"Do I eat the flesh of bulls?
Do I drink the blood of goats?
Present to God a thank-offering!
Repay your vows to the sovereign One!
Pray to me when you are in trouble!
I will deliver you, and you will honor me!" (Psalm 50:13-15)
Pastor Richie shared with us that God does not need our tithe to meet His needs; rather, we need to give God our tithe in order to meet our needs. It is the theme of Psalm 50. The tithe, given to the One who doesn’t need anything, opens the doors of heaven and procures our salvation, deliverance, and provision.
Our God is a God who permits us to transact with Him. Malachi 3, perhaps the most famous passage on tithing, makes this crystal-clear. “Bring the entire tithe into the storehouse so that there may be food in my temple. Test me in this matter,” says the Lord who rules over all, “to see if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until there is no room for it all. Then I will stop the plague from ruining your crops, and the vine will not lose its fruit before harvest,” says the Lord who rules over all. (Malachi 3:10-11)
God asks us to participate in this redemptive process: we give, and He gives. And He even takes into account our weakness. We give ten percent, and He pours out in such abundant measure that we cannot measure it: the blessing is poured out “until there is no room for it all”. In other words, it overflows! Our one-bedroom apartment is not big enough. Our 200-acre ranch is not big enough. As the old saying goes, we can never out-give God.
Where else can we find such a vast return on investment? And why do so many Christians fail in this simplest tenet of our faith? Let’s pray that the hearts of God’s people will turn to complete obedience in the matter of the tithe.
Lord, You are everything to me! I give you ten percent of my earnings and one hundred percent of my heart, one hundred percent of my passion, one hundred percent of my obedience. What else can I do? I love You and will do anything for You.
If only it were truly that simple, nearly every Christian would have been on the Forbes Billionaire’s list. Rather sadly, that is not the case.
ReplyDeleteThe notion that the New Testament believer has to give some form of tithe to god in order to have their needs met is definitely not scriptural. To even try to relate it to salvation is not right at all as doing this means you are relying on works and have completely rejected the sacrifice of Christ. Salvation comes by faith and by faith alone.
The bible clearly defines the tithe as the tenth part of crops and livestock from the land of Israel alone. It was only required of the Old Testament Jews and never the New Testament church.
God bless
Dear SBG,
DeleteThank you for sharing your thoughts. So glad to see that the U.K. is represented in the readership! God bless you too.
-Genise