THE TITHE!--Malachi 3:10.        DO 702          6/78
--A Financial Crisis.

         1. One of the main ideas in our work for God's business is to learn how to economise with the most precious & valuable thing we have--& what is that?
         2. The most valuable thing that we have is PEOPLE, MANPOWER! It is the scarcest thing & the hardest to get. God has done a miracle by His Grace in giving us the message & the wisdom whereby we have recruited a missionary force of 7,000 in a shorter time than any missionary movement in history outside of the original Early Church! (1988: Now 12,000!)
         3. We want to use our manpower so that it can benefit everybody & reach the most parts of the World possible with the Gospel to every creature. This has been my great burden, & I have worked years at it & God has blessed me with making it come true. It has been fulfilled by many miracles & by the power of God, but also by personal obedience.
         4. As the Lord once told you, "By the obedience of one man, many have been made righteous."--Rom.5:19. Because I obeyed the Lord you're here today, every one of you. I was afraid NOT to obey God. He gave the ideas & I passed them on.
         5. He gave the orders, I obeyed & therefore He gave the blessing of recruiting disciples, the manpower, the workers, the labourers for the field, the hardest thing to get. There is always a great harvest of new souls waiting for you, but it's hard to get the labourers who will go into the field to reap.
         6. Even the harvest of material blessings is always great & plenteous if you'll just go out there & obey God & do His Will & harvest. It's all there! If you do God's work, you're His employee, you work for Him, & He is certainly going to pay your salary & foot the bill, amen?
         7. At the same time we want to be sure that we are not wasteful with the material blessings that God gives us any more than we are with manpower, that we don't waste our money or materials. Have you tried to economise both on manpower & on the material things?
         8. Material things do not interest me except that they are necessary to carry out the work of God I have to do.
         9. I try to save everything! I was so saving that the day came once upon a time that God showed me that a lot of something far more valuable than material things was being thrown away, & that was your lives: Lives of the dregs of society, the hippies, the drug addicts, the vice addicts, the criminals. c
         10. Anybody who knows me & has lived with me knows that I am probably the most economical saving person that you'd ever want to know, and a horrible penny pincher, as chintzy as they come. I'm almost as bad as my Grandfather, who my Mother said would squeeze a Dollar, when they still had silver Dollars that were worth something, so hard that it would make the eagle scream! So I am very economical, very saving.
         11. I have had to learn something that my Mother often said, that God's Servant is more valuable than His money. There have been times when I have suffered because I was too darn stingy to want to spend the money & I have abused God's Servant, his strength & his time, because I didn't want to spend a few extra pennies to make it a little easier & quicker.
         12. There's nothing I've ever asked you kids to do that I haven't done some time or other myself, including hitchhiking & all the rest, or wangling a meal off a restaurant or whatnot.--And I'm still trying to do that! Only now with my security situation I have to act my best.
         13. Well, I could tell you many tales of how we saved money, some that you might not believe, but it's the truth. So it hurts me when people are extravagant, it hurts me when people waste things, especially manpower.
         14. I haven't asked for one red cent more than we have got to have to survive & do the job God gave us to do. That's what it costs to feed us, foot the bills & buy just things we need. I haven't gone to a store for two years! I haven't bought myself a damn thing that I know of. We don't just go around buying ourselves new clothes.
         15. I don't like to have anything to do with money. Personally, I never had much money to worry about &, as Maria knows, that's not my besetting sin, any desire for money.
         16. I never wanted any money, never had any, never cared a damn about it! I was thankful if I had a place to stay & something to eat. And the fact that God has given us any & entrusted us with any is only a miracle of God & apparently because I don't like it, & don't want it & I'm not covetous of it.
         17. So you have tossed the ball in my court? Well, I'm going to toss it back to you. If you're going to keep the tithes, which are necessary to both keep me & to keep the Family in business, then I just want you to explain to me what I am going to do & what World Services is going to do!
         18. Well, you say, let's just eliminate World Services entirely & then they won't need any tithes. Well, if you can figure out a way to make it any smaller than I have then I'm all for it. Maybe you can eliminate me too & you won't need to send in any tithes. But I wonder what you'll do for MO Letters & your own support?--Kind of like the guy who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. Remember that story?
         19. He got a little impatient waiting on just one golden egg a day, & decided to kill the goose & get them all at once. You know what happened, don't you? He found he killed the gold factory, because when he split the goose open there was just one egg, & that was the last one, that was the end.
