Sacrifice

I’m almost finished with a YouVersion devotional by Oswald Chambers, one of my favorites. Yesterday’s topic was sacrifice and he said this: “In certain stages of spiritual life we get the morbid conception that everything we have we must give up. In the Bible the meaning of sacrifice is the deliberate giving of the best I have to God that He may make it His and mine forever.”

This biblical perspective is in opposition to our cultural understanding of sacrifice: “It looks as if we had to give up everything, lose all we have, and instead of Christianity bringing us joy and simplicity, it makes us miserable…”

When we sacrifice, we invest whatever we sacrifice. The returns may look different than the image that ‘invest’ invokes in this day and age, but the concept is that we sacrifice our best [fill in the blank] so that God can use it to its fullest.