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You’re standing in the checkout line of the giving app, or maybe you’re just doing the math in your head during the offering. Ten percent. You did it last month. You’re doing it this month. And somewhere underneath the math, there’s a quiet question you don’t say out loud: Is this actually what God wants from me, or am I just checking a box so I can stop thinking about it?
If you’ve grown up around church, you’ve heard a hundred sermons on tithing. Malachi 3:10. "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse." Test God and see. Most of them end the same way — give the ten percent, watch the blessing show up.
But here’s something that gets skipped almost every time: Jesus only talks about tithing directly one time in all four Gospels. Once. And when He does, He doesn’t say what you’d expect.
The One Time Jesus Talked About Tithing
It’s in Matthew 23, and Jesus isn’t teaching a class on generosity. He’s confronting the religious leaders of His day — the scribes and Pharisees — in the middle of the temple courts, in front of a crowd. This is one of the most direct, unfiltered moments in the Gospels. No parables. No soft edges. Just Jesus, naming exactly what He sees.
And what He sees is a group of men who have turned tithing into a performance of precision.
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone." (Matthew 23:23, KJV)
Read that slowly. Mint. Anise (dill). Cumin. These aren’t crops. They’re kitchen herbs — the kind of thing you’d grow in a small garden patch, not a field. The Pharisees were so committed to technical obedience that they were counting out individual sprigs of dill and setting aside a tenth of them for God.
That’s not an exaggeration for effect. That’s genuinely what the historical record shows — a level of tithing so meticulous it extended to garden spices, something the Old Testament law never explicitly required down to that level of detail.
What the Pharisees Were Actually Doing
To understand why Jesus calls this out, you have to understand what tithing was actually for.
The tithe goes back to the storehouse principle in Malachi 3:10 and further, into the Law of Moses — Leviticus 27:30 and Deuteronomy 14:22. It was never a tip. It was the mechanism that funded the priesthood, cared for the Levites who owned no land of their own, and provided for the poor, the widow, and the foreigner living among God’s people. The tithe existed so that no one in the community would be forgotten.
It was a justice mechanism wearing the clothes of a religious obligation.
And that’s exactly what the Pharisees had lost. They had become so obsessed with the measuring — getting the tenth exactly right, down to the spice rack — that they’d walked straight past the reason the measuring existed in the first place. Jesus names it directly: judgment (justice), mercy, and faith(fulness). The weightier matters. The things the tithe was supposed to produce in a person’s life, not just their ledger.
They’d mastered the math and missed the point.
He Didn’t Abolish the Tithe. He Subordinated It.
Here’s where most people stop reading this passage — right after the word "hypocrites," assuming Jesus just tore the whole practice down.
He didn’t.
Look at the second half of the verse again: "these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone." Jesus doesn’t say stop tithing. He says keep doing it — and stop pretending it was ever the finish line.
That’s the Turn most tithing conversations miss entirely. There are really only two camps out there: the "give your ten percent and watch God bless you financially" camp, and the "grace freed us from all that Old Testament math" camp. Jesus, in the one moment He actually addresses this, refuses both. He says: yes, the tithe. And justice, mercy, and faithfulness. The tithe was never meant to be the ceiling of your obedience. It was the floor — the minimum posture of a person who takes God seriously. What you build on top of that floor is where the real transformation was always supposed to happen.
That’s harder than either camp’s version. A number is easy to hit and move on from. Justice, mercy, and faithfulness don’t have a percentage. They don’t have a finish line. They ask something of you that a giving app can’t calculate.
What This Means for Your Checkbook — and Your Life
So what does this actually change on a Tuesday?
It means the question worth asking isn’t just "did I give my ten percent this month?" It’s "did the way I handled money this month make anyone’s life more just? More mercied? Did it reflect someone who’s actually faithful — not just accurate?"
Practically, that might look like this: you tithe faithfully, and you also notice the coworker who’s quietly drowning in a medical bill. You tithe faithfully, and you also forgive the friend who still owes you money instead of keeping score. You tithe faithfully, and you also ask whether the rest of your spending — the 90% — reflects a person who’s generous, or just a person who’s compliant in one specific column.
Jesus isn’t asking you to abandon the discipline of giving. Money has a way of becoming a rival god if you let it — and the tithe is one real, practical way you keep that from happening. But He is asking you to notice if the discipline has become the whole relationship, or if it’s actually producing the justice and mercy it was designed to produce in you.
"The tithe was never the ceiling. It was the floor."
3 Things You Can Do This Week
- Look at last month’s bank statement for five minutes. Don’t judge it — just notice. Where did your money go besides the tithe? Does any of it reflect mercy, or was it all reflex?
- Pick one person this week whose need you already know about — and do something for them beyond your normal giving. A meal, a bill, a gift card, your time. Something outside the automated 10%.
- The next time you give — online, in the offering plate, wherever — pause for ten seconds first and ask God: "Show me if this has become a box I check, or a heart I actually bring." Let the question sit before you move on.
Something to Sit With
- Where in your life have you turned an act of faith into a checklist item — with tithing or anywhere else?
- If Jesus looked at your last three financial decisions the way He looked at the Pharisees’ spice jars, what would He say was "weightier" that got left undone?
- Justice, mercy, and faithfulness aren’t line items. What would it look like to actually budget time and attention for them, the way you budget money?
A Prayer for This
God, I’ve been treating my giving like a box to check, and I think You’ve known that longer than I have. Thank You for not letting me off the hook the easy way, and for not shaming me either — for showing me the floor is good, but You want so much more than my ten percent. Show me where justice and mercy are missing from the other ninety. Make me faithful with what’s in my hands, not just accurate. Amen.
Let’s Talk About It
Where do you land — was Jesus loosening the requirement on tithing in this passage, or raising it? Tell us in the comments.
Share This
- "The tithe was never the ceiling. It was the floor." — rereading Matthew 23:23 today and it wrecked me a little.
- Jesus only talked about tithing once in the Gospels. He didn’t cancel it. He said it wasn’t enough on its own. #WhatJesusActuallySaid
- Turns out you can get the math exactly right and still miss what God was actually after. Matthew 23:23 hits different when you slow down.
Common Questions About Jesus and Tithing
Did Jesus command Christians to tithe? Jesus never issues a direct command to tithe in the Gospels. The one time He addresses it, in Matthew 23:23, He affirms it as something the Pharisees were right to do — "these ought ye to have done" — while rebuking them for treating it as sufficient on its own, apart from justice, mercy, and faithfulness.
What does Matthew 23:23 actually say about tithing? Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for tithing even small garden herbs like mint, dill, and cumin with extreme precision while neglecting "the weightier matters of the law" — justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He tells them to keep tithing, but not at the expense of those greater things.
Is tithing still required under the New Testament? The New Testament doesn’t repeat the Old Testament tithe law as a binding command for the church. Instead, writers like Paul emphasize cheerful, generous giving (2 Corinthians 9:7) as the guiding principle. Many believers still tithe as a discipline of faithfulness, understanding it — as Jesus modeled here — as a floor, not a finish line.
Why did the Pharisees tithe garden herbs like mint and cumin? Jewish tradition at the time extended the principle of tithing beyond the major crops named in the Law of Moses to nearly everything grown, including small kitchen herbs, as an expression of extreme religious precision. Jesus doesn’t condemn the practice itself — He condemns using that precision as a substitute for justice and mercy.
What are the "weightier matters of the law" Jesus mentions? Jesus names three: judgment (justice), mercy, and faith (faithfulness). These summarize the deeper heart of the Law of Moses — the way God’s people were meant to treat one another — as distinct from, and more important than, ritual precision.
