God Does Not Want You To Be Comfortable.

IS IT GOD’S WILL FOR YOU TO PROSPER?

The answer is undoubtedly YES – it is God’s will for you to prosper! … I love the fact that God actually gets pleasure from our prosperity. Think about it: it makes God happy when you prosper … let me clarify the point that wealth and riches are just one aspect of prosperity.

Being prosperous includes your health and your relationships … A completely prosperous person walking in the fullness of God has it all.

Houston, B. (1999). You Need More Money: Discovering God’s Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life. Maximised Leadership Incorporated, pp. 55–57.

“A completely prosperous person walking in the fullness of God has it all.”

That single sentence from Houston’s book captures beautifully the heart of the Health and Wealth Gospel. This distortion of the true Christian Gospel is just the extreme expression of a very human tendency that lies in the hearts of us all, the tendency to use God as a tool for getting what we want. We think in terms of what satisfies our basic human instincts: physical safety and health; avoidance of poverty, disease, humiliation, failure; etc. That is what we want God for: to make us comfortable.

But quite often, God doesn’t want us to be comfortable. He wants us to be comforted. Let me explain this very important difference.

To make us comfortable, God must change our circumstances. Are you suffering the discomfort of being poor? Then God makes you comfortably rich. Are you sick? Then God makes you comfortably healthy. Are you feeling like a failure? Then God makes you comfortably successful. You get the point. Being comfortable means having things around you—objects, circumstances, people—that make you comfortable, because they are what you want or what you need. In short, for God to make you comfortable, He must mould the world around you to your personal wishes.

But God often does the exact opposite of that. Who is to say that what I want is actually what is good—not just good in itself, but even good for me? It is often said that most loving thing God can give us is not what we want, but what we actually need. And often, in this broken world and for us broken people, the road to what we truly need involves re-making us. That re-making—like breaking a badly healed bone in order to re-set it properly—is often quite uncomfortable.

We all know the mournful cries of the psalms, pleading for salvation from horrible, uncomfortable situations (e.g., Psalm 13). And Jesus Himself said that He came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34). Far more people felt uncomfortable with Him and stopped following Him than those who stayed—just think of the crowds who left Him when His words about eating His body and drinking His blood made them too uncomfortable (John 6). Or the rich young man who felt so uncomfortable when Jesus called him to sell all he had and follow Him that he turned and walked away (Mark 10). Not to mention the scribes and the lawyers and the Pharisees and the priests who were so uncomfortable with Jesus that they ended up crucifying Him. I could go on.

All this discomfort is the result of Light and Goodness coming face to face with darkness and brokenness. The darkness hates the Light. But it doesn’t end there.

Christ did not come just to make us uncomfortable. He came to save us. When His Light and Goodness invade our lives, we are transformed by them. Then—and here is that crucial distinction—we are not necessarily made more comfortable: our outer circumstances often do not change. Rather, we are comforted: our inner circumstances change by being illuminated by His Light and purified by His Goodness.

A beautiful image of this is found in Psalm 131:

Surely, I have calmed and quieted my soul.

Like a weaned child with his mother,

Like a weaned child is my soul within me.

I read that and think of St Irenaeus tender description of the Son and the Holy Spirit as the two hands of the Father. They reach out to me and lift me into His comforting lap, hugging me and holding me close till all the fear and anxiety have seeped away from my soul. The Father knows what good parenting is. He does not trample in anger over the world that hurts us in order to fix every little problem we have for us. God is no ‘helicopter parent.’ Rather, He encourages us, teaches us, and supports us so that we can go out and face the world ourselves. Only thus can we actually grow as human beings. Without doing everything for us, He comforts us, working inside us much more than He works on what is outside of us.

This is what it means when Jesus calls the Holy Spirit “the Comforter.” And Jesus Himself—the other hand of the Father—is also our Comforter:

“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” John 16:33.

Notice where exactly our peace is to be found? Is it in a world that has been fixed by God and re-moulded to make us comfortable? No! In the world you will have tribulation. Where then do we find comfort and good cheer? “In Me you may have peace.”

Health and wealth will make you comfortable, sure. But that is settling for a poor imitation. Rising above your circumstances—however uncomfortable they may be—and finding true peace in the Father, through Christ, by the Holy Spirit, now that is something worth having.