The Immortality of Sacrifice

The Immortality of Sacrifice

To Christ and Christianity there are two sides which at first thought might seem mutually to exclude each other, but in reality, they supplement each other.

Here we learn, on the one hand, the incomparable worth of our own personalities. Never before Christ came, had the worth of personality been so highly rated; never had men been taught that the spirit which dwelt within them was of more value than the entire outside world.

And on the other hand, we learn the idea of sacrifice, in its highest meaning. Never before Christ had it come to man that he who would be the greatest must become the least: never before had human souls been instructed that the very chiefest honour consisted in ministering to others; that the highest glory of all is to be the servant of all.

By one flash of divine light, it is revealed that our personal spirits are the most precious things God ever gave to created beings; by another flash of the same divine light, we are directed actually to lose these priceless possessions—to sacrifice and lose our lives.

What is sacrifice in the Christian sense? What are the truths that lie behind our Lord’s strange words about losing one’s life?

Many still do not understand the full meaning of sacrifice at all.

Sorrow is not sacrifice. Sorrow in some instances is but a mild form of expressing rebellion against God’s will.

Another experience often mistaken for sacrifice is suffering. Here again we have something which is often connected with sacrifice, but, which taken by itself, can never possibly constitute sacrifice—that is, in the Christian sense. Some suffering is self-inflicted; some suffering is but the just retribution upon unsound ways of thinking or living; much suffering is, in the final analysis, unnecessary. Suffering is often involved in sacrifice, but sacrifice is different from suffering and is decidedly more than suffering.

Again, we associate with sacrifice the idea of its cost to us. This is for the most part a proper association; often personal loss is part of an experience of sacrifice, but it is not automatically the loss that makes it a sacrifice. It can arise simply through poor standards of relative values; and sometimes unerringly registers one’s desire for self-glory and the applause of men. Who, then, would presume to say that costliness, in itself, rises to the eternal values inherent in true sacrifice!

What, then, is Christian sacrifice? What method shall we pursue in order to come to its deepest and fullest meaning? Let’s go back to Him who is the living substance of all Christian truth. If we are to understand the full meaning of sacrifice at all, we must see it in Christ. Let us, then, consider Him as the perfect exemplification of His own words about losing one’s life and finding it again.

Christian sacrifice is

non-selective.

Jesus gave all: He gave His time, His strength, He gave His body in ministry to others—gave of His intellect, His affections, and His emotions. Finally, on the cross He gave the last of life itself. Sacrifice in the Christian sense is non-selective. We may never be called upon to give our all to the degree to which Jesus gave His all, but there must be a perfect readiness to do so. We cannot choose to dedicate some things to God and retain others for ourselves. That violates the spirit of Christian sacrifice. There must be no selection, no reservation, no partitioning off of our lives between God and other interests: all must be at His full disposal. All we are and have must be held ready for Him at a moment’s call. Just what particular form our sacrifice will next assume must never be determined by our own preferences. We must make sure that we are as ready to give one thing as another, to serve in one way as in another.

II. A second characteristic of sacrifice as we find it in Christ, is that

it is voluntary.

He did not spend His life ministering to others because He was driven to it; He was not forced to the cross by a resistless power; He did not die unwillingly. He accepted His Father’s plan as His own. “No man takes it (My life) from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” Likewise, must it be with those who bear His name. They must act of their own choice in offering themselves in sacrifice. No gift or ministry wrung from our grasp can be a sacrifice.

All we offer as a sacrifice must be purely voluntary on our part. This does not mean that the choice originates with us. Most often it first comes to us as some revelation of the Father’s will or wish, we then are to accept it and make it our own.

III. Christian sacrifice in the third place, as we see it in Christ is

offered to God.

Who has read the Gospels, and failed to be impressed with the way in which God continually filled the consciousness of Jesus as the great objective of all He did? He taught and preached for God; He lived as unto God; He died as unto God. He was not serving an ideal; He was serving His Father. He was not a martyr to a cause; He offered Himself a spotless offering unto God. This God objective, in fact, is one of the great things in Jesus’ life: and this, likewise, must be one of the great things in your experience and of all who would offer the Christian sacrifice: it must be offered unto God. This is the most spiritual requirement of all; and it is the most difficult to fulfil. So much is done in reality as unto one’s church, or one’s organization, or one’s spiritual leaders, or one’s pet cause, or one’s friends. This is done in God’s name, but in reality, the underlying cause and the pervading spirit of its performance leave it far below the high spiritual quality of an offering to God Himself. For this reason, these things can never share the values of Christian sacrifice. Such sacrifice finds its highest glory in being an offering given directly to God.

