Sacrifice

Talk I gave at the athlete's Bible study last week:

Hope you guys had a great Easter. Tonight’s topic is pretty fitting for what just happened this past week because we’re going to be talking about the word sacrifice. As you know last Friday was Good Friday: the day that Jesus was crucified for our sin. Last Friday was the anniversary of the greatest sacrifice ever made. We’ll get more into Jesus’ sacrifice in a minute, but first I want to talk about sacrifice in general.

I heard someone say once, “In order to get anything worthwhile or valuable in life, something else needs to be sacrificed.” Off the bat I wasn’t sure I agreed with that. After all, I had a pretty cushy life. What had I given up? But as that phrase was explained I began to agree. We sacrifice for things that are important to us. If what’s important to you is losing weight, you sacrifice food and comfort. If you value athletic achievement (which I assume you all do, because you are athletes at this school) you sacrifice your body and your time to reach your goals. If it’s your country that is important to you, you may sacrifice your life. If it’s car, you sacrifice money. If it’s education, you sacrifice time and money. We actually sacrifice all the time. If something is important enough to us we give up our time, comfort, money, sleep, freedom, etc., etc. I think you guys more than almost anyone at this school understands sacrifice. Your time is not your own. You give up holidays and weekends for your sport. You give up having a job. You give up sleep when you have early morning weights. Sometimes you have to give up your social life because you have commitments to your sport. And my question for you is: why do you do it? Why do you give up all this stuff to play football here? To play volleyball or softball or soccer or to swim here? Why do you do it? Many of you are wondering the same thing. Why the heck would I put myself through of all of that? I must be crazy. And maybe you are, but I think the reason you do it is because you love your sport. Even when I hated volleyball, I still loved volleyball. I always did and I always will. And hopefully for most of you that’s why you’re here. Hopefully you’re willing to make all those sacrifices because at one point you fell in love with your sport. And I’m pretty confident in saying that the driving force behind most sacrifice is love. We love things, or people, or ourselves so we’re willing to make sacrifices. Where our love is, there our sacrifice will be also. Think about it: parents love their children enough to get out of bed at 3 AM to feed a screaming infant. People love money enough to stay at a job they hate or love their families enough to stay at a job they hate in order to provide for them. Some boyfriends love their girlfriends enough to sit through a Nicolas Spark’s movie. The driving force is love.

I hope I have some fellow Harry Potter fans in here because I’m going to read an excerpt from the first book in the series.  For those of you who haven’t read the books or seen the movies: #1 - shame on you and #2 - I’m telling you right now: spoiler alert! I’m about to ruin the end of the first book for you, so hopefully you had no intention of ever reading them. Harry Potter’s nemesis is Voldemort. He is a dark wizard who is the epitome of evil. Long story short, Harry is an orphan. His parents sacrificed themselves to save Harry’s life. And in the first book Voldemort had to borrow someone’s body because his was destroyed in a curse gone wrong. He possessed the body of Professor Quirrell, a teacher at Harry’s school. In the climax of the story Voldemort instructs Quirrell to kill Harry, but every time Quirrell put his hands on Harry they started burning and blistering. Eventually Harry defeats Quirrell and Voldemort (for the time being anyway) by burning him to pieces. As Harry was recovering he asks his mentor Dumbledore, “Why couldn’t Quirrell touch me?” I’m going to read you Dumbledore’s response because I think it was actually pretty profound:

“Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign… to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever… Quirrell, full of hatred, greed, and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.”  (Harry Potter and Sorcerer’s Stone p. 299)

That is a fictional story, yet the reason why so many people connect with it is because it surfaces desires we all have in our hearts: desires for love, bravery, and sacrifice. All of these sacrifices we connect with in books and movies are meant to point us to the ultimate sacrifice. Jesus showed us love’s greatest act by dying for us and taking upon himself all our guilt and atoning for our sin. The important thing about sacrifice is it involves choice. Sacrifice isn’t random or passive. We choose to give up something in order to gain something else that is exceedingly more worthwhile. And Jesus chose to go to the cross for you and me. Let’s turn to Romans 3:23-25.

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”

Now this section of verses has some words I hear in church a lot, but don’t hear often in everyday conversation. So I’m going to define them for us so we can understand these verses a little better.

