Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60048. The prosperity gospel is the teaching that God wills every believer to be materially wealthy and physically well, and that faith is the mechanism by which those benefits are released. It goes by several names. Word of Faith. Health and wealth. Name it and claim it. Positive confession. The labels differ and the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12061. Scripture does not endorse any of the economic systems human beings have devised, and I think that disappoints people on all sides. Christians keep hoping the Bible will bless capitalism or socialism outright, and it stubbornly refuses to do either. What it does give us is a set of convictions about property, work,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12060. Borrowing money is not always wrong, and the short answer to this question is no, though borrowing money carries warnings in Scripture that most Christians in Britain have never heard preached. We live in a country built on credit, and a teaching that never examines it has quietly surrendered a large part of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12031 Christians and gambling is a question that cannot be settled by looking up a verse, because there is no verse. The Bible never names the lottery, the bookmaker or the online casino, and anyone who tells you otherwise is quoting something out of context. That does not leave us without an answer. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12011 Charging interest has a long and awkward history in Christian ethics. For centuries the church treated it as sin outright, and Christians who lent at interest could find themselves excluded from communion. Today most believers hold a mortgage, a pension and a savings account without a flicker of conscience. Something has clearly shifted,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11093 Christian giving is one of those subjects that makes a congregation shuffle in its seats, and I understand why. Money is private, budgets are tight, and most of us have sat under at least one sermon that felt like a sales pitch. So let me say at the outset that I am not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11080 Material wealth is one of those subjects on which the Bible says a great deal more than most congregations want to hear, and it says it in both directions. Anyone hoping for a simple verdict, either that riches are a blessing to be pursued or that poverty is inherently holy, will be disappointed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11064. Biblical stewardship is one of those phrases that has been reduced almost entirely to money, and usually to money at the point where a church needs some. That is a shame, because the idea is far larger and considerably more searching than an annual appeal. A steward in the ancient world was a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11063. Christians and poverty is a subject on which the church has swung wildly between two errors, and both of them are still with us. One says that God wants every believer wealthy and that poverty indicates a failure of faith. The other treats poverty itself as a spiritual achievement and regards money as…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11004. Christian giving is one of the few subjects where almost everyone agrees in principle and disagrees in practice. We all know we should be generous. Most of us give rather less than we imagine we do, and almost nobody wants the sermon. So let me try to make the case honestly, without guilt-driven…