When we let God’s Word change us, when we spend the time, when we digest it and ruminate over it, hunger for it and let it change us, it is such an enormous blessing.

The Fast Food Generation

We live in a ‘fast food’ generation. We get everything so quickly – you go to the hamburger store, you go to the chicken store – everything is fast, and we expect it to come that way and sometimes, I think, we expect to receive God’s blessings just in that same way. Now I truly believe that God wants to bless us and God wants to prosper us. Some people get a bit twitchy with that. I’m not going to some sort of extreme here, which says being a Christian is all about driving fast cars and being rich. Not where we are going. We are going over the next three to four weeks have a really good look at God’s plan to bless us.

The series we are starting this week, I have called, “In Everything They Do, They Prosper.” That comes from Psalm 1, it’s the direct quote from God’s Word and I truly believe that God wants to prosper us, but as I said, sometimes we expect to get God’s blessings in a kind of a ‘fast food’ mentality way and God just doesn’t work that way. It’s a funny thing, you know, as we grow up, we have the instructions of life programmed into us by what goes on around us. You know, from conception to being a baby, to being a child, to being an adolescent, to becoming an adult and then maturing as an adult, there are a whole bunch of positive and negative influences on our lives, on our perceptions, on our characters on our behaviors, all sorts of things happening around us.

The ideal role of parents, of course, is to love us and nurture us and support us. The ideal role of school and teachers is to educate us and to help us to grow and develop and realize our potential. But so often our parents weren’t perfect, so often we discover our teachers weren’t perfect and our schooling wasn’t perfect and so there are disruptive things that happened to us in our developmental stages that kind of interrupt God’s plan. Now we might see them as disruptive things, God sees them quite simply as sin and sin interrupts God’s plan in our life. Yet, God’s plan is that in everything that we do we should prosper. There’s materialism, there’s the whole issue of money, and wealth and having stuff. I mean, people don’t talk much these days about responsibility, loyalty, dedication, wisdom, honesty, strength, those sorts of values in one sense, when we talk about them, are seen to be old fashioned, and yet when the truth be known, those things are important to each one of us.

So how do we grow up into an effective person, how do we grow up to make right choices, to experience love, to give love, to have strong secure foundations, in a world where we get tossed around. If we take a look at ourselves and say, “What are my foundations like, what are my expectations of God like and am I actually living in and experiencing His blessing? My hunch is that, if we took a true look at that, we might see ourselves coming up short in all of that. The question is, “What are God’s plans for my life? What are God’s plans for your life and then how do we participate in those plans?

They’re the two questions we are going to be looking at over these next four weeks as we work our way through this series that I have called, “In Everything They do, They Prosper.” Direct quote from Psalm 1 in God’s Word and we are going to spend some time today in that very first Psalm, because, I tell you, it is a beautiful Psalm, it’s is full of God’s love and God’s wisdom and God’s blessing. In fact, let’s go there now. If you have a Bible, open it up at Psalm 1. Let’s have a read of just the first two verses of Psalm 1. It says this, “Blessed are those who don’t follow the advice of the wicked or take the path of the sinners or sit on the seat of the scoffers, but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law they meditate day and night; blessed is the person.” God is in the business of blessing us. The whole point of creation is He makes us so that we can be blessed by Him, so that we can know His love, we can know His goodness, we can know all the blessings that come with being children of God.

Now you might be someone who has never, ever given their lives to Jesus. You’ve never met Jesus. You think, “What is this bloke talking about?” Well stick with us, because I would love to introduce you to a God who blesses – who blesses our socks off. The whole point of making you and making me is that we could know how much He loves us and we could experience the blessings of God. Now some days it just doesn’t feel like that. Some days bad things happen to us. We have accidents, we get sick, people are yelling at us, we’re at the end of our tether. Some days it is really hard to believe that God wants to bless us.

But let me just read you the beginning of that very first Psalm again. “Blessed are those who don’t walk in the advice of the wicked or stand with the sinners or sit with the scoffers, but their delight is the law of the Lord. On His law they meditate day and night.” In fact, it is really interesting, the book immediately before the book of the Psalms in the Old Testament, is the book of Job. Job was a man who honoured God, he was wealthy, he was blessed, he lived his life for God, he prayed, he gave to the poor. He did all the things that God called him to do, then God let curse after curse after curse after curse fall on Job. The devil came to God and said, “Can I curse Job?” – And God progressively allowed the devil to curse Job. It’s a great book to read and you get to the last bit, Chapter 42, right at the end, and when Job has traveled all this way, and when all his friends criticized him and all his family deserted him and his money went away and everything he owned was gone, right at the end, God says this, “And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.”

Sometimes we see problems and difficulties and hard days and sad days and we think, “Where is God’s blessing?” God’s heart is to bless you and to bless me and you can see it here in Job. After Job had traveled through the path that God had chosen for him, God gave him double for his trouble. God blessed Job and God’s heart is to bless you and to bless me. The past no longer has a hold over us when we belong to God and I can hear you say, “But, but, but, you don’t know my life, I had terrible parents, I had no good input. My foundations are so rotten and so cracked; my life will never be any good.” Well, let me take you to Psalm 27, verse 10. It says, “Although my mother and father have forsaken me, yet the Lord will take me up and adopt me as His child.” That is a healing Scripture. That is a Scripture for anyone whose past is robbing them of their present and their future. God wants to bless you and me.

God is in the business of healing and reconciling and holding and loving. We can get a wrong picture of God. We can get the sort of picture of God the devil wants us to have, which is, you know, God is mean spirited; God wants to take everything away from us, God …..Hang on! Listen to Psalm 1 again. “Blessed is the one who doesn’t walk in the advice of the wicked, or stand with the sinners or sit with the scoffers but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on this law he meditates day and night.” We can either get in tune with what God is doing and believe what God says about us or we can believe the devil. Now for me, I am going to get in agreement with God.

We are going to talk next week about some of the difficult times in life and what it means to be blessed in the difficult times of life. Between then and now you may want to go to the passage we are going to next week on Christianityworks, which is Proverbs chapters 1 and 2, which talks about the blessing of God in the midst of adversity. But right now I would like to focus on this Psalm 1. God wants to bless us. Full stop, end of story! Well, how, what’s involved, how does that go?

Thinking and Sitting

We are talking today about the fact God has a plan for our life and that plan is a plan of abundant blessing. We are looking at Psalm 1. If you’ve got a Bible, go and grab it, but it’s a fabulous Psalm. “Happy are those, or blessed are those who don’t walk in the advice of the wicked, or stand with the sinners, or sit with the scoffers but their delight is in the law of the Lord and on this law they meditate day and night.” What a sharp contrast, isn’t it, between those who love God and those who are wicked, those who are sinners, those who are scoffers. In fact, in verse 3, he goes on with that. “They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves don’t wither. In all that they do, they prosper.” There it is – there’s the name of our series, it’s a direct quote from Psalm 1:3. “Blessed are those who don’t walk with the wicked, or stand with sinners or sit with the scoffers, but they delight in God’s revelation and they meditate on it day and night.” Those people, they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in season and their leaves don’t wither. In all that they do, they prosper.” You know, when we walk with the wicked, we take steps away from God. When we walk with the wicked, we walk away from God and we rebel. When we stand with the sinners, we passively align ourselves with enemies of God and when we sit with the mockers, we just make ourselves comfortable with cynical people who undermine the love and the grace of God. Walking with the wicked, standing with the sinners, sitting with the mockers, is one side of that sharp contrast. The other side is the person who delights in the law of the Lord and this law he meditates day and night. See, God wants us to be involved in His plan. This is not a passive, ‘sugar-daddy’ plan. This is not a plan where God say, “Well, you believe in me and ever after there you’ll be driving a Rolls Royce and you’ll be living in a huge house and you’ll have gold-plated taps.

