Ask three faithful Christians whether tithing is required today and you will get four opinions. One will tell you ten percent is a command, full stop. Another will tell you the tithe was Old Covenant law and Christians...
Ask three faithful Christians whether tithing is required today and you will get four opinions. One will tell you ten percent is a command, full stop. Another will tell you the tithe was Old Covenant law and Christians are free from it. A third will say something vague about giving from the heart and change the subject. Most teaching on money in the church either pounds the ten percent drum or avoids the question entirely, and both approaches leave families confused at exactly the point where they need clarity.
This essay will not settle the debate for you. It will do something more useful. It will lay out what the Bible actually says, name the two traps that swallow most families, and then hand the question back to your household, where it belongs, with a way to answer it together.
The most quoted verse in every tithing sermon is Malachi 3:10: "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it."
It is a stunning promise, and it deserves to be read in its own context. Malachi was speaking to the nation of Israel under the Mosaic covenant. The storehouse was a real place, a set of chambers attached to the temple where grain, oil, and produce were kept. The tithe funded a specific system: the Levites, who served at the temple and were given no tribal land of their own, ate from it. So did the priests. The storehouse was the national mechanism for supporting worship and the people who led it. When Israel withheld the tithe, the Levites had to abandon their posts and go farm, and the whole worship life of the nation decayed.
So Malachi 3:10 is a rebuke to a covenant people who were starving their own temple system. It is fair to draw a principle from it, that God's people should fund God's work and that God honors those who do. It is a stretch to lift the verse out of that system and drop it, unmodified, onto a salaried worker in Nairobi or Dallas as a legal formula.
Here is a detail the pulpit version usually skips. The Old Testament describes not one tithe but three, each with its own purpose.
The first was the Levitical tithe. "I give to the Levites all the tithes in Israel as their inheritance in return for the work they do while serving at the tent of meeting" (Numbers 18:21). Ten percent of produce and flocks, every year, to sustain the tribe that ran Israel's worship.
The second was the festival tithe of Deuteronomy 14:22-27. Families set aside a tenth of their produce, carried it to the place God chose, and ate it there in celebration, together, "in the presence of the LORD your God" (Deuteronomy 14:23). This tithe was, in effect, a mandated family feast, a savings plan for rejoicing.
The third was the poor tithe. Every third year, a tenth was stored in the towns "so that the Levites... and the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be satisfied" (Deuteronomy 14:28-29). It was a welfare system for the vulnerable.
Add these together and the faithful Israelite was giving something in the range of twenty-three percent per year, not ten. Anyone who says "the Bible clearly commands ten percent" has already simplified the text. The tithes were part of an integrated national system covering worship, celebration, and care for the poor, functions that in a modern state are split among the church, the family budget, and taxation.
When you turn to the letters written to churches, something interesting happens. The apostles talk about money constantly, and they never once instruct Christians to tithe. Jesus mentions tithing when confronting Pharisees who tithed their spice racks while neglecting justice and mercy, and he tells them they "should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former" (Matthew 23:23), an endorsement spoken to people still living under the Mosaic system.
What the New Testament does teach is demanding in a different way. Paul writes, "Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7). Notice the structure of that sentence. Giving is decided, in the heart, in advance. It is not an impulse and not a tax.
And it is regular. "On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income" (1 Corinthians 16:2). Weekly rhythm, proportional to income, planned before the need arrives. The New Testament pattern is deliberate, proportional, joyful generosity with no stated percentage. The ceiling comes off entirely. Jesus praised a widow who gave everything. Zacchaeus gave half. The Macedonian churches gave "beyond their ability" (2 Corinthians 8:3). Ten percent starts to look less like the finish line and more like the on-ramp.
Families fall off this road on both sides.
The first trap is legalism. Ten percent becomes a toll paid to keep God off your back. You calculate it to the shilling, pay it grimly, and consider the rest of your money entirely yours. This is precisely the spirit Paul rules out with the words "not reluctantly or under compulsion." A family can tithe faithfully for thirty years and never once be generous. The percentage was met; the heart never showed up. Legalism also breeds the quiet pride Jesus skewered in the Pharisee who prayed, "I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get" (Luke 18:12).
The second trap is the excuse. "We are not under law, we give from the heart" sounds spiritual and often means we give whatever is left, which is nothing. Grace becomes a loophole. If the Old Covenant believer, with far less revelation of God's generosity than we have, gave twenty-plus percent, it is hard to argue that freedom in Christ should produce less. Ron Blue, in Master Your Money, has counseled Christian families for decades and observes that giving that is not planned simply does not happen; the heart may be willing, but the budget is already spent. Dave Ramsey, who teaches the tithe as a baseline in The Total Money Makeover, makes a similar practical point: people who wait until they feel wealthy enough to give never arrive.
Both traps share a root. They treat giving as an obligation to be minimized rather than an opportunity to be seized.
Randy Alcorn, in The Treasure Principle, builds his entire case on one sentence of Jesus: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth... But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:19-21). Alcorn's summary is blunt: you cannot take it with you, but you can send it on ahead. Giving is not losing money. It is transferring it to an account that survives you. He also offers the most helpful framing of the tithe debate on record: for his own family, the tithe functions like training wheels, a starting discipline that teaches balance until generosity can ride on its own.
That is the frame that dissolves both traps. If giving is treasure sent ahead, the legalist's question, "how little must I give," and the escapist's question, "must I give at all," both become absurd. The real question is how much treasure you want where you are going.
So here is what a family does with an unsettled debate. You do not wait for the theologians to finish. You hold a meeting.
Sit down together, spouses first, then children old enough to understand, and decide your giving floor: the percentage of income your household will give before anything else is allocated, in any month, at any income. For many families that floor will be ten percent, and the long history of the tithe makes it an honest, well-worn starting point. For a family in crisis it might begin at two percent. The number matters less than three properties it must have.
It is written down. An unwritten intention is a mood. Put it in the same document as your budget, with the date and both signatures.
It is a floor, not a ceiling. The tithe-as-ceiling mindset asks how to hit ten and stop. The floor mindset asks how to grow past it. Revisit the number once a year, ideally when income changes, and raise it when you can.
It is decided, not felt. Per 2 Corinthians 9:7, the deciding happens in advance, in the heart, together. Then the cheerfulness has room to arrive, because the wrestling is already done.
This week, put one hour on the calendar. Open the passages above, read them aloud as a household, and write down your floor. Do not let the debate about the tithe do what it does in most families, which is to postpone generosity indefinitely. Settle your number, sign it, and start sending treasure ahead.