1. Sinned: moral failing in thought and action. In what we do, and what we fail to do. You could think about it this way. Sin is anything less than perfection. So if you were going to shoot arrows at a target, the bulls eye is perfection. Anything off the mark is sin. Anything less than perfect: this includes thing I do wrong on purpose, things I do on accident, or things I know I should do that I don’t.
2. Justified: a judiciary term where the guilty party is declared, not only innocent, but morally blameless. Let’s say you stole a candy bar, got arrested, and went to court. If you were justified it would mean that you were declared innocent by the judge. And not just you were innocent because there wasn’t enough evidence or you had a hung jury or you get off on a technicality. You are declared morally blameless. They believe you didn’t even do it. It would be like you could rewind and it never even happened.
3. Grace: a free, unmerited gift neither earned nor deserved. Let’s pretend I broke into Wes’ car and stole money, his iPod, and his GPS. Then he comes to me later and instead of getting mad, yelling at me, and calling the cops (which is what I deserve) he gives me a puppy instead. I deserve punishment and he gives me a good gift instead. That’s what Jesus did for us on a way bigger scale. We deserved death and hell and he gives us eternal life instead.
4. Redemption: the price paid to purchase someone out of slavery.  Again, Jesus did this for us. We were slaves to sin and he purchased us out of slavery.
5. Sacrifice: a substitute takes upon themselves the suffering and judgment of another. Jesus took my sin upon himself and willingly went to the cross in my place.

So here’s my translation of those verses, the way I understand it. We all screw up. We’re less than perfect. So much less in fact I don’t deserve to know him. But I am declared completely blameless, but not because I did anything to deserve it. It is a free gift that I could never earn or deserve. This was made possible by the gruesome, painful death of Jesus on the cross. He took my place because I was the one who deserved that. I’ve been called righteous by putting my complete trust in his name.

Wow. That all sounds great doesn’t it? But why is Christ’s death and resurrection the solution to my sin? Have you ever thought about that? Why did Christ have to die? Why couldn’t he just run a marathon and call it good? Why couldn’t he just live a perfect life and ascend to heaven? Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death.” A wage is something you earn. If you work at a job you earn a wage. You get money for the work that you do. This verse is saying what we’ve earned for our sin is death. I can’t say to a perfect, holy God, “I’m a pretty good person. I probably deserve eternal life.” How good is good enough? I can’t be good enough.

According to Romans 6:23 the price to be paid was death. You wouldn’t walk into a store and try to buy a $50 pair of jeans with cheerios or buttons. No, the price is dollars. The price for sin wasn’t a marathon or a perfect life. It was death and Jesus willingly went to the cross to pay that price for you.  He lived a perfect life to be a perfect sacrifice, so that no other sacrifice was needed. You and I walk free because of what Jesus did. And here’s the really cool part. Jesus is better than Harry Potter’s mom. Besides the fact that she is fictional… Harry’s mom sacrificed her life for her son because she loved him deeply, but that is where it ended. She had no power over death. Jesus defeated death. He rose from the dead and gives us freedom from death as well. The only thing other religions can over you is rules. Christ through his life, death, and resurrection offers forgiveness, justification, and life.

If you’ve never surrendered your life to Christ, but believe what I shared with you tonight please let me, Wes, or one of the leaders know. We’d love to talk more about these things with you! If you’re already a Christian I hope these truths hit you in a fresh way today. I hope Good Friday didn’t pass without reflecting on the magnitude of that day. I hope tonight was another chance to praise God for his undeserved grace and mercy. And if you’re a Christian tonight I want you to think about the “so what” that goes along with all of this. That’s what you’re going to talk about in your groups tonight. This is the best news you’re ever going to hear. I don’t want us to become calloused to it. I pray there never comes a day when the cross and resurrection stop being amazing.  Christ’s sacrifice should lead us to some sort of response. Maybe it’s some actions that need to change. Maybe you need to confess some sin. Maybe God is asking you step of faith. Maybe he’s asking you to surrender some part of your life to him. Whatever it is know that he is WORTHY. Because of his sacrifice, because of the cross, because of his love he is worthy of whatever he’s asking. My prayer is that you’re surrendered. Again… because he’s worthy.

I’m going to leave you with a quick story and 1 Peter 3:18. Then you can break into your small groups to talk. Donald Grey Barnhouse is pastor of a church in Philadelphia. He was driving his family in a car to the funeral of his wife, who died from cancer. His kids were in the car, and a big truck passed by them on the other side of the road. Barnhouse said to his kids, “Did you see that truck? Did you see the shadow of that truck? Would you rather be hit by the truck or the shadow of the truck?” Of course his children replied, “The shadow.” And Barnhouse said, “Kids, the truck of death hit Jesus, so that mommy only has to go through the shadow of death.”

1 Peter 3:18:

“For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”