How do You Calculate Tithe?

2 Corinthians 9:7

Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)

Each person should do as he has decided in his heart—not reluctantly or out of necessity, for God loves a cheerful giver.

When we got married 49 years ago, Sylvia and I decided we would “pay” an honest tithe. We have lived up to our decision. We give a full ten percent of our increase and rejoice that we are able to do exactly that. We do this and have always done this because of the decision in our hearts to do so. Beyond that we give significantly more to various ministries of God, and we love doing it.

Our church has as a doctrine that every believer must pay tithe. In fact they stress that we must pay twenty percent of our gross income. For the first decade and more we did that, and I must confess that we felt it necessary to do so. Then as our understanding of God’s grace grew and blossomed into a grace filled experience of love with our Creator, we started to re-evaluate all of our relationships with God and with the church. As we read Scripture on the topic, we realized that our salvation did not depend on “paying” tithe.

We interpreted increase to be our take home salary. The part of our salary that was withheld for taxes was not part of our increase. The part that went for Social Security we knew we would be paying tithe on when we actually received Social Security; and we are indeed tithing that now. Recently we have been splitting our tithe between the church, where its use is somewhat mysterious, and direct support of missionaries in Africa.

There were nine years of our life where we didn’t really give tithe. When we served in Africa ourselves, the church deducted our tithe along with our taxes from our paychecks. When I queried why, they responded forthrightly that they don’t trust workers to pay tithe. We felt insulted and indeed missed the joy of willingly doing God's will because we wanted to do it.

Thank You, Lord, for fulfilling the promise in the next verse: “And God is able to give you more than you need, so that you will always have all you need for yourselves and more than enough for every good cause.”