I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. Genesis 12:2
Make no mistake about this: God wants us to be successful. Yet, He does not want us to have success that will crush us. I am sure that you have heard many stories of people who receive a sudden windfall when they come into a large inheritance or strike the first prize in a lottery. However, for some of these people, the sudden wealth did not give them a better life. Instead, in many instances, we know that it corrupted and destroyed their lives.
Often, these people were not able to handle their so-called success, and ended up leaving their wives and allowing their families to break down before their eyes. Perhaps they bought all sorts of things and lived in huge houses. Yet, they still felt a chronic sense of loneliness, emptiness, and dissatisfaction.
The sad reality is that many of those who chanced upon such sudden wealth squandered it all away, and some even became bankrupt. Such results are clearly not the Jesus-kind of results, nor are they the Jesus-kind of success. Let me make it clear from the outset: God has no problem with you having money, but He does not want money to have you!
“But Pastor Prince, how can you say that God has no problem with us having money? Doesn’t the Bible say that money is the root of all evil?”
Hold on a minute, that’s not in the Bible. Let’s be scripturally accurate. What the Bible says is this: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). Can you see the difference?
Having money does not make you evil. It is the obsession with and intense love of money that lead to all kinds of evil. Just because a person has no money in his pocket does not mean that he is holy. He may well be thinking, dreaming, and lusting after money all day long. You don’t need to have a lot of money to have the love of money. If a person is always purchasing lottery tickets, going to the casinos, and gambling in the stock market, this person clearly has a love for money. He is obsessed with getting more money.
When God called Abraham, He said to him, “ . . . I will bless you . . . and you shall be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). We who are new covenant believers in Christ are called the seed of Abraham (Gal. 3:29) and like Abraham, we are called to be a blessing.
Now, how can we be a blessing if we are not blessed in the first place? How can we be a blessing to others when we are always flat on our backs with sickness, living from hand to mouth, never having enough for our own family, and always having to borrow from others? No way, my friend.
God wants you healthy and strong, and He wants you to have more than enough financial resources so that you can be generous with your relatives, friends, community, or anyone who needs help. How can you be in a position to help others if you need all the help you can get yourself? It’s definitely not God's best for you if you barely have enough for yourself. He wants to bless you so that you can be a blessing!
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