Chapter Fifteen--Sacrifice
Chapter Fifteen
Sacrifice
trea·sure: a valuable or precious possession of any kind
The bottom line: Jesus calls us to offer him everything so that we can be free from the things that have a hold on us.
Do you know that every day you and I make personal sacrifices for something? This is hard to admit, but Luella and I got hooked on watching the reality TV show, Dancing with the Stars. The premise of the show was that ordinary entertainment personalities with little or no dancing experience would be paired with professional dancers in a ballroom dancing competition. For the previously non-dancing celebrities, the contest basically requires them to put their life on hold. Each week they are responsible for learning, mastering, and performing a new and complicated dance. At first you see the contestant bowled over by the catalog of dances they must learn and how specific the steps of each are. It would be hard enough just to learn how to properly dance the waltz, but imagine adding the tango, quickstep, Paso Doble, foxtrot, samba, jive, rumba, and the cha-cha!
Although these dances look fluid, delicate, and lyrical when danced correctly, they are all physically demanding and exhausting. They tend to tear up your feet, leave your toes bleeding, and cause your muscles to scream at you in sinewy protest. The dances are mentally demanding as well. You not only have to remember a series of complicated steps that tend to repeat and build, but you have to remember certain dictates of body posture as well. The way you position your head, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, hips, and toes either makes the dance look beautiful, strained, or ridiculous.
To begin with zero dance experience and then quickly become competition-ready demands an amazing level of commitment, discipline, and personal sacrifice. It means being in the dance studio from early morning until late at night. It means getting rid of all the other things on your schedule and forgetting that you have a social life. It means pushing your body beyond any limits previously set for it. It means forcing your already-confused mind to think, understand, and remember. It means starting the process all over again the next week, even though judges mocked your last hard-fought performance. And it means smiling into the camera when all you really want to do is cry, yell, or punch the nearest wall.
As we have watched this competition week after week, we have been amazed at the sacrifice. It is a whole-body, whole-mind, all-the-time competition. You cannot quit because you are tired, angry, confused, in pain, embarrassed, or bored with it all. And as soon as you complete the arduous process of learning a particular dance, you have no time to celebrate because you are required to start the process all over and learn another.
Why are these celebrities willing to make such intense personal, mental, and physical sacrifices? The answer astounded me when I thought about it. They do all of this for the dramatically short-term benefit of a little TV exposure, bragging rights, and a modest cash prize!
We human beings are interesting characters. When we have set our hearts on something, we are willing to make incredible sacrifices to get it. Do you realize how many willing personal sacrifices you make every day? It is amazing the kind of sacrifices a person will make for a job. A person will arrive at work early, stay late, and work on the weekend, not because the boss forces them to, but in order to get that raise or promotion. It is remarkable what a person will do to get the acceptance, respect, appreciation, or love of another human being. We will hang on that person’s every whim, submit our schedule to theirs, and invest time, money, and energy in pleasing them. It is incredible to watch what a person will do to turn their home into the home of their dreams. We will borrow inordinate amounts of money, spend amazing amounts of time, and have seemingly endless conversations with contractors, carpenters, and designers. We will live with dust and chaos everywhere, relegate ourselves to camping out in the tiny portion of the house that isn’t being renovated, and allow the final cost to progressively escalate. For what? So that we can live in a house that is as we envisioned it could be.
I could multiply example after example. Think of the sacrifices a person will make to lose weight, have a comfortable retirement, afford that special vacation, look younger, go to that renowned restaurant just once, get a degree, have a muscular physique, be an expert cook, have good teeth, afford the special pair of shoes, own a painting, acquire an iPod and all the accessories, satisfy some kind of physical appetite, own beautiful furniture, master a subject, learn a language, own that certain car, excel in a sport, visit a long-lost relative or friend, fish or hunt, get a politician elected, attend a concert, protest social injustice, or simply get away from it all and relax. What are you sacrificing for right now?
You can’t divide human beings into the “those who make sacrifices” and “those who don’t.” We all carry things in our hearts for which we are very willing to make sacrifices. The issue that divides us is for what, or for whom, are we willing to make these personal sacrifices.
The Sacrificial Kingdom
For all of its joy and celebration and for all of its gifts of life and grace, the kingdom of God is a kingdom of sacrifice. The central event in the history of this kingdom is a shocking and unthinkable sacrifice. This moment of sacrifice confounded the followers who were there to see it and has interested theologians ever since. It is at once the most terrible and most beautiful event in the kingdom. It is a sacrifice that makes perfect sense and no sense at all. And this sacrifice forms the operating agenda of the kingdom from that time on.
Jesus, by his bleeding and broken body on the cross, not only gave the kingdom of God its life and hope, but its paradigm for living as well. That history-changing death on the cross is also the life-changing call of Christ to everyone who would follow him. And as it did on the cross, that willingness to die will always result in life. This kingdom is a kingdom of the cross, and everyone who celebrates that sacrifice is called to drag a cross along with them every day.