         20. Now if you want, you can kill the organisation which we have, & which was not built for the egg to begin with, but if you want to kill the goose in order to get the last egg, then where are the rest of your eggs going to come from?
         21. If you're ready to dump me, praise God, I'm ready to go. That will save me a lot of work because I won't have to worry about you any more either, & you're a helluva lot bigger worry than I ever had before in my whole life. When I never had anybody but myself & my own little family, we lived on almost nothing, travelling around in a camper.
         22. But now I've got you on my hands, a much bigger Family & a helluva lot more responsibility which requires a lot more finances, a lot more figuring how to make it work & stay alive & help you stay with your heads above water.
         23. I'll tell you right now, I never asked for this job in the first place, never wanted it, & certainly didn't want it for the money, that's the last thing! I never wanted to be loaded with such responsibility.
         24. You remind me of the Prodigal Son.--He thought he ought to have his share too, right away quick. So he insisted on it, it was his, & he got it. All right, where did he get it?
         25. Why hadn't the Father given it to him beforehand? What was that portion? It was a part of the farm. It was a part of the total investment. It was literally a part of the business & he demanded his share of the investment.
         26. He didn't give a damn about how the Father or the Brother got along, or Mom either, after he was gone, whether they made it or not; he wanted what was coming to him. "That's mine and I want it, give it to me, I deserve it. It's supposed to be mine and I'm going to take it and do as I please with it. I'm going to get the benefit of it." So he did, & what came of it?
         27. By the time he got done with it there wasn't anything left, & if it hadn't been for his wise Father & smarter Older Brother who stayed home & worked & kept things going & managed to survive the loss, he could have damned well stayed out there stuck in the mud with his God-damned hogs & died there!--Because he wouldn't have had any home to go back to. There wouldn't have been any home, nor any loving Father or Elder Brother to take care of him when he went broke.
         28. We have had to rescue many Homes out of a jam when they couldn't make it & asked us for money, & we sent it to help them. But if you want to destroy the house, sell the home & throw away the roof & chop up the farm so that when the emergency comes there's not going to be any help & the Homes will have nobody to look to & nowhere to go & nowhere to get help from, well, it's your farm & that's what you can do if you want to, if you want to be that foolish.
         29. I'm working fast & furious & as hard as I can on figuring how to cut down on expenses, & have finally just about eliminated extra services & spread out everything so that we can know that every penny is counting & nothing's being wasted & nothing's being spent on anything that isn't absolutely necessary. That's why I spent so much time telling you how damned chintzy & saving I am.
         30. If what's left of World Services has no support, there'll no longer be any communications center. Maybe your little Home would stay together & you'd keep your part of the Kingdom, but there'd be no more international worldwide Family, at least not that amounts to anything. But if you think we'd all be better off broken up in little pieces & little breezes here & little breezes there instead of one mighty hurricane, if that's what you want you can have it.
         31. Well, you say, "The money's got to be given to the ones who need it". Fine, I agree. And one of the poor men happens to be World Services, which had been damn poor until I started plugging for the fact that they needed & deserved the support of the World!
         32. Well, now maybe you have learned something about God's business that you never knew before. I hope you can take it & I hope you understand it & are not worse off than you were before. Pray to God that you won't make the same mistake & use such poor judgment & such poor wisdom ever again as to fail to support His Work as you should!
         33. "Bring ye ALL the tithes into the storehouse (W.S.), that there may be meat in Mine house, & prove Me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of Heaven, & pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it."--Mal.3:10.--Amen! GBY! WLY!

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         34. P.S. Many of our missionaries are still in dire need, & this is where OUR tithe goes, to WORLD MISSIONS--10% of OUR total income.--But it's still not enough.
         35. If you would only tithe your TOTAL income we would be able to support these needy missionaries better, & better serve YOUR W.S. needs as well.
         36. So please try to tithe 10% of your TOTAL income to meet all these needs, both of W.S. to you & the needs of your MISSIONARIES in hard fields.
         37. You'll never be sorry! God will repay! Read the verse again! (Mal.3:10) He'll pour you out such blessings there won't be room enough to hold'm! Amen? PTL!
         38. GBY! WLY! And THANK you! We wouldn't ASK you for it if we didn't NEED it, but we DO need it & your missionaries need it DESPERATELY!
         39. Will you help? Will you tithe? We believe you will, & God will bless you for it! We KNOW, because WE'RE doing it too!--And God IS blessing! PTL! GBY & make you a blessing!

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family