“Your father has only a few more months to live,” the specialist doctor told us privately. Despite my dad’s health having deteriorated for months, those dreaded words still stung!

Long before the pandemic, I had felt the urge to reach out to my dad for his salvation. Each time we went back to my hometown in Melaka, we would gather my folks to pray aloud for my parents’ well-being before we left. As the years passed, I had the opportunity to lead my mother in prayer to invite Jesus into her heart. Nevertheless, the situation was different with my dad.

With multitudes of self-improvement books, TED talks, get-rich-quick seminars, online success stories and the like, now everyone can be rich and successful… not!

Oftentimes, success stories glorify the end results rather than the unseen arduous process of getting there. We are told to maintain our positive thinking and don’t give up. But while being positive has its benefits, often it is not sufficient.

So, what happens when the business start-up sinks, the marriage breaks down, and bankruptcy knocks on the door, or worse, all three come at once? Is one doomed for unrecoverable failure? Can one survive from such a crash?

Have you ever heard of the Poverty Gospel? It is a worldview which believes that being poor makes one holy, that wealth should be avoided because it is not healthy to one’s faith, or that having material possessions are inherently bad.

It is not difficult to imagine how the term filthy rich comes about. For those who hold this view, “money is the root of all evil,” despite the fact that the actual verse says, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10, italics mine).

Hence, suffering is equated with sacrifice, and some choose this path as a way of denying themselves, picking up the cross and following Jesus (Matthew 16:14).

Many Christians are familiar with the term “prosperity gospel”. But what exactly is it and does the Bible say anything about it? Following on from our Part 1 on poverty gospel, today I would like to invite you to look a little deeper at the prosperity gospel.