Giving Is Different Than Tithing And Christians Are Called To Do Both

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Now we’ve had a couple of other sermons on tithing and giving and managing your money, so check out a playlist up here if you’re on YouTube. Otherwise, navigate to our YouTube channel and you can find the “Blessed To Be A Blessing” playlist. Check that out, great messages in there about giving, tithing, all of that.

We have talked about how it is a New Covenant, an Old Covenant, on how pretty much it is throughout the Bible. So if you don’t believe in the tithe or in giving, then you might need to change your heart, change your mind, change your perspective.

No, I am not simply here saying, “Hey give me money.” That’s not what this is about. It’s not about that at all — at all. That’s not what even matters, what matters is the money is given to us by God. Wealth, money, possessions, things, etc. is given to us by God and we have to take care of them. It’s our job to steward those resources.

Now how do we do that? It’s really up to you, it is. You do not have to tithe, you don’t have to give, you can be a Scrooge, it’s up to you. Truly it’s up to you. We’re going to talk about that a little bit later too, it’s up to you.

I’m not here saying I want your money, I don’t. What I want is for you to be willing to share what God has given you and to trust that that is going to be used to further the Kingdom of God. That’s what this is about. That is it.

When you bring your money to your local church or when you donate to a charity, what is your goal when you give that money? It’s furthering the Kingdom of God. It’s bringing more people to Jesus. If you are giving to the animal funds, ASPCA, or whatever acronym, what are they doing? Are they bringing the gospel? Are they sharing Jesus?

Or when you give to support abortion, what are they doing? Are they sharing Jesus? No. Or when you give to the pride or Black Lives Matter or political campaigns.

The root of everything, whenever you give your money somewhere else, the root of it all, it needs to be that cause needs to be something going to God, to the Kingdom. That’s our goal here is to be fruitful and multiply and to preach and share the good news with everyone we can. And so wherever you are, stewarding your wealth should also be a part of that.

One thing, I’m not there yet, but I am really trying, is that let’s say I go to a grocery store. Who owns that grocery store? Am I giving money to a cause or a business that is following what I believe as a Christian? Or if I hire some work done on my house, I need to pour a new driveway or I want to build an addition, who am I hiring? Do those contractors believe what I believe?

Now I think that in every way possible, yes we should keep the money flowing in the Kingdom of God. So if we can hire people who believe what we believe — I’m not saying some kind of prejudice or racist or religious discrimination type of a thing — I’m saying that if we keep the money within the Kingdom of God and we share, we can truly change the world.

There are statistics out there, I don’t have them here, but I know of them so I encourage you to look them up and to check them out, to do some research if you are one of those people who are out there all upset about, “Oh all preachers just want money, all churches just want money,” all this.

Think about this. If everyone in the church, everyone who went to church tithed 10%, we would have no poverty, we would have no one hungry, no homeless, no problems.

There would be so much wealth within the Kingdom of God that we would be begging for people, we’d say, “Hey come here, come here. You want to fly over to Egypt? Hey, you want to go to Thailand? Hey, where do you want to go? We will pay for it. We have so much money and not enough people to do the work. We will pay for it, go.”

That’s what would happen. The world would change. But unfortunately it probably never will, because there is too much greed. Prove me wrong. Start tithing and giving. Let’s dive into it. Tithing is different than giving. Giving is different than tithing.

Giving to those in need is a wonderful way to show your devotion to God. Jesus tells others so many times to give to those in need. His whole ministry, what does He do? He’s always giving, always giving. He’s giving His power through healing, through casting out demons, through all this stuff. He’s always healing people and giving His knowledge. He’s sharing His wisdom. He’s always giving.

Now you say, “Yeah that is giving, not tithing.” We’re getting there. Jesus said in Acts 20:35, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” That means you should be giving so you get more blessings. Not giving so you get it, but guess what by doing it you will be blessed. Might just be in your heart, you will be filled with joy.

Many people confuse giving with tithing though. They believe that tithing and giving are the same thing. They say, “Oh no I already do that.” But it is not tithing, it is different. Tithing is to come off the first 10% of your income.

The first — right away. You get your $1,000 paycheck, immediately a hundred bucks. 10%, that’s what tithe means. Tithe means 10. It’s an old word that we’ve just kept. It’s like the Shakespearean word, thou. We don’t say thou anymore, I mean rarely. Or he goeth. We don’t say he goeth, we say went.

