A Ray of Light
Testimony★★★★★- A Ray of Light R. T. Kendall, longtime minister at Westminster Chapel, London, wrote that shortly after he and his wife were married they found themselves hopelessly in debt.
Tithing seemed utterly impossible to them. Some of the bills could not be helped, and others were the consequence of imprudence. Kendall was engaged in secular work at the time, and one day he came home very, very discouraged.
He fell on his knees in a sense of desperation, hoping that God would give him a ray of light that would help him through. There on the dining room table lay the large, white Bible his grandmother had given to him. He picked it up and opened it at random. Instantly his eyes fell on these words: “Will a man rob God?”
He didn’t like what he found one bit, so he closed his Bible and sat down to watch the television (for which he still owed). But he was perfectly miserable.
He knew that God wanted him to begin tithing, but he postponed it for a while longer; and in the meantime things went from bad to worse. “Although my wife and I were both working, it seemed that paying our bills was like dipping a cup into the ocean of debt.” Then one day they made a turn.
They took 10 percent of their income right off the top, making tithing the number one priority. He paid their bills with the remaining 90 percent. “We were not out of debt in weeks, but we were completely out of debt in less than two years, and those days became the happiest we have known.”
1 1 R. T. Kendall, Tithing: A Call to Serious, Biblical Stewardship (Grand Rapids, Ml: Zondervan, 1982), 25.
The point
R. T. Kendall shares how he and his wife, deeply in debt, were convicted by Malachi 3:8 to begin tithing. When they made tithing their first priority, God blessed them with eventual debt freedom and happiness.