That is not what God is talking about here. He’s talking about much bigger things. God wants us to delight in who He is and to meditate and to think day and night. How many Christians are in the camp that walks with the wicked, that stands with the sinners, that sits with the mockers? I am sick of hearing Christian’s winging about other people behind their backs; that harbour ill towards one another, that don’t pay all their taxes. That is rubbish – that is junk. That stuff is a stench in the nostrils of God. And then we think, “Well, how come I’m not getting blessing here, how come I’m not getting peace here, what’s the matter?’ God wants to involve us in His blessing. We don’t passively receive His blessing. God’s blessing is poured out and God wants to involve us in that. He wants us to delight in Him. He wants us to spend time in His revelation which is the Word of God – the Bible – His love letter to us.

Sin – walking with wicked, standing with sinners, sitting with mockers – sin – I know it is a horrible word, but it’s what God calls it – sin misses the point. Sin completely misses the point. We want the blessing of God, we’ve got to get involved, we’ve got to get involved the way God wants us to get involved. He calls that obedience! Again, people think, that’s an old fashioned concept. Hey, listen, God wants to involve us in His goodness. Don’t we think that’s going to involve our goodness as well? Growing in the goodness of God, obeying Him, delighting in who He is.

There is a liberating Scripture out there; First Corinthians 13, verse 7. It says, “Love bears all things.” If you’re walking with the wicked and standing with sinners and sitting with the mockers and grumbling about people and complaining and stabbing them…- have a look at that verse, First Corinthians 13, verse 7 – “Love bears all things.” When other people winge and complain and do a character assassination on us and talk about us behind our backs; “love bears all things.”

We need to accept their weaknesses, not just today, but next day, and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that. We need to be looking for good; we need to be looking for peace. This is one of the biggest miracles in my life, in coming to know the person of Jesus Christ. I used to be the most critical person you could ever, ever meet. Every year when I was in the Army and we got confidential report on us as officers. Every year my confidential report said, “This officer does not suffer fools gladly.” Well, you know something, if we don’t suffer fools gladly, we’re not going to be glad, we are going to have our lives ruined by the weaknesses of other people and when God set me free from that and gave me this liberating Scripture, that love bears all things, I’ve got to tell you, that was so much blessing, that was so much peace, that was so much being set free from getting angry and frustrated by the weaknesses of the people around me. It was setting me free from walking with the wicked, from standing with the sinners, from sitting with the mockers.

Blessing comes from repentance. Another old fashioned theological term which means – leave the junk behind, for goodness sake? God is good, God wants to bless, God wants to bless your socks off – leave the junk behind – turn away from it – repent and experience the blessing of God, because it says here, that if we do that, if we leave the walking with the wicked and the standing with the sinners and the sitting with the mockers, we go away from that then we will be like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in season and they’re leaves don’t wither and in all that we do, we prosper. That’s a promise from God, that’s God’s wisdom. How? We delight – we delight in the Word of God, we meditate on it day and night. Here they were talking about the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, the law.

We look at it now through what Jesus did for us. We look back on that Old Testament and say, “There’s more to this revelation because Jesus came along, He showed us what God is like. What we read when we read that, is that we delight in the revelation of God and on that we meditate day and night. God’s revelation, God’s guidance, you know, the godly in every age live in the revelation of God. The Bible, who God is, His plans and purposes and who we are in Jesus and how we should respond, by looking at Jesus Himself and seeing who God is and by listening to what God has to say. There is a awesome Scripture – we’re not going to go there now, but I would encourage you to go to it – in Isaiah, chapter 51, where Isaiah is giving an exiled Israel, a nation exiled in slavery in Babylon, some good news and it’s all about the blessing of God. All about it!

We are going to go there, I can’t help myself and these people are in exile and they are down, and it’s been going on for a long time and God sends Isaiah to say, “I’m going to set you free. You are my people. I am He who comforts you. Why, then are you afraid of men who have to die; a human being who fades like grass? Have you forgotten the Lord and your Maker?” And then He said, “Rouse yourself! Rouse yourself; stand up Jerusalem, you who have drunk at the hand of the Lord, the cup of His wrath. Stand up, rouse yourself.” In other words; “Wake up! God wants to bless you.

Read chapter 51 of Isaiah – fabulous! And you know what we do; we trifle with the Word of God in our culture. Reading isn’t in, it’s about video games and television and you know so many things to grab our attention – a razzamatazz-y world. Politicians reduce complex issues to eight second grabs on the steps of Parliament House; that’s the kind of world that we live in. Look at the first two verses of Psalm 1 again. “Blessed are those who don’t walk with the wicked or stand with the sinners or sit with the scoffers, but they delight in the revelation of God and on that they meditate day and night.” Blessing comes when we delight in the revelation of God, in who God is. What a contrast! Delighting in words God is listening to His voice and then – goodness gracious – thinking about it, meditating on it, chewing on it. You know, you go to church and you listen to a sermon that some preacher has worked hours to prepare that sermon. People listen, they forget ninety percent of it and they get ten percent of the benefit. What if we took notes? What if we thought about what had been said during the week? I mean, what if you spent some time this week just in Psalm 1? Over and over again in prayer and meditated and chewed on it.

I remember having a dear friend, he was my business partner for many years, his name is Graham. One of the smartest and wisest people I know. He said, “You know, when I was a lad, one of my teachers said to me once, “Graham you sit and think but mostly you just sit,” and I think, well, you know something, maybe that describes a lot of Christians. Maybe we expect to get through life on thirty minutes a week, but we can’t even get through kindergarten on thirty minutes a week can we, without taking notes? Going through education, growing and changing, and reaching out, potential takes effort, takes work, takes involvement. It’s a bit like food, you know, you see some food and you sniff at it, then you bite it, then you chew it then you eat it, then you digest it, then your body uses it. Well, I think we stop at the sniffing and the biting when it comes to God’s Word. I think so often, we fail to chew and eat and digest and benefit from what God is saying to us in this fabulous love letter.

Isaiah in Chapter 31 verse 31 said this. He said, “The time is coming when God will put His law in our hearts and write His Word on our hearts and God will be our God and we will be His people.” God wants His Word to be written on our hearts. It doesn’t happen by watching TV all the time. It just doesn’t happen!

Trees That Bear Fruit

For those beautiful three verses that we have been looking at in the first Psalm; Psalm 1, finish with the notion that people who delight in God’s revelation and meditate on it, are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season. Their leaves don’t wither and in all that they do, they prosper.” What a beautiful picture; a picture of a tree with deep roots by a stream of living water – growing, bearing fruit. I believe God’s church should be like an orchard of those trees, each one of us bearing our different fruit, trees that don’t wither.

The challenge is; is that the sort of Christian we want to be? – Because that’s the sort of Christian God wants us to be. God wants to bless us and for us to be a blessing in His name. God wants our leaves to be green and our fruit to be rich for other people to enjoy. God’s Word has the power to transform you and God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” When we let God’s Word change us, when we spend the time, when we digest it and ruminate over it, hunger for it and let it change us, it is such an enormous blessing;

There are two roads. There’s the high road, the high road of sacrifice and blessing, the high road that involves drinking in God’s Word and then there’s the low road. That’s a saved soul and a wasted life. That’s a life that doesn’t experience the blessings of God, that Jesus died and rose again to give us. We have a decision to make, which road we’ll take. What’s stopping us? What’s stopping us? God’s promise is that when we digest His Word, we will be like trees planted by streams of water which yield their fruit in season and their leaves never wither and in all that they do, they prosper.

