>Malachi 3:8-10 “Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing Me! But you say, ‘How have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing Me, the whole nation of you! Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this,” says the LORD of hosts, “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.”

Looking back at my last pay period, our bills were such that we were not able to pay everything AND tithe. I did the stupid thing, figured that God would understand, and paid my bills. I sent God’s tithe to some bank. We ended up having too much month at the end of the money.

My next paycheck came, and I thought about postponing the tithe, since again we might not have enough money, and we were running short of groceries. I decided that obeying God was more important than eating Oreos (i.e. we could pay our bills and not splurge at the grocery store). This time I paid my tithe to God, including my monthly payment to our church’s building program that I had promised before we started building. I didn’t know if we would have enough money, and, sure enough, last Friday (the non-payday Friday), it looked like we had $10 left for gas, groceries, etc. We got by, I rode my motorcycle a few times (since it only costs $6 to fill it up). I bought milk and eggs at the store, and we have been getting by on whatever we still had in our pantry.

I have been looking at our bank balance online, and it kept saying that we had $135. I was waiting for whatever hasn’t cleared to come in, since my records showed that we should have only $10. Finally I decided yesterday that I would balance the checkbook. I only do this every few months, since we usually keep close tabs of our account transactions through the bank’s website. When I got done, I found that there was only one item outstanding: a check for $7. I also discovered two errors I made: in February I entered a debit for groceries for $70 two times, and just a few weeks ago we returned a few things to Meijer (a local discount store) for $33, and I entered the transaction as a debit, not a deposit. So now we have $130 where we thought we only had $10.

Last pay period I didn’t pay God what He was due. We ran out of money.
This pay period I paid God what He was due. We found extra money.

Coincidence? I think not.