Giving Up Billy McFarland
A sermon on sacrifice
TCF Sermon
August 8, 2010
When I was about five years old, I lived in Pittsburgh, PA, where I was born. We lived in one of those classic eastern row houses - you know, where the houses are all attached to each other kind of like a duplex, except there’s dozens of them.
I remember one day, I got ahold of a cardboard box, and from it, I made this really cool house in my back yard - at least cool to a five year old. It was a simple, rather flimsy building, but I liked it, and enjoyed playing in it.
Then one day, a neighborhood kid named Billy McFarland came along. Now, Billy was not my favorite kid - he could be kind of obnoxious, and was kind of a bully and a tease. Billy came, and got into my pride and joy cardboard mansion...I told him to be careful, but he wasn’t - and he knocked it down while he was inside.
I was pretty upset. I lost my temper. Billy was inside, with the now-broken-down box covering him, and I could hear him inside laughing, while I was yelling - NO!, NO!, GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!
He kept laughing, and I completely lost it. So, I stepped on his face.
Of course, he was inside the box, covered in cardboard, but I stepped on his face. Not just once, but several times.
It’s not something I’m proud of, but it happened. My mother heard the hollering, and immediately came out and stopped me - and though I tried to tell her I was unfairly provoked - though I tried to tell her that it wasn’t fair, and he deserved it,
my mom took me inside the house, pulled down my pants, bent me over and proceeded to spank me.
But what hurt worse than the spanking was what I saw, as I was standing bent over, looking toward the front door. Looking through the screen door, watching and laughing, was Billy McFarland - face intact, unbloodied, and totally unrepentant, and glad to see me getting in trouble for stepping on his face - and to throw more salt in the wound, he was giggling at the scene.
Now, the reason I tell you this story is because of what happened the following Lent. I was raised Catholic, and we marked Lent, the 40-day period between Ash Wednesday and Easter. It was a period of time we were supposed to prepare our hearts for Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday.
It was supposed to be a period of prayer, fasting, and spiritual preparation. One of the ways we were instructed to focus our hearts on the deep meaning of this season, was by giving up things. We were encouraged to give up things we liked - favorite foods, favorite activities, things like that. This was designed to teach us something about fasting - and something about sacrifice.
So this particular Lent, I remember my parents asking me, Billy, what are you going to give up for Lent? I told them somewhat proudly, “I’m giving up Billy McFarland.”
Now, clearly, there were some things at age five I didn’t understand about sacrifice. One of those things I obviously didn’t understand was that giving up something you didn’t like wasn’t a sacrifice. Because true sacrifice always costs something - or by definition, it isn’t a sacrifice.
King David recognized that in a story from 1 Chronicles 21, when he wanted to buy some land to build an altar. The landowner offered it for free. But David refused the gift, and insisted on paying full price,
saying in verse 24: I will not take for the LORD what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing."
The word sacrifice implies giving something that costs the giver in terms of self, time, or money. In my life today, the equivalent of giving up Billy McFarland might be something like this:
I’m going to give up eating liver (of course, I hate liver). Or saying, Barb, I’ll make the ultimate sacrifice, and let you mow the lawn instead of me, when it’s 105 outside. Or I’m going to give up watching the Jerry Springer Show.
Now, these are all things I don’t like doing anyway, so giving them up is no sacrifice.
As Christians, sacrifice is supposed to be part and parcel of our daily existence.
Ephes. 5:1-2 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; 2and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
Paul tells the Ephesians that perhaps the most significant component of what it means to “walk in love” – as it says in vs 2 - is sacrifice. He uses Jesus as the ultimate example or model of this. Jesus, scripture tells us, gave Himself up for us. He sacrificed Himself to God for us.
These verses are right in the middle of a longer passage about Christian behavior, and relationships between Christians.
I’ve told more than one couple, struggling in their marriage, that the most significant relationship skill we can learn is this: dying to self.
Another way to say that might be: living sacrificially - giving ourselves up for others.
Saying that we need to give ourselves up for others as Jesus gave Himself up for us, is calling us to a pretty high standard of sacrifice. As I thought about sacrifice, I realized that there are basically three kinds of sacrifice:
1. self-sacrifice that benefits us personally
2. the kind of sacrifice that helps or benefits others
3. sacrifice that advances God’s Kingdom
I also realized that these three are often inter-related. For example, we can often see that when a sacrifice benefits others, it advances God’s Kingdom as well.
The reverse may be true: when a sacrifice advances, or benefits the Kingdom, it benefits others.
