Bind the Sacrifice

The reading in My Utmost for His Highest today talks about a very uncomfortable issue that God has been pressing me about. I have realized at times when He convicts me about things I say to others that are self-promoting or undermining that my resistance to repentance usually involves self-pity. I often whine and drag my feet with God while analyzing myself and maybe even trying self-therapy. I believe it is important to get past the surface circumstances to unmask the deeper issues. But the self-pity is a liability that inhibits growth in ways I do not yet full realize.

“'I am ready to be offered.' It is a transaction of will, not of sentiment. Tell God you are ready to be offered; then let the consequences be what they may, there is no strand of complaint now, no matter what God chooses. God puts you through the crisis in private, no one person can help another. Externally the life may be the same; the difference is in will. Go through the crisis in will, then when it comes externally there will be no thought of the cost. If you do not transact in will with God along this line, you will end in awakening sympathy for yourself.”

I saw the familiar pattern at this point. The Spirit prompted me to go ahead right now and tell God that “I am ready to be offered”. I detected a great amount of resistance, a desire to change the words – to soften them. But that is evasive and betrays something trying to hide inside, most likely another strong false god in there. So I go ahead and say the words. Yes there is fear and a certain amount of pain. But I also instantly realize that it is a choice, an important step toward the intimacy with God that I long to experience.

Then I read the next line and it tightened even more. “'Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.' The altar means fire – burning and purification and insulation for one purpose only, the destruction of every affinity that God has not started and of every attachment that is not an attachment in God.”

Not only must I offer myself as a sacrifice, my self-protection, self-justification, self-defense, but I must fasten it there with some kind of security measures to keep it from escaping the flames. This is serious and threatening. But then dying to self is not a picnic at the park. The flesh inside of me that has tried to protect me all these years becomes angry that I am “betraying” it to be destroyed. It threatens to create hell for me if I really go through with this. The truth is, that is what hell is all about. If my flesh, my self-dependence does not die now in the fire of God's presence it will die later in God's presence at take my soul with it.

“You do not destroy it. God does; you bind the sacrifice to the horns of the altar; and see that you do not give way to self-pity when the fire begins. After this way of fire, there is nothing that oppresses of depresses. When the crisis arises, you realize that things cannot touch you as they used to do.”

Yes, I see it more clearly. Self-pity is often the symptom of my resistance, whether it is complaining to God during conviction or trying to subtly elicit sympathy from others to soften my struggles. But as I read the last line the Spirit was insistent. “Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever dreamed He would be.”

Thank-you God for that reminder of what this is all about. I must remember that the whole object of this sacrifice is to remove all the things inside of me that prevent me from experiencing your presence more fully. Your passion is to prove Yourself to be more than I could ever imagine, to ravish me in your love, to satisfy and fill the deepest emptiness of my soul.

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Hebrews 12:1-3 NAS95)