Tithing is like a potato.
Say God gives you a potato.
The potato represents the various talents and opportunities, and He promises that if you give him a portion of the potato back to him you will be blessed.
If you keep the whole potato for yourself, you'll have one potato (until you eat it, or it goes bad). But if you take the eyes and plant 10% of the potato back into the ground, you'll get more potatoes, and before you know it, your blessings will multiply.
That got me thinking about the parable of the talents, and the law of consecration. Should we not also give a tithing of our gifts back to the Lord?
If we were to use just 10% of the time spent using our skills to serve Him and bring the spirit back into our homes, if we planted that portion to bear fruit, how much greater would our skills develop?
Probably a bushel of potatoes worth.
Spiritual gifts are potatoes.
Everything is potatoes.
Good analogy. Mike and I pray about those gifts...and whether we should. Reason being that when we were so poor, we had many people give us gifts, and we would estimate the value to pay tithing on them, but when we paid tithing on those gifts, we had no money to eat. The bishop told us to use common sense and pray, because the Lord didn't expect us to take money from our bills to pay tithing on gifts. Also, some people give cash for presents so it is easy to pay tithing on that, however some people give the cash, intending it to pay for a specific item and if you pay tithing on it, the item cannot be purchased. Mike and I paid tithing on our stimulus check, after praying.
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