Never try to build a house without first laying a foundation.
I don’t care how eager you are to get it finished, how excited you are about filling it with furniture and decorating it all just right—take the time to put down a solid foundation first. If you don’t, that house will be so unstable it will soon come tumbling down.
That’s simple advice, isn’t it? Anyone with any sense at all knows it. Yet in the spiritual realm, people make that mistake all the time. They see a blessing God has promised them in His Word, and they are so eager to have it, they ignore the foundational basics of godly living and pursue just that one thing.
That’s especially true in the area of prosperity. Often, people are so desperate for a quick financial fix, they just pull a few prosperity promises out of the Bible and try to believe them—without allowing God to change anything else in their lives. Of course, it doesn’t work and those people end up disappointed. Sometimes they even come to the conclusion that it wasn’t God’s will for them to prosper
after all.
But I can tell you today, from the Word of God and from personal experience: It is definitely God’s will for all of His children to prosper!
That’s why He inspired the Apostle John to write, “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth” (3 John 2). The margin says, “I ‘pray’ above all things.”
Notice there, however, that John didn’t just say, “I desire (pray) for you to prosper.” He said, “I desire (pray) for you to prosper as your soul prospers.” He tied financial prosperity to the prosperity of your mind, will and emotions—your soul.
God’s plan is for us to grow financially as we grow spiritually. He knows it is dangerous to put great wealth into the hands of someone who is too spiritually immature to handle it. You can see dramatic evidence of that fact in the lives of people who have acquired financial riches through this world’s system, apart from God. In most cases, such riches just help people to die younger and in more misery
than they would have if they’d been poorer.
That’s because they use their wealth to sin in greater measure. They use it to buy all the cocaine they want and drink all the alcohol they want. They use it to pay for an immoral lifestyle that eventually destroys them.
The wages of sin is death. That is an inescapable fact. So, when people get money and use it to sin, it does them more harm than good. As Proverbs 1:32 says, “…The prosperity of fools shall destroy them.”
Kenneth Copeland Ministries