Pots of Gold
We’ve all heard of the search for the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but the fact is that all of us live in search of some personally prized pot of gold. Here is the principle: behind every personal sacrifice is a quest for some kind of treasure. This principle not only explains the life and death of Christ, but Christ’s call to us as well.
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:28—33)
When you read this passage, you have to ask yourself why Christ asks all of his disciples to sacrifice everything. Think about it. He doesn’t just ask for some of our things. He doesn’t ask for the majority of our things. He doesn’t say, “I want the best of your things.” He doesn’t warn us that there are going to be times when he will take precious things from us. No, his call from the outset is this: “Any of you who does not give up everything that he has cannot be my disciple.” Why is his call so all-inclusive?
Jesus looks at the large crowd and does not just see people who have been attracted to his ministry because of his miracles and the authority with which he taught. He also sees people in the midst of a raging personal war. He understands that each one of the people surrounding him is a worshipper. That means that each of their lives is always shaped by the pursuit of the treasure that has come to rule their hearts. He knows that what they treasure will shape their decisions, actions, and words. And he knows that they will make incredible personal sacrifices to get, keep, and enjoy whatever it is that they treasure. So, in asking his followers to sacrifice everything, he is not calling them to live without anything. No, he is calling them to empty themselves of every other treasure but him. He is saying, “If you are going to be my disciple, I must be the treasure that gives shape and direction to everything you decide, say, and do.”
Christ is asking us to search our lives for pots of gold. He wants us to look for those things that challenge the place in our hearts that only he is supposed to have. You see, Jesus demands everything, not just so we would submit to his control, but to free us from the control of things that were never designed to control us. This hard call is at the same time a call of grace. Jesus knows that we all tend to shrink our lives to the size of our lives. He knows that we all tend to exchange the spiritual for the physical. He knows that every one of us ends up in some way putting the creation in the place where only the Creator should be. And he knows that true faith, in its essence, is not about theological knowledge or ministry activity. True faith is about what your heart treasures. A true follower of Jesus holds him as the central treasure of his heart and so is willing to make significant personal sacrifices in pursuit of him.
White-Knuckle Living
Where in your life right now are your fists clenched and your knuckles white? You know the scene: Someone is trying to take something from a person, and that person has wrapped his fingers so tightly around this prized possession that his knuckles are white from the force. What is it that you are holding onto tightly? Where are your knuckles white? Maybe it’s your job. Perhaps it is more central to your identity, meaning, and purpose than you thought it was. Maybe it’s a certain relationship to which you have attached your happiness and well-being. Maybe it’s an achievement, possession, or position. Examine your living. What are the things that battle for the place that only the Lord is to have?
The thing that is shocking about Christ’s call to sacrifice is that he is calling us to die. No, not to take our lives in the physical sense, but to so fundamentally sacrifice all that is precious to us, that it is as if we have died. In the sense that it cannot be the central treasure of our hearts, he calls us to die to our most precious relationship. He calls us to die to our plan for our own lives. He calls us to die to all the things we have set our hearts on that we think will make us happy and once and for all satisfy us. He calls us to open up our fists and give up all those other treasures that would control our decisions, determine our actions, and edit our words. Jesus knows we are not able to follow him and hold our fists around these things at the same time, because they end up taking hold of us.
Christ calls us to acknowledge that what we once wanted, and then became convinced that we needed, we now have become addicted to. We don’t hold things very well. Again and again we experience that what we once held loosely has now come to control us. So he calls us to open our hands and offer everything for his taking. And we celebrate his call to sacrifice, because it is a welcome to freedom. This call to die is a welcome to a wonderful new life. And the One who makes this call is the One who gave himself as the sacrifice that is the central event of the big kingdom. He was willing to let go of it all, even to die, so that we could live in personal pursuit of him, increasingly freed from bondage to all the other things that may control us.
Think of all the anger, anxiety, irritation, impatience, envy, fear, discouragement, obsession, vengeance, bitterness, and violence that result from lesser treasures controlling our hearts. Think how a person’s life gets distorted when his job is what he lives for. Think of the bad things that happen when a person becomes the central value in my life. Think of what results when my life is controlled by the quest for a certain position or possession. Why do I get so angry at you? Why do I struggle with impatience? Why am I ever eaten by envy or bitterness? Why would I ever plot vengeance? What would cause me to speak or act unkindly toward you? I don’t do these things because you are a flawed person; I do these things because in your flaws, you get in the way of what I treasure. And as long as there is stuff that I have a white-knuckle hold on, you and I will experience conflict. It is only when my heart is owned by Christ that I will be free from the driven and anxious pursuit of things that I cannot properly hold, cannot control, and that will quickly evaporate. Because the big kingdom is a kingdom of sacrifice, it also is a kingdom of freedom.
In order for the kingdom to be a place of glorious new life, it has to be a place of death. Jesus calls you to die to all that you treasure so that he can be the central treasure of your heart. When you value him more than anything else in your life, you are no longer shrinking your life down to what you can hold in your hands and control with your plans. You are beginning to live for something bigger than yourself. When you hold everything in your life with open hands for his taking, you expand everything you touch to the size of his kingdom.
The final question: whose kingdom are you making sacrifices for right now?