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God Gives an Insight: Tithe - Gifts.

Years ago the group here attended a meeting in another town and they took up an offering for the needy.  We did not have the Lord's Treasury checkbook with us, but one of our people was going back home so he brought it the next morning.  We wrote a check that we knew for certain had some tithe in it and some offering in it. ( We keep offerings in the Lord’s Treasury because offerings to Him are also delivered to His purposes. A person in the group had given an offering to bring it up to what we knew we were to give from the Lord’s Treasury. There was not enough tithe money in the account. ) We delivered the check to the leader of the meeting telling him it was for the offering to the needy that was taken up the night before.  

We soon found out that they had added it to their own fund saying now they could get the computer they needed.  We instantly knew we were wrong to intrust the Lord's funds into the hands of someone who didn't really understand.  In short, the Lords funds (tithes and offering) did not make it into the hands of a person (this time the needy) according to what the Lord had taught us and instructed us to do in this situation.

Later, the Lord gave me a scene in the night where our head elder (the one who delivered the check) and I were tied up to a pole waiting for the police to pick us up so we could be taken to trial.  I knew from the dream that we needed to replace the funds since we were responsible for them.  The head elder had gotten the same message.  We didn't know how to do this because we just didn't have that amount of money.  

We, as a group, asked the Lord to help us replace it and the Lord reminded me of the fact that some of it was offering.  I didn’t know why at the time, but the Lord was wanting to make a distinction! Our head elder was coming home from work one day and stopped at this grocery store to get some things.  At this grocery store they gave out money every once in a while.  You did nothing to get it, you didn't enter anything, they just gave it out randomly by when it came up in the cash register.   If you happened to be going through at the time the cash register gave the signal you got the funds.  This thing popped up as our head elder was paying for his produce.  It was the exact amount of the amount of tithe contained in the check for the needy.  

I knew from what I had learned about offerings that the Lord was answering our prayer and that the Lord was making it clear that we had to replace the tithe money because it had been stolen from Him, but not the offering money. The Lord was also making it clear through all of this that we are responsible to Him for delivering His tithe correctly.

You see, as the picture reveals, the tithe is the Lord's even when it is in our hands.  It belongs to Him and this is why we steal it if we use it for wrong purposes or our purposes.  We have not given the Lord anything when we tithe correctly, we have just not stolen what is already His.  An offering is above the tithe and is from us and it isn't His until it gets into the hands of a person.  It's like when the Lord said,

Matthew 25: 40
... Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

In conclusion, the picture God gave us was that the offering was not stolen from the Lord like the tithe was when those people didn't give the funds to the needy, but instead used it for their office purposes.  This is why we had to repay the tithe amount to the Lords Treasury, but not the offering amount.  

Note: You can give an offering anywhere, to any organization, a project, or to a church as you wish, but to give an offering to the Lord it must go to the same places as the tithe.

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Tithing Basics