Lindsay Roberts
There are three positions we can place ourselves in before God: out of His will, in His permissive will, and in His perfect will.
If we are out of God’s will, it means we are not in obedience and are not in position to receive God’s blessings. Being in God’s permissive will is okay, and we can get by with that, but we’re not positioned to receive God’s highest and best that He has for us. God wants us to be in His perfect will.
One day as I was praying, I said, “God, How can I get out of just being in Your permissive will and get to the place where I am in Your perfect will, perfect and complete, lacking nothing, as James 1:4 says?” God showed me that one way to obtain that position is to be obedient in honoring Him through tithes and offerings.
God led me to Malachi 3:7 NKJV which says “From the days of your fathers you have gone away from my ordinances and have not kept them.” So how do we end up out of God’s will? By not doing what He has told us to do; by failing to obey Him.
Then God led me to verses 7–10: “Return to Me, and I will return to you…Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed Me! But you say, ‘In what way have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings. You are cursed with a curse, for you have robbed Me…Bring all the tithes into the storehouse.”
The way we get into God’s perfect will is by obeying His ordinances in His Word. When we do that, we position ourselves to receive such blessings that there will not be room enough to receive it (v. 10).