IV. Christian sacrifice

is offered for the help and blessing of men.

What Jesus did was not done as a spectacle. His life and death were no mere exhibition or an empty display of devotion or courage. He had a great purpose in all that He did-and His purpose was to bring divine light and divine help to man. He lived for others, and He died for others. While the ultimate goal of His sacrifice was God, the practical purpose of it all was for the sake of man. And so, we say, whoever would offer sacrifice to God must make his sacrifice such as to tend toward bringing blessing of some kind. Not for empty display, not for the sake of merely demonstrating some professed degree of grace. Nothing is truly Christian which does not seek to reach other souls. We have failed to understand our Lord if we have not found in Him a master-passion for the good of others. To bring them Christ, or some of the countless benefits coming with Christ, is the element absolutely necessary if we are to make out of any experience a sacrifice in the Christian sense. These, then, are the elements of Christian sacrifice; these are the things about which Jesus spoke when He told of losing one’s life that he might find it again.

There are two things more to be said. One is this: to lose one’s life does not mean to waste it; the very contrary should result. If my life is to be given in service for the good of others, then let me conserve my life, that my service may be of long duration; and let me develop all the powers of my life to the highest limit of efficiency that my service may be as effective as possible and enduring in its results. One who has seen the vision of the life lost for others will work, as never before, to bring his mind up to its strongest possible development. He will also seek, as never before, to maintain the best of health and physical strength—for the functioning of the mind and the entire scope of one’s service is conditioned more than we realize upon health and strength of body. The sacrifice one offers to God in ministry, then, will have as good a physical basis as possible, as keen, and well-nurtured a mind as possible, and, above all, as fully developed spiritual forces and powers as it is possible to have. Nothing less is worthy of God. Nothing less can assure us of participation in the immortal values of the Christian sacrifice.

The second word of caution is this: Christian sacrifice is not an act, nor a series of acts; it is not an outward thing at all: it is a certain spirit, a spirit of sacrifice. There are some deeds which, as seen by men, appear to have all the characteristics of sacrifice. But the spirit lying behind these deeds may rob them hopelessly of any place among the sacrifices recognized by God. On the other hand, there are some persons whose outward lives seem to be so full of the things and conditions men naturally desire that no suggestion of sacrifice would occur to onlookers. But no one other than God knows the inner spirit behind this outward show of comfort or ease, and no one but God knows the struggles of the soul in seeking to live for others: and so, no one but God can see the genuine sacrifice of a Christian spirit in such instances as these.

Some of the most lauded cases of sacrifice may not have been even touched with the spirit of sacrifice: some of the purest sacrifices known to God have been entirely overlooked by men. The businessman in the whirl of modern trade and finance has precisely the same opportunity of losing his life as has the missionary at a lonely mission station. Christian sacrifice is not a matter to be gauged by a particular kind of outward living or indicated unerringly by certain approved deeds of more or less religious publicity; it is a spirit, and here a personal scrutiny is quite necessary, for pure Christian sacrifice is comparatively rare.

Christ died for us, as to sin, that we might not die; but He died for us, as to service, to show us how to go and die likewise. He ministered to man throughout His earthly life, not to pay our debt to our fellows and forever relieve us of this ministry, but to picture to us how every soul of man will minister to others when he has received Christ’s Spirit. Christ gave His time, His strength, His life in serving others that we might learn the extent to which our own service should go when we should have accepted Christ as our Master. The first cry of a soul as it comes into contact with Christ and Christianity may be: Oh, that my soul might be saved. But this is not the last cry. The cry of one who has truly met the Christ is a cry having to do with the souls of others. There is

a vast amount of mean and miserable selfishness

in our religious experiences, so called. No one has true fellowship with the Lord who weeps more over himself than over others, who prays more for himself than for others, who spends more energy and time upon his own needs than he spends upon the needs of others, who rejoices more feelingly over his own blessings than over the joys of others.

We often forget that our Lord is a martyr-Lord. The disciple is not above his Master: all who are truly and deeply Christ’s are martyr-souls. He lived and died for others, a vicarious life. All who are truly His, live vicarious lives. We cannot bear the sins of others—He alone can do that; but we can bear their burdens innumerable. This means we must lose our lives

for their sakes and His.

But this means that we shall find them again. It needs only a closing word to remind us that lives saturated with the Christian spirit of sacrifice, as we have been studying it, are the lives filled with immortal values. When we lose our lives for His sake and the gospel’s, we have our truest fellowship with Him; and only those things which share fellowship are certain of sharing His eternal rewards. The only way to make absolutely sure that we will live forever is to lose that life in continuing Christ’s ministry to other souls.

(from “The Alliance Weekly.”)