35. The Victory of Sacrifice
Most Christians understand and rejoice in the fact that Christ's sacrificial death – a seeming defeat in human terms – was, in fact, history's greatest victory. As believers we come to understand what was accomplished through that sacrifice and we see it as it is – a great spiritual triumph for the plan of God. Yet despite our understanding of the victory accomplished through Christ's sacrifice, how many of us clearly see and believe the fact that our own sacrifices are victories, too?
Sometimes Christian sacrifice is total, when Christians literally give their lives for other believers. There are many examples of this throughout history, but don't ever think they are something of the past. Just this year (2015), on March 15th in Youhanabad, Lahore, Pakistan, two Christian churches were attacked by Christian-hating suicide bombers. Both bombers detonated their explosives in the churches they attacked, but thankfully only a few people died out of the 2,000 or so believers meeting in the combined congregations. This was because in both churches the bombers were stopped in the entrances by church volunteers doing security duty.
In sacrificing their lives, those courageous volunteers in Youhanabad exemplified Christ's teaching that "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13) – a teaching repeated by the apostle John, "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters" (1 John 3:16).
But laying down our lives thankfully does not always have to mean physically losing them. The expression "to lay down" something, which is used to record Jesus' words "to lay down one's life," can also mean to place something in position for a purpose (as in Matthew 5:15 where a candle is "placed" on a stand).
When we come to understand, through the experiences of Christian training and combat, that our calling to sacrifice is to be
"placed for use," we come to see what the apostle Paul meant about the ongoing Christian walk much more clearly: "Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship" (Romans 12:1). But in what ways do we find victory in everyday sacrifice?
There are many ways we can sacrifice to accomplish good and thus achieve victory, and it makes a profitable Bible study topic to search out and think on the Scriptures that talk about giving in this way. For example, Hebrews 13:15 speaks of the sacrifice of praise and giving thanks, Hebrews 13:16 speaks of the sacrifice of doing good and sharing with others. But in every example where something is said to be a sacrifice it involves loss. To sacrifice we lose some aspect of our lives – whether time, money, energy, security, acceptance or whatever. But in reality that loss is always a victory. This is part of what Christ meant in saying "…whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it" (Matthew 16:25).
The phrase "All gave some, some gave all" is often used of the sacrifices made by our veterans and fallen service members, but it should be true of every Christian, also. In both cases, something is given, lost, denied oneself in order to accomplish something. That is why every sacrifice we make is a victory. Whether it is a victory over some blatant evil in the world or just over a part of our own inherently selfish natures, it is a victory.
Next time you find it difficult to give up something – whether time, resources, or anything else, remember that in the Christian walk there is no victory without sacrifice, but that every sacrifice is, at whatever level it is made, a meaningful victory.