God is so good!
so, i started filing our taxes online on sunday, and cannot stop thinking about God's faithfulness. what do taxes and God's faithfulness have to do with each other, you ask?
well... since we've been married, we have made tithing our number 1 priority. literally, that is the first check i write every month. that can sometimes be very difficult because 10% of our income could be used towards a mortgage, or for car payments, or we could go shopping. there's lots of ways i can think of to spend that 10%, and especially in a day and age where consumerism is at its peak and credit cards allow us to live a lifestyle of spending more that we make.
this year has also been financially "interesting" because i only worked for 1 semester, then we had a baby. because i was no longer in school, i had to start paying back my student loans; and because i was no longer working through the university, we no longer had state employee benefits, so we had to start paying more for health insurance as well as add joshua to our policy. (i know, this is getting personal, but i want to share this because it is hard to wrap our heads around the fact that God is bigger than our brains and that Kingdom economics do not work like what we learned in school.) so, basically, using 3rd grade math, less money coming in plus with more money going out equals something in the negative, right? well, no. that's wrong because the laws of Kingdom economics make the equation: faithful tithing equals abundant blessings.
well, we have been blessed beyond what we could ever imagine. we have a wonderful baby boy and somehow i am able to stay at home with him despite the math (and i am really good at math!). we've been careful about our spending and we were given so many gifts for joshua. we have absolutely everything we need and we are so happy. we lack nothing. seeing the numbers on the taxes just confirmed God's hand in our lives. logically, there is no reason for our income to have been greater in 2006 than in 2005. we truly are sons and daughters of the King.
this is the same thing that happened when we got back from malawi in 2005... i had been carefully tracking all the support money we had been given. when we left, we still needed a few more hundred dollars to come up with, but when we got back, nothing was owed. isn't God's math great?
as we seek His Kingdom faithfully, we are blessed abundantly.
well... since we've been married, we have made tithing our number 1 priority. literally, that is the first check i write every month. that can sometimes be very difficult because 10% of our income could be used towards a mortgage, or for car payments, or we could go shopping. there's lots of ways i can think of to spend that 10%, and especially in a day and age where consumerism is at its peak and credit cards allow us to live a lifestyle of spending more that we make.
this year has also been financially "interesting" because i only worked for 1 semester, then we had a baby. because i was no longer in school, i had to start paying back my student loans; and because i was no longer working through the university, we no longer had state employee benefits, so we had to start paying more for health insurance as well as add joshua to our policy. (i know, this is getting personal, but i want to share this because it is hard to wrap our heads around the fact that God is bigger than our brains and that Kingdom economics do not work like what we learned in school.) so, basically, using 3rd grade math, less money coming in plus with more money going out equals something in the negative, right? well, no. that's wrong because the laws of Kingdom economics make the equation: faithful tithing equals abundant blessings.
well, we have been blessed beyond what we could ever imagine. we have a wonderful baby boy and somehow i am able to stay at home with him despite the math (and i am really good at math!). we've been careful about our spending and we were given so many gifts for joshua. we have absolutely everything we need and we are so happy. we lack nothing. seeing the numbers on the taxes just confirmed God's hand in our lives. logically, there is no reason for our income to have been greater in 2006 than in 2005. we truly are sons and daughters of the King.
this is the same thing that happened when we got back from malawi in 2005... i had been carefully tracking all the support money we had been given. when we left, we still needed a few more hundred dollars to come up with, but when we got back, nothing was owed. isn't God's math great?
as we seek His Kingdom faithfully, we are blessed abundantly.
posted by elizabeth at 11:12 AM
2 Comments:
faithful tithing equals abundant blessings
I hope so at 10%. Ha.
There's quite a difference between giving one's money up to God and giving it to the Church. The two are not necessarily the same. One needs to constantly prune the tree in order to get fruit. In other words, one must continually make sure that they're on the right path. Faith isn't blind !
On another note:
This blog may interest you. David Plotz is "Blogging the Bible". He's Jewish, but is very familiar with Christianity as he went to a Christian high school. There are many ways to read the Bible - literally, historically, literary, etc. His goal is to read it as a reasonably educated person who believes in God.
well, i had to delete a bajillion paragraphs i just wrote on tithing because each paragraph was a paper in itself. there's so much i want to say on this topic, but that's hard to do just through a blog comment.
so... to simply reply to your comment, yes, you are right that you shouldn't blindly throw your tithe to any church. Deuteronomy 12 gives specific descriptions about what place of worship you should bring your tithes, and most importantly that you should seek the place that the Lord will choose. Therefore, you ought to ask God where to take your offerings.
LOL, we'll have to do a tithing discussion some other time. it requires some coffee.
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