New Monmouth Musings:  Why I Don’t Believe in Tithing

Dear Friends,

With our annual year coming to an end on June 30, your leadership will be presenting a new budget for the 2019-20 year. That means we will be asking you to attend our annual meeting on Sunday, June 9th, where the budget will be presented, discussed and approved.

Once again, we will be asking you to prayerfully consider what you might give to help New Monmouth Baptist Church continue to move forward in its ministry. You have been a most generous church in the past, and your habit of sacrificial giving is one of the greatest legacies passed down from the generations of faithful givers who have helped make our church what it is today, a church of sacrificial givers intent on helping to fulfill the Great Commission.

Giving like all other subjects in the Bible, is the revelation of God and it needs to be understood. A faulty understanding of giving will have significant impact upon not only the giver, but on the Kingdom of God.

We are most like God when we give and most unlike Him when we withhold.

Paul in 2 Cor 8:7 tells us that we are to excel in the grace of giving. The idea of excelling assumes that like playing the piano, we can get better, and that with spiritual growth comes growth in spiritual giving. As Christians grow and mature spiritually, their growth should reflect a growth in the area of stewardship. Good stewards are always growing

Likewise, for me or any pastor not to declare to you the principles of giving or to withhold certain subjects contained within the whole.

The counsel of God would be to rob you of blessings God desires you to experience.

I think it is important for God’s church to understand the principle of giving. And so this morning I hope to provide a clear understanding of our role and responsibility when it comes to biblical giving.

I have never been embarrassed or ashamed to talk about one’s giving, and next to equipping the greatest number of topical sermons I have preached over my years of ministry have been on this very subject of stewardship. In fact, as some will tell you who were a part of a former church I served, I delivered a Mothers’ Day sermon on stewardship. In retrospect that was probably a sermon I would never preach again, at least on Mother’s Day. I did get their attention, and some today are still talking about it for good or for bad.

Interestingly enough, Jesus talked a lot about money and our use of it.

Why did Jesus speak so frequently about money matters? Simply because He knew that money matters! One can’t divorce finances from faith, money from maturity because our giving provides a drain plug to our greed.

Jesus knew that when a man get’s rich, God gets a partner or a man loses his soul. Just read the portrait of the rich man who came to Jesus in Mark 10. He was close to faith, but in the end it was his money that kept him from the kingdom.

Some people react when the pastor discusses money. “I go to a spiritual church; we never have to talk about money”. Well, if this is. the case than Jesus must have been pretty unspiritual, for he was never embarrassed to discuss the use of our possessions. In fact 16 of his 38 parables address the use of our possessions. One in every 10 verses in the New Testament have to do with one’s use of money or  possessions. Jesus talks more about money than he does heaven and hell and faith combined.

One day we will all give an account for how we have handled God’s resources, and one of those resources will be our possessions.

Let me briefly share my thoughts about how you might consider what you will give. You have probably heard some teachers say you need to tithe your income as the Jews did who used the tithe as their giving standard. I used to teach that because I believed as many do that the tithe was what we ought to give. It was the believers; goal for giving. The tithe, in fact was the old testament, or the old covenant standard for the Jew. We, however, no longer live under the old covenant of law, but we live under the covenant of grace. And so my questions is for those of us who live on this side of the cross, should we be expected to give less than the old testament Jew living under the law. In other words, can we lower the spiritual ceiling because we stand on higher ground?

Now the tithe is what I consider to be a logical place for the believer to begin his/her giving. Having said this, however, I would point out that every New Testament example of giving goes beyond the tithe, and none fall short of it. Jesus raised the bar. He never lowered it.

If the Old Testament Jew gave ten percent of his income to the Lord, should we be expected to give anything less than ten percent?  Can we who live on this side of the cross give anything less than those who only lived in the shadow of the cross?

The bottom line for me is that I believe that the tithe should be the starting place for giving not the finish line.

For the believer, the question we should ask is not what should  be my tithe, but what should be my spiritual sacrifice. For some the tithe may represent your spiritual sacrifice. For others your sacrificial giving may even be less than your tithe. When we consider our giving, we should ask ourselves is our gift worthy of the sacrificial giving of our Lord Jesus who went to the cross to forgive us our sins, and to purchase a place for us in heaven.

To tithe or not to tithe is not the question we need to ask when confronted with the question of what should we give. The question confronting us is what are we willing to give that for us represents a sacrifice.

Jesus gives us a great example of giving sacrificially when in Mark 12:41-44 we see Him as He  watches many rich people throw in large amounts of money into the temple treasury. “But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. Calling his disciples to Him, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she,  out of her poverty, put in everything-all she had to live on.”

It is not what we have in our hands that determines if our gift is of a sacrificial nature. It is what we hold in our hearts that is the key to our sacrificial giving.

Someone once said “a living church is a giving church” and because you at New Monmouth Baptist Church have always been a giving church, you have been a living church; one that has continued to impact our world for all eternity. Thanks be to God.

Yours in faith and friendship,

Pastor Tom