With the holiday season here, one of the biggest hurdles many families are probably facing is finances. Money, after all, tends to be one of the biggest snares in life. Many of us probably learned that lesson at a rather young age. Where I grew up and live now, so many are living in poverty, while others are just barely staying out of it. Many preteens and teens in the area have to work to help provide for their families, and that’s just a part of life. Because of this and other things, it can be difficult for many families to have faith with their finances.
Personally, I do not come from a rich family (at least not rich in money), and I’ve definitely seen many a financial struggle. However, I am thankful that my mom never let us be worried about the financial situation we were in. She always taught us to be faithful to God, and He would provide. And He always did!
There were so many instances when she would receive random checks in the mail with no explanation as to why. One time she even found a check sitting in one of our kitchen cupboards. So growing up, while I knew we couldn’t afford a lot of extra stuff, I always knew that we would have everything we needed.
That provision was a result of my parents being diligent in their tithing. Giving a tithe is so important, and I’m grateful I had parents who taught me that. I remember the first time I ever made money, I was eight or nine years old, and I had made two dollars from scooping horse manure at my grandparents’ barn. I was so excited to tell my mom that I had made some money, and when I got home and showed her, the first thing she told me to do was tithe. She taught me that, no matter how little you have, you always give the Lord ten percent and He will bless the remaining 90 abundantly more. So that week at church, I gave 20 cents as my tithe.
I have carried that lesson with me through the years and have taken tithing seriously, because I have seen what the Lord can do when we are faithful with our finances. Since getting married, I have only learned more about the importance of tithing. That being said, I have also experienced more of the uncertainty and—if I’m being completely honest—the fear that comes with putting the money you have into the Lord’s hands.
In the past two years, I have experienced firsthand how difficult it can be to trust God with your finances. I would even argue that money is one of, if not the hardest thing to completely give over to the Lord (children might beat this, but I don’t have kids yet, so I’ll get back to you on that haha).
So how do you do it? How do you trust the Lord completely with our finances? How do you move past the fear of not knowing if all the bills are going to get paid this month, or how to get Christmas presents for all the kids, or maybe even where the next meal is coming from?
The Bible teaches us a lot about this, and if it’s something you struggle with, you should study the Word before anything else. After that, you can come back and keep reading for some of the things I’ve learned about operating in faith with my finances.
1. Trusting the Lord with your finances doesn’t mean you have no fear or worries.
I have found that a common misconception about faith is that you don’t have it if you’re still worried, but that’s not true. I think the purest of faith actually comes from a place of fear, as weird as that might sound. But let me explain what I mean.
I believe that everything that is meant for evil, God will use for good. Fear is included in that. The good He brings out of the evil that fear often creates is great faith. Honestly, I think if there was no fear in this world, faith really wouldn’t be necessary. If you have never experienced fear, you don’t know what having faith really means. So, while I do believe we are called to let go of our worries and fears completely, I don’t believe that having them negates our faith.
The important thing to remember is that the more you trust in God, the easier it gets. Eventually, your faith will overcome the fear to the point where being afraid isn’t even an option anymore. But great faith does not come instantly, including faith with your finances. It is something we continuously have to develop, and part of that development is learning to have faith despite our fear.
When it comes to finances, this can get amplified, because we live in a world where our entire livelihoods depend on how much money we have in the bank. When we don’t have enough, our fear of not being able to provide for the needs of our family comes out in full force. Even though the goal is to have no fear, God isn’t going to turn His back on you for being worried about your family. I think He probably respects it when we can say, “Lord, I trust you in spite of my fear.” When we say that, He gets an opportunity to show us that we really don’t have to be afraid when we see how well He provides!
2. God’s provision is never a coincidence.
During the 2021-22 school year, I had an interim teaching position at a local high school. For the first six months, I would receive my paycheck for each month at the end of the following month (so I would get my October paycheck at the end of November, and so on). Eventually, they caught me up to where I was getting paid for each month at the end of that actual month, but no one ever explained how it was working to me, so I was under the assumption that it was still behind by a month.
After leaving that position and taking an internship in Student Ministry at our church, I took a significant pay decrease. My husband and I were still counting on receiving my last paycheck from the school after I had already been done for a month, since (we thought) my paycheck was a month behind.
The end of June rolled around, and I didn’t receive that check; after inquiring about it, we realized why. So we were short over $2000 that we had already budgeted for. That hit us hard. We were worried, to say the least. We knew God would always provide, but even with that knowledge, it was hard to get over the fact that we were short two grand.
Fast forward to about mid-July, my husband’s company decided to give everyone a mid-year bonus. This has literally never happened in the history of the company, but for some reason, they decided to do it this year. The amount of my husband’s bonus? $2000.
Many people would chalk that up to coincidence, but God is intentional. Personally, I think we use the term “coincidence” as a stand in when we simply can’t explain what has happened. The fact that we were short that much money, and he got a bonus for the same amount from a company that has never before done a mid-year bonus isn’t a coincidence. That’s God.
3. Tithing is the lifeline to provision.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: tithing is important. It’s the most important financial move you can make. Unfortunately, not many people understand the significance of a tithe, but I guarantee you that everyone who has been faithful to tithe has an incredible story of how God has provided for them. He can do so much more with your 90 percent than you can with the full 100, and when you truly understand that, having faith with your finances will be easy.
