Should you tithe while paying off debt?

(The following is a transcription from a video I recorded. Please excuse any typos or errors.)

One of the questions I get a lot is, “Should I tithe while I’m paying off my debt?”

This is a great question that is not easy to answer. In help with answering this, I want to bring in some resources for us to help with making this decision.

The book, Master Your Money, is a classic on biblical money management. It’s a great read.

Ron Blue, the author of the book, has something that I think is pretty good to say with regards to tithing.

But, before I get into what Ron has to say, if you’d rather join our YouTube SeedTime community and watch my discussion about this topic, you can do so here:

God Owns It All

I like the way he wrote it. He says:

“I’m often asked whether couples in a heavy debt situation should tithe or not, and I have two thoughts regarding this.

First of all, tithing is no more or less spiritual than debt repayment if you know that God owns it all. However, because God does own it all, the tithe, as a priority, is a statement of your recognition that God owns it all. In other words, I don’t believe it’s a yes, no question. Rather, it’s a question of what is best relative to the individual and the circumstances.

A person must, however, bear in mind two principles. Number one, God owns it all, and as a priority, giving is commanded in the Bible. The question of whether to use the tithe money to fund debt repayment is a very serious spiritual decision that can only be made with much prayer and godly counsel.

Remember, faith requires a first step without fully understanding and without seeing how it’s all going to work out. Getting out of debt requires elements very typical of the faith walk. In most cases for the Christian, it requires faith to even take the first step.”

Trusting God

One of the problems that many Christians make is they compartmentalize their money, and they think, “Well, I’ll give God 2%, or I’ll give God 10%, but the rest is mine.”

But in reality, if we come back to the Bible, we learn that all of it is God’s. Now that doesn’t mean that He’s going to have us give it all away. That’s not normally what He leads us to do.

The point is that if He did, we should be in a position where we’re willing. We’re that open-handed that we can trust Him that He’s going to provide for our needs if he did lead us down that path.

Obeying God

So with Linda and I, in our particular situation when we were paying off our debt, after praying about it, we not only felt like we were supposed to continue to tithe, but we actually felt like we were supposed to give more.

So for me personally, that was a pretty big challenge because I had run the numbers, and I had figured out how long it was going to take. An increase in our giving was just going to slow that down, or at least according to my estimation.

Looking back on it, I’m really glad that we obeyed and that we followed that leading where the Lord was leading us because we ended up paying that debt off way faster. Years faster than I had planned.

So, even though it was completely counterintuitive and didn’t make sense, God knew what He was doing, and that’s what He led and asked us to do.

My Advice To You

Summing all this up, my advice to you is to take this to the Lord in prayer, see what He’s leading you to do, and then obey.

Do what He says. He knows better than you.

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