Consider this perhaps familiar story from Christian history:
The Moravians were a people banished from their homeland, Bohemia, and exiled to various countries in 1620. Some came to Germany and found refuge on the estate of Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1756). It was on his estate that they became known as the Moravian Brethren. They were the forerunners of the Protestant Missionary Movement. In 1730, Count Zinzendorf told the Moravians about the urgent need for missionaries to evangelize the slaves on the Virgin Islands.
A man named Leonard Dober listened to Zinzendorf’s appeal, and as he pondered God’s calling, Dober felt excited about this opportunity to serve, but he also envisioned the severe persecution he would endure by selling himself into slavery to evangelize these people. He anticipated the horrible working conditions, but above all the degradation of slavery. No price was too high, he thought, when Jesus Christ endured persecution and died for him. So, Leonard Dober, at the age of eighteen, became the first Moravian missionary to the Virgin Island sugar plantation slaves.
However, the source of his persecution did not come from the slave master’s whip, but from fellow Christians. Dober found himself ridiculed, mocked, and chastened for his decision to go to the Virgin Islands. The Christians asked him incredulous questions about how he planned to live in the Virgin Islands or how he intended to minister to the slaves. The persecution climaxed when the Christians discovered that Dober planned to sell himself into slavery.
Dober arrived in the Virgin Islands in the late 1730s, but he did not have to become a plantation slave. Instead he became a servant in the governor’s house. Soon he resigned his position, as he was concerned that this position was so superior to that of the slaves that it was detrimental to reaching them for Christ. He chose instead to live in a small mud hut where he could work one-on-one with the slaves. In three years his ministry grew to include 13,000 new converts.
Even though Leonard Dober did not have to pay the supreme sacrifice of his life to evangelize the Virgin Island slaves, it is important to note that he was ready to accept persecution and even martyrdom for these people.
Leonard Dober’s sacrifice advanced the Kingdom, and clearly also benefited others.
Often, sacrifice that benefits us personally has benefit to others, too. For example, if we work hard to earn a living for ourselves, our family benefits, too.
Sacrifice is not something that comes naturally - it’s something we’re taught. It’s something we learn. It’s something we witness. We see it modeled and learn from this. We teach our children that it’s a good thing to sacrifice now so that we can derive more benefits later.
Saving money is like this - but how many kids take to this immediately? They earn $5 and it burns a hole in their pockets - they’ll go and spend it on something impulsively, rather than save it, earn more money, and then eventually get something they really want, or actually need. Of course, sometimes adults aren’t much better - that’s why credit cards are often so overspent, or why people sometimes don’t have anything for emergencies when they arise. It’s the idea that “you can have it now” – and deserve it now.
But many adults do learn this idea of sacrifice, even if primarily for eventual self-benefit.
Tim Stafford wrote a great book called Knowing the Face of God. One of the chapters is about sacrifice, and I’ll quote and reference some ideas from that chapter this morning. One thing he writes is this:
Why does anyone get out of bed in the morning to go to work when it is so much more pleasant to lie drowsily under the warm covers? The force that gets me out of bed is hope. Today’s “me” sacrifices for tomorrow’s. Mature human beings know how to do this almost as second nature. We didn’t get it from nature, though. Our parents and teachers drilled it into us just as we must drill it into our children.
So sacrifice is a learned behavior, and it doesn’t come naturally. If you think about it, our whole civilization is built on sacrifice. This kind of self-sacrifice, – sometimes also known as deferred or delayed gratification – is the basis for civilization as we know it.
Nobody would build anything, plant anything, learn anything, ever go to work, ever earn money, if they did not live at least in part by sacrifice. A society built on instant pleasure would soon be back in the stone ages. Or there would be chaos. Or both.
Even your drive to church this morning required sacrifice. You did stop at the red light or the stop sign, didn’t you? Even though that’s a sacrifice imposed on you, you gave up your right to go first, in this case for the sake of order.
So, even though much of this kind of sacrifice is self-serving to some degree, it’s still vital to our existence, to our civilization.
But, as Stafford writes,
There is another reason, why we so insistently teach sacrifice to our children, and it is not the future of civilization. It is because we care about their happiness. Even if they stood to inherit millions and would never need to work, we would want our children to learn to sacrifice, because self-sacrifice is fundamental to knowing and being in a healthy relationship to ourselves.
I might add, it’s fundamental to being in a healthy relationship with others, and with God. Sacrifice is for something good – it’s for something that outweighs the temporary pain of the sacrifice.
When we think about making a sacrifice, we usually weigh the present sacrifice against the expected benefits.
