The War Against Christian Prosperity
Proverbs 14:23
Did you know that Christian men need money? That we don’t just float from heaven to Sunday service and back up to heaven again until we float down for the midweek meeting? Did you know that we aren’t just spiritual beings — we need money to do the things every man needs to do: get a spouse, a house, and fill it with wee babies?
But how much money do you need? Probably more than you earn right now — especially if you want your wife to work inside the home. But praise the Lord, it is possible, even in this Babylonian society, to be the man you need to be: to get the girl, buy the house, have the kids, and provide for wife and family. But only if you do it on God’s terms.
And that’s what I intend to do in this episode, by examining a very powerful scripture: Proverbs 14:23.
I’m Nathan F. Conkey with God’s World, God’s Way. My mission is to apply God’s way — his law and covenant — to God’s world, so that God’s men might know God’s transforming blessing. Sponsored by CR101Radio.com, in association with Grace Community School and Nicene Covenant Church. Visit CR101Radio.com where you’ll find free Christian audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts for the Christian who can’t accept the easy answers.
In all labour there is profit, but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury. — Proverbs 14:23
These sixteen words will change your world, if you understand them and put them into practice.
Be, Do, Have
All throughout the book of Proverbs, there’s a contrast between two ways of life: the wise and godly way, and the ungodly, foolish way. And that’s what we find in this verse.
Effective life transformation never starts with just doing different things. You have to go deeper — to who you are in your inner man. We are either wise or foolish at heart, and our identity determines what we do, and what we do determines what we have. And men today need to have a lot more than the average, to be godly men and meet their godly responsibilities.
The first contrast is between wisdom and foolishness. But I got it all wrong about wisdom — and maybe you have too. This misunderstanding cost me decades of my life, and it may cost you dearly if you don’t properly understand what wisdom is.
Wisdom is built on the fear of the Lord, and the fear of the Lord is built on God’s law and covenant. If we have hearts that listen and obey God, we will be blessed. If our hearts are hard and disobedient, we will suffer the consequences — even as believers. Think about David’s adultery, and the disaster that was for his family and his whole kingdom.
The mistake I made was to think that wisdom meant holding and articulating theological opinions — the more extreme the better — and performing certain religious forms: having a quiet time, going to church, even doing evangelism, without having a soft heart that ran from sin and grew daily in obedience to God’s law and word.
Work is built on the foundation of wisdom. And wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, which is built on God’s law and his covenant blessings — for an obeying heart, curses or chastisement for a disobedient heart.
Again, my ideas were messed up. I thought wealth came from wickedness — that you had to break the rules to get paid, and nice guys finish poor. So I was afraid to get wealth, like the wicked servant with only one talent. But the Bible reverses this lie. The wise way, the way of work, brings profit. The foolish way, the ungodly way, brings poverty.
We need to rewire our brain to realise that the money you need — to be a full man — will be unlocked when you start fearing God, fearing his negative sanctions for sin, and walking in his ways. Holiness brings God’s blessing, and God’s blessing means sorrow-free profit.
Be, do, have. If you be wise, you do work, and you have profit. But if you be foolish, you do talk, and you have poverty. God’s word cannot be broken. We are all bound by the law of be, do, have. You can’t just do more and expect to have more without working on your inner life. You need to rewire your innermost thoughts and become a different man — not by NLP programming, but by getting wisdom.
The Thermometer
In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty. This verse is like a thermometer. You can use it to diagnose your condition.
If you’re too poor to attract a mate, buy a house, support a wife and children — that’s a symptom of sickness. It may hurt to be called poor, but a good diagnosis allows you to deal with the disease. And God in this verse has written a prescription for poverty. What is it? If you want plenty, profit, and abundance — become a wise person. How? By meditating on Scripture and making changes by God’s Spirit.
Too Much Idle Chatter
In all labour there is profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty. So let’s talk about foolish talking. If you’ve got too much poverty, the Lord’s diagnosis is: there’s too much empty talk happening in your life.
I was a foolish talker. I thought I was very clever, and other fools probably thought so too. But no — I was just pushing a lot of air around the room, amusing myself. And big surprise: I was always in lack. I had plenty of poverty.
The Lord God has forged an unbreakable titanium-alloy chain that forever links poverty to too much idle chatter. You can ignore it, deny it, cry about it — but too much poverty means too much foolishness, and therefore too much talk.
