An Annual Giving Campaign Reflection
September 29, 2024
by Helen Shibut
My dad tells a story about when he went off to college and signed up for his first credit card. When the card came in the mail, he excitedly told his roommate, “My credit card is here! Money problems are over!” His roommate wisely replied, “Money problems are just beginning.”
No matter how our careers are going or how well we’re keeping up with the Joneses, most of us have worried about money from time to time. Of course there’s nothing wrong with wanting to provide for our families or save for retirement, but it’s easy to leap from being responsible to just plain worrying.
Ever since reading the Narnia books as a kid, I’ve been a huge fan of CS Lewis. In his famous Mere Christianity, Lewis writes about Jesus’ command that we love our neighbors. How exactly are we supposed to do that, when love is a feeling and maybe we’re just not feeling it? Lewis suggests we obey this command by behaving as if we love our neighbor exactly as God intends– by acting the way we would if we really loved that guy as ourselves. If we do it right, we’ll not only treat our neighbors right, but we may also find ourselves transformed and overcome with genuine love.
This same technique can be applied to the biblical practice of tithing. In Matthew 6, Jesus tells us, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear…But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” The Bible is clear about trusting God in all things; David prays in Psalm 31, “I trust in you, O Lord. I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hand.”
My husband and I weren’t quite able to honestly say that we perfectly trusted God’s promises like David did, but we prayed about it and decided to act as if we had the kind of faith we wanted. So, we committed to tithing.
If you try out the old “fake it til you make it” approach towards tithing, you might find that God’s promises relating to giving are true and beyond expectation. No, I’m not saying we got rich and you will, too. But God promises us that giving is the way to finally say goodbye to money problems, sometimes in ways we can’t understand at first.
Once we took a small step towards trusting God with our finances, my husband and I were blown away by the abundance we saw around us. We experienced more gratitude on a day to day basis. When we cut out a few luxuries to make sure we had the money to give, we found we didn’t miss them. We even started thinking about other areas of our lives where we could work on trusting God more.
Trinity is such a welcoming spiritual home for our family, and we’re blessed to be able to participate in renewing God’s creation through different programs here as well as through giving. I’m particularly grateful for the friendships I have with so many of you.
This year, I want to encourage you to find out for yourself what God’s promises around giving are all about.
Helen blogs about finance for Christians at mammonsense.com. Her April 24, 2024, post about tithing is here.
