Ran across this insightful thought last week:
What was once a health and wealth prosperity gospel, is becoming a “dreams,” and “potential,” gospel, and it is in mainstream evangelicalism
— Dean Inserra (@deaninserra) March 31, 2016
Not a day goes by when I do not see another Christian writer pushing these ideas. It’s looking out the same window of prosperity, just using different drapes (language) around the same window.
As my generation moves to a position of leadership within society, teachings are being adjusted to meet a group of people who place more value in experiences than money and influence instead of position. This shift in focus within the prosperity sect of Christian theology is desiring to fill that need.
I have much I could share as this has been a personal struggle of my own. By far the greatest encouragement and challenge to me in regards to dreams, wishes, destiny, and potential, has been reading Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In particular, this section on dreams, community, and the Christian life is spot on. I hope you find this instructive.
Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly.
He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself…
We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
