Sacrifice

Sacrifice, it’s something that’s painful at the time but can allow us to experience far greater satisfaction and fulfillment later on. I was recently listening to a lecture on sacrifice in the bible, and while a lot of the points seemed obvious when stated, they were things I had never really thought about and I thought they would be good to share here.  

Throughout the bible there are many scenes where someone sacrifices an animal for God, but I never really thought about how these sacrifices play a role in my life. It turns out that whenever you sacrifice anything in your life, at the core, you are doing the exact same thing the people in the bible were doing. You are giving up something of value now, so that you will hopefully be better off in the future.

Sacrifice is like bargaining with the future, you don’t know for a fact that just because you sacrifice now, you’ll be better off in the future, but you believe you will. Either because you have seen others do it, or you’ve been told it will work for you. That’s an amazing fact that God has given us in the bible.

If you think about it, living in the moment and making our lives as good as they could possibly be right this second and never thinking about the future makes a lot of sense. You don’t know what the future is going to be like, so why give up anything good now for uncertainty in the future? Luckily God has told us time and time again in the Bible, and shows us in our everyday lives, how beneficial sacrifice can be.

I know that I see plenty of people that live as if they have never heard of, or learned about, sacrifice. People that seek immediate gratification, people that want everything right now and don’t know how to wait. Follow the examples given in the Bible, if you want things in your life to get better, start making sacrifices.

The Proper Sacrifice

It is important though that you don’t sacrifice randomly, and that you don’t sacrifice things of little to no value. If you need to make better grades in a class, then sacrificing unhealthy foods and eating healthier won’t help you. You will be upset that you performed poorly in your class, and you will be even more upset because you have been working hard to eat healthy, thinking that because you were making sacrifices that you should get the grades you want. This is obviously a dramatized example but it is acted out in our lives in more subtle ways all the time. So, evaluate your sacrifices carefully, especially if you aren’t achieving the results you want.

Sacrifice What You Value Most

There was another idea the lecturer presented that I also thought was very interesting. The idea was that, if our life isn’t going the way we want it to, and we want things to change, sometimes we have to sacrifice the thing that we value the most in the world.

The idea behind it was that our values govern our actions, and if we are valuing the wrong things our actions won’t move us where we want to go. He illustrated this point with the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. As a little back ground, God had been telling Abraham for decades that he would have a son and that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. When God finally gives Abraham a son, he tells Abraham to sacrifice him. God was testing Abraham to see if Abraham still valued God more than his son, and that Abraham believed that if he trusted in God then God would deliver for him in the end. Luckily, right as Abraham trusted God, and right as he was about to sacrifice Isaac, the angel of the Lord came down and stopped Abraham, because he knew that Abraham feared the Lord.

If your life isn’t going the way you want it to, look at the things you value most. If you aren’t sure what you value most then look at your actions. Are you always being as stingy with money as you can? Maybe you are valuing money too much and that’s leading to excess anxiety and fear, maybe if you begin tithing that would allow you to see that its not your money, its Gods money that you are stewarding, which will help you to have a healthier relationship with money. Are you always hanging around people that are negative and bring you down or hold you back? Maybe you are valuing their friendship too much and you need to start spending more time with people that uplift you.

So go out and make sacrifices in your life, but make sure they are the appropriate sacrifices, and if you find that you don’t like the way your life is going, evaluate where you are placing your values and consider sacrificing the things you value most. Good luck.