Tithe never got updated. It’s still here. We’ve kept it. We’ve kept the word and tithe literally means tenth. So how do we know how much to tithe? We tithe the tenth, the first 10%. We’ve talked about this in another sermon. Please check it out. It received a lot of controversy, a lot of scrutiny, so check out the comments as well. But you can watch that on YouTube “Tithe the First 10% of Your Income.”

God says to tithe everything. Proverbs 3:9, “Honor the LORD with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops.” Now you may not grow crops, but whatever you do in this world, whatever you receive, honor the LORD with the first of it. The first tenth is tithing.

Now we have got that out of the way, what is giving? Giving is done in addition to tithing. This is over and above the tithe. It’s beyond the tithe. It’s meta. The meta tithe. We have tithing and we have meta tithing. What is meta? Meta is beyond.

There’s an old story if you are in philosophy you may know this. I remember taking this course in college, it’s a 400 level, so it’s higher and I got in there and I am like this is a joke, I mean it was a good course and it’s, it’s — whatever. But the point is, it was called metaphysics and I’m thinking this is going to be great, we’re going to get real intellectual, we’re going to study stuff.

But the guy that was teaching it was the wrong teacher for that type, he was more of the existentialist I guess and he said metaphysics is called metaphysics because they had all these books and they did not know what to call them. They were about theory and this and that, and they were kind of philosophy but they were not in the philosophy section.

And so on the ship or in the library or wherever they were cataloging them, there was the sciences and there was a physics section and they are like, “Oh well what is all this? We have no idea.”

They read some of the books They looked at the titles and they did not understand. They said “It’s metaphysics. Yep, it is beyond the physics. Metaphysics, that is what we are calling it.” Okay, metaphysics.

Giving is the meta tithe. It’s beyond the tithe. It’s over and above the tithe. You’ve got to give the tithe, 10% of everything. Giving is in addition to tithing. Where do you give? Think of it like charity. It’s done with leftover income, it’s to those in need, it’s a generosity fund.

The tithe, where does that go? To the local church. We see that in Malachi 3:10. I’m going to read the verse for you even though you probably already know it because guess what? We’ve talked about it many times before.

It’s the only time we can test God. We have got a card right here, “Tithing To Test God.” Check it out, go to the YouTube channel, “Tithing To Test God.” It’s a great sermon. Kind of a follow-up of the tithe. 10% tithing to test God, check it out.

So Malachi 3:10 says, “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse so that there may be food in my house.” Where is your storehouse? That’s your local church. “‘Test me in this,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.’”

Hey, you got a house full of stuff, you’re like “We got to get rid of all this, this and this and this and this, I just am overwhelmed.” Guess what? God is giving you so much you don’t have room for it.

Give it away, give it to others. Make sure you keep tithing and you’ll keep getting more. Now you don’t tithe to get more, it’s not how it works. That’s greed. We’re simply sharing what God has given us.

Tithes go to your local church. It’s your storehouse. This is kind of similar, people in the past have said, “Well wait a minute, there’s an Old Covenant and a New Covenant. In the Old Covenant, the tithe went to the Levites.” Okay, there are three tithes in the Old Covenant.

We’re going to kind of take a segway here and get into this because, in that other message, I mentioned the tithing to test God, we talked about how the tithe and giving is in the New Covenant. Okay so we’re going to come to this a little bit later, but I want to hint on it now to kind of prime the well.

The tithing, we say 10% right now, a tenth, that’s what a lot of verses have said. The tenth from the first of your wealth, the very first. First goes to God as a thank you and the rest is yours. You don’t do it at the end.

We have that analogy that if you get 1,000 bucks, you pay your bills and then there is a hundred left over, oh that is 10%. The first 10% goes to God because you’re trusting Him that the 90% that’s left is okay for you to live on.

And like Dave Ramsey says, if you can’t live on 90, you can’t live on 100%. 10% is not going to be that much in your life. Now in the Old Covenant, there were many tithes. We had the regular tithe, that was 10% of your income every year.

So 10% of whatever your crops brought in, whatever you made, went to the Lord. Then we have another tithe called the poor tithe. That was 10% and then there was another tithe every three years that went to the Levites and that is another 10%.

So of you total that up, you got 10% tithe, 10% poor, and 10% every three years — so it is really 3.3% a year, that is 10, 20, 3. Every year you should be tithing that is tithing according to the Old Covenant. Because the poor was a tithe, Levites was a tithe, and the local storehouse was the tithe. That’s 23% in tithing.

