Money: How you use it
August 3rd, 2008
Tribute, Taxes, Tithing
Tithing. There are few subjects more exciting, few topics more interesting, few concepts so captivating that draw people from all over simply to learn more about than tithing. If we had promoted the fact that we were going to talk about tithing there would not be enough seats in this building to hold all the people who would come by just in the off chance that they might hear something about money. God knows we love to talk about money. Especially when we can go to church and hear another preach give another long offering appeal dressed up as a sermon to plead, beg, berate, and guilt trip you into giving even more of your money than you already do. How fun! You know when you come to church and the topic of the sermon is about money that this is one of those sermons you are going to go tell your friends about. You are going to try and get a copy on cd so that you can listen to it time and time again because other people talking about how you spend your money never gets old. That’s how it works right?
I know how it feels. Everybody wants your money. You work hard for it 40-60 hours per week and no one helps you with that. Talk about Chicken Little. No one helps you make it, but once you have it everyone wants a slice. There is so much demand and so little money to go around. It can be frustrating. Now we could spend this morning talking about how you need to give all your money to the church and how you need to quit robbing God of what is His, or we could look at this from a little different perspective. Anyone have a preference?
Let me start off with a question: Why do we tithe? Why do we pass around those plates every week and try to force you to put your money in it? That is actually two questions but, well Ozark math. Before we go to far today I want to show you some things about tithing that you may not be aware of. Don’t worry you have my solemn vow that I will not try to sell you on tithing like an infomercial with stories how tithing worked for others. I am not so interested in trying to tell you what to do with your money as I am in showing you what this principle can do. In fact I want to encourage you to stop tithing. Good news for you: I probably hate talking about money more than you hate hearing someone talk about money, so hopefully this will work out for all of us.
Now for those of you who have been in the church for awhile you know that tithing comes from Leviticus 27. So tithing is a part of God’s law that He gave to His people. What is interesting is that tithing was around long before the law. Abraham who lived 500 years before the law gave a tithe to a man by the name of Melchizedek who was a priest/king in Genesis 14. Jacob also in Genesis 28 gave a tithe to the Lord. We are instructed as the people of God to give Him a tenth of all of our income. Tithing is just that, it is the practice of giving one tenth of a person’s income or property as an offering to God. Within the church this is considered common knowledge.
What is not so well known is that this is not an exclusively Christian practice. Nor was it exclusively Jewish. Many cultures in the ancient world gave tithe offerings to their gods as a form of worship. The pagan cultures did this as a way of appeasing the gods so that they did not become angry and cause troubles in their lives in many senses their tithes were a form of tribute. This offering or payment made in pagan cultures was not exclusive to religion. It also works well in politics. Rome in fact when they conquered an enemy would require them to pay tribute. In many senses this was a tax. The benefit to paying this tax was that if you paid it Rome probably would not come and destroy your people. So in Jesus day there were many demands for money as well; government, religion, bills. With so many demands on their money it would be easy to confuse one time of giving with another. You pay taxes out of obligation because you have no choice. You pay tributes out of the fear of reprisal if you don’t. In Matthew 22: 15 the Jewish leaders try to trap Jesus with this misconception about tithing. There trap is actually quiet clever, the just seem to keep forgetting that Jesus is way smarter than they are. For this particular trap two groups work together to tag team Jesus. The Herodians and Pharisees work together here. This is an unlikely pairing. Pharisees were conservative right wingers they do not like the Roman authority and fight and promote the Independence of Israel. The Herodians on the other hand believe that alignment with Rome is the best road to peace and prosperity they advocate supporting Rome. Do you see the problem here? Let’s look at the text:
Mt 22:15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. Mt 22:16 They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are. Mt 22:17 Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Mt 22:18 But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Mt 22:19 Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, Mt 22:20 and he asked them, “Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?” Mt 22:21 “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Mt 22:22 When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.
The trouble with this is that if Jesus says “No” don’t pay your taxes the people will love Him but the Herodians will arrest Him and have Him executed for undermining the authority of the Emperor. On the other hand if He says “Yes” then the Pharisees can lead the crowds away from Jesus because everyone knows the Messiah is suppose to overthrow Rome and if He is supporting taxation, well then He clearly is not Messiah. It is a well laid trap. But Jesus masterfully avoids it. He tells them give to Caesar what is Caesars and give to God what is God’s. You know what I find really interesting about this though? The word that Jesus uses for ‘give’ literally means ‘give back’. When you look on a Roman coin it is obvious who owns it. The coins are stamped with the face of Tiberius Caesar. The money clearly belongs to him because it was stamped with the image of its maker. Yet as Jesus looks around the crowd what do you think He sees? He sees people who have been stamped with the image of their maker. Jesus looks around the crowd and what He is saying here is more profound than we realize. He is saying, give Caesar his taxes, give God yourselves. This displays what tithing is really about.
As Christians the purpose of our tithe is not to offer tribute though sometimes we treat it like that, as if it was a tribute. Some of us tithe because we do not want God to be angry and punish us. The money we put in the offering plate we view as a monetary way of turning God’s wrath from us. That is not its purpose. The purpose of the tithe is not the money it is the acknowledgement that comes with it. What you are doing when you tithe is reminding yourself that everything in this world belongs to God. It is all His. Tithing is not so much about the money as it is about you recognizing who is really in control and who it is that really provides for you. It is time that we stopped tithing.
