous turning point in the history at Calvary Church. Well, that's a beautiful story. And so as we wrap up this podcast, I wanna thank you for taking time on fairly short notice to be on with me. And I wanna give you the last word. Well, the last word is Jesus is Lord. God is a good God. He loves us. He cares for us. I believe in the spirit of generosity, joyful giving because God is good.

18:13 The ace in the hole, if I can use that secular thing, is yes, God will not be outgiven. I believe that. But I don't believe in giving to manipulate God. I believe in giving because of who God is. I hope you learned something from Dr. Mark Rutland about prosperity. There's so much more than we could say about the subject. In fact, I dealt with it in my latest book called Spirit-Led Living in an Upside-Down World where I talk about the work of the Holy Spirit and have a whole chapter on how you can achieve your potential in God. You know, I believe, as Dr. Rutland said, that God does want to prosper us. He wants to bless us. He enjoys blessing us.

18:54 The problem comes when we're greedy or where we try to manipulate God. I hope that you'll get my book. It's available on Amazon.com. It's also available on SteveStrangBooks.com. In fact, you can get a bundle of several of my books. If you enjoy this podcast and if you look to me for leadership, I hope that you'll get a copy of Spirit-Led Living in an Upside-Down World. Thank you for tuning in. Please share this. My podcasts have really taken off because people like you share them. And if you haven't subscribed, be sure to subscribe so you're notified every Tuesday and Thursday at 4 p.m. daylight saving time for another episode of The Strang Report.

19:38 Until next time, God bless you.