The tithe is the tenth of one’s increase that is understood to be God’s portion of our love/trust covenant relationship with Him. It is to be returned to His treasury for use in spreading the gospel.

This blog is not about the origin of tithing, how tithe is calculated, who has the “right” to use it, or to specify where one is supposed to return their tithe. As I understand Scripture, the tithe is to be used for the purpose of advancing the gospel. Therefore, it is to be placed into the “hands” of those who are, in reality, advancing the gospel.

Asking What is the gospel? and What does it mean to advance it? would be the very type of questions each person must be fully persuaded in their own minds about (see Romans 14:5). The reason is that God wants every single person to grow in ever-increasing intimacy with Him. Therefore, if one takes their love relationship with God seriously and recognizes a loyal duty to return to God His portion of the increase, they will also seriously evaluate where they are entrusting their tithe before sending it. This will require them to study, pray, reason, examine, and determine for themselves what is the eternal gospel, the good news of God that Jesus brought, and then compare that gospel with what the people, organization, or group to which they are sending their tithe are advancing. Then, ultimately, they would make a confident love/trust decision to return their tithe to the avenues they recognize are advancing the true gospel.

My focus in this blog is not the tithe per se; it is the methods and means of returning the tithe and its impact on the believer. As an example of the methods, means, and impact on the believer, consider the following with what I described in the paragraph above:

Two Christians both believe they are to return a faithful tithe, and both do. One studies God’s Word for themselves, discovers the gospel message, and actively seeks out people, groups, and organizations that are advancing that message, and returns their tithe to those hands.

The other doesn’t study, doesn’t examine for themselves, but accepts the things they were told from childhood, continues to attend the church of their upbringing uncritically, and believes it is a rule they must follow, so they return their tithe faithfully to the organization of their birth without ever examining the gospel for themselves or thinking beyond the rule they were told they are supposed to follow.

While both individuals are returning a faithful tithe, given the underlying reasons, motives, and methods by which they came to do so, do they both experience the same spiritual development and growth? No—and that is the focus of this blog, not on the tithe or its legitimacy, but on the underlying methods for returning the tithe and the embedded meanings and consequences when we deviate from God’s design for individuals to decide for themselves to do so and where to do so.

Because of Adam’s sin, we are all born into the world fearful and insecure, with a spirit of fear (Psalm 51:5; 2 Timothy 1:7). Salvation requires that each of us come to the point in relationship with Jesus in which we trust Him enough to surrender the spirit of fear (our sinful lives) and be reborn with His Spirit of love and trust (John 3:3; Galatians 2:20).

Until then, we live animated and motivated by fear and survival, seeking to promote, protect, comfort, and prove self to get ahead of others in any way possible—always seeking inner peace, security, and safety. But every one of our self-initiated and directed efforts fails, for nothing we can do can actually free us from the spirit of fear with which we were born; only trust in Jesus and surrender to Him can do that.

God has provided everything we need to be won to trust and to engage with Him for our salvation—the inspired record, His handiwork in nature, life experiences, witness of others—all of which is to lead us ultimately to His Son, Jesus, who is the only means of salvation. But God has also provided many helpful tools for us to employ in our trust relationship with Him, to assist us in our cooperation with Him for our salvation (e.g., the Sabbath was made for man as a gift from God; man was not made for the Sabbath—see Mark 2:27).

How Tithing Heals

Another of God’s helpful tools is the therapeutic directions on tithes and offerings.

Fear naturally leads us to hoard, to accumulate, to take, to protect. The more we hoard, the safer we feel—but God’s kingdom is the kingdom of love and trust built upon truth. And when we trust God, because we know He is good, when we love others more than self, we seek to give rather than take. But this can be difficult when we have habituated patterns of worry, survival, and never-ending threat assessment, which inflame fear and tempt us to hoard. Thus, God prescribed tithes and offerings. Offerings are freewill gifts that come from hearts that love and, when freely done, exercise within the person the neural circuits of love, beneficence, compassion, altruism, and trust, and the brain, mind, and heart change as a result.

Tithes are not freewill offerings; they are returning to God what is understood to be His in our saving covenant relationship with Him. God cannot save people without their participation, and people cannot be saved without God. It is a cooperative effort. God provides everything for our salvation, but we must provide our choice, our surrender, our consent, our agreement, which ultimately is our trust in Him, which is encoded and made real within our being by our choice to engage in His program of healing by doing as He directs and trusting Him with how things turn out.

The tithe is an opportunity to exercise our trust, our confidence, our commitment, our ongoing covenant connection with God, returning to Him His “portion” of all our increase. As we do so, our “partnership,” relationship, intimacy, connection, confidence, trust, and love all grow. If we return tithe as God designed, we recognize its purpose, we understand it is to advance the gospel; therefore, we don’t just return it; we have a discussion with our Partner about His goals, His mission, His plan, and ask for His leading, direction, guidance—where He is working and how we can join Him. We get excited as His gospel is advancing, and our tithe becomes something more than a mere duty; it is a mission, a vision, a project, a real, lived partnership with the King of the universe, and we love Him and the privilege of being part of it.

But to have all of these benefits for the transformation of the soul, the tithe, despite being rightfully God’s, must be freely returned. Why? Because of how reality works! It is only as it is freely returned, with understanding, in the context of the love/trust relationship with God, that the believer grows, matures, and is transformed. While God has the divine power to reach inside a person and make changes against their will, changes they have not chosen, and therefore could program a person to return tithe, if He were to do that, He would destroy their individuality; they wouldn’t be them any longer but a robot (and God would not be a being we could trust).

Consider another method I heard about recently: A church organization requires its employees to “consent” to have tithe deducted from their paycheck (as taxes are) and automatically returned to the employing church. If an employee wants their tithe to go somewhere other than that organization, they lose their job.

What is the impact of such a method?

Those employees are being treated, at best, as children who are too immature to be responsible, or worse, as rebellious and unrighteous people who can’t be trusted to be loyal to God. Even assuming the employees intended to return their tithe to their employing organization, such a system deprives them of the opportunity to make their free-will choice on an ongoing basis to do so.

Such methods do not advance the kingdom of God principles of truth, love, and freedom, but the control methods of a world built on fear and selfishness. And as such, the organization, by utilizing this method, is stealing, cheating, depriving, and taking away from its employees the opportunity to exercise their free will to return their tithe and, thereby, mature and grow in trust.

Even with the most gracious interpretation, that this is done merely for convenience, if the employee is not given a choice, if it is a requirement of employment, then it is not for convenience; it is for control.

Therefore, while the tithe is God’s portion, the only way a person is blessed by returning the tithe is when they are persuaded in their own mind and freely choose to do so, and they grow in their development as they intelligently examine the gospel and the organization to which they are returning it. Any other mechanism, rather than encoding ever-growing love and trust in God, injures the soul.

Thus, God’s plan for human salvation goes far beyond learning a correct doctrinal fact or doing a correct behavior; its true aim, focus, intent is the healing of the soul, transformation of the character, which requires only God’s methods to be utilized.

I encourage you to deepen your partnership with God by actively investigating the gospel message and prayerfully seeking to return your tithe to the avenues that advance that message.