Tithing and Faith, etc.

Well, I’m still sick, yuck. 
Been watching TMC all night, all day… drifting in and out to various old
movies, old cartoons, and one reel shorts. I love this channel when I’m sick
although I usually have watched the educational channels when I’ve been recovering
from surgeries. I guess TMC is better for colds 😉 I do like old movies so
much. They’re easy to doze off to.

Certainly nothing exciting is going on here but it’s nice to
have my husband back.  My son seems to be
feeling a LOT better and I’m glad of that. 
They’re both out doing the grocery shopping right now.

I’ve pondered a lot of various things to write but have been too
lazy to write them, still I want to catch up with the tithing stuff I
concluded after my little Bible study. Bottom line is I had such a
positive experience in my quiet and personal Bible reading and what I guess you could call meditation, it was amazing. Only God can get through to a person with a mind
like mine. I tend to think so thickly and so fast that it’s hard to penetrate
my thoughts. But the end result was I realized that I was going to tithe
because I think I should. And I think I should for a variety of reasons. I
believe that God wants me to tithe and that it is the right order of things but
not in a legalistic way. I’m not doing it because I think I’ll be punished if I
don’t and I’m not doing it because I think God will necessarily reward me
monetarily or otherwise (as if it’s an investment upon which I expect a return).
I’m tithing (and it’s still sort of difficult for me to do so but not as
difficult as it could be) because I just think it’s what I should do.

I’m tithing and I believe that somehow God will come through
and provide in response to that tithe so I guess it is a statement of faith. As
long as I’m tithing I feel comfortable holding on to that faith. He did make a
promise. In tithing, I may have to give up some things I would like and that’s
just the way it is. Christianity has been about sacrifice since the very
beginning, hasn’t it? And certainly the sacrifice Christ made was so much
greater than any sacrifice I have ever been asked to make. I have already been
blessed in so many ways by God there is no sacrifice He would ever ask of me
that could ever equal what He has blessed me with so far, so tithing now should
really be nothing to me even if it means I have to give up things that I want.

After that one morning of introspection and Bible study a
couple of weeks ago, somehow I ended up tithing happily as well. And Q’s
quoting that piece of scripture about what we put into our mouths not making us
unclean did remind me that, with that statement, Jesus did allow us to eat
anything.  There is other scripture,
however, where he validated the tithe as still being in place. Matthew 23:23 “Woe
to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of
your spices–mint, dill and cummin. 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.”   

I don’t believe we’re bound to that because we’re not bound
to legalism since Paul said, “Everything is permissible”–but not everything is
beneficial," in I Corinthians 6:12 and, “Everything is permissible–but not
everything is constructive,” in I Corinthians 10:23, but I don’t want to do
just anything, I want to do the best thing and I think the best thing is to
just go ahead and give the tenth and trust in God to keep us afloat. I have
faith that this is the correct thing to do.

I find that lately my faith has been put to the test more
often.  I’ve been having to make more
decisions one way or the other. This tithing thing was just one of those. The
world would have me put this money away for retirement or pay off some of these
higher interest debts we have or something more practical than tithing for
sure. Only faith leads me to tithe. And it’s not because I’m a good person or
anything like that. As a matter of fact it’s really the opposite of that. If I
were a "good" person, I would have had money stowed away already and have been
practical with my money and wouldn’t have been facing these problems in the
first place. It’s because I’m such a goofball and so irresponsible that I’m in
these kinds of messes in the first place. It’s only because of God that I’m
given the Holy Spirit who moves in me and gives me the common sense and
motivation and faith to go ahead and step out and tithe, even when it doesn’t
seem to make sense and seems risky.

So, I don’t say all this in my diary to impress people with
who I am, but instead to impress people with who GOD is because I am weak,
pretty self-absorbed and self-centered, and only a real God could take somebody
like me, shake them out of themselves and get them to turn around, recognize
what they have, and convince them to share some of it and even give a little
bit of it up. Believe me, only God could
do that because certainly I would not do that of my own accord. Think what you
might, but I am way too familiar with who I am to give credit anyplace else but
to God.  And that is just one of the
reasons I find it not so difficult to believe in a God that others try to
claim doesn’t exist. He feels like a miracle in MY life.