What is Real Prosperity?

Do you find yourself enjoying your prosperity without thought, or are you haunted by guilt or shame because you have acquired so much? I’m guessing that most people are somewhere in between. So am I.
 
While we often tend to think of our financial state when using the word prosperity, it can be applied to many of our other advantages. Prosperity means a successful, flourishing, thriving condition, or good fortune (I got that from dictionary.com). One person could be intellectually prosperous, while another could have to work very hard to progress, and others struggle with starting below the mark. It’s the same with our physical abilities, our health, our confidence, our beauty. We could go on and on, but let’s get down to business.
 
Where do you prosper? What are you good at doing? What are the things you hang on to when you walk into a new phase of life? It’s normal to use our personal assets as the means to progress, but where would you lean if those advantages were lost? How can we live a life where our faith is integrated with our strengths? How can we grow our prosperity and faith together, right where we are, right here, right now? Can we make this sort of integration the lens from which we muster our motivation? Can we make it our prayer that this is the way we would live our lives?
 
The Bible is full of foundational Scripture to inspire us in this challenge, but I will focus on two of my favorites.

• Revelation 21:1-5. The gist of what I hear from this passage is that God wins in the end. Not only will our sins be forgotten, our flaws redeemed, and our tears wiped away, but EVERYTHING will be made new. I’m hungry for this kind of world, and it can only be done by God. Don’t you just want to be on the inside of this? How can we strive to live by this knowledge? Without simply leaning on our personal strengths, how can we depend more on this God who will lead us in this charge? 

In the last Chronicle of Narnia, The Last Battle, the characters are in the new world as they repeat over and over, “Higher up and deeper in.” May this be the prayer of our community, our very heart.

• And finally, from Ephesians 3:20, God is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or even imagine. Think about that! Our greatest hopes, our strongest desires, all that we can even imagine, God can do more. This is the God who hears our prayers.

Andrea Sheldon Tshihamba

• jennifer's blog