Prosperity isn’t just about money and success – prosperity is about fulfillment and joy and peace; the stuff that God brings us – the stuff that Jesus died to bring us.

Time to Wise Up

Let me ask you a question – if someone asks you, “Do you want to prosper?” What’s your answer, “Yes” or “No”? Well, it’s a bit of a no-brainer, isn’t it? We all want to prosper, but exactly what does that mean, what does it mean to you and what does it mean to me? Well the first thing we tend to think of when we hear that word ‘prosper’ is we think of money, don’t we? – We think of being wealthy. When people say ‘prosperity’ they mean lots of money, by and large. I guess you could add to that the concept of success. Do you want to be successful in all the things that you do – in everything that you turn your hand to, do you want to succeed? Well, of course we do, we all want to prosper, to be wealthy and to succeed and I guess that sounds great but there’s something implied in that term ‘prosperity’ which is more than just money and success. Because money and success without joy and fulfillment and contentment and peace, well frankly, they’re not worth having. Do you want to prosper, have money and success and fame and whatever that means to you, without the joy and peace and the contentment? Well, most people would say, “That’s not for me, no thank you; I want to have all that joy, and that peace and that contentment that comes with prosperity”. Yet, last week we saw that it’s more than possible to have one without the other. It’s more than possible to have fame and success and money without that sense of peace and contentment.

If you believe all the ads on television – the new house, the new car, the new clothes – they equal prosperity and automatically, they bring joy and fulfillment. I mean, they never show on advertisements, people with a new house, a new car and new clothes looking all glum and dejected. They want us to believe that those things, whatever it is that they’re advertising today, bring prosperity and that prosperity automatically brings that joy and fulfillment. But recent research into large lottery winners, tells us that’s not the case, that by and large, over ten years, people who have had a large win in the lottery, it’s made almost no difference at all to their sense of contentment and fulfillment. Now, please don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that those things are a bad thing, I’m not saying that having a house or a car or nice clothes, in and of itself is a bad thing, but simply this – that they don’t automatically produce a prosperity that fills us, a prosperity that satisfies us.

This is the second program in a series that I’ve called, “In All They Do, They Prosper”, because it’s a promise from God. Last week, in the first program, we looked at the first Psalm in the Old Testament and it contains that promise. Let me read it to you. “How happy is the man who doesn’t follow the advice of the wicked or take the path of the sinners or join a group of mockers, instead his delight is in the Lord’s instruction and he meditates on that day and night. He’s like a tree planted beside streams of water, that bears fruit in season and whose leaf doesn’t wither. In whatever he does, he prospers. The wicked aren’t like that instead they are like chaff and the wind blows them away. The wicked won’t survive the judgment; the sinners won’t be in the community of righteousness, but the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, the way of the wicked leads to ruin.”

I guess maybe today that sounds a little bit trite – be good and you’ll prosper, be bad and you’ll be ruined – but in a sense that is exactly God’s plan. God’s plan is to have people who are His, His children, people who worship Him and listen to Him and meditate on what He has to say, day and night, and those people, He says, “Are like trees planted beside streams of water, that bear fruit in season and whose leaves don’t wither and whatever they do, they prosper.” But did you see how the Psalm began – “How happy is the man…” See, this concept of happiness; another way that it is often rendered in different translations, is ‘blessed’. It’s this concept of prosperity includes happiness and blessing, and it happens when we have a relationship with God. It happens when we meditate on who He is and what He does and what He says.

Last week’s message was called, ‘We sit and think, but mostly we just sit.” because often we don’t think, we don’t meditate, we don’t chew over what it is that God is saying to us. This glib, trite stuff that the advertising machine dishes up to us in the media – ‘buy this house in this new estate and you will have a wonderful life.’ Come on! We’re being programmed, in a sense, to think a certain way, to think that things equal prosperity, but you scratch those images of success, you have a look at them – they are paper thin, they don‘t work – we know that, yet we go on believing it. We know that, we let the advertising industry program the way that we think. It’s insidious! There is more to life; the most important part is on the inside. Well, let’s have a reality check. How much do we subscribe to the worldly images of prosperity, just to be disappointed? You know, things, relationships, career promotions – that’ll make me happy, when I get that, I’ll be prosperous – verses, having a rich, deep, satisfying relationship with God. What is our priority? Come on! What are your priorities? It’s time, I think to wise up; it’s time for us to have a reality check.

We looked last week at Psalm 1, but this week we are going to begin with the first chapter of Proverbs and the first chapter of Proverbs says this in verse 7, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.” It begins with understanding God – it begins with honouring and worshipping God. There’s a world view that says, “Buy the house, the car, the clothes,” and there’s a God view, and today we’re going to look at both of those – the world’s view and God’s view on prosperity – and a lot of it has to do with the people we hang out with.

The Wrong Crowd

Well, what does God’s prosperity look like? Last week we looked at Psalm 1 and God promised that when we have a relationship with Him, we will prosper in all that we do, as we really think about what He has to say, and Proverbs Chapter 1 and verse 7, says, “Hang on, it all starts with God.” The first step in learning is bowing down to God and only fools thumb their noses at wisdom and learning. Let’s read on straight after that, beginning at verse 8, because it’s a wonderful thing that He then talks about. He talks about the impact of the people that we hang around with, on our prosperity in life. This is what He says.

“Pay close attention, friend, to what your Father tells you and never forget what you learned at your Mother’s knee. Wear their counsel like garlands of flowers in your hair, like rings on your fingers. Dear friend, if bad companions tempt you, don’t go along with them. If they say, “Let’s go out and raise some hell, let’s beat up some old man and mug some old woman, let’s pick them clean and then get ready for their funerals, we’ll load up on top quality loot, we’ll haul it home by the truck-load, join us for the time of your life. With us it’s a share and share alike.” Friend, don’t give them a second look, don’t listen to them for a minute, they’re racing to a very bad end, hurrying to ruin everything they lay their hands on. Nobody robs a bank with everyone watching, yet that’s what these people are doing, they’re doing themselves in. When you grab all that you can get, that’s what happens. The more you get, the less you are.”

Wow! – doesn’t muck around there! Do you remember your Mum and your Dad saying to you “Don’t hang around with the wrong crowd?” I remember my parents saying that. It seemed to be their worst fear, and as a teenager, you know, we roll our eyes to the back of our heads, saying, “What do Mum and Dad know?” And here we are now and God is saying to us, “Listen, pay close attention, friend, to what your Dad tells you, never forget what you learn from your Mum, wear them like a garland of flowers on your head and a ring on your finger.” That rocks you back – that makes you think when you read that. I can still hear them saying that – “Don’t hang around with the wrong crowd.”