Now us cheapskates nowadays have taken that tithe to mean 10th and have said it is only 10%. So God is giving us a lot of leeway here. Now of course in the Old Covenant, it was required. Under the New Covenant, Jesus paid for us and so it’s not required anymore. It’s encouraged, and again we have talked about that before. In the New Covenant, it’s requested.

Jesus says, “Hey I have given you guys everything, give some back to me.” What did Jesus say? He didn’t say 23%, He said a lot more, a lot more. And so I think you could do 10% and then I think you could do some giving as well. And how — how do you know what to give?

Well, let’s go through the order here. All right you receive a paycheck. You receive income. You grow your garden. Whatever you do, you have something come in. Then what? The first tenth to the local church.

Now of course, you grow a corn crop and you harvest 100 bushels of corn, you’re not going to be taking 10 bushels of corn over to your local church. They are going to say, “Great, thanks, what do we do?” Food pantry. We have got 10 bushels of corn. Okay, so you sell your corn. When you receive the money, give that to the church.

Now you say, “Oh all he wants is money, I knew it.” No, I say money because money is universal in today’s world. If we want to help people across the world — yeah, people in Africa, we could send them 10 bushels of corn and they would really like it, but you know what? You could send them money.

Well, the corn first of all would probably get eaten by rats on the way over or the corrupt government officials would dump it into the bay. You send money the corrupt government officials probably put in their pocket. You send a missionary with some money and now it gets to the people.

That’s why I say money. Because the money enables everything else. And so — it’s easy, it’s easy to move around so we’re going to stick with that. It’s not all about the money, but that’s the method of exchange. When we lose money and we go to Bitcoin or something, then I’ll be talking about that and say “Hey, with the tenth of your Bitcoin you gotta do it.”

Okay? If we were trading sand dollars like in the olden days or seashells, a tenth of your shells go to the church, get the picture? A tenth. The first tenth of whatever you receive, local storehouse, your local church. All right then your bills, mortgage, utilities, rent, whatever you have, food, groceries, kids, sports, car, all this stuff. Pay your bills.

Now hopefully you’re out of debt. If you’re not out of debt, you gotta get out of debt. Work hard, get out of debt. God doesn’t want you in debt. He doesn’t want you to borrow. You’re a slave. We’ve talked about that before. “The Borrower Is A Slave To The Lender.” Get out of debt.

Okay, you pay all your bills. Now you say, all right, gave to the church, we took care of us. The next thing you need to do is leave an inheritance. So you start saving money for that. Store up some wealth for future generations.

We’ve talked about leaving an inheritance before. We have a two-sermon playlist on that. You can check it out. “Leaving An Inheritance and Providing For Your Family,” check that out on our YouTube channel.

Proverbs 13:22 says, “A good man” — or a good person — “leaves an inheritance for his children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous.” That’s 13:22, Proverbs 13:22. Are you storing up your wealth for others who are righteous? Or are you leaving an inheritance?

All right, so how do we do this? First tenth local storehouse. You say, “Yeah we got it.” Okay, pay all your bills, take care of your family because it’s your family. You provide for your family, take care of them.

Whatever is left over, you say “All right now we take and leave an inheritance.” So with the rest of your income, let’s say, let’s say you get 1,000 bucks, a number easier to work with. $100 to the church. Say your expenses are $700 or $600 for easy math. You paid all your rent, it is $300.

I mean really you are getting $10,000 and your mortgage is probably $3,000. $1,000 is to God, mortgage is three, okay now you have got $6,000 left. All right, you pay your bills and that’s all $3,000 let’s say all your payments, now you got $3,000 left.

What do you do with that $3,000? Okay, you’ve taken care of the church, you’ve taken care of you and your family, your bills, now you have $3,000 left. You can save it, spend it, and give it.

All right, save — if it’s three things, save, spend, give, okay split it up; a third of whatever you have left. If it is $3,000, if it is $5,000, if it is $300, a third of whatever you have left. All right, that’s our fun money. We spend that, date night, movies, whatever. Fun money, a third.

Another third, where is that going to go? Long-term growth. That’s going to provide an inheritance. That’s not my rainy day fund, it’s not my money. That money is going in and I will never touch it. I will never see that money again. It is for my children’s children. My children may not even see that money. That is the inheritance.

