Throw Open The Windows Series

And so this morning for a little bit I want us to look at the tenth verse of the third chapter of this the last book in the Old Testament Malachi 3:10 Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do,” says the Lord Almighty, “I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in! Try it! Let me prove it to you!

In particular I want to look at the portion that says “I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in!” This is the word of God, speaking to God’s people and it says that God will pour His blessings on His people. And not just any blessing, this passage says He will pour out a blessing so great that we won’t be able to take it in. Would you like to be blessed? Would you like your life to be characterized as being blessed of God? Sure you would, so here’s the secret.

It begins with one very small very important word, just two letters and yet this entire promise hinges on that word. And the word is “if”. God is waiting and willing to bless Hi people, but, there’s another small yet important word, the choice is always up to us if we want to be blessed. In this case the word of God says “Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do,” What will happen? God will open the windows of heaven.

So the first question is Why will God bless You? The short and simple answer here is that God promised to bless the Israelites if they paid their tithe. So what is the tithe? Tithe simply means tenth and throughout the word of God the concept is reiterated that all that we have comes from God but he requires a tenth of it back. For the people of God this does not mean that we give God ten percent of what is ours, it means that He allows us to keep ninety percent of what is His. And in this case God tells his people, “If you tithe, if you return to me ten percent of what I have given to you then I will bless you” You see when we give to God, we are just taking our hands off what already belongs to Him.

And that is the short answer, and if that was the entire answer then we’d be finished. We could sing a song to close and we could go home but you would have received only a portion of what you need in order to achieve God’s blessings today.

Here then is the long answer the answer that is contained in the short answer.

You will be blessed if you are obedient. The fact that the Israelites had not been paying their tithe was only evidence of a much great problem and that was their obedience, or their disobedience in this case. The concept of the tithe goes back to Genesis, the first book in the Bible, when Abraham gave King Melchizedek, who was also a priest, ten percent of his belongings as an act of worship to God.

The commandment to God’s people to return ten percent of what God had given them is first recorded in Leviticus 27:30 A tenth of the produce of the land, whether grain or fruit, belongs to the Lord and must be set apart to him as holy. It is also mentioned in Deuteronomy 14:22 You must set aside a tithe of your crops—one-tenth of all the crops you harvest each year. Throughout the Old Testament we see God’s people responding to the command of the Tithe, when they were living in obedience to God’s will and commandments. However when they were living in disobedience it is often evidenced by the fact that they are not giving to God’s work.