The following is a reproduction of an article I published in The Paddle, my church's monthly newsletter:
“The
multitude of your sacrifices, what are they to me?” says the Lord. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings…Stop
bringing meaningless offerings! Your
incense is detestable to me…Wash and make yourself clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong, learn to do right. Seek justice.
Encourage the oppressed. Defend
the cause of the fatherless. Plead the
case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:11-17)
When
I was in Israel, I met a man named Moshe Shorashim, in a little bookshop in
Jerusalem. Moshe was Orthodox Jewish,
but he explained to me one of the best descriptions of Christian discipleship
that I have ever heard. He talked about
how, for him, his devotion to following God’s Law was not based on a sense of
obligation in order to receive God’s blessings and go to heaven someday, but it
was precisely because he had received
God’s blessings. His devotion to
following God’s Law was borne precisely out of his understanding that God had
chosen him to be blessed, to go to
heaven. In short, the more Moshe
contemplated God’s love for him, the more joy and gratitude he felt, which
motivated him to respond with acts of service and devotion to the God who had
saved him, as a means to express his own love for the God who first loved him.
This
is what it means to be a Christian. God
has chosen us. God has first loved us.
“We
love Him because He first loved us,” said the Apostle John (1 John 4:19).
But
in the Old Testament, there are prescriptions for making sacrifices and
offerings to God, and today in the Christian Church, many people believe and
preach that our status before God depends very much on how we live our
lives. In other words, in order to be
saved, we must be good.
The
Bible does not say this.
What
the Bible says, is that we are chosen by God.
This is first and foremost, and independent of anything we can or will
do in order to be acceptable before him, because there is nothing that we can
do to be acceptable or righteous before him.
Then
the Bible says that we are called – called to live lives of holiness, called to
follow the example of Jesus Christ, God’s perfect Son, who is with us by the
presence of God the Holy Spirit, who gives us faith to empower us to good works
of devotion and service.
But
it all begins and ends with the love of God.
With the grace of God. Doing good
deeds, being righteous, being faithful, etc.
means living lives of discipleship and obeying God’s Law out of
gratitude and love for what He has already done for us – chosen us in Jesus
Christ to be conformed to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29).
So
the life we live as disciples is to be a gift to the One who first gave to us,
and it is another Orthodox Jew, a Rabbi no less, who explains this very
beautifully to us:
“The
greatest gift a parent can give a child is the dignity of being able to
give. It is not that the parent lacks
anything or that the child has genuinely given something he owns. Its significance is that it is a gesture of
love – of acknowledgment and thanksgiving and reciprocity. The child knows that he has nothing of his
own to give, yet he seeks to answer love with love. For a parent to give a child that possibility
is a monumental act of humility. It is
this gesture that is at the heart of the biblical sacrifices.” – Jonathan Sacks,
Leviticus: The Book of Holiness. Pp.
65-66.
Now,
I’m not suggesting that we all go out and start burning animal sacrifices on
altars to God. Rather, let us consider the
words of Isaiah, quoted above, and Malachi, who wrote, “What does the Lord
require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Malachi 6:8, emphasis mine); and Paul,
who wrote, “What shall we say then? Are
we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
By no means! How can we who died
to sin still live in it? Do not present
your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves
to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to
God as instruments for righteousness.” (Romans 6:1-2, 13).
The
concept of sacrifice in the biblical perspective means “to bring close,” and so
the Christian concept of discipleship is that we present ourselves to God as “a
living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship
(Romans 12:1).” Rabbi Sacks says that
sacrifice is a “process of opening ourselves to God by renouncing something of
ourselves (Leviticus, p. 68).”
This
is how we are to live every day of our lives as Spirit-filled Christians. This is what we were chosen for, called to
be, as the Bible says both in reference to Israel and to the Christian Church, “a
royal priesthood, a holy nation” (Exodus 22:31; Leviticus 19:2; Deuteronomy 7:6;
1 Peter 2:5, 9; Revelation 1:6, 5:10;
and several other places).
So
if you have answered the call of God in your lives and place your faith in
Jesus Christ as your only Savior and Lord, I encourage you to work towards the
fulfillment of that calling, knowing that God has already secured for you a
place at his heavenly banquet table. May
that assurance of salvation motivate you to a greater love and joyful service.