Last third, giving it away. That’s the generosity fund. Maybe you put that in a bank account and you let it grow and someone is in need, whether it’s a family member, a friend, whether it’s Social Media Ministries, the Red Cross, whoever you want to go to, Convoy of Hope — wherever — that is the giving.

That’s over and above and beyond the tithe. That’s the meta tithe. That can come off the bottom of your income. You see how we did that there. Tithe, provide for your family, leave an inheritance, fun money, and giving. Then leave inheritance and fun money and giving are like here.

We have tithe, family, three. It’s kind of like a goofy guy, ding, ding, three right? All right you can do that. Follow that. It’s the best — really great to practice all three, save, spend, give. That is at the end. The end of your money.

Now we mentioned how Jesus said it’s a lot more than the 23% of the Old Testament, the Old Covenant. How do we know this? Jesus focused on giving. He gave it all, okay? He gave His whole life. That’s 100%.

So for starters, 100% — now God had one son Jesus. He didn’t say, “Jesus you’re gonna have to cut off your legs, I’ll give out half your body.” He said no, give half his son, Jesus is in a wheelchair. He gave His whole son. So God gave 100%.

Jesus didn’t say “Well I am only okay with giving 10%, just cut off like my forearm and I will be alright. Can you do that?” No, Jesus said, “All right, I will give 100%.” God gave 100%, Jesus gave 100%, then what does Jesus tell us?

There is a rich man that says, “Hey Lord, I want to follow you, I want to inherit eternal life.” This is in Luke Chapter 18 Verse 22. Jesus says to him, “Hey yeah you followed all the commandments, sell everything you have, give all the money away 100%.”

Now John the Baptist, Luke 3:11, he says, “Hey, if you have two tunics give one away. You have two cloaks, give one away.” John the Baptist said 50%. So yeah, we’re under a New Covenant all right. Does not mean tithing is null and void, that means you’ve gotta step up your game, you gotta raise the bar.

We have talked about this before. Jesus raised the bar. He said, “Hey do not murder, but I tell you if you even look at someone and think about killing them you have committed murder. You know do not commit adultery, if you look at them and think about it you are committing adultery.” Jesus raised the bar.

He said the Old Covenant said, “Yes you’re to give 23.3 indefinite percent. 10%, 10%, and then 10% every three years equals 23%. Yeah, you can do that, guess what I’m telling you to do 100%. All my disciples 100%, me 100%, my father 100%” — they all gave. The rich man 100%. He said give it all up, 100%.

Now that doesn’t mean you need to go give it all away. It means you need to be living your life with the idea that you are living 100% for God. How do you do that? Follow God’s plan. What’s God’s plan?

Tithe 10%, take care of your family. You’re taking care of your family, that’s living for others. Then what? Save, spend, give. You’re saving it for future generations, that’s leaving an inheritance for others. You are giving it. You give another third to other people, whether it’s charities, non-profits, a family member that lost their job, whatever. You’re giving it.

Okay then the other one, spend. You got to have some fun. God created this world for our enjoyment. I’m sure He’ll be okay if you take a third of whatever you have left as your fun money. If you have any questions, please comment below. Remember Jesus raised the bar. I encourage you to live generously. Seriously, it will change your life for the better.

Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for bringing us all here today. Thank you for this great message. I ask that it provide great insight and clarity with those who are listening and watching. Lord that you would inspire them to check out those other messages that we have, that we mentioned, that we referenced, and that they would really grasp this idea of money and tithing and finance.

That you want us to have control of our money. Our money is not to control us. Money is not to be an idol. We’re not to love money, that is bad. But we are to use money. It’s a tool just like a hammer or a screwdriver.

Allow these people watching and listening to become skilled in using the tool of money to further grow your Kingdom. God, please help them follow your plan for their money. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Now if you need help managing your money, you need a budget, you need anything like that, I really encourage you to check out Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for everyone to learn about. You might not agree with everything. For example, I still have credit cards, but the principles he brings out are very very good and biblically sound.

Now if you don’t know Jesus, please consider making the decision to follow Jesus. Invite Him into your life. Allow Him to lead. Ask for forgiveness of your sins and live for Him. It will change your life. Part of that, commit your money to Him and you are a manager, you are a fiduciary of what He gave you. Use it to build His Kingdom, not yours. God bless.

Money God’s Way: Rich Or Poor It’s Up To You – Devotional Book by Spencer Coffman