On a bush trek some years back, I came across a termite mound taller than I was — one of those impressive reddish towers you sometimes stumble on in the savanna, hardened like clay, standing as confidently as a small monument. From the outside, it looked utterly solid, the kind of structure you’d assume could survive anything. My guide tapped it lightly with a stick, and it gave a hollow, papery sound.
The colony inside had died out or moved on long before, leaving the outer shell standing exactly as impressively as ever — a monument to a life that was no longer actually there. Nothing about its appearance gave that away. You had to tap it to find out.
That’s a fair picture of a warning John understood well when he wrote one of the most quoted, and most misquoted, verses in the New Testament:
“Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” — 3 John 1:2, NKJV
Read it slowly, because the phrase everyone skips over is the one carrying all the weight: just as your soul prospers. Not instead of. Not as a bonus once the real prosperity arrives. The visible prosperity John prays for is explicitly tied to, and measured against, the health of something no one can see from the outside at all.
What “Prosper” Actually Meant
The Greek word behind “prosper” here is euodoutai — literally, to have a good road, a good journey, to be led along a successful path toward a destination. It’s not primarily a word about accumulation. It’s a word about arrival. A trader whose journey to market goes well, whose road is smooth, whose goods arrive intact — that trader has euodoutai. The word says nothing about how large his cart was to begin with. It says everything about whether the journey itself was sound.
This matters enormously, because a great deal of what gets preached under the banner of this single verse quietly reverses John’s order — treating the visible fruit as the whole point, and the soul’s condition as, at best, an afterthought. John prayed the opposite prayer. He prayed for a good journey that started with the soul and only then, appropriately, showed up in the rest of a person’s life.
A Rich Man Who Wasn’t Prospering, and a Poor One Who Was
Christ told a brief, uncomfortable parable about a man whose barns overflowed:
“The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’… But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’” — Luke 12:16-17, 20, NKJV
By every visible measure available to his neighbours, this man was the picture of prosperity. By the only measure that actually counted, his soul had been starving the entire time. Contrast him with Lazarus, the beggar at the rich man’s gate, covered in sores, dependent on scraps (Luke 16:19-22) — and yet it’s Lazarus, not the rich man he sat outside of, whom Scripture describes carried away to comfort at his death. Two men. Two very different balance sheets. Only one of them, it turns out, had actually been prospering all along.
Paul, writing from a prison cell with nothing to his name but chains, made the same point about himself directly:
“Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content… I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” — Philippians 4:11-12, NKJV
A man in prison, describing himself as having learned to abound. That sentence only makes sense if prosperity, as Scripture actually defines it, was never primarily about the size of his circumstances.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I once knew a trader in the market who, by any visible measure, was doing modestly at best — a small stall, unremarkable turnover, nothing that would draw attention. But he was known throughout that market for something else entirely: his word was gold. Buyers trusted his scales without checking them twice. Fellow traders came to him for wisdom, not loans. When hardship struck a neighbouring stall, he was often the first to quietly help, without needing it announced. Years later, his business had grown steadily, honestly, without a single shortcut — but even before it grew, everyone who knew him would have told you the man was already prospering. His soul had been in good order long before his stall reflected it.
There’s a proverb worth carrying alongside John’s prayer: the tortoise carries its house on its back, but it is not the house that makes the tortoise wise. Visible increase is not, by itself, proof of anything. What’s underneath it is where the real story is being written.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
1. If my soul’s condition were the only visible measure of my prosperity, would others describe me as prospering?
2. Have I quietly reversed John’s order — praying for the fruit while neglecting the root that’s meant to produce it?
3. Like Paul, have I learned contentment in both abundance and lack, or does my peace still rise and fall entirely with my circumstances?
4. Is there an area of visible increase in my life that’s actually standing on hollowed-out ground underneath?
5. What would it look like this week to invest as deliberately in my soul’s health as I do in my income?
Final Word
The termite mound’s impressive shell was never the problem to watch. What had happened inside it was. John’s prayer for us was never a permission slip to chase visible increase while ignoring what’s happening beneath the surface — it was a promise that the visible would rightly follow the invisible, in that order, every time. Prosper, by all means. Just make sure it’s the kind of prosperity that could survive a tap of the stick.
If this stirred something in you about what biblical prosperity really involves — work, generosity, stewardship, and the character that has to come before any of it — I’ve written a fuller book on the subject. Thou Shalt Prosper walks through these principles in depth, free to download at oludareakinbo.com/my-books.
