Your Soul Prospers

“Beloved, I pray you prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 1:2).

In the church world, you may hear about the “spirit of poverty” in connection to a struggle for finances. But a spirit of poverty isn’t really about money. It’s a love deficit. A financial lack might be a consequence of a poverty spirit, but it’s not the root. A poverty spirit doesn’t believe God can be trusted to care for your life. It’s a disconnect between a person’s head knowledge about God’s goodness, and his or her heart experiences with it.

If you let doubt in his love for you control your mindset, then you have to deal with your circumstances from the limits of your own strength. When you agree with any thought contrary to who God is, or how he thinks, you put a limitation on your life in the area of that thought. Every new negative circumstance drains from your ability to manage that place until you’ve got nothing left. Even if you’re the strongest, most intelligent, well–adjusted person in the world, there’s just never enough of your own resources to manage all the relationships and circumstances in your life.

That’s the core of a poverty spirit: there’s never enough. That controlling lie wants to make you see everything with the heart of an orphan. It tells you there will never be enough, so take whatever you need to survive. Never fully trust anyone. Guard what you have like you’ll never get more. You’re on your own, so either hide from anything more powerful than you, or learn to attack it. Everything you encounter is a potential threat to protect yourself from, even an offer of God’s love. The poverty spirit points at all the rejection you’ve experienced, all the suffering you’ve seen, and twists your journey with God into hiding with fear.

But God is unrelenting in His love for you. He’s there with you right now, waiting for you to let Him teach you to receive—and overflow—grace, hope, healing, peace, joy, goodness, blessing, and his love. Because there’s more than enough. That’s your new paradigm. That’s your new mindset. There is always more than enough, because Jesus is always with you. You never have to do life on your own. You are not an orphan, and you never have to think like one. You get to learn to think like he does, thoughts which are focused on loving you and everyone around you into a truly abundant life.

Take a few moments and hold out your hands. Symbolically give Jesus your old mindset. Ask him to forgive you for believing the lies that have kept you in the dark, and to set you free from them. Ask him to teach you to receive his love so it displaces the ways you used to think. Then just thank him. Look around your life and thank him for all the things you have. One revelation of his love, goodness, and provision will lead to another, and another, and another, until you start seeing just how rich you really are.

“For I know the thoughts I intend for you, says the Lord: not one of misery, but all of peace, wholeness, and prosperity, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).