07 December 2003 19:34
The Apostle Paul sets a bad exampless this morning was on 2cor8.1-15,24.
i've never been too sure exactly what "tithing" meant. i'm cool with giving 10%, i can handle that. my parents raised me to not really think of giving a tenth of my income as an option, so to this day it's a simple matter of course for me to set that aside. but tithing seems to be a more ambivalent term to me. so abraham gave melchizedek a tenth of his possessions, that sets a pretty good precedent, one we still follow today... sorta. i've met many people who readily give 10 or more percent of their income. on the other hand, i haven't met any (whom i've talked to anyway), who give ten percent of their possessions.
okay, so abraham didn't have all that much in currency lying around the tent.. gold wasn't of much use to him. come to think of it, gold isn't that much of use to me either. it's all a matter of what society values. abraham's possessions happend to be 52 million head of sheep and cattle and the occasional camel. so that's what melchizedek would have ended up getting. now, if a person were to give a tenth of their possesions to God on a regular basis (abraham seems to have done it once in his lifetime, so he's okay on this one), they would end up with very little. they would always have something, but not a while lot of it. if i were to start out with $10000, after week one i would have $9000, week two $8100, three $7290, after a year i'd have $41 presuming i wasn't making money and God wasn't blessing me financially. is this what God intends? so we tend to tithe our income (there i go, using "tithe" again, even though i dont' know its exact definition), giving 10% of everything that comes in.
now of course, truth is not always relative, but here's where gray area attacks and we each end up discovering our own truth. whatever. what is true is this: we should give back to the Lord on a regular basis. Biblical precedence seems to be 10%, church tradition says 10% or greater. are you knodding your heads? excellent. because now i'm goign to argue that biblical precedence is not 10%. what, are you now shaking your heads? ye scoffers.
okay, so we have Abraham giving 10%. then we have Paul encouraging us in 2Cor to give "as much as we are able." Abraham was loaded. he didn't need 52 million sheep. he was very very blessed financially.
ideally, everybody will have more than we need. everybody being at peace, everbody having what they need, that is utopia, aka heaven. we have spiritual needs, God fulfills those. we have emotional needs, God fulfills those, and gives us family and friends. we have phsyical needs, God gives us what we need to satisfy him. he also gives us more.. a kitchen and utensils help us stay fed, make the job easier for us. a house shelter's us from the elements, keeps us warm. a car helps us go places in a timely manner: church school hospital job grocery store etc. four cars helps everybody go different places simultaniously. we don't all have to have a house. we don't all have to have a car. i carpooled for a year in highschool. then for my senior year i had a car. it made life easier, but i had been able to get along without it. i just bought a watch last week. my old watch band broke. i could have gotten a new band, changed the battery and kept going, but i upgraded to a new watch. we always try to improve our lot in life, making it easier, more comfortable. i used a hand-me-down computer for three years before i bought this one. i could still be using that one, but now i have one that's faster, has more features. i don't feel as guilty because i am giving the old one away, putting it to good use. i'm wanting to buy a new mouse, because my old one is uncomfortable. it is still functional, i can still get use out of it, but i wan't something newer. should i get it? couldn't the $40 i spend on a new mouse be used to sponser a kid in africa for seven and a half weeks? who am i to be buying a new mouse just because i don't like the new one when there are people starving in the world?!!
i don't know.
...but i did just suceed in making myself feel very guilty.
which wasn't supposed to be the point.
con't above...
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