“If we like luxuries or necessities more than we like obedience, we will miss the blessings which he would like to give us.”
Tithing
LDS Quotes on Tithing
“Pay your tithes and offerings out of honesty and integrity because they are God’s rightful due. Surely one of the most piercing lines in all of scripture is Jehovah’s thundering inquiry, ‘Will a man rob God?’
“Paying tithing is not a token gift we are somehow charitably bestowing upon God. Paying tithing is discharging a debt.”
“A man who has not paid his tithing is unfit to be baptized for his dead. … If a man has not faith enough to attend to these little things, he has not faith enough to save himself and his friends.”
| History of the Church, 7:282.
“Pay your tithing as a declaration that possession of material goods and the accumulation of worldly wealth are not the uppermost goals of your existence…In a society that tells us money is our most important asset, we declare empathically that it is not.”
Now, do not get me wrong. I am not here to say that if you pay an honest tithing you will realize your dream of a fine house, a Rolls Royce, and a condominium in Hawaii. The Lord will open the windows of heaven according to our need, and not according to our greed. If we are paying tithing to get rich, we are doing it for the wrong reason. The basic purpose for tithing is to provide the Church with the means needed to carry on His work. The blessing to the giver is an ancillary return, and that blessing may not be always in the form of financial or material benefit.
| Tithing:An Opportunity to Prove Our Faithfulness
“We would not lend a neighbor money with which to run his business without interest. Neither would we expect him to lend us money without paying interest. I found I was using God’s money and the business talents He had given me without paying Him interest. That’s all I’ve done in tithing—just met my interest obligations!”
| quoted by Ernest L Wilkinson, “The Principle and Practice of Paying Tithing,” Brigham Young University Bulletin, 10 Dec. 1957, pp. 10–11
“The honest payment of tithing provides a person the inner strength and commitment to comply with the other commandments.”
| Ensign, November 1996
There has been laid upon the Church a tremendous responsibility. Tithing is the source of income for the Church to carry forward its mandated activities. The need is always greater than the availability. God help us to be faithful in observing this great principle which comes from him with his marvelous promise.
| Tithing:An Opportunity to Prove Our Faithfulness
By this principle it shall be known who is for the kingdom of God and who is against it. … By it shall be known whether we are faithful or unfaithful.
| Gospel Doctrine, 5th ed. (1939), 225.
“I bear witness—and I know that the witness I bear is true—that the men and the women who have been absolutely honest with God, who have paid their tithing, … God has given them wisdom whereby they have been able to utilize the remaining nine-tenths, and it has been of greater value to them, and they have accomplished more with it than they would if they had not been honest with the Lord”
| Conference Report, Apr. 1912, p. 30