Obedience, sacrifice or sacrificial obedience...?

I've been reading through some of the Old Testament psalms in recent weeks, and two words seem to keep cropping up a lot. One is obedience and the other is sacrifice.

In fact, both words are recurring themes in the Bible as a whole, but it's interesting that God keeps bringing them to my attention in a season where I've sometimes found myself in a position of having to make a choice between the two.

The Bible tells some stories that are examples of sacrificial obedience - obeying God even when it is very costly for us. An Old Testament example would be in the book of Esther, where Queen Esther risks her own life in order to save her people. A New Testament example would of course be Jesus Himself, who obeyed God and sacrificed His own life in order to purchase salvation for mankind. The phrase sacrificial obedience is so common in Christian circles that it would be very easy for us to believe that they are always one and the same thing.

Of course, they're not. The people who wrote the psalms, for example, often speak of their joyful obedience or their willing obedience - of times when God's favour and blessing are so obvious that it's a joy to obey Him and there seems to be no sacrifice involved at all. Obedience and sacrifice are not always the same thing.

This was a principle that God sought to impress on the very first king of Israel, King Saul. In 1 Samuel 15: 22, Saul was told, "To obey is better than to make a sacrifice." Pressurised by people and circumstances, Saul had rushed to offer up a sacrifice, believing that it would ensure God's blessing on himself and his army. (I wrote about this incident in a blog post a few months ago: see here.)

But, speaking through the prophet Samuel, God tells Saul very clearly: It is not your sacrifice that brings blessing; it is your obedience.

In the psalm I was reading this morning, Psalm 40, we can see that God has impressed that same lesson on the heart of Saul's successor, King David. In that psalm, David says to the Lord: I finally understand that you don't take delight in sacrifice; that's not what you require of us. What you're looking for is obedience, and I take joy in doing your will, my God, for your instructions are written on my heart.

Of course, sometimes obedience is costly for us because our desires and our priorities are not always the same as God's. But it's important for us to understand, like David, that sacrifice and obedience are not always the same thing. Sometimes we have to make a choice between them. Sometimes true obedience requires us, unlike Saul, to have enough faith not to make the sacrifice. 

An anniversary...

Today is an anniversary. It is exactly 16 years ago today that I moved to live in Spain. It means that I have lived in this town of Alhaurín longer than I have lived anywhere else in my entire life. Moving here wasn't specifically "planned" at the time, yet when I look back I can see how God has confirmed very specifically, again and again, that this is the place He wanted me to be. 

If you were already reading this blog back in 2008, you might remember the incredibly specific Bible verse about the 12 springs and 70 palm trees; that was only one of the ways that God confirmed the rightness of my being here. 

When you’ve lived somewhere for a long time, leaving it permanently can be a very challenging transition. I can still remember how traumatic it was for me to leave South Africa after living there for almost fifteen years. Suddenly, absolutely everything in my life was changed or simply lost.

I lost my home; I lost my friends and team mates; I lost my church and my missions/ministry involvement. I had to give away my car, my furniture, my books and all kinds of other things that it is impossible to take with you when you change continents. I lost my dog and my cat… and although they lived quite a number of years after that, I never saw either of them again before they died.

I moved to a situation where everything was different: different culture, different language, different way of doing things, different church, different ministry opportunities…

That’s the way things are if you’re single. When a couple or a family move to another location, they take their team with them. When a single person relocates, they lose absolutely everything and have to start completely from scratch. There were many times in those early years when I reflected that I felt like a refugee. I’d had to leave everyone and everything behind and it felt like I was starting life and ministry from scratch. There was a long period of loss and grieving as I made such a huge transition.

I knew that, one day, the “new place” would become home, but until that happened, I felt cast adrift, having to learn a new language, make new friendships and build a new life as a missionary in a completely different setting.

And now, here we are, many years down the road. It’s amazing for me to realise that I have now lived in Spain even longer than I lived in South Africa. Today marks the 16th anniversary of my moving to Spain.