The Irish, in my humble opinion, are the finest in the world at mere talking. There are shrines to mere talking dotted up and down the landscape all over Ireland — exported successfully all over the world. The authorities tried to stamp this out during the COVID period, but they are now back in full force. I’m talking, of course, about the Irish pub. Men hone their mere-talking craft to a fine art in these fine institutions — fuelled, of course, by the performance-reducing mere-talk drug: stout, and perhaps whisky, and cider will do too.
Now, I would love to tell you that it’s only those who prop up the bar who are mere talkers. But that’s far from the truth. People can be mere talkers about all sorts of difficult, interesting, and important subjects — geopolitics, the realignment of the world around three power centres, and the decline of the older imperial model. That’s gripping stuff. But if you’re always talking about it and it’s none of your business, your God-chosen reward for all that mere talk is plenty of need.
You can talk with your mouth or with your keyboard on social media. Too much vain posting or meaningless memeing gives you a God-given guarantee of lack in place of plenty.
But people can even talk about theology — and if they’re not becoming visibly biblically wiser, verifiably more obedient to God’s law-word with every discussion, it amounts to mere talk. No matter how complex or controversial or clearly articulated your theological talk is, true theology means ever-increasing wisdom, personal transformation, an increased ability to do, and — in God’s time — having all your needs supplied in abundance.
But that mere talk doesn’t have to be your own. You can turn even the best sermons into mere talk by applying the sermon to everyone else apart from yourself. How many have gone to church all their lives, listening to a minister preach for 25, 30, or even 45 minutes each service, and have never grown as believers? They’re not growing wiser. They’re not able to do more in terms of obedience. And they reap a harvest of not enough — of the fruits of the Spirit, not to mention plenty of poverty.
With smartphones and data, we now have an infinite supply of mere talk available for all tastes: videos, podcasts, audiobooks, and more. A lot of this content is much better than the BBC slop we used to be served. But all of it can become mere talk if it’s wholly irrelevant, if it doesn’t result in more godly thinking or godly action.
Let’s say you want to be a better marketer. So you listen to an expert marketer talk about marketing. If you’re listening with your notebook, taking careful notes, thinking hard about how to apply it to your circumstances, drawing up a plan to integrate best practice into your craft — that’s a long way from mere talk. But if you’re on your third month of consuming marketing content, have made no notes, and haven’t done any marketing yet — you’re a mere talker, and plenty of poverty awaits you.
Profit Is Not Evil
In all labour there is profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.
We need profit to be men today — to get married and have a family — but not like the generations before us. We need a way-above-average profit in order to truly realise ourselves as men. So we must focus on profit. We must do whatever God tells us to do to get that needed profit.
But you will never get any real profit if you think profit is evil. Popular culture demonises profit. Capitalists — people who make more money than others through the free exchange of goods and services — are rich because they take it from others, they say. Which is of course a lie. Rich people are evil, notorious sinners, and particularly wicked. But in reality, it’s impossible to do business over a long period of time without being morally upright — unless the market is rigged by legislation and regulation.
Beyond that, you must embrace the fact that God loves profit. He wants his people to profit. We must drive this into our minds and exorcise forever the demonic drivel that profit is evil. If profit were so morally dubious and dangerous, surely the all-wise Lord would heap it on the heads of the wicked and foolish — the sluggards, the timid, the angry man, the sexually immoral man. But that’s altogether perverse. And yet that lie is holding back so many good, honest Christian men.
In God’s economy, profit is the province of God’s peculiar people. The wise labour and they profit; the foolish just talk and get plenty of nothing.
Maybe you’re tempted to say: I’ll never make money in my God-given field. But what does the Lord say? In all labour there is profit. Abraham — very rich in gold and silver — made his money in a livestock operation. So did his son and his son’s son. And Job, the richest man in the East, made his money in the sheep and cattle business. How mundane and ordinary is that? You can make more than enough money in your chosen industry, be it ever so humble and smelly, if you labour at it instead of just yapping about it.
The Egyptians despised shepherds — looked down their noses at them. And maybe that’s what people think of your business. It’s not respectable, not cool, not cutting-edge, not accredited, not super-holy like being a minister or missionary. It may even be embarrassing. But I have to tell you: the richest man I ever had dinner with was a junkyard owner.
