It says in verse 29 and Jesus answered and said, verily I say unto you,
there is no man that had left house or brethren or sisters or father or mother
or wife or children or lands for my sake and the gospels,
but he shall receive a hundred fold.
And here's the key that I want you to see the next few words now in this time.
Now is this just saying, Hey, all the rewards are in heaven.
Everything's after you die. Is that what it says? No,
it says he shall receive a hundred fold now in this time houses and brethren and
sisters and mothers and children and lands with persecutions and in the world to
come eternal life.
But many that are first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Now here's where people would go astray with this doctrine and teach the
prosperity gospel or the health and wealth gospel is that they leave out these two
little words in verse 30 with persecutions.
That's one of the errors that they make is that the Bible's not telling us that
if we serve God, we aren't going to have any problems.
Everything's going to be great. Our health is going to be perfect.
We're going to have tons of money and prosperity and wealth. No,
because the Bible says we will be very generously rewarded in this life,
but there are also going to be persecutions along the way.
The Bible says many are the afflictions of the righteous, but out of them all,
the Lord delivers him.
The Bible tells us that all who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer
persecution.
So the Bible is not telling you that if you serve God,
you're not going to go anything through anything difficult or hard.
You're not going to have pain and suffering or loss.
You're not going to have persecution. You're going to have all those things,
but God is also going to generously reward you.
Another problem with the health and wealth gospel is that they have a perverted
view of what it means to be blessed and what it means to be rewarded because
they're so carnal and worldly to them.
Their dream is to wear fancy designer clothes and to have the portion,
the circular driveway of their gigantic mansion.
But here's the thing.
Actually, people who are godly and spiritual don't even desire those things.
You say, well, you just ruined the whole sermon for me, Pastor Anderson,
because, you know, I thought the reward was going to be in the garage.
You know, I thought the reward was going to be in the wardrobe.
I thought that I was going to be living the rock and roll lifestyle.
Well, here's the thing.
It just shows how carnal you are and how much understanding you lack and how
unspiritual you are if you really think that that equals success.
That's not success.
You see, the Bible is talking about great rewards for those who love and serve God.
And the rewards are real.
The rewards are tangible.
But they come with struggle, with persecution.
And they're not the kind of foolish rewards
that Kenneth Copeland wants and Joyce Meyer wants, where they want to wear a
bunch of jewelry like the harlot of Revelation or something, you know, just
completely decked out and all this gold and precious stones and pearls and and
scarlet color and purple and all this stuff, you know, they want to be decked out
like the whore of Revelation 17 or they want to fly around in private jets or
drive all these impractical sports cars that only see two people.
OK, that's not what the Bible, you know, the Bible says children are in heritage
of the Lord and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
There goes your sports car is where you can put the kids, right?
You got to have the back seat.
You need the four door or something bigger, something more practical.
The point is that the health and wealth gospel has taken scriptures like this and
abuse them, twisted them and taught this thing of, hey,
you're going to be a millionaire.
And if you get sick, it's because you didn't have enough faith or whatever.
It's garbage.
You know, the Bible teaches about men of God and great women in the Bible who
endured sickness, pain, struggles, affliction.
In fact, it's all of them.
Every godly person in the Bible went
through adversity and we're going to go through adversity in hard times, too.
But I think the problem is when you have a group of people who've twisted a
doctrine or abused it, then sometimes we will tend to accidentally kind of go too
far the other way, we'll kind of react to that.
Like because we know that the health and wealth preaching is garbage.
Sometimes we'll go too far in the other
direction and just forget that there's any reward in this life for serving God
that comes right now.
So we don't want to make the mistake of
going too far in the opposite direction to just kind of react.
We want to get a balanced view of this from the Bible.
You know, you are going to be blessed if you serve God.
I'm not saying that you're going to be rich.
I'm not saying that you're going to have all these carnal things that we shouldn't
even care about anyway, but I'm saying that God can bless us with joy,
happiness, peace, and even material.
He can make sure that we have enough good food to eat and that we have a place to
live and that we have good clothes to wear and that we have what we need in life.
Let me tell you something. If you don't serve God,
you're a born again Christian and you just get out of church and just start
living for yourself and not serving God. You know what?
You're not going to be blessed.
Like if you stayed in church and read your Bible and went so and you're not
going to live the same life period.