How to Survive Prosperity: On Ministry Scandals and David's Fall

But when he [Uzziah] was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction. For he was unfaithful to the LORD his God and entered the temple of the LORD to burn incense on the altar of incense.

--2 Chronicles 26:16

Every time a man in ministry tragically falls, the church of Jesus Christ has a period of shock and confusion. In the aftermath, we typically try to get a sense for the why. Why did this happen? How could it happen? Who knew about the patterns of sin involved, and how much did they know? These are understandable and even necessary questions. But the why discussion misses a still bigger reality: the what.

By this, here’s what I mean: we focus on the details of the latest scandal, but we miss the bigger trend right in front of us. There is in many such instances a clear and unmistakable element: the men in question fell when they were doing well. They did not flame out of gospel ministry when they were barely surviving; they flamed out when they were prospering.

My observation here is rather counter-intuitive. Job would remind us in no uncertain terms that adversity is indeed a massive challenge, after all. But threaded throughout Scripture is a stranger truth, one sharply at odds with our common dreams and desires: adversity is often brutal to navigate, but prosperity can be far more dangerous still.

Why Prosperity Is (Often) More Dangerous Than Adversity

Why on earth would this be so? Isn’t our gravest danger the catalogue of hardships that afflict us all in some measure in this life? Isn’t cancer awful? Isn’t low attendance discouraging? Isn’t strife between brothers on the elder board challenging? Isn’t the ordinary malaise of plugging along, with its often anonymous and thankless tasks, prone to wear us down over time?

The answer to all of the above questions is a clear yes. Adversity is a bear. Some men in ministry, frankly, do not survive it, and we can all easily understand why. But strange as it is to say, I actually believe upon sustained biblical reflection (and my own personal sociological analysis) that prosperity is actually harder to survive. So many of the men I know and love who have fallen from ministry were not barely treading water. Most of the men I know who have lost their church leadership post were thriving.

Though this still may confound some, the explanation behind this desultory trend is not hard to piece together. As a Christian, when we’re in the tough seasons of life, we tend to lean on the Lord. When you’re in the early years of a pastorate, a college presidency, or a missions appointment; when you’re trying to get the church plant funded and the membership roll up to 150; when you yearn for abundant budgets and plentiful members and fruit-bearing ministries; when prosperity seems a planet away, you take your burdens to the Lord.

When we are faced with trials and needs from sunup to sundown, we feel our dependence on God keenly. We pray a lot. We get a lot of spiritual counsel. We read good books of deep truth. We hold hands with our spouse, and converse at length, navigating both excitement over the future and fear over its uncertainty.

Small wonder that the hard years can actually be deeply joyful years. Yes, there are tears and pains and obstacles and lots of looming trials. But in the midst of all that, the Christian cultivates a close walk with the Lord. He takes nothing for granted. He prays like he has never prayed before. He drinks the Word of God like water. He fasts and calls on God for help that he knows only God can give.

Then—all of a sudden—things shift. Out of the blue, God’s blessings pour down from the heavens. Attendance surges. The membership roll spikes. Giving increases fivefold. Students flock to your campus. Unbelievers convert to Christ. Your conference draws thousands of people. You’re asked to speak at big events. Your website, so long ignored, is now read by many. Overnight, you feel like you’re living a different life than in past days.

Yet here’s the cold-blooded truth: you have just entered the danger zone. Yes, all of life is war, spiritual war (Ephesians 6:10-20). But I believe, with biblical justification, that the man in prosperity is not only in a dangerous place, but may very well be in the most dangerous season of his ministry. Why? For this simple reason: now, like never before, he is going to be tempted to live in his own strength, not the strength of God.

The Alchemy of Ministry Failure: Forgetting God

This likely sounds laughable to some. Some readers out there would delight to take on the “grave danger” of great blessing, I’m sure! Yet I hold my ground nonetheless. Again, when the blessing of God is pouring in, it is not hard for us to lose our humble dependence on God. Our prayer life may lag. Our Bible reading may dry up. Our prayers of thankfulness may give way to internal mantras like “God owes me this—I faced years of hardship, and this is what I’ve earned, and it’s not gonna end now.”

This can all happen very quietly. Once we soaked up Christian fellowship like a sponge. Now, we may not seek it out. Once we felt our need for counsel; now we may close our ears to it. Once we heard words of loving correction or rebuke; now, however, when things are soaring, we may well feel that such admonishment is unnecessary. Our success, we wrongly think, is a force-field against conviction, when it is no such thing. (“Success” all the more necessitates careful counsel and loving correction.)

Here is what has happened overall: without declaring it publicly, this man’s ministry has functionally ceased to be about Christ and has become about him. This is when Satan really gets his hooks in a man. The temptations come fast and furious now, and the defenses are down. Every man has his own sin patterns, and men fall for many different reasons. But suffice it to say that the harvest time, when not carefully and vigilantly guarded, is often when Satan takes men down.

The Test of Prosperity

The test of prosperity is, for many men, the most dangerous zone of their lives. (The “test of prosperity” is language that owes to the Puritans, in particular John Owen; I first heard it exposited, brilliantly, from C. J. Mahaney. Mahaney’s preaching on this theme has stayed with me for decades.) This was true of many biblical figures, whether Hezekiah, Solomon, Saul, Asa, and more (see 2 Kings 20; 1 Kings 11; 1 Samuel 15; 2 Chronicles 16).

