Victoria Osteen is Both Right and Horribly, Horribly Wrong

Maybe you've seen this video floating around the Internet in the last week.  Victoria Osteen is the wife of Joel Osteen, the megachurch pastor whose church meets in a former NBA arena and whose services are broadcast all over the world.  Why is this clip so viral?  Let's just say it's not because everyone wants to share her message...  so how should we react?



I say Victoria Osteen is right... and she is horribly, horribly wrong.


Victoria Osteen is Horribly Wrong

We'll start with the obvious.  Worship is not about self, unless the object of worship is self.  True worship is by definition a tribute to the object of your worship.  If you are "doing it for yourself," you are making yourself the object of worship.

The heart of the pagan worship system is worship-as-transaction.  You worship your god for what the god will do for you in return--a sacrifice for power, an offering for fertility, etc.  Christian worship is to be an end in itself.  You worship God because He is worthy and out of gratitude for what He has already done.

And now we get to the issue of "God takes pleasure when we're happy.  That's the thing that gives Him the greatest joy."  The problem with the Osteens in general is that they present God as always eager to bless (which is true) but without any mention of any demands or true authority He has over our lives.  God ultimately becomes our servant, doing everything--even the cross--for us, rather than for His glory.  That's thoroughly unbiblical.

Victoria Osteen is Right (sort of)

This incomplete gospel that the Osteens consistently present sets them up for us to assume the worst when we hear this type of thing said, and nothing I say in this section is meant to detract from what I wrote in the first section.  But I want to look into what I think Mrs. Osteen was trying to say, if we give her some benefit of the doubt.

She sort of went in a circle with what she said: we obey God to make ourselves happy, which in turn makes God happy.  She also said that "doing it for God" was "one way to look at it."  She, it seems, was just trying to give another perspective.

Obeying God does make us happy, and you could say God's "greatest pleasure" in us is when we delight in Him through joyful worship and obedience.  So we do obey God for both our own good and for God's pleasure.  Sometimes we need to be reminded that it's not a burden to obey God, but instead it is what will bring our greatest joy and, yes, happiness.

She's right.  Obeying God is the greatest thing you can do for yourself.

But when this truth is stated in such a clumsy way from a source that offers such a self-centered idea of the Christian life in general, it seems more like a Freudian slip.  It's our choice in how to react to it.

Social Media Slingin'



In his book The Next Story, Tim Challies writes that all technology gravitates toward its original purpose.  For example, TV was invented for entertainment, so even when you try to educate or give the news (or preach the gospel) on TV, it turns into entertainment.

I'll admit that all I know about Facebook history comes from the movie The Social Network, so I'm no expert.  But in that movie, we see that Facebook, in its origins, had two purposes: for college kids to hook up and for them to evaluate and ridicule one another.

I think the response to this Victoria Osteen clip has Facebook's original purpose rearing its ugly head.  We may be sharing this Osteen video with the heart of wanting to point out error and warn people about the problems with the Osteen gospel, but I don't really think we're helping anyone.  We're ridiculing, not rebuking.  We're reinforcing through an "in-joke" who is in, not reaching out.

So let's worship God for His glory, use discernment in what we write and share on social media, and pursue happiness in the wonderful, blessed life of obedience to God.