The God of the Bible versus the god of MLM

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Personal Testimony

I grew up in a small town in Appalachia.

My mom and dad struggled along like most others of that time and place, working, paying bills - and doing their best to give my sister and me the things they never had. My goal - very early in life - was to become "rich and famous" --the first in the family to "make it big".

My favorite show on television was a series entitled "The Millionaire". It was about a multi millionaire who would give away a million dollars tax-free to some struggling couple on the condition that they never reveal to anyone how they received their newfound wealth. I ate it up.

I developed a taste for "the best that life had to offer". While my parents were busy providing me with daily needs, I would dream of the latest, most expensive fishing rod and scheme how to get it; how many lawns I had to cut at $3 a lawn... how many driveways I had to shovel at $2 each... and so it went.

My parents had drilled into me the formula for success: get all the education you can afford, get a secure job with the biggest corporation you can find (one with a good retirement plan and all the fringe benefits) and you'll have it "made in the shade".

As my desire for worldly riches continued to grow, my parents and grandparents were gently reminding me that "money isn't everything" - and that "as long as you've got love and your health, you've got true riches". I didn't listen - it was too late.

I did well in school and attained a Masters degree. After I received my undergraduate degree, I got married to a wonderful woman and we began our life together in a small apartment. I graduated after two years of study, and took a job with a small advertising agency.

To meet expenses, my wife also worked full time in the executive compensation office of a large department store chain. The stories that she brought home of million dollar annual salaries whetted my appetite even more for the executive suite. I now knew that my parents were right - big corporations and big money go together.

After about a year with the agency, I got a position with one of the largest corporations in the U.S. - and started my climb to the top.

Now that I was "set for life", my wife - who was a juvenile diabetic - began to suggest that she stay at home and start a family. I reminded her that if we wanted the "good life," kids would have to wait - so she got a job.

Three years later my wife became pregnant. We were living in a town house and wanted to move to a place with some acreage. How could we do it on one income? In my heart, I wished that my wife had never become pregnant.

By this time, the Lord had just about all He could take of "Mr. Success". Nine months later our first child was stillborn. My wife and I were devastated. We buried our baby and began to make plans to start the family that we now both wanted to have. My wife became pregnant again - and we lost our baby a few months later through a miscarriage.

By now, my wife's diabetes and two pregnancies had begun to compromise her health - and we decided to adopt. Several months later, my wife became pregnant again and delivered our third child--a daughter-- born with congenital heart defects as a result of her mom's diabetes. She required immediate surgery. I began to pray to a God I didn't know - the God of the Bible. The Lord was merciful and gave us a successful result. We learned that our daughter would have to undergo a series of operations over a period of several years. The Lord had begun His work in my life -- breaking me down, bit by bit.

Family matters had cost me time and attention away from my work, and my performance began to slip. I was no longer a rising star at work. Frustrated, I began looking for ways to supplement my income. I actually prayed for something to come along - and God answered my prayer - but in a way that I would never have imagined.

I was invited to join a multi-level marketing organization that had an extraordinarily comprehensive "training system" that included hundreds of cassette tapes, videos, books, and business meetings—all marketed to the distributor organization as absolutely essential to achieving success.

Soon I was immersed in learning ‘success doctrine’—spending hundreds of dollars each month on tapes, books and a variety of ‘business functions’. As I drove us deeper into debt –learning how to be successful—my wife struggled with balancing the checkbook, working a full-time job, taking care of our daughter and accompanying me on the endless round of "business-building " functions that we were told was a prerequisite of success. My wife hated it— but I ate it up. Several months after joining the organization, we attended a weekend training session in Greensboro, South Carolina that attracted over 20,000 people from all over the country. The air was charged with expectations of success as people told their rags to riches stories from stage. I was excited! It looked as though I had found a way to become rich and famous and have all the things in life I had wanted.

Throughout the weekend, the speakers kept emphasizing that the real secret of the business was to be found in the optional, non-denominational "Christian" worship service on Sunday morning. Bleary-eyed from the 2:00 A.M. ending of the Saturday night business meetings, my wife and I went. After an hour of rock and roll "Christian" music, the message was brought by the same man who had created the "training system"--a successful layman who claimed to know Christ as his Savior.

The message portrayed Christ as God in the flesh that died for our sin, and was available to help us gain a home in Heaven as well as material success on earth. My heart desired material success more than anything else—and I accepted Christ as my ticket to Heaven and material success on earth. I "bought Jesus" just as readily as I bought the tapes, books and all the other tools of success.