That is such great advice. It seemed so out of touch then, but that is such great advice. Not just for back then but here and now, I think we still need to hear that. If we are looking at the world’s view of prosperity, verses God’s view of prosperity, the picture here, that God paints in the first chapter of Proverbs, verse 8 and onwards – about rolling over some old man and mugging some old woman, getting all that you need, filling yourself up, taking whatever you want – it’s a pretty ugly picture, isn’t it? When we hear on the news that an old lady has been mugged and her handbag has been stolen, we’re outraged. That’s the picture that God is painting here for us. If we are greedy and want to fill ourselves and see prosperity as having everything, we are saying, “Hey, you are racing off to a very bad end, if you hang around people like that, that’s exactly how you’ll end up. If you hang around people who think that way and talk that way, you’ll end up looking like them and the more you try and grab all you can get, the less that you are.

Now, we might say, “Come on, I’m not going to beat up an old man or old woman, that’s not me. No, no, no, that’s an extreme example.” Maybe it is an extreme example, but it grabs your attention, doesn’t it? These days, for most of us, it’s much more subtle. Kids hang out with the wrong crowd, they binge drink, they’re sexually active at young ages, they’re on drugs and then we grow up and adults think, “Well, you know, I can do whatever, everyone lives together now before they get married, I can sleep around with who ever I want to, just ignore God and have anger in my heart and bitterness in my heart and arguing and rebellion at work and …” – the list goes on, doesn’t it? We could list another hundred things without even thinking. Come on, you’re being so old fashioned, Berni, everyone does this now-a-days, everyone is like that. Well, if we hang around with the wrong crowd, it reinforces all those things, you hang around with people who mug old ladies, and I tell you, it won’t be long and you will be mugging old ladies. It’s true, the wrong crowd has a huge impact on who we are and what we do.

We see how they behave and we stoop to their level, we whinge, they whinge, we whinge, they whinge, they reinforce, we’re always whinging – it’s a vicious circle. God the Father – God, Dad – what’s His advice, what’s His wisdom? Well, firstly, He wants us to prosper and here He is saying, “Don’t hang around with the wrong crowd friend, don’t even give them a second look, don’t listen to them. Move on, they’re racing to a bad end, it doesn’t work! But will we listen? Will we listen to God’s wisdom or will we still go and have coffee with those people and gossip about other people and have bad patterns and think that we can prosper the wrong way. We can prosper by climbing the ladder; we can prosper by walking on people. That’s not the sort of prosperity that God is talking about. That’s not the sort of wisdom that God’s talking about and it’s that wisdom – the wisdom of God – because it’s in that wisdom that we really discover God’s prosperity.

Wisdom and Prosperity

Well, today on the program we are looking at the wisdom of God and how that brings prosperity into our lives, because God’s wisdom is linked with God‘s prosperity. Just before, we looked at how God is giving us almost parental advice, like a Mum and Dad, who love us. Don’t hang around with the wrong crowd. At the time when we are teenagers and Mum and Dad are telling us that, seems so old fashioned, but in reality, it is well motivated and it is such wise advice, and the question that each one of us has to answer, is, “Am I hanging around with the wrong crowd? Am I hanging around with friends who are dragging me down, who are being critical, who are whinging, who are complaining?” Because if we are, those people, well, they are going to pull us down. They are going to rob us of the prosperity that God has for us, because prosperity isn’t just about money and success, prosperity is about fulfillment and joy and peace – the stuff that God brings us, the stuff that Jesus died to bring us.

Now we can either embrace God’s wisdom or we can ignore it and Proverbs Chapter 1, goes on to talk about this very thing. It’s a kind of a picture of a town crier; let me read it to you, beginning at Proverbs chapter 1, if you have a Bible, verse 20.

“Lady Wisdom goes out on the streets and shouts, at the town centre, she makes her speech. In the middle of the traffic, she takes a stand, at the busiest corner, she calls out. “You simpletons, how long will you wallow in your ignorance? You cynics, how long will you feed your cynicism? You idiots, how long will you refuse to learn? About face, I can revise your life. Look, I am ready to pour out my spirit on you; I’m ready to tell you all I know. As it is, I’ve called you, but you have turned a deaf ear. I’ve reached out to you, but you have ignored me. Well, since you laughed at my counsel and made a joke of my advice, how can I take you seriously? I’ll turn the tables and the joke about on your trouble. What if the roof falls in and your whole life goes to pieces, what if catastrophe strikes and there’s nothing to show for your life but rubble and ashes? You’ll need me then. You’ll call for me but don’t expect an answer, no matter how hard you look, you won’t find me because you hated knowledge and you had nothing to do with the fear of God, because you wouldn’t take my advice, and brushed aside all my offers to train you. Well, you have made your bed now lie in it. You wanted your own way, now, how do you like it? Don’t you see what happens? You simpletons, you idiots! Carelessness kills, complacency is murder. First pay attention to me, then relax; now you can take it easy, you’re in good hands.”

He doesn’t mince words there, does he? Anybody whose ever been a parent, whose brought up teenagers knows that it is tough work, because a teenager is somewhere between childhood and adulthood – a teenager is learning to become an adult and at that stage anything parents say, well, you know, doesn’t make sense, and they don’t listen. Well, it’s just the nature of things. It’s just as well I was never like that when I was a teenager! Yea, right!

Now here’s the problem; here’s why we don’t prosper. God is crying out to us, saying, ”Look, I’m God, your creator, I’m God your Father, I’m God with the most wonderful intentions, I’m the God who wants to bless you and prosper you and here’s all my wisdom, it’s all in my Word, it’s all in the Bible. It’s about life, it’s about real stuff,” and we don’t make it a priority to listen. I can’t tell you the number of times I have been to churches and listened to a really good message from someone who’s preaching and people wander out grumbling, saying, “Did you know he went for thirty two minutes? – I can’t believe he preached that long?” What is it with us, that we can watch a three hour movie and be entertained but we can’t find thirty minutes to listen to some really good teaching from God’s wisdom. We ignore God, we are too busy, we brush Him aside. One of the best things I ever did – in fact two things – was firstly go to Bible College for four years and get the depth of understanding of God’s wisdom. Not just dry theological training but a real depth of understanding of who God is and what He is saying, and then listening to a woman called Joyce Meyer, whom you can watch on TV right around the world. I tell you, she taught me more about God’s wisdom in twenty minutes to half an hour than I could ever, ever have imagined.

Spiritually, as Christians, we can be children and then we mature and become teenagers and become adults and then we become really mature, that’s God’s plan. You read James, Chapter 1, that’s exactly what God wants for us. He wants us to grow up into Christ and be mature and lacking in nothing. Now being a teenager is fun for a while, but it’s hard too. You’re hormones are going up and down, you’re trying to figure out what it means to be an adult, you’re learning tough things, you have pimples on your face. If we spend our whole lives as teenagers, could we live life to the full, could we reach our fullest potential, could we be all that God has planned for us? Clearly, the answer is no! It’s a time, it’s a faze, but I tell you, I believe that the church is full of adolescent Christians; people who haven’t soaked themselves in the wisdom of God. That passage we just read from Proverbs Chapter 1 is a picture of wisdom and God as a town crier, standing on the corner, calling out, “Listen to me! Listen to me! I love you!” Then sometimes, (you look at verse 24), we turn a deaf ear, and then when it all comes crashing down around us, as it always does, that’s when we really need wisdom, but wisdom is like a harvest; in the good years when there are plenty, we fill the store houses, and then in the bad years, the years of famine, we draw on the reserves. Wisdom builds up, it’s gradual. It happens through learning and experience. It’s tough; it’s the school of hard knocks.