If this is your business — if God has uniquely fitted you for it through circumstances and aptitudes — don’t despise it. Labour at it, and the profit will come, sooner or later. Let God be true and every man a liar. No matter how well-meaning and pious they are, those telling you earthly wealth is somehow sinful are wrong. The profit will come, brother, and you will be able to marry the girl, buy the house, and have the family, by the power of God’s grace.
Pain and Profit
But what is work or labour? We know what the words mean — but work and labour are only translations. Let’s look at the original Hebrew.
As soon as we look it up, something weird happens. The first meaning has nothing to do with work. The first word we encounter is pain, and the second is hurt. Only the third English word used to translate etsev in Hebrew is toil, meaning hard, gruelling work. So what’s this all about? Why the focus on pain and hurt?
The media hypnotised me to believe that work should be easy and learning should be fun — it shouldn’t be hard. I believed that if I attempted something and found it to be super hard, I was either doing the wrong thing or doing the thing wrong. I have always stupidly believed there has to be an easy way. I thought hard work was like touching a hot stove — it hurts, so never try that again. And if you believe that, you too can be as poor and hopeless as I once was.
Now, we can trust our natural reflexes on a hot stove. But the Lord is here demanding that we rewire our nervous system entirely. In the course of doing our work, when we feel that pressure just above the navel — pain and foreboding — the Lord is asking us to exclaim: Yes, I’m on the right track. Profit is surely coming my way.
Have you seen metal detectors in action? The pitch intensifies as metal comes across its path. When the pitch goes up, metal is present — maybe a big payday is on the way. Likewise, the Lord has given us a built-in profit detector. But instead of a screaming metal detector, our being lets out a groan of pain.
We need to take that signal of gut-wrenching pain and keep following it, like the detector follows the noise. Be it far or near, that sweet profit is on its way. So too the transformed character that comes with difficult work — the confidence and competence that attracts the good girl, and the house and children that aren’t far behind.
Pain, hurt, and toil in your profession mean profit. It’s a divine guarantee. That angsty, nervous, fear-inducing feeling in the pit of your stomach that has perhaps kept you away from the work you know in your heart is your work — it isn’t a sign of pain, pain, and more pain. It’s pain now, with a certain promise of profit later. Turn your brain right-side up. Use that pain as it should be used — as a God-given, infallible profit detector — and ask God for grace to work through that pain barrier, in the certain confidence that your self-realisation in God’s plan for your life lies along that road.
Pain and the Fall
But why has the Lord forever knitted together two seemingly contradictory experiences — pain and profit?
If we look up etsev in the Hebrew, the first mentions of this word explain everything. The first mention of etsev — hurt, pain, and toil — is in Genesis 3:16–17, concerning the first woman and the first man. That hurt you feel when you’re toiling at your job should lead our minds straight to Genesis 3 and the fall of man. We feel it not in our bellies by chance, but because of the curse God put on our work. Only by the sweat of our brow — really hard work — would we gain profit to support our households.
Once there was zero resistance to doing our dominion tasks; work was only ever satisfying and fulfilling, even though demanding. Sweat and toil entered the chat after the fall.
So as Christian men faced with a lifetime of hard labour, let us think immediately of the fall and give thanks to the Saviour — then run to the covenant of God, which does not eliminate toil but assures us of a sure reward for the sweat of our brow. Let us immediately run to our Saviour and thank him for saving us from the ultimate consequences of the fall, and turn our backs on Adam’s plan to rise above work by becoming a god. Let us embrace instead our labour in the Lord, which is never in vain.
Man’s labour is a little like a woman’s labour. There is pain — and more pain — and what happens at the end of the process is that a baby is born, and all the pain is forgotten. Man’s lot is not to bring forth children, but to bring forth profit. And once the profit is reaped, the pain is quickly forgotten.
But quickly: one last thought. As we get wiser and wiser, and our obedience to God’s law and word becomes more complete and more instant — particularly in our work — something will happen to that pain and hurt. As we are transformed, as we become more like Christ, as we are yoked together with him and become more and more labourers together with God, the effects of the fall fall away. Progressively, painful labour becomes more pleasurable. Thorns and weeds of sin give way to a broad place where we can work more freely. That is the power and promise of getting true wisdom.
Thanks so much for listening right to the end, brother. I really appreciate that. If you have any comments or questions, email me at questions@godsworldgodsway.com. Until next week.