Hank Smith: 00:05 Hello, my friends. Welcome to followHIM Favorites. If you’ve been following us this year, you know that we take a single question from each week’s lesson and talk about it for followHIM Favorites. This week, John and I are in the book of Malachi and we are going to talk tithing. John, tithing can be a difficult principle for some people. It can be a really sensitive subject. So let’s say I’m listening to this and I think, well, why should I pay my tithing? What benefit does it do for me? What does it do for the Lord? What does it do for the church? Why should I pay my tithing? What would you say?

John Bytheway: 00:35 There’s two words that the Lord used in Malachi, prove me. Just try it. I think we all love the story when they ask Jesus, “Where did you get your doctrine?” And he said, “It’s not mine, it’s Him that sent me. And if any man will do His will, he’ll know of the doctrine.” And this is one of those that I go back to my own little family history. My dad, who joined the church at age 24, started paying tithing before he was baptized because the missionaries read that promise out of Malachi. The language is just beautiful. “I will open you the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing. There shall not be room enough to receive it.” And my dad thought, really? And so he tried it. And I think this is a wonderful little test the Lord is giving us, that he really wants us to take the test and to show us what will happen.

  01:25 To me, it’s one of the easier things to do because it’s mathematical, I can just do it. And then, I can just throw it all on the Lord and say, “Okay, you said prove me, so I’m proving it.” I wish some of the other commandments were as easy. Can I say that, Hank? Do you know what I’m saying, because it’s so easy to figure out. Some of them are really hard and you struggle in here and in here. But tithing, piece of cake.

Hank Smith: 01:49 As I’ve grown older, I’ve had a sense for how pervasive money can be in your life and that the Lord is offering you an opportunity to make sure that money doesn’t corrode.

John Bytheway: 01:59 Yeah, good point.

Hank Smith: 02:01 That it doesn’t corrode your soul. I remember our friend, Jamie Nielsen, who works on our podcast, she said to me once, “Why does 10% giving seem like so much, but when someone offers you 10% off, it just doesn’t seem like that much.” Right?

John Bytheway: 02:16 That’s great.

Hank Smith: 02:17 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 02:17 Oh that’s great.

Hank Smith: 02:18 And I thought, yeah, that’s true. It doesn’t, 10%-

John Bytheway: 02:21 That’s nothing.

Hank Smith: 02:21 That’s not a great discount.

John Bytheway: 02:23 That’s not a discount.

Hank Smith: 02:25 But then when you offer it, it feels like so much. That can be how pervasive money can be. One of my favorite lessons I’ve ever had is when I take groups to the Holy Land. John, you’ve been. And you go to the Sea of Galilee and it is beautiful and it is so full of fish. We’ll go on a boat ride and you can walk up to the dock there and just look off to the right and to the left and you can just see fish.

John Bytheway: 02:47 You sure can.

Hank Smith: 02:47 All over the place. And there’s people all around and there’s life and it’s green and pretty gorgeous. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place to be. And then you go to the Dead Sea. And the Dead Sea is just kind of blah.

John Bytheway: 03:01 I know where you’re going with this.

Hank Smith: 03:02 You can’t do much with the Dead Sea. There’s nothing alive in it. There’s not that much beauty around it. You can get a little mud bath, I guess.

John Bytheway: 03:10 It didn’t improve my appearance. I tried it.

Hank Smith: 03:14 And I always point out to the people I go with, that this is the same water. The same water that goes into the Sea of Galilee goes into the Dead Sea. So what is it about the Sea of Galilee that makes it so beautiful and the Dead Sea makes it so horrible? And it’s that the Sea of Galilee gets the water but then gives some away. It gets and gives, it gets and gives. And that’s what keeps it full of life. And the Dead Sea only gets and takes and keeps, and it does not give any away.

  03:45 For me, every time an opportunity to pay my tithing comes up, I think of that Sea of Galilee and how beautiful it is because it gets and gives. It gets and gives. I don’t want to be the Dead Sea when it comes to my tithes and offerings.

John Bytheway: 03:59 That reminds me of President Gordon B. Hinkley who said, “We don’t pay tithing because we have money, we pay tithing because we have faith.” And I remember I was at a place where Elder Ballard was talking about a trip he and Elder Packer had taken, and it was Elder back then, to New York to talk to reporters coming into the sesquicentennial of the pioneers arriving in the Valley, 1997. And he said that there were two questions, no matter how hard we tried to answer them, that we just couldn’t seem to answer to the reporter’s satisfaction. How do you get young people to go on missions? How do you get people to pay tithing?

  04:36 It always reminds me of something I saw on the wall of a copy center at BYU. It said, “Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.” And I think when you hear the music of the gospel, something that seems counterintuitive to the world is I give away 10% and I’m blessed with more, but it works. And so prove him. Try it.

Hank Smith: 04:59 Yep. And often the we’re the ones being proved. You’ve shown me that. So many times in scripture where the Lord says, we’re going to prove you, we’re going to prove my children. But this time he’s like, prove me. Test me on this principle. And we would challenge anyone listening to give it a try. This is one of those principles that you need to practice in order to gain the testimony of it.

  05:20 Thank you for joining us this week for followHIM Favorites. We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. And then come back next week as we have our final followHIM Favorites of the year.