« Stewardship Devotional
Day Eleven - Starting Somewhere
Leviticus 27:30 “A tithe of everything… belongs to the LORD.”
Read
Leviticus 27:30-33
Apply
In the Old Testament, all believers were required to give a tenth of income to God’s work and the poor. The tithe is still a minimum guideline for our giving. The tithe (or ten percent) guideline makes many Christians feel guilty. Some of that guilt, as we saw yesterday, is false. However, as one observer states: “…some of us should feel legitimately guilty about what we put in the offering plate. Relative to the wealth that has been placed in our care, few of us give sacrificially. We are greedy and giving God the leftovers. The law has a legitimate ‘role to bring us to the righteous God at the foot of the cross, where we meet a gracious loving Christ. It is the love of Christ that we are responding to, that motivates us to be great givers and deep lovers.1
What about grace? The tithe is not a law that brings us merit in God’s eyes. It shows us that we need the grace of Christ to cover our greed, to set us free from self-service. We then can see the tithe just like every other law of God) as a means of expressing gratitude. That’s what Leviticus says the tithe was for anyway.
- Do you tithe your income? Do you give away more than ten percent, or less?
- What would it take to move your giving up one level, giving away a few percent more next year?
Pray
Pray for a renewed lifestyle that moves up each year in giving to biblical proportions, from nothing to tithing to beyond.
Do
What is your income level? What is ten percent of the gross? How does that compare to your giving?
1 Ron Voss, quoted in: Behind the Stained Glass Windows: Money Dynamics in the Church, John and Sylvia Ronsvalle (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996)
Copyright 1997. Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New York City