“Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob Me.
But you ask, ‘How are we robbing You?’ In tithes and offerings.”
Malachi 3:8
It is easy for all of us to point the finger of accusation at corporate executives who have exploited and plundered their company’s finances or used their assets as their own personal bank account. It is also easy to condemn the accountants who cooked the books to cover up blatant financial abuse.
What about the church? What about the millions of Christians who weekly rationalize their stealing? Let’s get even more personal. What about your own financial records? What would they reveal if they were made public—not to Congress, but to your local congregation?
Tragically, when it comes to money and materialism, there is more of the world in the church than there is the church in the world! Unfortunately, too many of us Christians mirror and reflect the economic greed of the world rather than the economic contentment that is supposed to characterize God’s people!
Would your buying and spending habits reveal that you have been cooking the books to cover up your own economic greed? Would a total audit of your personal financial records reveal that you are also guilty of theft—not from man, but from God? One day at the Judgment Seat of Christ, God will “open the books” and “audit the accounts” for each of us (2 Corinthians 5:10; Revelation 20:11–15)!
This is not a new problem for the people of God! That’s why one of the oldest and most familiar questions in the Old Testament is this: “Will a man rob God?” In this passage in Malachi, a renewal in giving was the minimum starting point for God’s people to prove their sincerity to the Lord. It would be a tangible way of demonstrating a change of heart concerning their relationship with God.
Just as God’s ancient people were often guilty of robbing Him, so His people today are consistently guilty of robbing Him. Our theft is not so much from taking, but from holding back and keeping what rightfully belongs to God.
Millions of us Christians regularly steal from God just as certainly as if we reached in our hand and took money out of the offering plate when it passed by us! We pocket God’s money as if it were our own. We deposit His funds in our accounts and then we consume it on ourselves.
What about you, my friend? If you want to be “filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Peter 1:8), then get in step with what God is doing in the world—both locally and globally! Invest your resources where God is investing His Spirit. Make His treasure your treasure. You can never know the fullness of His blessings until you quit robbing God by not systematically tithing and giving.
I lovingly urge you, then, to accept God’s challenge that He lays before His people. Tithing is the spiritual and financial key to obedience that will “open the floodgates of heaven” so that God will be able to “pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it” (Malachi 3:10)!