I was raised to know and understand this, but many people were not, and it’s one of the hardest concepts for new Christians to understand. My husband wasn’t saved until he was 28, not long before we met. When we got married, tithing was the one aspect of our finances that we didn’t totally agree on. I was all-in and wanted to give the full ten percent every month, but that was harder for him because he was a relatively new Christian and wasn’t raised in a household that tithed.
He felt the pressure of needing to provide for us, and he wanted to make sure we were taken care of, which of course I couldn’t fault him for. So I consented to not tithing a full ten percent every month, and I just trusted that the it was something between Kyle and the Lord that would get worked out.
I continued to wait on the Lord and Kyle to work it out, up until just a couple of months ago. We got into some sort of discussion that eventually led us to talking about tithing. I was reiterating my desire to give the full ten percent, and he agreed that it was important, so we made the decision to give the Lord the first ten percent of what we make every month.
However, there was still the concern of making sure all of our needs were met. Tithing the full ten percent meant we were sacrificing our safety net. It meant there was a chance we wouldn’t have enough to cover our bills each month. As Kyle expressed this concern, I told him I wasn’t too worried about it because I had seen my mom receive money out of nowhere. His response to that was something along the lines of “well God isn’t blessing us like that.”
Tithing Leads to Provision
I kind of think that God took that comment as a personal challenge. Earlier that same day, my mother-in-law, whose name is also Elizabeth, came to us with a $100 check she needed me to cash because the person who gave it to her wrote it out to “Liz Hamilton,” but she recently remarried and her last name was no longer Hamilton. She asked if I could cash the check for her, and she would get it the next time she saw us. That night, after Kyle and I had our discussion about tithing, his mom texted him and told him she wanted us to keep the check. That was $100 just given to us out of nowhere. Kyle didn’t even tell me until the next day because he was so shocked.
Later that same week, I received $100 from the school system due to a covid bonus that I had no idea about. I hadn’t been an employee there in over six months, but for some reason I got that random bonus the very week Kyle said God wasn’t blessing us with unexpected money.
Then, once again within the same week, we received a $50 gift card as a thank you for some work Kyle had done for someone months prior. It was like God was trying to prove to Kyle, and reaffirm to me, that if we would just be faithful to give Him that ten percent, He would bless in ways He never has before.
But He didn’t stop there. The following month, we attended a marriage conference on the weekend of our first anniversary. We played a newlywed game, and the prize was a $100 gift card. We both knew that it would be a huge blessing if we won that, but unfortunately, we did not. As the conference was getting ready to finish up, the couple who won came up to us, gave us the gift card, and told us they wanted us to have it as an anniversary gift. My husband, who is not one to cry a whole lot, sat down and wept. He said to me, “I don’t know why He keeps trying to prove it to me.”
So if you get nothing else out of this, at least know this: your tithe is important, and if you trust the Lord with it, He will go out of His way to bless you abundantly more than what you could have ever received had you not given Him anything.
4. Testing God is okay, and even encouraged.
Malachi 3:10-12 is, for me, one of the most significant passages in the Bible regarding tithes and finances. The Lord tells His people that they are robbing Him by withholding their full tithe, and then goes on to explain the blessings they will receive if they would simply give ten percent.
The most intriguing part of this passage is when the Lord tells them to test Him on this. He is saying, “If you don’t believe me, then give your tithe and see if I don’t bless you like I say I will.” God encourages us to hold Him to His word. There was a point not too long ago when we had literally nothing in our bank account. Actually, I think we were in the negatives. All we had was a little over $400 in cash that my husband had gotten from a side job.
When the time came to tithe at church on Sunday, I watched as he counted it all out, paused for a moment, and then handed every single dollar to me to put in the envelope. After church, I asked him what made him decide to do that, and he simply said, “I felt like the Lord was telling me to test Him.”
Faith Through Disappointment
Three days later, he received a chance to bid on a $20,000 contracting job, and it was pretty much a guarantee that he would get it. When he told me, I said, “this is the fruit of you giving all of our money away.”
Now here’s the hard part: he lost the bid. This is something that he and I are both still grappling with, because we were so sure that this job was God’s promised blessing. But the truth is, we don’t know what His blessing will be, or when we will receive it. We simply know that it is promised to us. Sometimes we think we know what it should look like, or how quickly we should receive it, and it hurts when we realize we were wrong.
I still don’t know what will come of Kyle testing the Lord with literally all of our money. I do know that all of our needs were met, despite having no money for a little bit. That in and of itself is a blessing. Even so, we know more is coming. The hard truth is that we don’t get to decide when it gets here, and when we do try to decide, we are usually left disappointed. Despite our disappointment, we still have faith that the Lord will stay true to His word. We have tested Him, and He will bless us with more than we know what to do with because of it. We just have to be humble enough to admit that the how and when is not up to us.
It’s so hard to trust God with our money, but it is SO rewarding when we do. Even when we don’t see the reward right away, we can rest assured that God is a man of His word, and He will bless us abundantly when we are faithful. Be encouraged, friend. Know that, no matter what your financial state might be right now, the Lord will provide if you trust Him (and test Him) with whatever amount you do have.
