Giving to God in Response to God and His Bling

I started thinking about the last post, "God and His Bling." Where does our tithes fit into this? God doesn't need our money, if fact He needs no money at all. Money is not valuable to God. If all this is true, why do we give or need to give our hard earned money to God?

Before we start, I need to make something real clear and probably should have made it clear in "God and His Bling", however that was not the point. The point of "God and His Bling" was to show that God does not need money and only uses it to bring glory to Himself throughout the Bible. The point of this blog is to now show that it is our responsibility to bring glory to God using our money, and anything else that we have. But I want to make this real clear so it doesn't come back to bite me.

God wants us to tithe to Him.
Clear enough. No?
You should be giving a portion of your money to God.

Leviticus 27:30
"A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord; it is holy to the LORD.

Churches are struggling through this tough economic climate and there is no reason for it. What is really sad is churches struggling through a good economy. What is the cause? Only 5% of believers tithe and usually they only tithe 3%.* That is the absolute worst statistic that could possibly come to the surface. That is worse than the Christian divorce rate, decline of churches, rate of people falling away from the church and so on. People are not faithful to God, period! Simply the fact is that if people tithe faithfully, most of the bad statistics would disappear.

1 Timothy 6:10
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

I do not want to spend our time here harping on not giving, rather I want to take a brief look at how we as the church could be glorifying God.

• There are several numbers out there on how many Christians are in the United States, we will go with 230 million (yes, this includes all that claim to be Christian, but if you claim Christianity you should be obeying God).
• The average income of an American citizen is $32,000. (It's actually a little higher)
• 10% - Popular amount of money to tithe.
• 10% of $32,000 = $3,200
• 230,000,000 X $3,200 = $736,000,000,000

If the church as a whole gave %10 of their income, there would be $736 Trillion to work with. I think we could solve some problems. Maybe even get the whole country back into shape. Feel that number is too high, then I'll cut back some.

There are 150 million protestants. 150 million X $3,200 = 480 Trillion!
Don't like that number lets say only half of the protestants are actually believers. 240 Trillion.
It doesn't matter how you slice this number, it is always going to be huge. If we are obeying God as believers, there should be a ton of money to glorify God with.

What could $240 Trillion do?

• Take care of the US deficit within a year and a half.
• There are 850 million people starving in the world, Christians would have enough money to serve them a 3 hot meals a day will leftovers.
• A $30,000 well in Africa gets clean drinking water to 20,000 people for 20 years. Don't even worry about digging wells, we could run drinking water to every town and village and given them water sprinklers to water their gardens. What not enough money? Lets say we do it over 10 years, $2.4 quadrillion, that will do it.
• Restore New Orleans, done.
• Solve world hunger, done.

I know these are gargantuan numbers, but they are real. Let's bring them down to home and see what could happen. Most towns, even small towns have a church that have an attendance 350. If they gave 10%, that is $1.12 million. I think that little church would have a huge impact in their town. How about the church that large church across town that is running 2000, $6.4 million. In my city there are 6 churches that run 2000+, how about Christians hitting the city with $38.4 million, that doesn't include the smaller churches. Their are 250,000 people in my home town, its an average city. Over half claim to be Christian, but lets go with half. If 125,000 believers gave 10%, the churches in my home would have $400 million a year to impact their church, city, country and world with.

Money does not mean anything to God. But, God knows it means a lot to us humans. If we obey God and give tithes like we should, the God that we obey would be glorified in ways that we could never expect. Showing people the church does care and can meet the needs of people also shows them the love of Christ. Divorce rates go down, attendance rates sore, poverty all but disappears. Is this a dream world? Yes. Would Satan try to corrupt a church with that much money, yes. But, if Christians would simply give as they should to the church, the love of Christ would be able to spread extremely fast.

By the way, the average income in the world is $7000 and 2 billion Christians, if as the worldwide church gave 10%, there would be $1,400,000,000,000 every year in tithes, $1.4 quadrillion per year.

What could the world look like if Christians would just obey God?

* The Barna Group - "New Study Shows Trends in Tithing and Donating"

Note
Money still has no intrinsic value to God. He does not need money to build His kingdom. However, money does matter to Him in the sense that human can use it to glorify Him. I am asking that you don't get confused and say, "Well, Haley said that money doesn't matter to God so I am not giving." That is just stupid thinking.