Psalm 51:15-17, 139:1-18, 23-24, Philippians
3:10
September 4, 2005
First Presbyterian Church Carson City
Purpose:
For people to learn and live the positive meaning and power of sacrifice to God;
what it really means to give our lives to God.
Sacrifice. What a word sacrifice is.
It means literally to make holy; to set apart. But we intuitively hear it as hardship. And it certainly can bring pain.
But I think we have in our time and place lost touch with the power and
joy that sacrifice truly calls us to as Christians. In this final and summarizing discipline of following Jesus
Christ, Chuck Swindoll writes, “What is sacrifice? The term is so old and so strange to our ears it’s like an
ancient relic from a forgotten age.”
Chuck is right. We’ve lost the meaning of sacrifice. And yet sacrifice is at the core of who God shows himself to
be. It is at the center of our
discovering what it really means to know the meaning of life.
But only as we truly allow ourselves to be sacrificed; our hearts, will
we begin to know the power and wonder and JOY of this gift.
After David had stolen the virtue of Bathsheba and let her husband be
killed could be begin to realize the need for the sacrifice of his heart.
He began as a young man after God’s own heart.
But he had wandered from letting God have his heart. In the subtle process of life he had substituted things that
didn’t matter for the matters of the heart that matter most to God.
David realized what we need to; that God wants our hearts every day.
In Psalm 139 David realizes what we need to realize; that we can try to
hide from God; but we can’t hide our hearts.
God knows where we are in the most essential way.
He knows where our hearts are and God knows where we need to be.
Only as we acknowledge this will we know the hope that escapes us on our
own.
God knows our hearts need to be broken in order to put them back together
his way. Quickly we ask, How long
does my heart need be to be broken? Until
it is time to put us back together. Is
that OK with us? Can we praise God
in this? I think so.
Consider David’s situation. It
is really ours. What does God
really need you to sacrifice? This
question could be the entire focus of our life’s journey. If we allowed it to be we would know the redemption God
offers.
David realized this when he said, “I come to the end – I am still
with you” – this is our meaning; our holiness – that no matter what
happens along the way we are still with God.
“I am still WITH YOU” – God makes us holy in the going such that at
the end of our rope; when all hope seems gone, God is there holding on to us
when we have nothing to hold on to.
Once Nobel Peace Prize winner and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, was
asked, Dr. Wiesel once you said you hated God, now you say you love God.
Isn’t that inconsistent? “No,”
responded Wiesel because I never said I was without God.” This is our meaning. Learning
again and again to sacrifice our hearts to the one God is always for us.
Once again martyred missionary Jim Elliot is so helpful in writing in his
journal, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot
lose.” – Is this our view of sacrifice?
If it is, then it is no sacrifice. As
I say to couples getting married. You
cannot lose in sacrificing yourself to the righteous needs of the other person.
All the more, when we give ourselves to God and what God calls forth from
us we can but win.
God takes us to the edge of our relationship with himself to take us to
where we need to be in trusting that he is bigger and more faithful than any
chasm that threatens to swallow us.
Satan hates it; Sheol, hell, meaninglessness hate when people put God
above all. As we realize that God invites us to sacrifice our fears in
this life on the altar of his faithfulness we begin to know what true meaning
and freedom are. We start to see
resources that are unending. We
start to realize that the darkest times are the times we not only get to know
God best, but are equipped by God to enter in his name and with HIS light.
There are thousands of people whose lives have been hammered by a storm.
Many of them are in Louisiana, but some of them are closer to home; they
are friends and family members and total strangers in our town who need our
hearts. It would be such a victory
for the power of evil if instead of stepping out on a limb and giving ourselves
away, we caved in worrying about gas prices and how WE are going to make it.
To know just how abundantly we will make it God calls us to put our
hearts on the line. Often this is
very literal because God knows it is the only way to win our hearts to himself
for our sakes.
In the book The Five People You Meet in Heaven,
Mitch Albom tells the story of Eddie, a carnival maintenance worker who dies
saving the life of a little girl. In heaven he meets five people who had been
part of his life.
The
second person he meets was captain of his army unit in Vietnam. For the first
time Eddie learns the captain died saving his life. As they reminisce about
their time together, the captain talks about the significance of the sacrifices
each of them made.
"Sacrifice," the Captain said. "You
made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept
thinking about what you lost. You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of life.
It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.
Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A
daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. A man goes to war…"
He stopped for a moment and looked off into the
cloudy gray sky.
"Rabozzo (a member of their unit who died in
captivity) didn't die for nothing, you know. He sacrificed for his country, and
his family knew it, and his kid brother went on to be a good soldier and a great
man because he was inspired by it. I didn't die for nothing, either. That night,
we might have all driven over that land mine. Then the four of us would have
been gone."
Eddie shook his head. "But you…" He
lowered his voice. "You lost your life."
The Captain smacked his tongue on his teeth.
"That's the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're
not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."
In Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address, he referenced the simple
white grave markers in Arlington Memorial Cemetery. He said:
Under one such marker lies a young man—Martin
Treptow—who left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France
with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed
trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire.
We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the
heading, "My Pledge," he had written these words: "America must
win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will
endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole
struggle depended on me alone."
What Martin Treptow left in his
journal God did for us in sacrificing his own Son so that we may have life now
and forever. This table is an
invitation to sacrifice; to be made holy; to let our lives be set apart for
God’s purpose. This table is
where the God of the universe calls us to let our heart be broken so that the
heart of each of us can truly be set free.
This is the place where all our disciplines that lead to following Jesus
come together. This is where the
tangibility of God’s sacrifice calls us into the joyful response of doing the
same; of letting go of what we deem most precious in order to take hold of
something even greater; a deepening relationship with God in Jesus Christ. There are people in Louisiana who need our hearts broken so
that they may experience God’s love poured out through us. There are people on the streets and in the homes of Carson
City whose lives will be touched as we learn to sacrifice now and in days to
come to build a worship space they can call home; a home that is not a building,
but a place where relationship with God gives them meaning they would never
otherwise have.
So today, bring your heart here. Let God change it and come be filled forever. Amen.