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Fresh Start Devotions




To The Penny

“Lord,” I’d pray, “we’re not making it. Everything we make is going to pay for Seminary and the new baby, we need more money.”

We weren’t economically challenged. We were flat broke. We were sharing a small apartment with several hundred cockroaches and often were only able to eat a partial meal each day. Times were tough.

The church I was pastoring was growing, but most of the new money was going into programs and for the new building we were planning. I took on some side jobs teaching Speech at a Christian school and substituting in the public school system to help ease the pressure, but we needed divine intervention. We were in over our heads.

When I prayed about our situation, I kept hearing God say the same thing—”increase your giving.” “You’ve got to be kidding,” I’d pray, “increase our giving? You don’t understand, we need more money, not less.”

We were already tithers, giving 10% of our income to the Lord, but now He was asking us to take a step of faith and increase our giving to be a tithe of our need, not our income. When I put a pencil to the paper, I calculated that we needed $12,000.00 more a year to make it, that meant, if we were to tithe on our need, we’d have to start giving an additional $100.00 a month.

Somehow we did it. Don’t ask me how, I’m not an economist, all I know is we made it happen. Giving stopped being routine for us, it became an expression of faith. “God, this doesn’t make any sense to me, but I feel like you’ve told me to do it, so here is our tithe on our need, not our income.” I’d pray as I wrote out the check.

We didn’t talk about it to anyone, we just did it. The next year the church gave us a substantial raise. More than I’d ever gotten before or since. The amount? You guessed it. To the penny!


Jim L. Wilson, Fresh Start Devotionals (Fresno, CA: Willow City Press, 2009).

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