When we think about sacrifice like this, sometimes sacrifice isn’t really extraordinary. It’s actually ordinary, daily behavior - the kind of behavior we expect to see, and to do ourselves. It’s the kind of behavior we couldn’t live without. And we certainly could not live as healthy, mature people, in good relationship with ourselves, with others, or with God, without some clear sacrifices acted out pretty much daily.
But that just covers the kinds of “sacrifices” we make as part of our daily lives - the kind we essentially do for our own benefit, even if there are things in it that benefit others.
Most of the time, when we think of sacrifice, we think of something done for the sake of others. Sometimes, even this is nothing out-of-the-ordinary. Perhaps the best example is when a mother gives birth to a baby. She’s sacrificing her comfort - experiencing pain for a while - for the joy of the new life this sacrifice will bring.
That’s so common that we don’t even really think of it as a sacrifice, unless we see it in the light of what we’ve been examining today.
Our everyday common understanding of the word sacrifice, captures part of the Biblical understanding. Here’s a dictionary definition of sacrifice:
1. an offering of the life of a person or animal, or an object, in homage to a deity. 2. a giving up, destroying, etc. of one thing for the sake of another of higher value.
So, back to our mother analogy:
Though we don’t think of it as a sacrifice because it’s so common, it fits the second definition: a mother gives up comfort for nine months - she gives up lack of pain for perhaps several hours - for the sake of gaining something else of higher value.
And of course, for parents in general, the sacrifice continues for a lifetime. Parents sacrifice many times daily for their children, and no one thinks that’s a big deal. It’s expected – part of the package. It’s more unusual, and noteworthy, when a parent doesn’t make these sacrifices for their kids. Then, if their children are young, they might be arrested for neglect - and arrested or not, their kids suffer when parents don’t sacrifice for the sake of their childrens’ well-being.
Why is that? Why is it expected that parents sacrifice for their children, and no one thinks this is unusual or extraordinary? At least in part, this is true because sacrifice is normal when people love each other. When real love is involved, there is always sacrifice.
Think about the hyperbole of lovers – in song and in poetry - people in love who poetically say things like: “I’d swim the deepest ocean, climb the highest mountain for you”
But though things like that are not reality, they do often reflect what these people in love deeply feel.
Stafford writes:
They sense correctly that sacrifice can bind them together, for it is the most tangible proof we have of human solidarity. One person gives up and the other gains, but there is a conservation of blessings; we do not lose by sacrificing, because what is good for the person we love is also good for us. In a sense, it is just as selfish as sacrificing for ourselves. If we love people deeply enough, their benefits are ours.
Some of you may have read the O. Henry story “Gift of the Magi.” Without going through the whole story, let me tell you some of the basics:
She has long beautiful hair. He has his cherished pocket watch. With Christmas coming, and no money, they both want to give each other a gift for Christmas. Secretly, they both make sacrifices so they can please the other: he sells his watch to buy combs for her hair - she sells her long beautiful hair to a wigmaker to buy him a watch fob.
Of course, when they give their gifts to each other, it looks like they’ve made their sacrifices in vain. But the story ends by saying that though it appeared these two foolishly sacrificed for each other, they were the wisest.
What O. Henry, the author of this story means, is that these two lost things, but gained each other, in a fuller, deeper way. What they lost in material, they gained in relationship. The relationship gained immensely by the sacrifice - they didn’t have the things anymore, but the relationship grew stronger.
Sacrifice may be based on a hopeful calculation of costs and benefits. Yet it provides a greater benefit merely by speaking the depth of its love.
Tim Stafford
Isn’t that a great way to see sacrifice? It provides a greater benefit merely by speaking of the depth of its love. The more deeply we are connected with someone, the more we love someone, the less likely we are to think of certain things as a sacrifice. It’s natural to give up one thing to get another.
I think of what Jim and Diana Downing have done in raising their grandchildren. On the outside, looking in, I think most of us would think of this as a sacrifice. They’re parenting their grandkids – with all that means in terms of commitment of time and resources.
But I would also guess that they don’t think much or at all about the sacrificial element of this, because they love their grandkids, and that bond of love is their motivator.
Sacrifices are part of the makeup of any truly close relationships. Sacrifices reveal that people who love each other see each other’s benefits as their own.
Because of that, it shouldn’t be surprising that our faith is rooted in sacrifice. It all starts with the model of Jesus’ sacrifice for us. Reading again the passage of scripture we read earlier:
Ephes. 5:1-2 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; 2and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
With all bonds of love, and all real relationships - our protective and self-preserving love of ourselves, our love of each other, and relationship to each other and our love for and relationship with God, with all these things, sacrifice is involved.