As the above references show, the books of 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, and 1-2 Chronicles are an extended meditation (among other themes) on how common it is to fail the test of prosperity. The most prominent—and tragic—example here is that of King David. David did not fall in the wilderness, when Saul wickedly hunted him like game. David did not fall when Goliath taunted him before thousands of men, shaming him. David did not fall in the wilderness.

No, David fell in the palace.

David fell when everything was going great for him, in sum (see 2 Samuel 11). David fell when his enemies lay at his feet. David fell when his chief antagonist, Saul, had met his untimely end. David fell when his kingdom was drenched in blessing and abounding with prosperity. The undoing of his highly favored reign did not happen when God pronounced consequences on him through Nathan. David’s undoing occurred when David desired a woman who was not his wife and took her into his bed. That was his fall; the rest was just logistics.

The Gracious God We So Easily Forget

Uriah and Bathshebah were wronged, terribly wronged, by David’s sin. But this does not obscure the fact that there was someone else who was even more sinned against than these two people: God. God, after all, is the one David forgot. God is the one who was jilted. God is the one whose kindness and mercy elevated the shepherd-boy David, at the bottom of the depth chart in his own home, to the pinnacle of power.

There is a reason behind such a narrative. It is this: the biblical God is not a God of tiny blessings and only occasional gifts. The biblical God does not give stones to those who need fish. The biblical God overflows with love (see Exodus 34:6-7). The biblical God abounds with forgiveness. The biblical God renews his mercies for us every single morning we live.

The biblical God is the antidote to our sin. Seeing and savoring the biblical God is the way to survive the test of prosperity (and the test of adversity). The biblical God is the one who gives men in ministry every last scrap of blessing they have. This is what stands out to me as I mull over so many of the cases of ministry failure in the last 10-15 years. So many of these men were not wasting away; they were men who knew blessing of a wildly unusual kind.

Like my own unworthy self, these men had so much. They were given more than they could have asked for or expected. The mind boggles at it all: they shepherded congregations, preached the Word of God, traveled the globe, wrote important books, took consequential stands, built meaningful networks, made real friendships, earned a generous living, and had families. But here’s the sad truth: none of this matters if you’ve lost sight of God.

How to Pass the Test of Prosperity

We are not alone in this spiritual struggle. We have a devilish foe who never sleeps or takes a day off (1 Peter 5:8). We must remember this about the devil: he loves to operate in prosperous conditions. He does much of his best work in the light, so to speak, when a man is flying high and everything about him seems untouchable. It is then, he knows, that he can get men to live not in humble dependence, but in proud liberation.

The devil is a cunning adversary—but God is greater still. Because God is God, we can pass all tests. We can survive. Not only this, we can thrive. We can glorify God when the cancer diagnosis strikes and our entire family is catapulted into the valley of adversity. But we can equally glorify God when the church explodes in growth and the ministry opportunities pour in.

If we are to do so, though, we need a plan. We need a plan for the test of adversity, for it will surely come. But as I am at pains to say, we need just as much a plan for the test of prosperity. So how do we pass the test, then? Is it all hopeless? No, it is not. The way to pass the test of prosperity is to run the very same plays we ran when we faced the test of adversity.

We need to lift our eyes to God (Isaiah 40:26-28). We need to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). We need to cast ourselves on the daily mercy and grace of God. We need to drink deeply from the Word, great gulps of Bible on a consistent basis. We need to rehearse our blessings regularly, pouring out praise for all God has given us. If married, we need to cultivate closeness with our wife and love our children, putting them before us, always asking the work of ministry to come second behind our love for our family.

We must not become professional Christians. We must always be a worshipper of Jesus, nothing more, nothing less. We must remember that all we deserve at any moment of any day is eternal damnation. We must pour the gospel on our head like water from a rushing shower, reminding ourselves continually of the miracle of our initial salvation and our ongoing growth in godliness.

We need to repent daily, keeping close accounts with God and man (1 John 1:9). We need to speak the language of humility every day, taking ownership of our wrongs, embracing accountability for our patterns of sin, and being quick to take blame and give credit (rather than being quick to take credit and give blame). We must never forget that we are not impervious to falling; but for the grace of God, we would, at every given moment (1 Cor. 10:12).

Conclusion

In the end, there is no foolproof solution for our sin condition. Ours is a walk lived by grace and limned in vigilance (see Proverbs 4:23). We are always on the night watch. But realistic as we must be, we do not live in terror of failure. We do not drench ourselves in dread each day. Instead, we live in God-centered confidence. God is our focus. God is our passion. God, we remember daily, is bigger than our sin, greater than the devil, more powerful than our most ingrained life tendencies.

We are the problem, but God is the solution. 2 Timothy 2:13 echoes in our mind, turning anxiety into gratitude: “if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.”

Can we survive the test of prosperity? Yes, by the grace of God, we can.

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(Image: Wikimedia Commons, Manuscript Leaf with King David in an Initial I, from a Psalter MET)