Of Sacrifice and Service

A compilation Sep 01, 2014

Recently I’ve been studying about some of the great men and women of God of the past. Many of them made huge sacrifices, because that’s what was necessary to get the job done in the time and place where they lived, or because that’s what the Lord called them to do. The Lord does ask difficult and sometimes very costly sacrifices of His followers today, but in many cases, the sacrifices we make today are different from theirs. Sacrifice, when the Lord asks it of us, is part of our life for the Lord.—Peter Amsterdam

God often brings us into an area where He has bigger reasons than we know. He is continually at work in this world and we have the privilege of playing a particular role, but it is in the context of a much bigger picture.

Though we may not be privy to an end result, or only see it in hindsight, God’s plans for our lives are intricately connected to His plans for the world. We need to look beyond the mundane to the magnificent and see God’s divine purpose.—Charles Price

I don’t have a sad God! I have a happy God, who wants me to be happy too, and you as well. This is the whole point of it all, to relieve us of the suffering, pain, death and tears brought into the world by the Enemy and the sins of man. Jesus said, “I am come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.” And “these things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”

The world’s idea of righteousness is often different from God’s. The world often equates goodness with perfection. But the Lord said the sinner was closer to God than the holier-than-thou priests and Pharisees. He told them, “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” For God’s way up is down.

God’s idea of righteousness is the lost, humble, loving sinner who knows he needs God and depends on Him for salvation—not the self-righteous, hypocritical Pharisees who think they can save themselves by their own goodness. Jesus said, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick, But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”7—David Brandt Berg

People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt we owe to our God be called a sacrifice? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own best reward in healthful activity, the knowledge that one is doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter?

It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say, rather, it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then, with less of the common conveniences of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink, but let this be only for a moment.

All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice! We ought not to talk of this when we remember the great sacrifice made by Him who left His Father’s throne on high to give Himself to us.—David Livingstone

Published on Anchor September 2014. Read by Simon Peterson.
Music by Michael Dooley. TFI