But there’s a key difference in the sacrifices we make for our own well being, and the sacrifices we make for others...compared to the sacrifices we make for God and for His Kingdom.
Loving sacrifice is normally reciprocal – not always, but often…one person sacrifices for another, and vice versa. That’s how Paul is instructing the Ephesians here to walk, to live their lives. But think about this for a moment: with God, how can we sacrifice for Him? Why should we sacrifice for Him? He doesn’t truly need anything. He’s God!
Acts 17:24-25 (NIV) "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.
He gives, He provides everything, so God doesn’t truly need like you and I do.
Psalms 50:12 (NASB95) "If I were hungry I would not tell you, For the world is Mine, and all it contains.
If God has no needs, what can we possibly have to give to Him? How can we sacrifice for Him? Yet, Jesus encouraged us to sacrifice:
Luke 14:27 ... anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
Carrying your cross means sacrifice. But the truth of it is, this sacrifice is apparently for our benefit, not primarily for His. Our sacrifice for God may benefit His Kingdom, but it’s for our good.
Paul apparently considered sacrifice for the things of God a bargain:
Philip. 3:7-9 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.
So, when you hear people making a big deal out of their sacrifices for God, you know one thing for sure. They do not understand their position in Christ. Our position in Christ is clearly one of absolute dependence. Our sacrifices to God do not ever put Him in a position of owing us anything, or ever needing something from us.
We hate being dependent, but we are dependent on God. So how can a dependent people sacrifice anything for God, and why should we, apart from the fact that scripture clearly indicates we should?
To help us begin to understand this, we can go back to the relationship between loving parents and dependent children to begin to see the answer. Parents pour out their lives – spend themselves financially and emotionally and spiritually.
By the way – the phrase “spent,” when it implies pouring out yourself for something, has a strong biblical basis, and relates to the idea of sacrifice we’re examining this morning.
Philip. 2:17 But even if I am being poured out like a drink offering on the sacrifice and service coming from your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you.
The Greek word for offering here is spendo,
which means to pour out as a drink, i.e. (figurative) to devote (one’s life or blood, as a sacrifice) (“spend”) :- (be ready to) be offered
So when parents spend themselves, all for the well-being of their child, how does this compare to our relationship with our Heavenly Father?
Parents sometimes derive their pleasure from their kids’ pleasure, simply because they are their children. However, this sometimes one-sided grace from parents toward children, does not create, of itself, a fully intimate, two-person relationship.
The truth is, we sacrifice for our children, not just because it’s the right thing to do, and not at all hoping they will pay us back with sacrifices of their own, but hoping that they will love us.
Now, good parents, as does our Heavenly Father, love their children whether or not they love in return. But don’t we as parents want their love? Just because we’re willing to give love unconditionally doesn’t mean we don’t want to see it reciprocated in some form. Parents find their best reward in children who want to see them - who want to be with them - who want to talk with them – want a real relationship with them. Sacrifices that lead to such love are worth it.
But the sacrifice itself doesn’t automatically bring this about. Our kids still have a choice. If you think about it, we’re all in a similar position with Jesus. He spent his life for us. More than that, He literally poured out His blood for us. There’s no way we can match that sacrifice.
But in this passage from Ephesians, and in the passage from Romans 12:1 that calls us to be living sacrifices, we see the Word does call us to sacrifice. God doesn’t need my sacrifice or my offerings, but He wants them.
Why? Because, our sacrificial obedience reveals our love for Him. My sacrifices don’t repay God for anything. They thank Him. They may illustrate my love for Him. They may show my gratitude for His love and mercy.
So, even though we live in a relationship of one-sided, total dependence on God, our sacrifices, whether they’re for others, or expressly for the Kingdom of God, do mean something to Him, when they represent gratitude and thanks and genuine love.
Our sacrifices please God when they represent our hearts. Our sacrifices offer symbolically the one thing God wants from His one great, awful sacrifice of Jesus on the cross: He wants US – not just part of us, but our whole hearts, completely devoted to Him.
I want to close with one more quote:
Jesus, looking toward death, could see his sacrifice as a basis for relating to me. We know it was difficult for him – that he sweat blood. But why did he go through it? “For the joy set before Him, (He) endured the cross, scorning its shame” (Heb 12:2). But what joy? A part of the joy was the same kind of joy I look for when I sacrifice for my children and friends; I want to be one with them. Tim Stafford
God doesn’t need anything. But He does want us to spend eternity with Him. That’s the joy set before Him. Our redemption. Our salvation. Our ability to have a genuine relationship with Him. And for that, He sacrificed. And we are grateful.
Pray
