“Sacrificial Devotion”
1 Kings
Romans 6:9-19
The word devotion is used routinely to describe the Christian faith. As Christ’s disciples, we devote ourselves to Christ’s teachings and his way of life. We use daily devotionals to help us through the day, and to help us remain focused and centered on God. We even speak of having a deeply devoted love for God.
Yet, I wonder if we truly grasp
the significance of our claim of being devoted people. Certainly, if we are talking about devotion
as meaning passionate and affectionate love for Jesus, then I believe we can
understand what this kind of devotion means, because we can understand God’s
love for us in Jesus Christ.
We understand what agape love
means. We love our children with agape
love. We love our parents and spouses
with agape love, with an unconditional love, self-sacrificing love that knows
no bounds. But, I also believe that
saying we love God in Jesus Christ and showing our love for God are two
different things.
The American Heritage Dictionary
defines devotion as (1) the act of giving or applying one’s time, attention,
and self entirely to a particular activity, pursuit, cause, or person, and (2)
as the act of setting apart for a specific purpose or use.
Being devoted people is more than
just saying we love Jesus, being devoted people means that we must also
radically demonstrate that love for Jesus in our everyday lives, it means that
our devotion must be more than just passionate and affectionate in nature; our
devotion must also be sacrificial in nature.
But, the reality is that we often
have a difficult time showing our love for God in Jesus Christ in a sacrificial
way. It’s not because we don’t want to,
we desperately want to, but because we are sinful creatures, because we
routinely fail to completely and perfectly demonstrate our love for God as we
are supposed to.
We know and confess that we fall
short of God’s glory everyday. In the
words we say and don’t say, we fall short.
In our actions and inactions, we fall short. In our humanness, we fall short. We don’t need to make excuses, and we don’t
need to dance around the issue. Let’s
have the honesty to call it like we see it, we are sinners.
We are sinners who are in constant
need of God’s reconciling grace. We are
sinners who are in constant need of the liberating power of cross for our very
lives. We are sinners, who need to
constantly re-evaluate the devotion of our faith, and then re-commit ourselves
to a faith that is sacrificial to God.
Throughout
the history of God’s interaction and relationship with God’s people, God has
called for sacrifice as a response to God’s faithfulness and steadfast love for
God’s people. Our first inclination is
to turn away from any concept of sacrifice at all. When we hear the word sacrifice, we have a
tendency to think about all those instances and examples of sacrifices in the
Old Testament, and we quickly remind ourselves that we don’t do that kind of
stuff anymore.
The pure size of the sacrifice in
our reading from 1 Kings is astonishing enough, and makes us again cringe at
violence of this ritual. Twenty-two
thousand oxen and one hundred twenty thousand sheep were used at this
dedication ceremony of the new, Jerusalem Temple. You would think that a ribbon cutting
ceremony would have sufficed?
However, let us remind ourselves
that sacrifices were more than just for the atonement of sins, they were the
means by which God’s people demonstrated their loyalty, allegiance,
faithfulness, and repentance to the Almighty God. Throughout the Old Testament, sacrifices
served as an important ritual in the lives of the faithful.
Even though the Old Testament is
ambiguous about the practice of sacrifice - in some places saying it is a
divine requirement and in other cases saying that God rejects the whole
practice all together - sacrifices served to symbolically demonstrate a
person’s own self-offering to God’s will and purpose, to atone for sins
willingly and unknowingly committed, and to evoke God’s good favor and blessing
upon them.
But this kind of sacrifice only
brought a temporary change in the lives of the people. This kind of sacrifice was only effective
until the next sin was committed, and then another sacrifice was needed to put
the people back in God’s favor and re-establish their relationship with
God.
But as
Christians, we believe it is the death of Jesus, the Lamb of God, that
definitively secures for the whole of humanity the full effects of atonement
and fellowship that the older sacrifices brought about temporarily. We believe that what people could only do
temporarily for themselves, God did permanently for the world in Jesus
Christ.
For us as Christians, the cross
event is the defining moment in human history, when the invisible transition between
two epochs of time, the old age and the new age, became visible to the
world. In the cross event, the whole of
history has shifted from the old age to the new age, from law to faith, from
death to life, from sin to obedience.
