living sacrifice
Dear friend, our work is worship.
My sister-friend, who forever speaks God’s words back to me, sends this text in the early morning, while the daylight is still new, as I rub my eyes and contemplate the day, the work, that I know God has planned well ahead of me.
They are burnt offerings.
By this, I know she means the artwork God draws from our fingers, hers and mine, because we are artists, called, by grace, to live creatively.
Ten sharp words, the flash of a sword for my heart, and with them, the tang of blood, the flicker of flame.
What is it, I wonder, staring at the glow of her words, that feels so offensive about making a sacrifice?
More mission than mantra, in view of God’s visceral compassions, those apprenticed to Jesus worship by offering our bodies as living sacrifices. Visceral, let it settle deep, means felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body. Scripture repeatedly describes Christ’s compassion this way, says He was moved with compassion, meaning that it gripped Him from the inside, compelling Him to act.
This, then, the question of the good shepherd, as I wrestle to my sheepy feet: What moves you today?
Because this morning I might as well be walking on the shards of whatever I had credited to myself, the last of it dashed to the ground just before midnight, on my way down the hall to Adam’s room to fight a blood sugar so high his glucometer had replaced the numbers with the word HIGH, screaming in all caps. Empty-handed, I had prepared myself for Adam’s rejection, knowing he wouldn’t understand the urgency of the situation, the danger to himself, or how little I had left with which to meet it.
I can relate. Even after years of loving Jesus, I know I can only just barely comprehend, have only just begun to feel deeply compelled by, how much it cost Him to die in my place. It takes a human being a long time to take the weight of sin—the urgency of our need of Him—to heart. Some never do.
In the night the Spirit of God had reminded me, as I walked down that hall, of a slice of scripture, something King David had said while negotiating the purchase of a place to make an offering, when Araunah just plain offered up his threshing floor to the king for free, his hand maybe shaking a little down by his side. David had replied, steadily, I imagine, I will not give a sacrifice to the Lord that costs me nothing.
And yet somehow, I still expect to make an offering, to carry a cross, without really dying to anything.
Despite God’s history of revealing His limitless strength in the context of human weakness and limitation, I still feel surprised to find myself a reluctant Gideon, marching into battle outnumbered, God Himself having whittled my army down, with nothing in my hands but a ram’s horn and a clay jar with a torch inside. I still feel surprised when He expects me to surrender the comfort of holding on and holding back, to smash that jar as an act of war. After all this time, I still imagine some glorious effort instead of the oft painful posture of two empty, waiting arms outstretched.
Our work is worship. They are burnt offerings.
I put down my phone, opening my hands to pray.
Oh, to approach the day as a series of offerings, to live in response to His visceral compassions.
On my way down to Adam’s room last night, I had whispered a prayer to God—whispered, because I had no voice left and the hall felt holy, asking Him to breathe His life into my dry bones. I listened to the gentle sound of Kevin’s voice, his bedtime prayers with Riley curling and drifting over my head, and knew I was walking to an altar. I was Isaac, carrying the wood upon which to be the sacrifice, and I confess that instead of feeling King David’s resolve, I entertained the bone-tired naked wish to be able make an offering for love without feeling the cost.
What it must have been like, that twist in His gut, when He was moved by compassion for me.
Kevin and I had been to the performing arts center earlier in the evening, a date to see a musical, some mixed up story of pleasure misdefined as love, the audience cheering trouble, and Kevin had, jerking a thumb towards the stage during intermission, said pointedly, “But this isn’t love. Love is spending the day digging stinking mud out of flooded buildings.”
It had been another way of quoting David, of affirming what Christ Himself meant when He said as I have loved you so you should love one another, our minds having been captivated earlier in the day by pictures of Western North Carolina disaster relief crews covered head-to-toe in mud-smeared white safety suits, their tired smiles, their gloved hands plunging shovels into the rotten muck. The play felt perverse somehow considering what we’d seen, this celebration on the stage, by the audience, of love as the pursuit of getting what I want instead of giving myself up.
They are burnt offerings. I re-read my friend’s text, standing barefoot beside my waiting shoes, marking it with a flame, accepting the refreshment of a new perspective on the work God prepared in advance for me to do.
We are burnt offerings. Our work is worship. Worship is our work.
I can tell you this: Changing an insulin pod as night gives way, darkly, to the wee hours of the morning, wasn’t what I wanted last night at all, right then on the empty edge of sleep, my body bucking at the idea of being tied down, but the Spirit of God had intervened, reminding me of true love, stirring me with compassion for my son, filling me with the bold truth that in Christ the ache of dying always gives way to life.
In the thinning channel between the work of the day and surrendered sleep, in the place of sacrifice, God’s words to me had been His words to Peter, when the immature disciple, having heard the true story of love, rebuked the King for speaking of the sacrifice that would cost Him everything, had urged Him not to talk of such things. The living sacrifice had replied to Peter, to me: You are seeing things merely from a human point of view.
The human point of view, that love is getting what I want, that giving should cost me nothing.
I opened Adam’s door, the door audibly popping away from the frame, and immediately, he sat up in bed, resurrected, blinked at me through the cavernous dark, as light from the hallway overwhelmed the night.
As I had expected, he was not happy to see me, not tender, not loving or interested or ready for me at all.
“Go to bed,” he said, his voice all gravel. “Go away, please. I said, ‘Go away.’”
Adam, following the tendency of all humankind, happens to be most vocal about resistance and complaints.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I apologized, my voice little more than a rasp, “but your pod isn’t working. Your blood sugar is too high. I’ve got to change it.” For his sake and mine, I kept my explanation simple.
“Already change pod,” Adam argued emphatically in shorthand, thrusting out his hand, palm strongly flat, the universal sign for stop held up against my approach. “It’s time for sleeping. I said, ‘Go away, please.’”
But God is kind to the ungrateful, and so, I swallowed the sigh that wanted escape and got to work, pulling the supplies I needed from the bag next to Adam’s bed. I worked quietly, as quickly as I could, bringing help while Adam relentlessly continued pontificating his refusal of both my compassion and my efforts on his behalf.
Meanwhile, this settled, stirring my heart, that while yet we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He had been moved by compassion, not by any way we have ever received Him.
Adam’s eyes flashed at me from the shadows, but I do love him so deeply, and suddenly I realized that I really wouldn’t trade the cost of loving him. I recognized a flooding current of compassion not my own, welling up into a deep desire to be gentle and patient with his lack of understanding. I could, I realized, for love, keep on loving him this way for as long as it takes him to understand why, and even if he never does.
Remembering this, that grace that still reaches for me in the watches of the night, that reached for me last night beside Adam’s bed, I settle into my shoes now, ready to face the day, thinking how absolutely critical this will always be for making offerings, this keeping His mercies in view.
