What is Poverty, What is Prosperity?, By Ken Tadaferua

Someone raised two key issues as a rejoinder to a comment I made on prosperity teaching and the state of our nation on Facebook. The first is a question: Is poverty a virtue? The second is: If 3 John 1: 2 does not encourage prosperity by saying we should prosper, have a healthy life and to have a soul prepared for heaven?

Permit me to reproduce my answer here. I did not answer the questions directly but built up some scriptures and my viewpoint which I hope will provide illumination. Enjoy:

Was Jesus Christ born in a manger, with a carpenter earthly father with whom he worked before he began his ministry poor? Couldn’t Jesus have been born in great wealth and in a powerful palace as a prince? Is there not a lesson in his birth for mankind? By today’s standards, he was poor. But in humility, he came to show to us that wealth lies not in the glitter of accumulation but in spiritual gifts. Is our definition of prosperity the same as in the Bible?

Did not Jesus say: “Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Luke 12:27.

If the natural gifts God gave the lily makes it better arrayed than Solomon in his splendour, are we by defining prosperity as man made currency, large mansions and luxury jets, not redefining what the Bible means by wealth and ignoring the massive material and spiritual gifts of nature which God has bestowed man with?

In Zechariah 8:12, God said: “For the seed shall be prosperous; the vine shall give her fruit, and the ground shall give her increase, and the heavens shall give their dew; and I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things”. It is the abundance of nature that is prosperity. When those things are in lack, or we are cut off from them or we ignore them, we then suffer from poverty. That is why famine, pestilences, wilderness and man’s cruelty to man, as in slavery and deprivation, are tantamount to poverty in the Bible.

Therefore a man cannot be poor who lives on fertile land that yields fruit. But he is poor, who is unable to work the land, who is deprived of the wherewithal to produce from nature and who is mentally deceived that wealth is limited to man made currency.
Look at Nigeria. Is it a poor country? With massive minerals, fertile lands watered with the sweet waters of rivers and beautiful weather, sunshine and rain, the profusion of herbs and forests and fish and birds and animals. Yet the great majority of the people are poor, living like people in a land cursed with famine and pestilences. Why?

It is because the people have turned from the wealth of nature to the prosperity of cash. It is because the leaders are stealing the wherewithal that the honest poor require to produce from the healthy lands God gave this country.

It is because the lure of easy cash from unearned rent and prosperity from crude oil and tithes and offerings, and miracles and magic and political thuggery and yahoo/yahoo and fake drugs and armed robbery have turned the notion of wealth upside down, producing generations of greedy political leaders and rapacious pastors and priests who have forgotten the words of God.

They have forgotten justice and mercy and compassion and conscience and morality to lie on the soapbox and pulpit, and to deceive and impoverish the people of the wherewithal to produce from the abundant prosperity of nature from God.

Is it not the same land that men worked on, to produce the massive export crops – cocoa, rubber, timber, groundnuts, cotton etc which made Nigeria rank among middle developed countries, ahead of Malaysia and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s? What happened?

Nigeria is very wealthy in nature. But our leaders, political and religious, have moved the mentality of the people from working and benefiting from the dignity of labour and its produce to running after easy money from “miracles” and “hot sharp money” which they equally deprive and steal from people.

When the leaders and the people ignore the massive wealth around them, given freely in abundance by God, they become poor, mentally, physically and spiritually. Many of those called wealthy in material terms in Nigeria are clearly mentally and spiritually poor.

To move away from our blind view of poverty and prosperity, we need to have, and must teach, the gifts of the Holy Spirit which abound in us. But we neither teach nor practice them. To our detriment. The spiritual gifts are: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord, which foster the virtues of charity, faith, hope, justice, prudence, temperance.

He who lacks these virtues is suffering from spiritual poverty. Our politicians and clergy are, in the main, deficient in these virtues. They engage in fraud and teach prosperity and live prosperity. They, the leaders, are in deep poverty, being visionless and ignorant of divine tenets. Their spiritual poverty and lack of knowledge, and arrogant pomposity like the Pharisees, is killing the country and impoverishing the people.

The church must return to teaching conscience and gifts of the Spirit and virtues, to take the hearts of the people back to God, to recognise the great wealth bestowed on the nation, and to work in his vineyard so that the land prospers in fruits and the people go back to honest hard work driven by integrity and truth and not to be blinded by get-rich-quick prosperity.

God said: “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land.” Isaiah 1: 19. I repeat the good of the land. The Almighty Father said: “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” Isaiah 1: 17. God said: “Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy.” Leviticus 19: 1. To be holy is to be merciful and kind and compassionate, which we lack in Nigeria even in the church.

Isn’t this what Jesus Christ taught us:

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

“But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Matthew 6: 19-21.

Our emphasis on wealth and prosperity on earth negate the teachings of the Son of God, our Lord, Jesus Christ. We must revert to teaching conscience and morality and charity, and love and gifts of the Holy Spirit to help the sheep.

Before his passion and death, Jesus spoke about what he would ask on Judgement Day. He said he would ask what we did for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison. Matthew 25: 34-44. He did not talk about the prosperous.

He said, whatever you do to the least of my brethren that you do unto me.

Let us get wisdom.

The greatest wealth a man can have is the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Also it is imperative to understand what poverty is. When incapacitated physically or mentally by reasons of birth or environmental or sociopolitical conditions and unable to attain the BASICs of life, you may be described as poor. But that man, if he understands what God surrounds him, and he has peace and acknowledges the spiritual gifts in him, is content and not poor.

Ken Tadaferua is a media and marketing communications consultant. Twitter: @ktadaferua