Wisdom in a marriage relationship is when a husband and wife are arguing and pick, pick, pick, God convicts us to hold our tongue – that’s knowledge, but in weeks and months that follow it, when we implement it, when it’s hard and it’s excruciating and we work through it, one day it becomes wisdom. It’s a part of our maturity; it’s there for the good times and the bad times. God wants you to prosper, He wants me to prosper. But His version of prosperity isn’t restricted to lots of money and success. God’s prosperity is about wisdom and maturity and peace and when you read that thing in Proverbs Chapter 1 – which I would encourage you to read again – it seems harsh but sometimes the truth hurts. It’s God crying out to us, “Wake up! I want you to prosper, I want to bless you, but you are ignoring me and there’s one thing for certain, it will come crashing down, it will hurt, don’t go there! This is a desperate, loving warning from the Father, but there is an up side – I’d encourage you to read Chapter 2 of Proverbs, because God talks about His wisdom as being our protection. We have a choice; we can listen or not, we can take God’s wisdom on board or not. Question is, do we really want to prosper?

We have all rejected God at some stage, yet He comes and gives us a new life through Jesus and He says, “I want to bless you, I’m not just your Ruler, I’m not just your King, I’m you Helper, I want to bless you.

The Prosperity Dilemma

It is just fantastic to be with you again this week and today is the third program in a series that we’ve called, “In all that they do, they prosper.” Prosperity is something that we all want. Mostly I guess, when we talk about prosperity, people talk about money but last week we saw that it is so much more than just money and even without money and things and stuff, we can have a joy and a contentment that we really can point to and say, “That is my prosperity, that is what God has given me.” A sort of richness and fullness of life, an abundance where we look at every day and go, “Man, I am so glad that I’m alive today.” There’s an advertisement cliché though. You may have heard the advertisement a few years ago. It said, “But where do you get it?”

I often watch a program on the Lifestyle channel, on cable TV and it’s called “Grand Designs” – it’s a program out of the U.K., and it’s about house renovations. I’ve done a renovation with my wife – we have an old nineteenth century terrace which we renovated a few years back. So we kind of know the ups and downs of housing renovations. And so we love watching this show, Jacqui and I, called “Grand Designs” – but it’s renovations on a grand scale. Normally they are quite large houses that they renovate, often old houses that they modernise. Last week these people took an old mill, that was a derelict relic from the industrial era and they completely gutted it inside and built this ultra modern, white interior. It was the most incredible renovation with technological wizardry coming out of every wall. It was huge and I guess we enjoyed watching it because it reminded us of the days when we were doing a renovation – I must say – on a much less grand scale, so we had some affinity. So these people got to the end of their renovation and had a real sense of achievement and satisfaction that they had done this wonderful thing to their house. It cost them about three hundred thousand pounds, which is, in my money, in the Australian currency, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Now for me that is an awful lot of money. It’s great that they did that and it’s great that they enjoyed it and it turned out wonderfully well, which not all the houses on this program do, but does all of that equal prosperity in their lives – that’s the question?

What does prosperity feel like? Have you ever been in a place, a nice holiday destination or a nice home that has been renovated or a nice car or a nice coffee shop or a nice marriage or a nice family and you look around and you think – this is really nice, it doesn’t get much better that this, so why is it that I’m not happy, why is it that I’m not content? Why is it that I’m not at rest inside? I have! I remember one year, being on holidays and it was just the most beautiful place and yet inside I was completely in turmoil. Now this is a common condition – we get to that place, we get to that thing or that goal, whatever we thought that would mean prosperity and then we go, “Now that I’m prosperous, now that I’ve arrived, it doesn’t feel like prosperity at all.” We’ve been there, haven’t we? And today’s message is called, “It doesn’t feel like prosperity at all.” What’s that about? Why do we have that feeling when we have all the right things around us and yet we don’t have that sense of fulfillment and contentment? Why is that? We are going to unpack that very question today on the program.

Two weeks ago we began this series which is called, “In all that they do, they prosper,” looking at Psalm 1 and we see there in Psalm 1 that ‘prospering’ is about being close to God; about living our lives in Him and through Him and for Him in a really close relationship with Him. And then last week, in the second program we saw how much prosperity is to be found in God’s wisdom, in applying His wisdom to our lives. Now those two programs were really the foundations, the pillars on which today’s message stands. Today, if you have a Bible, we are going to look at Psalm 115, so open it up – if you don’t, I’ll be reading some bits out of that Psalm from a very contemporary translation.

The question is – why is it that when we get to that place of promised prosperity, that it doesn’t feel like that? Why is that? Let’s open God’s Word, the Bible, at Psalm 115 and I’d just like to read just the first two verses of that Psalm. I’m reading from a translation by Eugene Peterson, called The Message, because I just like the way He translates this Psalm from the original Hebrew and it begins like this; the first two verses. “Not for our sake, God, no, not for our sake, but for Your Name’s sake, show us your glory. Do it on account of your merciful love, do it on account of your faithful ways, do it so none of the nations around us can say to us, “Where now, where is your God?”

It seems like a kind of funny place to start to talk about God’s prosperity and in fact this Psalm begins with talking about God’s glory, showing His glory to the nations around Israel. So it does seem like a funny place to start, but as we work our way through this Psalm, what we’ll see is that it is actually talking about God’s blessing on His people, about God prospering them. And it begins out by saying, “Lord, not for our sake, don’t do this for us, but we have an outward desire, we want to see your name glorified, we want to see the nations around us, look at us and see your mercy and your love and your faithfulness to us so that they can never look at us and say, “Well, Ok, we’re looking at you, you don’t have such a good lot, where is your God exactly today?”

Now we normally start prosperity with ‘us’, with ‘me’, it’s an inward desire. “I want to be blessed for my sake. Bless me so that I’ll be happy – me, me, me!” It’s true, isn’t it? But yet God is a God of mercy and faithfulness and the Psalmist is saying, “Pour yourself out on me and through me and show your glory.” So, what? So that none of the nations around us can say -”Well, where the heck is your God anyway?” Imagine that! People who don’t know Jesus looking at God’s people, you and me, and saying, “Wow! I want what they’ve got – I want to be blessed with what they’ve got. We are going to come back to that radical thought in a minute and just see what it is others should be seeing in us.

Dead Prosperity

We are exploring this radical thought; this contrast of God’s people who are carrying around in them and through them and on them, God’s blessing, with a tactile, here and now world – the worldly blessings. This Psalm that we’re looking at, Psalm 115, makes such a sharp contrast between the two and it begins as we just saw by saying, “God, don’t bless me for my sake, bless me for your sake. Bless me so that all of those people out there who don’t know you yet, would look at me and see how awesome you are.” Let’s read on now, the next five verses, from verse three to eight – because this is really the crux of the Psalm. It goes like this – “Our God, our God is in heaven doing whatever He wants to do. Their gods, their gods are metal and wood, handmade in a basement shop, carved mouths that can’t talk, painted eyes that can’t see, tin ears that can’t hear, molded noses that can’t smell, hands that can’t grasp, feet that can’t walk or run, throats that never utter a sound. Those who make those idols have become just like them; they have become just like the gods they trust.”

There it is! There is the reason why it is, that blessings that we try and manufacture with our own hands, prosperity that we try and manufacture with our own hands, does not work. You see what the Psalmist is saying here? He is saying, the reason they don’t work is that they’re dead, they’re not real. Now idols have been worshipped right down through human history and the Psalmist is saying here, “They’re futile, they’re just bits of wood with silver or gold inlaid. We can’t put our faith in those things because they’re dead, blind Freddy can see that, yet down through the ages, people have done just that. They’ve bowed down to dead images, dead idols and sworn by them but when they’re dead, they’re dead! Let’s just stop and let that sink in for a minute, because it’s important. Wood and silver, fashioned into an idol, we can’t put our faith in that. It’s blindingly, glimpsingly, obvious that it doesn’t make sense, right – it is not going to bless us. So, why should it be any different to any other form of manufactured prosperity that we idolize?

