Issue 293
We continue our series on Words That Need Redefining
Hard times can call for difficult measures. There is talk of cutbacks, layoffs and belt tightening. It’s not long before some part of a workforce is paying the price for the conditions in the marketplace. Job losses mean that corporate pain spills over into personal lives and marketplace troubles come home to domestic environments.
A word moves into our vocabulary during these seasons – sacrifice. Staff are called upon to make sacrifices, taking pay cuts or losing perks. Companies speak in terms of sacrificing assets in order to save the business as a whole.
In the religious arena, sacrifice has a rich and varied history. Usually in the form of an animal but sometimes food or produce, the ritual generally involves making some sort of symbolic offering to a deity, designed to engender good will. The range of meanings attached to the sacrifice spread from expressions of love towards an adored object of worship, to frantic attempts to appease the wrath of an enraged deity.
So sacrifices are generally something made by people for a purpose. They are seen as pleasant things forgone in order to survive, appease or adore. Generally these sacrifices are external to the giver. The sacrificer foots the bill one way or another in order to effect the purpose of the offering.
There is something of a trade-off approach here; a sacrifice is an investment, a bargaining chip or a payment. The nature of the outcome will be related to the agenda of the one making the offering
But there is another way to harness the word. In the Christian language the sacrifice is no longer what you make or what you give. It is not a cutback or an investment. Sacrifice is what you become – sacrifice is who you are.
Now may I suggest how that would affect your job description? Your job is to be a sacrifice to God – whatever your tasks. Your work is not a sacrifice that you offer – you are – your work is what you do as an expression of your sacrificial self.
Here there are both similarities to and differences from the traditional uses of the word. You will want to offer yourself as a loving lifestyle of expression to your God. Unlike the majority of sacrifices, however, your offering is alive and remains alive. The clarion call for you is to be a living sacrifice not a dead one.
Your tasks are acts of worship – because you are an act of worship. Your work is worship because you are a living sacrifice yourself. Everything you are and do is angled and directed towards the divine and is now drenched in the lifeblood of meaning – however apparently mundane it appears. You no longer clean floors – you offer yourself as a cleaner. You no longer drive a vehicle – you offer yourself as a driver. Nothing can now fall out of the category of sacrifice because you are now the holistic offering yourself.
Look at your ‘to do’ list – it is an expression of yourself.Look at your achievements – they are aspects of your sacrifice. Some of your activities today, you may not be so proud of – if they were offerings of fragrance there might be a bit of a bad smell about them.
Thankfully there is a filter. When Jesus sacrificed himself – the first in the line of living sacrifices – he created a filter through which all your sacrifices pass. This is why we talk in terms of doing things in the name of or through Jesus Christ. Who you are is now embedded in who he is.
His hard times called for difficult measures, cuts in his back, the laying down of his life and the sacrifice of all his assets in order to save the company of humanity as a whole.
So you do not work – you sacrifice; you do not study – you sacrifice; you do not travel – you sacrifice. Sometimes you use the words work, study, travel and a host of others as shorthand – but in reality they are images only – sacrifice is the real deal and its name is yours.
Romans 12:1-2
1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers,
in view of God’s mercy,
to offer your bodies as living sacrifices,
holy and pleasing to God –
this is your spiritual act of worship.
2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what
God’s will is?his good, pleasing and perfect will.
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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