“Just ’cause the world don’t have it doesn’t mean you can’t have it.” — Creflo Dollar
It was just a few months back that prosperity peddler Creflo Dollar asked his followers for $300 each so he could buy a Gulfstream G650 luxury jet — and then was publicly shamed into withdrawing the request.
But hey, that was just a temporary setback. Now, we’ve learned that the board of Dollar’s World Changers Church International is set to forge ahead with purchasing the plane it dubs “necessary in order to fulfill the mission of the ministry.”
Here is a part of the board’s recently released statement:
“We believe that if our efforts are focused on building the Kingdom of God around the world, then it is His desire for us to see the desires of our hearts. … We seek out what we believe to be the will of God, we allow ourselves to dream BIG, we present our ‘family’ with an opportunity to ‘invest,’ and we all come together to turn those dreams into reality. We plan to acquire a Gulfstream G650 because it is the best, and it is a reflection of the level of excellence at which this organization chooses to operate. We, the World Changers family, so value the lives, the safety and the well-being of our pastors and leaders that we wish to provide to them the best air travel experience possible.”
Yet as The Washington Post points out: “The Gulfstream G650 isn’t just any private jet. The billionaires lining up these luxury jets, which sell for upwards of $65 million each, are willing to put their names on a waiting list for years just for the pleasure.”
That’s one salient point. The other is one we can draw from the Dollar board’s statement here: “We believe that if our efforts are focused on building the Kingdom of God around the world, then it is His desire for us to see the desires of our hearts.” In other words, “I’m doing things for God, He wants me to be happy, and therefore, I should get whatever I want!” So, away with you, commercial flights! I can “dream BIGGER” than any ol’ 737-700 or MD-80!
It hardly needs to be restated that this is the outrageous, invented theology of the greedy and manipulative Prosperity Peddlers, not of the Lord Jesus who had “no place to lay His head.” (Luke 9:58)
What does need to be restated, though, is that thousands of people today continue to be manipulated by this garbage for one main reason: They don’t read their Bibles. They get their theology not from God’s Word, but from TV hucksters who mix in enough God talk to sound religious with enough worldly bait to make their groundless claims go down easily.
I “dream BIG,” too. I “dream BIG” that the church will finally have enough of this spiritual poison — grotesque materialism dressed up as God’s obligatory “blessings.” I “dream BIG” that the church that will care more about gleaning truth from God’s Word than from its own selfish desires. I “dream BIG” that the church will someday value the Bible above the word of some slick TV guru and his religious empire. I “dream BIG” that the church would demonstrate its allegiance to the Word by reading it, studying it, soaking it in, understanding it, memorizing it and having the ability to quote it easily in context. In the final analysis, our determined adherence to the Word of God is the only protection any of us really have have against the “BIG dreams” of the religious hucksters.