Run that one by me again?

“Broke people can’t help broke people?”

Don’t believe it.

This phrase is meant to explain that if someone has material needs, only someone else with material resources can meet them, thereby showing the silliness of considering wealth a sin. Unfortunately, it’s just plain false, and the falseness of it helps reveal the core problem in the thinking of the prosperity Christians who typically express it.

The truth is that broke people have tremendous capacity to help other broke people, whether by befriending them, praying for them, sharing knowledge with them, or even evangelizing them. And the fact that some people scoff at these gifts only proves how much they overvalue economic wealth. But if this extraordinarily materialist cliché were true, then we wouldn’t have the apostles specifically disproving it (Acts 3:1-8) and we would have to believe that no one was ever helped by Jesus, a man so broke that He didn’t even have a denarius in his own pocket to use as an illustration (Mark 12:13-17).

In reality, the message of the Gospel is that the wealth we have in Christ comes in sideways to all the world’s forms of power and subverts their status as ultimate goods by giving us access to the only true Good, God. And that’s why people who say, “Broke people can’t help broke people,” are in their own unwitting way subverting the very hope promised in the Gospel.