have always thought it would be cool to see someone healed. Or to be healed myself. I don't mean a healing in which I have a cold, and I pray and get well. Or even praying for someone with cancer, and the next time I see them the cancer is gone. What I would like to see is someone healed instantaneously-like someone who has been blind their entire life. Now, that would be a miracle that would clinch it for me. I would never doubt God again.

Unfortunately, that is not the way it works. Sure, God does heal people this way. But He knows these kinds of miracles are not persuasive. Consider when Jesus healed the blind man on the Sabbath and the Pharisees remained unconvinced. And just days after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead (now, that would have been something to see!) people were calling for Jesus' crucifixion. These types of miracles are not as persuasive or as sustaining as we like to think they are.

What Is This Weekly Miracle?
God has instead built a system that gives us constant reassurance of His presence in our lives. It allows us to go through life with a personal miracle that is as old as my Christianity and is as fresh as this morning's prayers.

The miracle I am talking about is the system of tithes and offerings.

The first part of this miraculous system is where God gives us a way to have ownership in the Great Commission. An act of faith here, in the United States, translates into a blessing there, say in Cambodia. The gospel work does prosper as people give and languish as people don't give. However, this is not because God is broke and has no other way to get the money, but because He is freed by our giving to respond to the needs of gospel work.

The second part of the system is the challenge by God that says, in essence, "If you make the first move in faith, I will make the second move in grace.' If the order were reversed, then it would not be faith, and according to Romans 14 anything that is not of faith is sin. Look at the cause and effect in the following verse:

"Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this," says the LORD of hosts, "if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows. Then I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it may not destroy the fruits of the ground; nor will your vine in the field cast its grapes," says the Lord of hosts (Mal. 3:10, 11, NASB).

Many people have looked at this as some sort of deal, but that is not what is intended. Do we deserve God opening the "windows of heaven"? Of course not. No payment of any amount could make us deserve such a thing. But God does promise to respond to our faith. This continuing reenactment of the faith/grace interplay gives us a constant reminder of the redemption that God is doing in our lives.

The third part of this system deals with sacrifice. One wag has said, "The problem with the living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar." This part shows God as brilliant.

I was once in India when I saw a man rolling down the edge of the road-just like you might see a kid rolling down a hill. He told me that he was rolling to a holy shrine. He said that it was the least he could do for the god that lived there. I realized that I would do the same thing for my Father. And I also realized that it is easier to take on some fantastic challenge of absurd sacrifice than to follow God's simple commands. Naaman would have taken on wild feats of daring or made rash sacrifices to be healed from his leprosy. But when Elisha told him to bathe in the Jordan seven times, he was insulted. His servant showed him that obedience is more important than sacrifice. The tithe and offering system is God's way of reminding us that He demands everything in a simple, straightforward manner.

The fourth part of this system is the apparent impossibility of doing it. Recent research has shown that all people think they are having trouble making ends meet. I am not talking about those who are fantastically wealthy (which I know nothing about). But what surprised researchers was that people who were very wealthy by any definition of the word reported that they were having trouble paying their bills. It seems that everyone who encounters the tithe and offering system feels that it is impossible for their personal situation. If a person could afford to pay tithe, then it wouldn't be an act of faith. And if there is no faith in it, then it has no merit.

For tithes and offerings to be an act of faith, the giver must think that without God's divine intervention such gifts will mean financial ruin. Jesus emphasized this when He noticed the woman who was quietly slipping a penny's worth of donation into the offering plate. He said that she was giving her all. Her gift was a death sentence from a logical financial point of view. Jesus contrasted her gift to the large gifts of the Pharisees that were given only out of their surplus. He saw no faith in their gifts.

Acting on the Miracle
With this background in the tithe and offering system, it is possible to develop some practical guidelines on how to go about doing it:

1. Trying to fit tithes and offerings into your budget is misdirecting your focus. The way most people develop a personal budget is to take their paycheck and break it up into all the places the money has to go. In the tithe and offering system, the tithe and offerings must be viewed as a reduction of income at the very onset. They are not one way to spend the money you have. They are a reduction of the amount you have.

2. The amount of the tithe and offerings are systematically determined. The tithe is, of course, 10 percent. But 10 percent of what? Net pay? Gross pay? Gross pay plus what your employer pays for your insurance, retirement plan, and company car?

If you own a company, it is even more challenging. Do you pay on what you draw out as a salary? What about the company's net income plus what you draw out as a salary? What about net income plus what you draw out as a salary plus the value of the personal use of the company's car?

It takes prayer and counsel to figure out the basis of calculating the 10 percent. After you determine a basis you should stick to it until God shows you otherwise. As you will see later, the actual basis, as long as it is honestly determined, is not all that critical.

In regard to the offerings, with prayer and family discussions determine the percentage you want to give as offerings. Calculate it on the same basis you decide to use in the tithe calculation.

Once you have decided how to calculate the tithe and offerings, do it immediately upon receipt of your paycheck. Prepare the tithe envelope and stick it in your Bible to take it to church without giving it another thought. There have been times when I have had a nearly constant level of income. So I wrote 12 checks each for the tithe and offerings I wanted to give and dated the checks for each month in the year. I prepared an offering envelope for each month and delivered them to an extremely cooperative church treasurer, who deposited one of the checks each month. The value of some sort of systematic giving scheme is that it prevents the rehashing all of the issues every time you sit down to write the check. It prevents your current economic crisis from interfering with your obedience.

3. It is when you give in faith that God will continue to bless you as you give. Determine in advance a system for increasing your giving percentage each year. Some people use a 1 percent a year increase. At first this may sound ridiculous. You may think that you could never afford it. You are right. It is ridiculous. But since you cannot afford the giving level you set up initially, the idea of increasing this impossibility is not that bizarre. It is a way to keep testing the reliability of God in a fashion He approves of.

4. In this system debt is especially dangerous. If you choose to go into debt to buy things you could not otherwise have, the spiritual blessings and sacrifice associated with the giving are disconnected by the debt.

Sacrifice is the heart of the system. Practically this means that paying tithe and offerings means that you don't have something you could have had because you have paid the tithes and offerings.

The Benefits of the Miracle
Sure, we would like to see miracles! But God's tithe and offering system is a fantastic miracle taking place right in front of us. We can carry it around with us, think about it, and see it working whenever we wish. And with it we can have reassurance of His presence in our lives every day.

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Mack Tennyson, Ph.D., is a professor of accountancy at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. He has five daughters of whom he is very proud.