The speaker encouraged us to seek out a local church where the Bible was preached and to obey God through baptism. We were led to an independent, fundamental Baptist church where we were baptized and accepted as part of the fellowship. I believed that I had been saved—but God was just beginning the work in my deceitfully wicked heart.

After this experience, I laid aside some bad habits I had developed in college, and viewed this as evidence of my salvation. We began attending our new church home regularly, and God's Word became interesting to me as I sought to learn more about the God who was going to help me achieve my dreams of wealth and prosperity. As I pored through the Bible, taking notes on sermons and filling my mind with the things of God, I began to sense a conflict between the Bible's teachings and many of the teachings within the business training system that was filling my brain with "success doctrine".

We left the local church, and attended a variety of other churches that preached a watered-down Gospel –one that did not include Bible repentance. I had been programmed by the training system to believe that our distributor organization was a type of "church" –complete with a God that wanted nothing but my success. As I moved further from the Light of the God of the Bible, all my old sinful habits returned. I responded by diving even deeper into the business system’s teachings of positive self-confession, "possibility thinking" and "positive self-esteem" -anything I could do to drown out the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. I focused my area of Bible study on the select Scriptures (and twisted interpretations thereof) that seemed to support my developing view of God as my goodie-getter. "Confess it and you will possess it"... "Conceive, believe, achieve"...these and many other sayings became my mantra for becoming "rich and famous".

As the years wore on, I worked my job by day and my business by night - missing the little blessing that God had given me - my daughter. My wife worked too - trying to help rescue us from the financial pressure that I had created in search for "the good life". I continued to float from church to church - always on the lookout for new prospects for my multi-level marketing distributorship and totally blinded to my need for Christ.

Finally, my wife's health declined to the point that her doctor ordered her to stop working. The Lord was merciful - and gave me a job with better pay. In the late 1980’s, my wife began her final four-year battle with diabetes that finally took her home to be with the Lord.

I remarried, and found a church that preached the God of the Bible. As I learned more about who Jesus Christ really is, the old conflicts began to resurface - the God of the Bible vs. the god of health, wealth and prosperity. One day as I was listening to one of my "prosperity gospel" tapes, the speaker said, "the Bible says that man without vision shall perish". He continued to suggest that this mean "a man without a goal or vision for his life shall perish". I checked it out in my Bible and learned that this interpretation was not at all what the Bible says.

The Bible says in Proverbs 29:18 that

"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but He That keepeth the law, happy is he".

What the Bible is saying is that wherever people cannot get the true Word of God, they perish. It had nothing to do with goal-setting or "being successful". I was shocked - and I realized that this verse had been true in my life whenever I had been away from a church that preached and taught the whole Word of God. I immediately asked God to show me the prosperity-gospel-based "business training system" through His eyes.

I resigned my distributorship and over the next two years, God began to show me who I was—an unrepentant sinner destined for Hell. Sermon after sermon, the convicting power of the Holy Spirit revealed my utterly lost condition. Instead of responding to my own need, I deflected the messages and used them to spiritually club my wife and kids into religious externalism— getting them to looking good so Dad would look good. Finally, on September 17, 1997, an evangelist preached a message on "Eight Truths to Teach our Young People". As the preaching started, I started taking detailed notes—anticipating that the message would only confirm my own opinion that I was fulfilling my responsibility as spiritual leader of my family.

One by one , the evangelist unfolded eight truths from the Word of God that thoroughly and completely convicted me as a total failure as a spiritual provider for my family. Throughout the night, the Holy Spirit showed me my life in review—how I had been totally focused on providing my family with material things and completely ignoring their spiritual provision. I had delegated the responsibility for their spiritual training to the church and Christian school. More importantly, God showed me that I had never taken responsibility for my own sin that had nailed Christ to the cross. I finally realized that my sin had murdered an innocent Man. I knew I was headed for an eternal Hell. That night, at 3:40 A.M. I realized what I was before God. I begged God to forgive me for what I had done to His Son and asked Jesus to save me. God’s peace came over me and I told my wife what had happened. Then I went to my kids’ rooms and asked their forgiveness for failing to provide for their spiritual well-being.

I could write a book on what God has shown me and how I went wrong. More importantly, God has written a Book - called the Bible - that has every single bit of information you need to become a true success. What's a true success? Someone who brings glory to God with the short time they have here on earth. God receives glory from a person who recognizes their sin and trusts Jesus to save them from a certain Hell. He receives glory from those who are saved when they share the most precious possession they have - their faith in a Christ who saves anyone who will put their trust in Him - and Him alone.

I finally found what I was looking for - I just hadn't been looking in the right place. I found the true riches in Christ Jesus. And I found eternal fame - because my name is written in Heaven, in the Book of Life.