I know someone who tries so hard to do God’s will that he’s miserable. This someone--let’s call him Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious--is careful about what he and his wife and two daughters watch on television, what music they listen to and what books they read. His wife wears a scarf over her head at church (1 Corinthians 11). He doesn’t force her to do that; she is just as pious as he is. He even quit attending a church he liked because the person who leads worship is a woman (1 Timothy 2:12). Most of the Church today considers these verses culturally specific to those to whom Paul was writing. Culture has changed, and the cultural reasons for giving those orders don’t exist anymore.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious follows his conscience in regard to those verses, but his conscience is strangely seared when it comes to tithing. It’s easy to put a scarf on your head when you pray, and it’s even easy to find a church where everyone on staff is male. It’s not as easy to give ten percent of all that you make to God, especially when you’re only making enough to scrape by as it is--even when you know that God has promised to bless your finances when you give the first ten percent to him.
When God first gave the command to tithe (Leviticus 27:30), it was measured in grains and spices and wool and sheep and cattle and donkeys and anything else that an agricultural society could raise or grow. The world’s economy long ago switched from a barter system to a monetary one. Now our ten percent is measured in money. Can you imagine hauling a couple of sheep to your local church once a month? The Israelites didn’t even get to take them to the local church; they all had to take their tithe to the temple in Jerusalem
The Jews in Jesus’ time did tithe. The Pharisees loved tithing, because they could tithe in front of everyone else and prove how godly they were. What did Jesus have to say about that? “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23, NIV). Here Jesus reemphasizes the importance of tithing even while condemning the Pharisees for not following “the more important matters of the law.” So, we know from the Old Testament that the tithe is ten percent, and that tithing was a command from the Lord, and we know from the New Testament that Jesus told the Pharisees not to stop tithing, even while he condemned everything else they did.
Tithing is never easy, but it gets more difficult as you get older. When my wife and I were first married we felt poor. Three kids later, I look back on those days and realize that I will never again have that much extra cash. Now, my wife and I never have enough money, and yet we always have enough money. Hopefully you’ve heard this cliché before, and hopefully you’re listening this time: God can do more with 90 percent than you can do with 100. Make a good habit now; it won’t get any easier. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious will tell you that.
