Tithe
Mt 22:37-40
Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Passage Mark 12:30:
30And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
Interestingly enough this passage does have an interesting connection to tithing. It’s easy to grasp how to love God with all your heart, soul and with all your strength. These visual pictures at least give us a way to understand what we are giving to God. However, there are always questions when it comes to loving the Lord with all of our minds. It seems almost impossible to do. We cannot go a single day without sin, without thinking things we should not, whether intentional or not. So how is it that God can ask something of us that we could never achieve?
Well for one, we shouldn’t be surprised because He asks us to live as His son did and that’s impossible for us to perfectly do, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t constantly try.
So here’s the interesting kicker:
The average human being “controls” 10% of their brain whereas the other 90% is already being used to our benefit. This follows right along side our paychecks. God says we can technically keep 90% and just wants to demonstrate how powerful He is with 10% or a tithe of our income. This is the only place in the bible where God says “test me in this.”
What is interesting here is how the two correlate. If we control 10% of our brains and the other parts are involuntary, then it means God is asking for a tithe of our brains too. In fact, He’s asking for the part that we control. When God says to love Him with all our mind, it means to relinquish the part that we control, use to think, make decisions, etc. We’re not giving up the right to choose, we are giving up our own will for God’s will.
This isn’t something that God specifically states (that we should tithe our brains) but it makes sense when given the percentages. God doesn’t merely ask for 10% because to much that is given much is expected. We know that people who we consider “geniuses” may use more of their brains and as such, more is required for God’s will to be done. So it’s not too farfetched to think that offering our minds as a tithing to God would be something out of the ordinary.
We are to relinquish control so that He might begin a new work in us that can be carried on to completion so that we might know Him better and get out of the way so that we allow His work to be done rather than our own.
Just interesting food for thought.
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