“Hashtag Faith” by Chris Buscher

For a time around the turn of the millennium, it seemed that all Bibles were going to have to be reprinted to include a fifth gospel – The Prayer of Jabez. It was a wildly popular book when it was published in 2000, and it became wildly controversial. An obscure Old Testament passage had become the basis for a new theology. At one point, I was hearing the book preached from the pulpit, studied in a small Bible study group, and serialized in a Sunday School class.

The message of the book: pray to God and ask him to “enlarge your territory,” that is, bless you spiritually and materially. And he’ll do it.  If that sounds like a modernized version of the prosperity gospel, that’s because, in my opinion, that’s exactly what it is.

I was reminded of The Prayer of Jabez and its teaching as I read Hashtag Faith: A Powerful Gospel in the Hands of a Distracted Generation by Chris Buscher, co-founder and CEO of Lay Me Down Ministry. One of the things Buscher does in this relatively short book on faith is take the prosperity gospel head on and strip it down to the false teaching it is. Faith is not about gaining material wealth, enlarging your territory, or experiencing worldly success, he says, and he’s exactly right. Jesus and the apostles did not teach “how to become rich and be as powerful as the Romans.”

Buscher provides a primer on what faith is, and what it isn’t. He explores what the foundation of faith is and where the word “faith” comes from. Faith is not the prosperity gospel; neither is it the social gospel, “which secularizes the faith and attempts to secure harmony and recognition with other religion and people groups.” Both the prosperity gospel and the social gospel are creations of humanity, not creations of God. What we do in this world for this world is aimed at spreading God’s kingdom.

Chris Busches

He particularly takes aim at the prosperity gospel. It is motivated by greed, he says, and it shares one essential element in common with all false teachings – that our thoughts control reality. “Whether it is the power of positive thinking or the ‘prosperity gospel,’; he writes, ‘the premise is the same: what you think or believe will happen is ultimately what controls what will happen.” It other words, it’s all about us, and all about me.

Buscher, a pastor, is also the author of My Confession: Finding Myself at the Feet of Jesus and Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me: A Christian Devotional Inspired by Those Who Gave Their Life for Jesus.

True Biblical prosperity has nothing to do with material wealth or riches. It is seeking God first, understanding the purpose for which you were created, dying to self, and making heaven your goal. That’s the core message of Hashtag Faith, and it is a welcome one.

Photograph by Ben White via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Have Everything, Possess Nothing

We first heard of the book in our small group Bible study. We had just finished one study, and someone suggested we read a new book called The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson. It was short and easy to read, and lots of Christians were supposedly reading it. So we agreed, and began our study and discussion.

Not long after that, one of the ministers at our church began to teach our adult Sunday School class – and the subject was The Prayer of Jabez. And not long after that, a sermon series began in worship services on – surprise – The Prayer of Jabez.

The book was a bestseller, and for a long time. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s based on a rather obscure text in 1 Chronicles: “And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, 'Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain.' So God granted him what he requested.”

The focus in our Sunday School class and the worship services was primarily one phrase in that text – enlarge my territory.

My church wasn’t alone. Far from it. The book swept evangelical churches all over the United States (and beyond, for all I know). There were study guides, audio CDs, all the usual stuff that comes with a bestseller. Time Magazine did a one-page feature on the book phenomenon.

Somebody’s territory indeed got enlarged.

Never had I seen my church, or any other church, go so overboard over a book. If the sales figures are any indication, the entire church in America went overboard.

I likely offended a few people by referring to the book as the “gospel of Jabez.”

In retrospect, it was a book almost tailor-made for suburban American churches and their middle-class and upper-middle-class members. You could justify material well-being as God’s special blessing, his “enlargement of your territory.”

Some of us, and I hope it was more than some, were appalled. A very thin, almost non-existent line separated the message of Jabez from the name-it-and-claim-it, prosperity gospel: if you have sufficient faith, you will be materially blessed, and you will be blessed in this lifetime. All you have to do is ask God to “enlarge your territory.”

Jabez had little to say to the poor in America or in the world. It had little to say to people who were suffering, or to the unemployed. And it should have had precious little to say to the rest of us, too.

Material blessings are not a sign of how good a Christian you are, or whether you have sufficient faith. The real question is not whether you have them or not, but whether they possess you or not.

A.W. Tozer invites us to consider Abraham.

“He (Abraham) had everything, but he possessed nothing,” writes A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God. “There is the spiritual secret. There is the sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in the school of renunciation. The books on systematic theology overlook this, but the wise will understand.”

Abraham withheld nothing from God, not even his own son. And he didn’t have to ask God to enlarge his territory

To have everything, but to possess nothing.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To read more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.