Michael Horton has written an insightful piece on Joel Osteen’s ministry entitled, Joel Osteen and the Glory Story: A Case Study. He concludes it like this:
This gospel of “submission,” “commitment,” “decision,” and “having a personal relationship with God” fails to realize, first of all, that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified co-heir with Christ and adopted child of the Father. “How can I be right with God?” is no longer a question when my happiness rather than God’s holiness is the main issue. My concern is that Joel Osteen is simply the latest in a long line of self-help evangelists who appeal to the native American obsession with pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Salvation is not a matter of divine rescue from the judgment that is coming on the world, but a matter of self-improvement in order to have your best life now.
As such, I have a new appreciation for the ability of Yahoo’s spam filter to block bad e-mails from entering my inbox (click on the picture for a larger view):
