Intro.
A. Have you noticed how many factories today have a big white banner prominently displaying how many days they have gone without any injuries? The reason for this is because any injury makes everyone pay a price. When you count the cost of treating the injury, replacing the worker, loss of productivity, higher workman’s comp rates, and higher health liability insurance rates you can see why getting employees to follow the safety rules is so important. Too bad we don’t count the number of people keeping God’s rules in the church. When God’s people keep the rules then everyone benefits just as when only one breaks the rules, everyone inevitably pays a price.
B. Tithing is one of God’s rules. Tithing is not a test to see how much money the church can raise, tithing is a test of faith to help us grow in our relationship with Christ.
C. The reason I am speaking on tithing today is not because we need more money. In fact, the income from your tithes are what we anticipated them to be when making our church budget last year. The reason I am talking about tithing is because it is a crucial element of your relationship with God. Tithing is between you and God, it’s not about the church or me.
D. Just because one out of eight verses in the Bible talks about bling bling caching caching is reason enough to talk about it at least a couple Sundays of the year. Would it be Christian of me to not talk about money when Jesus talked so much about it?
I. What is tithing?
A. Tithing is bringing 10% of the increase of my wealth to the Lord. Anytime you receive more wealth as in paychecks, sales of cashed out items, etc… you are increasing your wealth and God is asking for 10% of what that figure is.
B. Martin Luther said that a Christian must be converted three times. The first time for his mind. The second time for his heart. And the third time for his wallet, and of the three the most difficult conversion is of the wallet.
C. Someone once said that a Christian is someone who is content to live on leftovers. When it comes to tithing isn’t that basically true? We give to God the first of what comes in and then we gladly live on what’s left over.
II. What’s the origin of tithing?
A. The idea of 10% probably had its origin with simple math. Since people have always had 10 fingers, figuring out how to compute one out of ten would be fairly easy.
B. The earliest biblical reference is 4600 years ago when Abram got through a war fairly unscathed and rescued his relative Lot. The Bible mentions that Abram then went to Melchizedek, a king and a priest of God, and gave him a tenth of everything he owned (Genesis 14:20).
Another early place we see the tithe is in Numbers 18:21 where Moses gives the people a law of God telling them to bring all their tithes to the priests.
C. In the New Testament Jesus assumed the old law was the rock bottom expectation of the Christian. According to Jesus, his followers should not only give according to the law but also a whole lot more.
D. The early church in the east tithed from the inspiration of the story of the rich young ruler.
In the western church, Chrysostom shamed his stingy church for marveling at the tithes of others!
So tithing has been practiced by God’s children for thousands of years.
III. What’s good about tithing?
There are many good things about tithing but I will focus on four of them.
1. Tithing is evidence of a growing faith. Tithing and faith are intricately connected. It takes faith to tithe, especially to get started. When we tithe we are stating that we are practicing faith, that God will do what he says he will do regardless of how likely I am to see it happening.
2. Tithing reminds me of God’s ownership. In the great San Francisco earthquake a century ago, one of the complicating factors was that the ensuing fires destroyed nearly every document. As a result people who had rented their houses told judges that they had owned them instead and that the deeds had been burned in the fires. Only the landlords who had rent receipts were able to retain ownership of their properties. When we tithe we are giving a type of receipt to God that we acknowledge that he is the owner of all things.
3. Tithing proves God can trust me with more. One of the biblical reasons God gives us wealth is for us to share it with others. A 90% commission isn’t bad for any job, is it? But that is exactly what God does in giving us money when it is his intention that we should pass it on to his saving work in the world. Wouldn’t it be sad to get to heaven and discover that one of the reasons you did not have more wealth on earth was because God couldn’t rely on you to pass a tenth of it on to others?
4. Tithing keeps me focused on others. Every once in a while I meet someone so greedy and selfish (do you know someone like that?) that I tell them that they have to tithe. The reason is because they have lived their lives hogging so much that if they have any hope of a reward in heaven it will only be because they tithed, and certainly nothing else. Tithing is a weekly proof that others matter.
IV. What’s bad to do?
A. My dad had a problem with me as a kid. If I needed six dollars to pay a fee or something he would usually be glad to help me out. If he didn’t have six ones or a five and a one but he did have a ten he would usually give me the ten and ask me to bring him back the change. But I remember how the time I brought back three dollars created a real problem. His issue wasn’t the amount but the deal we had made. He said that if I needed that extra dollar he would have been glad to give it to me after I had returned the change to him as agreed. Being a father of a teenager myself now, I feel his pain. When God gives us x amount of money he expects a tenth of it to come back to him, regardless.
B. In John 12 there is a story of Mary, not Jesus’ mother, but a Mary who went to Neiman Marcus and bought the most expensive perfume. She poured it on Jesus feet but Judas protested saying the money should not have been spent on perfume at all but should have been put in the disciples money bag and used to feed the poor. Of course the only reason Judas threw in the bit about the poor was because that was his best chance of getting people to put money in the bag that he regularly embezzled from. So what Judas was really saying was, “Don’t take that money away from me… I want that money.” Let’s exchange the biblical word for “money bag” to “offering plate.” When we don’t give our tithes to the Lord aren’t we saying “I don’t want this money to go to the Lord, I want this money?”
C. Malachi 3:8 warns us about stealing from God. How do we rob God? We rob God in when we don’t return his money to him. Now that you know, would you willing rob from God?
v. Why should I tithe?
A. In Luke 16:11 Jesus makes an amazing statement: “If you cannot be trusted with worldly wealth, how can God trust you with true riches?” Jesus makes it plain that there is a connection between how we spend our money on earth and how we will spend eternity. That puts a whole different spin on spending.
B. Personally I would rather have 9 out of every 10 bucks with God’s blessing than 10 out of every 10 without God’s blessing. You know that without God’s blessing you would lose more than a buck anyways. Besides, tithing keeps me one step ahead of the selfish and greed that can lurk in the darkness of my heart.
C. There are only two times that the phrase “floodgates of heaven” are used in the Bible. The first time was before it had ever rained and Noah had build a boat in preparation for a flood. The Bible says that God then opened the “floodgates of heaven” and the deluge that resulted in a global flood helps us define what “floodgates of heaven” means. The second time is in Malachi 3:10 in reference to blessings being poured out on tithers. Sometimes I don’t feel like God has exactly opened the “floodgates of heaven” on me after a lifetime of tithing but that might be a very narrow and blind view of life. Certainly in comparison with 95% of the world I live in great wealth. Who knows what my life would be like without God’s blessing, I shudder at the thought. Maybe you need to ask God to reveal how the “floodgates” have changed your life or maybe you need to start tithing if you want to experience the “floodgates of heaven.” Let’s take this time to consider the brutal truth about ourselves before the Lord and allow Him to reveal your next step; but before he reveals anything, let’s let him know that we will obey what ever he asks of us. Pray with me…