The dictionary definition of ‘idol’ is – ‘an image used as an object of worship, a false god, something that’s adored, often blindly and excessively‘ – and this one I really love -‘something visible but without substance.’ So a house or a career or a car or a plasma TV or a sound system or a dress or a….! Nothing wrong with those things, per se, but they have limitations, they’re just things, they’re works of our hands, they’re stuff that we made and when we try and elevate them in our lives and say, “That’s prosperity, that’s what I put my faith in, ‘stuff‘, I’ll trust that this stuff will make me to prosper, I’ll trust that this stuff makes me happy,” we are idolizing them. All that stuff is capable of doing is delivering a fleeting feeling, that’s all. When we elevate stuff or position or reputation or career; when we elevate those things and we put our trust into them, for them to make us prosper, to make us happy, then we are idolizing them. We are blindly and excessively worshipping something that’s visible but without substance and that’s why it doesn’t feel like prosperity when we get there, because it’s dead.

Here it is; here’s the answer that humanity has been looking for, for as long as we can remember. Stuff! Stuff is dead, that’s why it can’t bring us joy or peace or fulfillment, but it’s actually much worse than that. Just have another read of what he says here about idols. “Our God is alive, He’s in heaven, He’s doing whatever He wants to do – He’s a sovereign person, being, but their gods are metal and wood, carved in a basement, carved mouths that can’t talk, eyes that can’t see, ears that can’t hear, noses that can’t smell, hands that can’t grasp, feet that can’t walk or run, throats that never utter a sound,” but here’s where it gets worse, because the last verse in that little section, verse eight, says this, “Those who make those idols have become just like them, they have become just like the gods in whom they trust.”

What are the idols in our lives? The things in which we trust, that will make us contented and fulfilled. We carve those idols but what makes them idols, is that we put our trust in them, we blindly accept them, we inherit the deception in advertising, which says – buy this stuff and you will be content, and we keep walking down the road with that. We end up dead inside too. I wonder how many of us have been there. I wonder how many of us are so programmed, so convinced that money or effort or emotional investment or chasing a mirage – something visible which is without substance – I wonder how many of us have been so hard wired by that, that we believe it without even thinking about it.

Let me say it again very clearly and very plainly. Stuff does not make us happy!! It does not give us contentment and fulfillment. It’s an impostor. There is an alternative. God’s heart is for us to experience the ‘real thing’ and in a minute we are going to look at that and see what God’s ’real thing’ actually is.

The Real Thing

We have been taking a look at the fact that manufactured prosperity equals dead works. It doesn’t matter how much we try and make ourselves prosperous, doesn’t matter how many televisions and sound systems and cars and clothes we stuff into our lives, ultimately, when we try and fill ourselves up with stuff, it’s a cancer that eats us from the inside. The more we try and pour in, the worse it gets. This Psalm that we are looking at, Psalm 115, started with a notion of God blessing His people, to shine His glory out through them to other people. The writer of the Psalm comes back to exactly that. I’d like to read that last little bit, verses nine to seventeen. He contrasts the dead idols with the God of Israel and says this; “You who fear God, trust in God, trust in your Helper and your Ruler. God, remember us and bless us, bless the families of Israel and let God bless all who fear God. Bless the small, bless the great, let God enlarge your families, giving you growth; growth to your children. May you be blessed by God – by God who made the heaven and the earth? The heaven of heavens is for God but He put us in charge of the earth. Dead people can’t praise God – not a word is to be heard from those buried in the ground, but we bless God. Oh, we just bless Him now, we bless Him always. Halleluiah!

This Psalmist understands. He is putting his trust, not in stuff, not in dead idols that are carved by human hands, not in the things that we can buy in the shops and in the supermarkets and in the car yards. No, trust God, not stuff. I love the way he says twice, “Trust in your Helper, trust in your Ruler.” Now we often think of God as King, as a Ruler, as the God above everything, but how often do we forget that God is also our Helper? What an awesome God, and to help us, to bless us, actually means, He humbles Himself; He brings Himself low, because, listen, let’s face it, you and I, we have all rejected God at some stage. He deserves better than that, yet He comes and gives us a new life through Jesus and He says, “I want to bless you. I’m not just your Ruler, I’m not just your King, I’m your Helper. I want to bless you.”

May you be blessed by God, the God who made the heavens and the earth – the whole universe! This God is the God that wants to bless us. Let’s pick up on that for a minute, because God’s blessing is so much bigger than money and things. I’d like to share very briefly, a story from one of our team who was in China recently, amongst the persecuted church, which is work that we are heavily involved in. Just have a quick listen to what he says. He was sitting across from a man in a village in Inner Mongolia, in the northern part of China. They had suffered drought and there was hardly anything in the land. These people were poor and it was a jurte, a humble Mongolian house and the night sky was a canopy of stars, without the city lights and he was talking to the Chinese brother who is the head of this house church network in Inner Mongolia. They receive our radio program and listen to it regularly. Now from ’94 to ’96 this man served as an assistant district leader of a group of four and in November 1996 more than twenty co-workers, or approximately eighty percent of the leaders in that area were caught by the police; they were beaten, they were shocked with electric prods, they were battered in the face with shoes and hung by their hands behind their backs.

The purpose of the crack-down was to force them to name names of other leaders and to force compliance with the local authorities, but this brother was imprisoned for thirty eight days and repeatedly beaten and shocked and ultimately he was released. He didn’t bribe anyone, there was just a phone call that came from a senior official and he was looking down the barrel of a labour camp for a good many years, leaving his family behind, and he was set free. “And,” writes this associate of mine, “there was a pause in the conversation and my brother, who was smiling at me, lent forward and suggested that it was a call from heaven. After their release, this small team of leaders continued to spread the Gospel, now more that ever.” You know, sitting up there, in Inner Mongolia, in that humble house with none of the stuff that I have in my life, probably none of the stuff that you have in your life, that Chinese brother of ours, I truly believe that under the stars – those same stars that Abraham looked at all those thousands of years before – that man is blessed. Amidst persecution, that man is blessed with a relationship with God.

Do you think he is blessed? I certainly do. There’s something much deeper going on there for him in leading a network of house churches, with actually over a million members. The numbers are kind of mind blowing to me but there are over a million members in his house church, most of whom listen to our Chinese language programs. These people know what it is to know God amidst difficult circumstances that actually threaten their well-being. The biggest blessing of all is the relationship between God and us and sure, He adds things to that relationship. He blesses us materially; He gives us peace and joy. He gives us a heart for giving so that we can use the gifts that He has given us, not for ourselves, but for His glory, to bring glory to His name so that all of those people out there, who think that prosperity comes through stuff; that prosperity comes through material well-being alone; they can look at a person who follows Jesus, a person maybe like you or me and say, “Wow, look at what that person’s got, there’s something more, there’s something in that person that speaks so strongly of a peace and a satisfaction and a fulfillment that I just haven’t been able to experience, chasing my dreams of material wealth.” That’s the point of this Psalm.