Eight years ago, I was invited to consider moving to another part of the world to pioneer a new ministry there. I remember counting the cost - realising that Spain had become home and that leaving here would likely be just as costly as it had been for me to leave Cape Town…. perhaps even more so, as I was almost sixty, and “starting from scratch” is even more challenging when you’re in an “older” stage of life. I confess to feeling a sense of relief when God confirmed that He was not in fact asking me to make that move.

Almost another decade has gone by since then and I’m at the age when some people give up work and retire. I don’t at all sense at this point that the Lord is prompting me to retire from missions, but I have given some thought to the question of where I should live if I ever do retire. And I realise that it would be here in Spain. The climate is so much better for my lungs and my arthritis than colder places in northern Europe, including the country where I was born and from where I hold a passport.

The world has also changed a lot since I’ve been here. In particular, Britain’s decision to exit the European Union has had huge implications for missionaries serving in Europe or for those who might hope to end their days here.

Fortunately, I got my Spanish residency before Brexit happened. I still had some battles to get back into the healthcare system, but at least I didn’t lose my residency and find myself restricted to just “90 days in Europe” at a time. But if I ever leave Spain, and lose my treasured residency, it would be extremely difficult, probably impossible, for me to get a visa to move back here again. And the same would be true for any other country in Europe. Any departure from here would be as permanent as my long ago departure from South Africa has been.

So today, on this anniversary, I look back and thank God for the many different ways that He demonstrated His faithfulness in the past. I honestly do not know all that the future holds, but as I seek to stay close to Him and obey Him, I know I can thank Him in advance for the many different ways that He will demonstrate His faithfulness in the future.

In what ways do you celebrate the faithfulness of God in your life?

What made these women wise?

I was translating for our church service this morning. It's something I do several times a month - wearing headphones and translating the Spanish into English for visitors to the church or for members whose grasp of Spanish is not strong.

Today we came to the end of a four-week series on stewardship - on what it means to be faithful with everything that the Lord has entrusted to us. One week we looked at stewardship of our time, another week at stewardship of our finances and possessions, and still another week at stewardship of our gifts and talents. Today, for the last preaching in the series, the pastor was speaking about "integrated stewardship" - how it all fits together.

From passages in Matthew's Gospel chapters 24 and 25, he was asking the question: What does God expect of us if we are to be good stewards and hear His commendation: "Well done, good and faithful servant." ?

The two parables in Matthew 25 are well known: 

• the parable of the wise and foolish virgins with their lamps
• the parable of the three servants with their talents

Sermons on these two parables typically focus on the obvious: 

• using our talents rather than burying them
• being alert and ready for the Lord's return

So it was interesting that some of the truths the pastor highlighted this morning went beyond the usual surface explanations of these two stories that Jesus told. He highlighted aspects like looking ahead and being faithful to God for the long term, rather than being pressurised by an immediate need in the present.

For example, when the "foolish" girls ask the "wise" ones to give them some oil for their lamps, the ones commended for being wise say, "No." 

That might shock us. Their response may seem selfish, lacking in compassion or generosity. But the reason given (vs 9) makes it quite clear why those girls were wise. If they had given away some of their oil, none of the girls, neither the wise nor the foolish, would have had enough oil to do what the Lord, the Bridegroom, was asking of them: to keep their lamps burning right to the end, as long as God was asking them to.

The principle is this: If we give beyond what God is asking of us, we are not being good stewards; we are being "foolish."

Being compassionate, giving generously, and even sacrificing ourselves to do so, can all be very commendable. But such behaviour is only "wise" if it is not to the detriment of what God has entrusted to us, of what He actually asked us to do.

Reflecting later, I realised that the first two parables in Matthew 25 illustrate a few different ways that we can be poor stewards of what God has given us:

The first, illustrated by the story of the ten girls warns against:

• not being ready, not being sufficiently prepared
• not being wise, giving beyond what God wants or expects of us

The second parable warns against:

• holding back out of fear or self interest; having a wrong picture of God
• neglecting what we were asked to do and thus failing to be fruitful with what God has entrusted to us

Perhaps it's our personality that determines which of the mistakes we're most likely to fall into. But if we want to hear His, "Well done," we need to be wise in how we steward what He has given us and asked of us.