In the old age, people sinned and needed sacrifice to put themselves back in favor with God. They were symbolic rituals of self-sacrifice, but in the end they were just that – symbolic rituals. The sacrifices of old did not affect any real change in the people or person doing the sacrifice. They were external rather than internal. They only served to maintain the status as God’s people rather than empowering them to be someone different and better than they were before because they were God’s people.
It’s the difference between
children behaving and doing good in order to keep a parent’s love, rather than
behaving and doing good because they know the parent already loves them. It’s the difference between works and grace,
trying to keep salvation and living as one who is saved.
For Paul, living in this new age
means living in the new life we have in Christ.
It means living in grace and not in fear. It means living in freedom not slavery. It means living out of our identity and
vocation as God’s own children. For Paul,
spending the rest of one’s life under the yoke of sin’s slavery is no life at
all, but spending the rest of one’s life in the freedom of God’s righteousness
in Christ is living life at its fullest.
Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it
abundantly.”
We no longer need the sacrifices
of old to make ourselves right with God, God has already made us right with him
through the fullest expression of grace and love in Christ’s sefl-sacrifice on
the cross.
It is the cross that has once and for
all dealt with our sin and freed us from its deadly consequences. It is the cross that has once and for all
brought us into permanent fellowship with God.
It is the cross that has permanently changed our status from being
slaves to sin, to now being slaves to righteousness, from living under the
taskmaster of sin continually burdened with its relentless suffocating,
debilitating, oppressive effect on our lives, to living under the power and
grace of God in Jesus Christ.
So do we really need to concern
ourselves with the whole notion of sacrifice?
If Jesus' death was the once and for all atoning sacrifice, certainly we
don’t need to worry about having to sacrifice anything, because what good does
it do anyway? Since God made the
greatest, most costly sacrifice, then isn’t it just party time for us? Since Jesus took the burdens of sin upon
himself and freed us from sin's deadly consequences, then do the things we have
done and not done, and the things we have said and not said really matter in
the long run?
If the season of Lent is anything,
it's a reminder that having a devoted faith means having a sacrificial faith,
that our loyalties and allegiances, our deepest affections, all of who we are,
and all of who we are called to be, belong not to sin and not even to
ourselves, but to God. The season of
Lent is the reminder that sacrifice is still important in the lives of the
faithful, not sacrifices of token things, but of ourselves.
Sacrificial devotion is not to be
a burden to our faith, it is to be a joyful response to God’s grace for the
salvation we have been given.
Sacrificial devotion is not about having to toe the line and make sure
we are in compliance with God’s rules.
It is about moving God to the center of our lives rather than ourselves. It’s about serving the Creator and not the
creature. It’s about putting God first
of everything, including ourselves.
Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny
themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will
lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the
gospel, will save it.”
Sacrificial devotion is about
outwardly demonstrating our love for God and responding to God in the opposite
way of our human inclinations. It is the
way in which we begin to live in a new moral and ethical standard that has
Christ-like implications. Spending time
in prayer and with God’s word when it means that you have to rearrange your
schedule is demonstrating sacrificial devotion.
Standing up for justice for the oppressed when it may mean that people
won’t like us is demonstrating sacrificial devotion. Speaking out against something wrong when it
means that we won’t be politically correct is demonstrating sacrificial devotion. Upholding your convictions at the same time
respecting the other is demonstrating sacrificial devotion. Refusing to act angrily when someone does
something against you when it means they get their way is demonstrating
sacrificial devotion. Refusing to engage
in hateful talk or useless gossip when it means alienation from the “in crowd,”
seeking the things that are above when it means that the world is against you,
and serving those who are in need when it means giving up something you would
rather be doing is demonstrating sacrificial devotion. Even laughing with those who laugh at you
when you are the brunt of the joke is demonstrating sacrificial devotion.
Lent is a time to again
re-sacrifice ourselves to God, to again give up ourselves to God’s sphere of
influence in our lives, to again present the very members of our body as a
self-offering to God as God’s instruments of righteousness. Let us take these forty days of Lent and make
it a time for us to once again move from theology to practice, to once again
re-commit ourselves to the new life we have in Christ, to once again put faith
into action, to once again begin to make the right choices in our sacrificial
devotion of faith. Amen.