God’s blessing isn’t meant to stop with us, it’s not an inward flow, it’s a through flow. The blessing flows from God to us and out through to other people. It flows on and on. “Dead people,” says verse seventeen in this Psalm, “dead people can not praise God, not a word comes from those buried in the ground.” What’s the point? The point is that God’s blessing would flow through you and through me to those who are dead, to bring them life through a knowledge of Jesus. Let’s not look at prosperity as something that we hoard. The greatest element of God’s prosperity is walking in close relationship with Him, just like that man in Inner Mongolia, who’s been persecuted for his faith, he’s spent time in prison, being tortured and cattle prodded. Life is like that sometimes. I pray that I will never experience something like that but who knows? Who knows what you will experience and in the middle of that, God means to prosper you. God means to pour His blessing out on you. God wants us to have God, the real thing.

Blessings – it’s not about what we think it is – flash cars and big things – no, blessing, my prosperity, is all about the stuff that really matters. About being poor in spirit, about acknowledging who we are for God.

A Recap on Prosperity

When I was a child, I discovered I love chocolate – most kids do and you know something, there’s something about Easter egg chocolate. I think it’s in a whole different category or genre, it’s so special. You know when you’re a kid you pig out on chocolate and all of a sudden, after a few times of doing that, you realise it makes you feel really sick and bloated. Of course when you grow up, you realise chocolate is one of the most fatty things that you can possibly eat, so we have to stick to small quantities. You know, fats and cholesterol and our health – it’s all an issue as we start to put on the years, right, and the grey hairs. And so these days I try and have a balanced healthy diet and surprisingly enough, when we are not eating really well, a good and balanced diet with vegetables and cereals and all the stuff that you’re supposed to eat, we feel good. You know, you feel healthy, there’s a certain vitality, if I can use the word. You get a real sense that you are prospering, that you are doing well in life, when you are putting the right stuff into your mouth.

Well, what is prosperity? Is prosperity about eating all of the chocolate that you can stuff into your face? Or is prosperity about enjoying life because of the vitality and the vigour that comes from actually eating a balanced diet and exercising and getting plenty of rest. You know, even though I still adore chocolate, it’s pretty obvious to me where I want to be. It’s pretty obvious to me that I want to have that sense of well being and vitality and energy to do all of the things that I love to do in my life. Now, mind you, that’s not immediately obvious to me when someone waves a bar of chocolate under my nose, but you know what I mean. You know, it’s the immediate gratification that comes from pigging out on all the lovely things that we like to pig out on and yet, the long term sense of well being from eating well. All you chocoholics out there know exactly what I am talking about.

Today is the last message in a series called, “In all that they do, they prosper,” and today’s message is called, “Prospering in Christ.” I truly believe that God wants us to prosper but so many people are disappointed because the prosperity that God offers, somehow, doesn’t seem to live up to the expectations they have. It’s like chocolate and me. Sometimes we go looking for prosperity in the wrong places, in the wrong direction and today’s message is about really bringing this whole issue of God’s desire to bless us and prosper us, together, in life here and now. Exactly, what does it mean to prosper in Christ?

But before we go there, I’d like to recap the first three messages in the series that brought us right up to this point. A
d the very first one three weeks ago was called, “We sit and think but mostly we just sit,” and the promise of prosperity actually comes from the Scripture passage we used there, which is Psalm 1, which says this, “Happy are those who don’t follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers, but they delight in the Law of the Lord and on His law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season and their leaves don’t wither. In all that they do, they prosper.” Maybe sometime in your life you have asked the question, “Why is it that I’m not prospering, what’s going wrong in my life?”

Well, what this Psalm tells us is that, how we live, the choices that we make, actually impact on whether we prosper. Happy are those who don’t follow the advice of the wicked, who don’t take the path that the sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers. Happy are those people, instead of doing that, they delight in doing what God has to say to them. They don’t just delight in it, they meditate on it, read it and digest it and learn it and take God’s Word into them because it changes them. Those are the ones that are happy; those are the ones who are blessed. It’s not about stuffing ourselves with all the gratifying things that this world has to offer, that’s not what prosperity is about. Prosperity is about that deep, deep joy that comes when we are living the life that God wants us to live and those people, the Psalmist says, are like trees, planted by irrigation ducts – they yield fruit in its season, their leaves don’t wither and in all that they do they prosper. It’s kind of like that ‘chocolate verses good eating’ analogy. When we live the good life that God has planned for us, the balanced life, the life of goodness – righteousness, the Bible calls it – that’s what prosperity is. Prosperity is like being a tree that’s planted by this endless supply of fresh, clean, living water and even on the hottest days, when all the other trees are withering and wilting and dying, this tree that’s prospering – its leaves never shrivel and fall off and in the right season it bears fruit – and that fruit isn’t fruit that’s consumed by the tree, that fruit is fruit that’s consumed by other people. That’s the picture of prosperity and in all that they do, people like that, prosper.

In the second message, ‘The Prosperity of Wisdom’, we saw that Proverbs Chapter 1 goes on and talks about exactly the same thing. That Wisdom is like a town crier, crying out, “Listen to me,” and yet no one listens and in Proverbs Chapter 1, Wisdom says, “How long will you, oh simple ones, love being simple?” Wisdom is something we develop during the good times. We proactively learn and it carries us through the bad times. The town crier says in Chapter 1, “Then when distress and anguish fall upon you, you’ll call for me and I won’t answer you, you’ll seek me out but you won’t find me.” The wisdom of life is seriously taking God’s Word in us, not just some thirty minute sermon, once a week. As I’ve said once before, you can’t get through the first year of school by just going there once a week, for thirty minutes. Wisdom is listening to God, day by day by day. Getting His Word in us, feeding on it, so that we prosper through that wisdom and even through the dark times in life, we still have the wisdom of God to fall back on.

Then last week the message that we looked at was called, “It doesn’t feel like prosperity,” and we looked at Psalm 115, which really contrasts people who make idols with their human hands, verses people who worship the true God, the living God, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. When we can make idols today of chocolate, of money, of prosperity, of cars, of houses, of holidays – you know, there are so many things that we can have as idols and effectively bow down and worship them – and yet Psalm 115 says, “No, don’t do that, go for the real thing, go for the God who loves you, go for the God who wants to bless you – deep, deep inside – go for this God. Wake up! You won’t find the satisfaction that you are expecting in prosperity, chasing down all these things that the world has to offer. They’re great, but that’s not the main game. It’s not where the action is, it’s not where the real satisfaction and blessing and prosperity is – you’ll only find that in God. And it’s interesting you know that as we look at those three messages, they were all based in the Old Testament – Psalm 1, Proverbs Chapter 1 and Psalm 115. In the Old Testament, the word ‘prosperity’ or ‘prospering’ or ‘prospered’ occurs sixty eight times. How many times do you think that ‘prosperity’ occurs in the New Testament’? Well, actually, it only happens once.

What Does God Mean?

Well, what does God mean by having the word ‘prosperity’ appear sixty eight times in the Old Testament and only once in the New Testament and in fact, that one time that it appears in the New Testament, it’s pointing back to a prosperity that happened in the Old Testament? Why is it that the New Testament doesn’t use the word ’prosperity’? The answer is that it focuses on ‘blessing.’ You see, you take prosperity plus God’s grace and that’s a blessing. ‘Blessing’ is much deeper, much more relational. You see, in the Old Testament there are few things that signified God’s blessing – they were land, livestock and children – if you had lots of land, you had lots of kids, you had lots of livestock, you were considered to be blessed.