In our commercial economy it is easy to believe that we provide for ourselves. After all it’s not like God is waking up at 5 in the morning every day to drive to work and working for 10 hours only to come home so exhausted He can’t do much else so that you can sit around in comfort. It is an easy mistake to make thinking that you are providing for yourself. Tithing is a reminder that it is not you that meets your needs, but God who is enabling you to meet your needs.
Tithing also has another very valuable function. Not only is it a reminder of who everything belongs to, it is a teacher. Tithing teaches us to rely on God in a very real very physical sense. When we allow ourselves to learn this reliance with the physical things we will also learn to develop our reliance on Him with the Spiritual things. This enables us to lean on Him when times are hard. To trust in Him when the world comes crashing down around us. But still I want to encourage you to stop tithing.
Throughout the Old Testament God would provide for His people giving them land and victories over their enemies. As recognition of God’s provision Israel was suppose to give God the first fruits/firstborn of the animals and fruits of the soil that God had given over to them. They were not giving to God they were giving back to God what was already His. This was an act of stewardship. A visible display of their acknowledgment that all they had they had because God had given it to them. That is what a tithe is all about. Giving should be faithful and a display of our recognition of who is in control of everything. It all belongs to God. Now a tithe was taken and used to provide for brothers in need, to take care of widows, to help the poor, and to support the Levites. Their tithes were not just of coin, but of livestock, fruits of the soil, and other materials including property. You see it has always been the responsibility of God’s people to take care of the poor in their community.
The purpose of a tithe is to offer a gift to God, to display our stewardship, and to remind ourselves that nothing that we have is ours. The Israelites gave of their time, money, property, and lives. They gave to the building of the temple, presented God with the first fruits of their grain and livestock, offered tithes at feasts. The Israelites devotion to God came at a high cost, but they were richly blessed in return. God always provided for them. That is in fact the point. The point of a tithe is to remind us that God provides for us, we do not provide for ourselves. If you look at Matthew 6:25 we see Jesus talking in His sermon on the mount about how we are to live this life. He instructs us not to worry about how we will be provided for because God will take care of us. The problem with this is that the NIV separates verse 24 from verse 25. In order to really grasp what this text is talking about we actually have to start a verse earlier with 24.
Mt 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. Mt 6:25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Mt 6:26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Mt 6:27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life ? Mt 6:28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Mt 6:29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. Mt 6:30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Mt 6:31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ Mt 6:32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. Mt 6:33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Mt 6:34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Just before this text Jesus has been trying to show people that they need to focus on the eternal rather than the earthly. The natural response to that is reservation. If I do not worry about money, if I do not plan and focus on it then how can my needs be met? Jesus responds to that unasked question. He says trust God. Then He uses a Jewish argument of lesser to greater to show why we have nothing to worry about. He shows us that money is not something we need to worry about because God will provide for us just as He provides for the grass of the field and the birds of the air which are far less important to God than we are. So tithing teaches us a valuable lesson. It teaches us how to trust God. The fact remains however, that it is time we stopped tithing.
We see tithing in God’s law. We see tithing before the establishment of God’s law. It is a common Old Testament practice. What about the New Testament, what does it have to say about our money? There is the tricky part. You know why you have never heard a Scripture reference where Jesus commands you to tithe? That is because there isn’t one. In all the NT there is not a single passage that commands us to tithe. (Don’t tell anyone from another church I told you that or I might get in trouble, it is supposed to be a ministry secret.) You see even the Bible supports it. Jesus, Peter, Paul, none of the NT writers demand that we give a time. It is time as a church that we stopped tithing.
Seems a bit uncommon for us to give and then after giving trust God to provide for us. We seem to prefer, take care of ourselves first, then give and trust God will bless us in return. We need to remember that we cannot actually give to God. Everything is His. All we are doing is giving back to God what was His from the beginning.
I am going to make a statement and this statement makes me nervous because the church is where I make my living. Funds stop coming in and I really do have to find a creative way to put food on the table. But I believe it is right to say regardless of how uncomfortable it makes me. If you are giving out of duty or obligation, keep it. There are better ways to spend your money than giving out of duty. I don’t think God wants to tax you. He is not demanding a tribute. That is why the New Testament does not command us to tithe. God is interested in your heart not your wallet. We need to learn to give for the right reasons. We need to give because we recognize who God is. If you put an offering in today may it be out of a desire to give to God. May it be out of a heart that truly wants to give to Him. Let us stop tithing and start giving ourselves. When we tithe we are giving God money God doesn’t want our money. We need to give God ourselves and all that we are. Money is just a tool that teaches us how to give ourselves. Don’t let the tool become the focal point of our giving.
I am not telling you not to give to God. I am asking you to look into your heart and find your reason for giving. The money that you give to God can be used to store up eternal treasures or it can simply be a wasted investment. It all depends on your heart as the giver. Drop in your obligation and your offering isn’t an offering at all. Put if you give out of a desire to honor God, to give Him what is His, and to provide for the church and those in need then your offering is storing up eternal treasure. So let us not bring God a tribute or offer Him a tax or tithe, let us offer ourselves and all that we are to Him. You see our offerings are not about giving money they are about giving ourselves.
So today the invitation is simple. Will you give God more than a tithe? Will you give Him more than a song. He wants you all of you because you are His. So today, will you offer God more than just a tithe, will you offer Him yourselves?
