10. Mixed motivations give mixed results

Some people prefer to have an external guideline to live by – it makes it easier to know where your responsibility starts and ends - so why can’t we just follow both our new nature, and an external guideline, at the same time? The key is purity of motivation.

The law had to be added for Old Covenant believers, as they were spiritually dead. It needed to serve like an external conscience to the people, revealing God’s standards to them and condemning them when they didn’t measure up. But conversely, if we continue with any form of external regulation in the New Covenant, it is dulling us to the voice of our own conscience which Jesus quickened in us when we became born again.

Today, what do we have? You have Christians, born again, and we begin what we’ll call a discipling process, and when it comes to giving, what do we teach? Malachi chapter 3 verses 8 through 10. In other words, what we’re doing is we’re taking somebody that’s born again, they’re not under the law, they’re not under the ordinances of the law, that commandment is not hanging over their head, but what we do is, we actually work to suppress the operation of their new nature by enforcing upon them a law that no longer exists for the Body of Christ! If you live under that system long enough, what’s happening is this … Your conscience will be seared to the voice of your new nature, and you’ll end up trained to think only of yourself.

(Jim Martin – Audio message Are you robbing God? From ‘Financing Revival’ series, available at: http://jmmgrace.com/teachings4.html )

As you can see by the chart below, the two motivations - the letter of the law versus the nature of God working in our hearts - are of a completely different essence and cannot fruitfully be mixed.

Love is other-centred, is based on God’s grace, acts out of love for God, and draws out our new nature. In contrast, law is self-centred, is based on works, tries to gain God’s blessing (or avoid a curse), and ultimately draws out our old nature (our flesh). One is the antithesis of the other; the two motivations are mutually exclusive.

Advocating ‘tithes’ (i.e. giving the first 10% because you have to, to avoid a curse), then ‘offerings’ after that (giving any amounts on top of that because you want to, and to secure more blessing) is trying to foster a mixed motivation. Living this way desensitizes our conscience, and negates the way God has chosen to commune with us – through our born-again spirit.

In the New Testament, we are continually being told to put away the old nature and live by the new. But how can we do that in the financial area when appeals are regularly being made to our flesh?! Unfortunately what tithing has done, is create a system which trains people out of that godly motivation – giving purely out of love for God and the love He’s given them to help people and to spread His Kingdom - and ingrains into them the habit of being self-focussed, and self-serving with their giving - or at the best mixes their motives, pure with impure. We've been taught that we should be seed-conscious, not need-conscious. But in fact, both miss the boat - we should be God-conscious instead.

Our heart attitude, and our motivation for giving, is of primary importance, not the amount that we give, and this is stressed over and over again in the New Testament. It’s the willingness to give that makes our gift acceptable (2 Cor 8:11-12). God wants a cheerful giver! not one that gives reluctantly or under compulsion (2 Cor 9:7).

However, the paradox is that if our heart attitude is right, the love of God in our hearts will cause us to freely, voluntarily, want to go far beyond the demands of the Law’s external standards (Rom 8:4, 14) and this is God’s plan for us in the New Covenant.

In fact, the New Testament Scriptures abound with genuine examples of giving – records of people who gave freely, often far above and beyond what the law required in terms of tithes and offerings, and who were often commended for it. There are also negative examples of people giving with the wrong motivation, and suffering for it¹. This is so natural a part of the narratives that it can be easy to miss in connection with giving when we're focussed on the 10% figure.

That is not to say that when it comes to finances, someone could not continue to give 10% if they chose freely to give that amount; the important point is our motivation: Are you being self-focussed, trusting your giving to supply your need, or are you being God-focussed, giving freely out of the love of God flowing through your heart?

God’s priority has always been our heart - if he has that, he has all of us including our money anyway, but it doesn’t work the other way round. We therefore have a choice – to follow an external Law, a ‘formula’ – and never really mature into full sonship or walk in our inheritance in that area of our lives - or to be led by our new natures in a living relationship with Jesus our Lord through the Holy Spirit – but not both.