One of the blogs I read is written by one of my favorite New Testament scholars, Ben Witherington III. He recently wrote a post over at his blog, Bible and Culture, called Rabbits Foot Religion. Here is an excerpt:
The practitioner of rabbit’s foot religion is impatient. He wants an answer, indeed he wants an outcome right now! God however is not our cosmic bellhop and he does not exist to fulfill all the wishes of our materialistic little hearts. The health and wealth Gospel is a travesty of the real Gospel, precisely because it not only denies the value of suffering and the call of Christ to take up one’s cross and follow him, it also tries to manipulate God to give us ‘the desires of our hearts’, whether they are good for us or not. To these sorts of requests, God has an answer—-NO! A loving God, like a loving parent will not give us things that will spoil and destroy our Christian character. And by the way— NO is definitely an answer to prayer. The wrong sort of prayer.
I like it! Have you seen Rabbit’s Foot Religion in your own life or in somebody at your church?
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