andrew dodson

My take on Joel Osteen is not my own. Sometimes, others can state their opinion a lot better than me. Undoubtedly, a lot of you saw the Joel Osteen interview on TV last night. I missed it. But, I know there are a lot of Christians that disagree with Osteen’s teaching. Challies has reviewed his latest book, and I encourage everyone to follow the link to read the review. However, this paragraph sticks out as one that sums up my take on Osteen:

This is not to say that Osteen has no understanding of Christianity. Become a Better You contains some teaching that seems consistent with the Bible, and certainly there is lots of Christian terminology woven in. But Osteen teaches what is clearly a woefully inadequate theology of sin, repentance, sanctification and life. Osteen seems unable or unwilling to bring the power of the gospel to bear on life–real life. Life, he teaches, is not a meant to bring glory to God, but is meant to bring blessing and ease to the individual. He occasionally shares words that approximate the gospel, but ones that always stop short of providing the complete gospel as we find it in the Bible. “We’ve all sinned, failed, and made mistakes,” he says, “But many people don’t know they can receive God’s mercy and forgiveness.” That sounds fair, but he goes on to say, “As long as you’re doing your best and desire to do what’s right according to God’s Word, you can be assured God is pleased with you.” Is it enough to desire to do what’s right? Is God pleased with those who do their best? “That accusing voice will come to you and tell you, ‘You lost your temper last week in traffic.’ Your attitude should be, ‘That’s okay. I’m growing.’” But sin is never okay, whether we are growing or not. We can never excuse sin and can never minimize it.

As Challies points out, Osteen says, “(Life)…is not a meant to bring glory to God, but is meant to bring blessing and ease to the individual.” I think this is the key of where my disagreement with Osteen lies. This is the prosperity gospel through and through. God doesn’t promise blessings in this life. This life is about honoring God, not for what we can get in return, but out of our love for Him and the grace that He offers through salvation. We don’t do good works to be rewarded in life. We do good works out of a love for God and obedience to His Word. God doesn’t owe us – or promise – our next breath, no matter how good of a person we think we have been. To expect God to reward us for doing good is awfully self-centered, in my opinion. I’d be interested to hear Osteen’s take on this:

We are all infected and impure with sin.
When we display our righteous deeds,
they are nothing but filthy rags.