That’s why the Promised Land was so important for the land of Israel. Why was that? Well, they didn’t know about Jesus yet, and at the beginning of the New Testament, which starts right with the birth of Christ, what we discover is God wants to give us a new revelation, to be much more relational, inner rather than outer. God shifts down a couple of gears, He reaches deep inside us through the love of Christ on the cross and He says, “I want to bless you, through Jesus.” Now He doesn’t throw out Old Testament prosperity, He simply goes deeper to our inner foundations and says, “I want to bless you.” So the question is, deep down in your heart of hearts, do you believe that God wants to radically, abundantly, outrageously bless and prosper you? Come on, on a scale of zero to ten, how much do you think God wants to bless you?

Well, it’s time for us to look at what God’s Word says. If you have a Bible, grab it and open it to Ephesians Chapter 1, because in that chapter, verse 3, He says something outrageous about blessing. He says this, “That God has blessed us in Christ with every Spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” That’s what Paul writes, the Apostle, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for He has blessed us in Christ with every Spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” Now let me get this – it’s not one or two, it’s not some Spiritual blessings, it’s not a hundred Spiritual blessings, it’s EVERY Spiritual blessing and notice that Paul writes, it‘s not like God is going to do that, it’s not that God will one day bless us with every Spiritual blessing, Paul writes that God HAS blessed us in Christ with every Spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, through Jesus Christ.

So, God lifts up our gaze and points us towards heaven and says, “Listen, have a look at my perspective for a minute. You might be looking at your little dung heap and your problems and your limitations and the things that are frustrating you at the moment. Look up at me. Look, because I am the God who has blessed you with every Spiritual blessing, in Christ in heavenly places. And the word that’s used there for blessing, is the Greek word, ‘eulogia’, we get the word ‘eulogy’ from that. What’s a ‘eulogy’? Well, ‘eulogy’ is when someone dies, you or I get up and talk about that person and generally, we don’t say nasty things, generally, we say good things and nice things. So the word ‘eulogia’, the word ‘blessing’ means God speaks well of us – God is praising and encouraging us – God in heaven is speaking every possible blessing that He can come up with over our lives.

Paul elsewhere in the book of Romans writes that God calls things that aren’t, as though they are. When God speaks things happen. When God said, “Let there be light, there was light and it was good.” God spoke the whole of creation into existence and get this – just get this – right this very instant, God is speaking His blessing over your life! Wow, let’s just let that sink in for a minute. That’s His promise that He HAS blessed us, with every Spiritual blessing. How can that be, I don’t deserve that? No, you and I don’t. That’s why Paul writes that God has blessed us with every Spiritual blessing in Christ. Through what Jesus did on the cross, reconciling us back to God, through the forgiveness we have, the eternal life we have, through God’s presence in us, through His Spirit, every Spiritual blessing is ours. That’s real prosperity, that’s real blessing. Chocolates are great, the short term things that we have fun with, are great, but this is where the action is. Which one would you rather have?

Father, I pray that you, by your Spirit would open our hearts and really let it sink in, that You have blessed us with every Spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, through Christ Jesus, and Father I pray that you would show us over the next ten minutes or so what that really means in our lives, here and now today. I ask that in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.

Real Life Blessing

Well, that’s great – God has blessed us with every Spiritual blessing in heavenly places but what does that mean here and now? What about my life with its ups and downs, what does blessing and prosperity mean now? That’s a good question and Jesus talked about it in the Sermon on the Mount. He talked about blessing in real life. There was a huge crowd that was following Him. It was one of the very early addresses that He gave publicly, so He must have thought that this blessing stuff was really, really important. He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness, because they’ll be filled, blessed are the merciful because they’ll receive mercy, blessed are the pure in heart because they will see God, blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God, blessed are those who are persecuted, blessed are you if people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you, because of my sake.”

The guts of His message is the blessing, it isn’t about stuffing ourselves full of chocolates, it’s not about what we think it is – flash cars and big things – no, blessing, He says, is like that tree in Psalm 1, whose leaves never wither, who bears fruit. Blessing, my prosperity, is all about the stuff that really matters, about being poor in spirit, about acknowledging who we are before God. Even when we mourn – do you want to mourn? – I don’t, but sometimes we do, because those who mourn will be comforted, the meek, the humble, that’s where you find blessing. You find blessing when you get into God’s Word and you discover what He’s like and you discover what Jesus is like and you end up looking like Jesus.

Look at the criteria that Jesus lists for blessing – poor in spirit, mourning, humility, doing the right thing, showing mercy, having a purity of heart, being a peace maker, being persecuted and reviled for believing in Jesus. If you met someone who fitted all those criteria, would you look at them and think, “I hope God blesses them.” Of course we would, because that sort of person is the person God wants us to be – like Jesus and if we would want to bless a person who is humble and kind and doing the right thing even when they are mourning and they’re pure in heart and they’re passionate for God, if we would want to bless such a person, well, wouldn’t God want to bless them too? Wouldn’t God want to prosper such a person as well? Jesus turns on its head this prosperity thing. He says you people are putting the cart before the horse. First seek out God’s kingdom, God’s righteousness and that other stuff will be added afterwards.

Get your priorities right, people, is what Jesus is saying here. “Seek out, be pro-active, be passionate, look for a life based on me. Look for Me, get to know Me, I’m humble and lowly of heart, I’m merciful, I’m your peacemaker – that’s what I was doing on the cross for you.” You see, how we end up missing the point, if we think that God’s blessing and God’s prosperity is about material things? In my life, I have owned and lost a lot of material things before I came to Christ – a lot of things, and I look back on that and I think there is not one of those things that I could point to and say, “They really made me happy.”

God hasn’t taken everything away from me just because I’m serving as a minister of His Gospel – He hasn’t taken anything away from me, but now that I have discovered where the real action is, in that relationship with Jesus, all that other stuff that gets added, has a richness to it, because it’s a gift from God, it’s not something that Berni Dymet has accumulated for himself and trod on people – no, God blesses us with that stuff, some people more, some people less. The people who live in the street where I live, who drive much bigger cars than I do, worth four times/five times as much as my car. I walk past those cars and I think, “I have got so much, I am so blessed, I am so contented, I have so much prosperity because of who God is in my life.

When we seek out God’s goodness, when we seek out what He has to say about life, in His Word, when we seek out His wisdom, and we chew it over, when we meditate on it day and night then the character and nature of Jesus, the Christ, shines in us and when we’re having this deep and passionate relationship with Jesus, being more and more like Him. When we let that be our first priority, then the blessing will flow, as surely as night follows day, the prosperity of God will flow – not on our terms – not the way we that maybe we thought before we really experienced this intimacy with God. Because when we have that intimacy – an intimacy that is open to each one of us – we don’t have to be anyone special. We just have to believe in Jesus and want to embrace God with our love and our time and our efforts and everything that we are and we come to a God like that, then we begin to experience that intimacy and if you have, have you noticed how it has changed your perspective on what prosperity really is. It’s better than anything that we can either hope for or imagine and when we are in that place, no matter what the world throws at us, no matter what life throws at us, no matter what happens to our health or our money or our relationships at the end of the day when we are in that place, then God’s blessing, God’s prosperity will come to pass. And it will be better and more lasting and more satisfying than anything we could have dreamt ever, and just think of this: that blessing is just the smallest foretaste of the eternal blessing that will come to us one day as we live out eternity in the presence of God. In all that we do, we prosper – that is God’s promise, in Christ.