An interview with Ravi Zacharias about prosperity gospel

I am documenting an excerpt from an interview with famous Christian Apologist, Dr. Ravi Zacharias.

Interviewer: Shifting gears a little, some Christians speak of the abundant life, which Jesus alludes to in John 10, as one of God’s great promises. How would you define this abundant life and has your understanding of this concept changed over the course of your faith journey?

Ravi: The most important thing to know is what it is not. It is not the prosperity gospel. I was waiting to be picked up for the airport recently in Stuttgart, Germany. It was a Sunday morning and a preacher on television was going to town on all that you can have—and he is the best example of it, I guess. I think it is very sad, especially when you are coming from a context of so much deprivation. So first, the abundant life does not necessarily mean the wealthy life. The abundant life is what I would distinguish as zoe from bios, the spiritual life versus the biological life.

Abundant life, to go back to your earlier questions on contentment and emotional complementariness to the intellect, is where you’ve learned whatsoever state you are in therewith to be content. When eleven out of the twelve disciples die a martyr’s death and when Peter is told that while he was young he went where he wanted, but when he was old somebody else was going to lead him, signifying the manner of death that he was going to die—that was hardly a projection of the abundant life. It was a projection of some abundant sacrifice that he was going to have to make. I like the way the apostle Paul talks about it because Paul came sequentially in a different way than the rest of the disciples. The rest of them came through Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection. Paul came from the resurrection to the crucifixion, and that’s why he says, “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death” (Philippians 3:10). He came triumphantly, getting a glimpse of the risen Christ, but he knew he had to move back towards the cross and be conformed to what it might entail. So the abundant life to me is a full life of understanding what life is all about, whether to know how to abound and to know how to be abased. That is the one, I think, who is leading the abundant life: the one who can handle both success and failure.