Many persons think that being a Christian is about what you have to give up, rather than what treasure you might receive. Yet the truth is, what may appear as a sacrifice from the outside, will in fact be anything but a sacrifice from the inside, for the persons making it. Does God seek sacrifice from us? Are we supposed to get rid of all our possessions, so that we may possess the kingdom of heaven, whatever and whenever that is? God says through the prophet Hosea that God desires “steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6). Jesus slightly amends this, telling His listeners, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Matt 9:13).
For an important example, to those looking from the outside, what a couple does and willingly gives up after falling in love may appear foolish and immature. Yet it is anything but that to the couple. I remember two white-haired persons in their seventies, whose spouses had died a few years before. They met and fell in love on a cruise ship. In their unexpected romantic love, it was as if they returned to their young adult stage of wide-eyed optimism and sheer joy in each other. Being around them was a pure delight; they were truly in love. I know, because I got to conduct their premarriage counseling and perform their marriage ceremony. They ended up having nearly twenty years together, and I conducted their funerals a mere two months apart.
As I have written:
“To fall in love includes both losing and finding, letting go and binding together. You lose yourself as a sole entity to find yourself as a partner in a relationship greater than you alone.
You let go of singular life to be bound together in mutual life.
We are designed to fall in love, yet almost as if by the same design or designer, we by nature resist what we most seek:
Giving ourselves away to a greater power, losing personal strength for the sake of a mutual power.
To fall in love means to risk your heart and even your life to attain what may bless or blister you, cherish or crush you, with no going back to being the same person you were before exposing and expressing what is most precious and sensitive in your being:
Your heart, temporarily unguarded as you risk faith, seeking fulfillment.
Yet with God, falling in love is one with falling into faith, trusting your all to the one true Beloved, with Whom alone, there is no loss but only gain, no fear, but only fullness, absolute safety in God’s hidden sanctuary of Love.
Fall here, and only here:
For the One who has already fallen for you.
Give your heart into no one else’s keeping.”
My point is this: when you fall in love, you will do whatever is necessary to enter fully into and fulfill that love. At that time, giving up singleness and independent living is not a sacrifice but a joy. The same dynamic holds true for Christians. As Paul said, “But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). Who would guess from the outside the treasure which is ours on the inside?
Jesus puts this together in two brief parables:
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matt 13:44-46).
Leave a Reply