No Sacrifice

Dr. David Livingstone once said "People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa.  Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?. . . Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought!  It is emphatically no sacrifice.  Say rather it is a privilege.  Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger,  now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities 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 hereafter be revealed in, and for, us.  I never made a sacrifice.  Of this we ought not to talk, when we remember the great sacrifice which HE made who left His Father's throne on high to give Himself for us."

I know that the Apostle Paul, in Romans 12, tells us to give ourselves as living sacrifices.  I am fairly certain Dr. Livingstone knew this quite well and was not contesting Paul's wording.  I think he was saying that we see the giving up of trifling things and time we do as such a big thing, when in reality, we certainly give up nothing in comparison to what we have been given.  If I were to rephrase (Dr. Livingstone, please indulge me here) the good missionary's quote for our time and circumstances, specifically my time and circumstance, I would say this:

People can talk of the sacrifice I have made in staying home with my kids, giving my money to the church and to missions when I could buy more things or take fancier vacations, and realizing and verbalizing how great a sinner and how I have nothing without Christ.  Can that be called a sacrifice when God gave me Christ and His Righteousness, the strength and brains to live and work and make money, the world I live in, the children I am blessed to have, the church which trains and exhorts me, the missionaries who spread the Gospel around the world, which gifts I can never repay?  Forget that!  Say rather it is something I have the joy of doing, and who am I (as David said in I Chronicles) that I get to do that?  So I have anxieties over finances or traffic or government; I get sick; I suffer being made fun of or disparaged as being too conservative and small-minded; and I meet danger, though not much of that here except what is common to all in a city like this.  So I forego some things like fancy vacations, new cars, electronic devices, television shows, and the like; so what are they in the grand scheme of things and since all is God's anyway?  So what I give time to serve the church and others?  The time is not mine but God's to use.  And really, what is Time? (In The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, the demon Screwtape instructs the demon Wormwood to "zealously guard in his [the man who was Wormwood's assignment] mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own.' . . . The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him as a pure gift.")  So what if people think I'm strange because honesty compels me to follow tax laws or not take advantage of others financially?  I get depressed, scared, and worried, but hopefully, these are only temporary feelings.  All this is less than peanuts compared with seeing and showing God's love and glory in a darkened world. My dear friend Esther recently said, "So often we think we are doing God a favor, and we forget our insurmountable debt."  This is especially true when I remember what Philippians 2:5-8 says of Christ: "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing. . . being made in human likeness. . . he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death--even death on a cross."

Christmas, the time we celebrate Christ's incarnation, is a good time to remember this afresh.  So as we present ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing, let us not think of it as a giving up of anything but of gaining all that is real, unseen, and eternal.