7/13/09

Monday Manna

I am a tither. I tithe 10% of my income faithfully and also give an offering on top of it. I'm not bragging and I'll be the first to admit that I haven't always been a faithful tither. I would rob God in a heartbeat whenever I needed a little extra money to pay a bill or to buy an outfit or do a little car maintenance. (I will also admit that there are a few other things in the Bible that I should be doing but I don't and vice versa but for the moment we are talking about tithing)

So why do I tithe. Simply because the Lord says to. He says in Deuteronomy 14:22 that you should truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year.

In Malachi 3:8 God also says "Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me? But you say, 'In what way have we robbed You? In tithes and offerings. Simply put....not tithing is robbing God. He blesses us in many ways but I'll deal with the monetary blessings that we recieve since we are not paid with cows and horses and pigs, etc these days. Anyway, He gives us 90% of our income and only asks us to part with 10% of it so that the church can prosper. The subject of having a church home is a whole other post. Whether you like it or not, you have to believe that the church is an important part of the Christian experience. A lot of outreach is done through the church and one way that these ministries thrive is through the paying of tithes. In Malachi 3:10 God says to Bring all the tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in My house.

Okay, my friend Greta brought up a point in a conversation we were having about why I tithe. "I told her that I tithe because a lot of horrible things have happened to us financially when we didn't tithe" Which is true. I thought that by keeping all of my money to myself, I was helping us financially but we ended up in a horrible financial predicament down the road. So her point was that we shouldn't tithe simply to get a financial blessing from God. I totally agree with that. We shouldn't serve the Lord at all for what He can do for us. We should serve the Lord simply because we love Him with all of our heart and soul and our desire is to please Him. But God is bound by His word. It is a fact that paying your tithes will result in being blessed. He says in Malachi 3: 10 that He would....open for you the windows of Heaven and pour you out a blessing that you will not have room enough to receive.

Of course that doesn't always mean a financial blessing, but you will be blessed in one away or another. I could go on and on about the hundreds of ways that God blesses us every day. It's just that for many.....a financial blessing is easily recognizable whereas we don't always stop to think that the fact that we are living and breathing with a roof over our head and food to eat is a blessing from God.

Now I just have to work on being more faithful to obeying the rest of God's word!

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