Message from July 28

The message today was challenging and topical, focusing on sacrifice as we have experienced it through biblical history but aimed at interpreting its meaning to the modern mind. Why is sacrifice not part of Christian living today?
We are familiar with prominent biblical examples of the sacrifice of Cain and Able, Noah, Abraham, the Passover lambs, and the sacrificial feasts in Moses’s time. The associated shedding of blood seems barbaric to us now but the root of the English word sacrifice is ‘ to make holy’, and that is how we should engage in sacrifice in our lives today.
The essential message of Christianity is that God offered Jesus the Christ in the ultimate sacrifice to redeem humanity of sinfulness. That replaced historical temporary sacrifices and enabled us to chose to acknowledge individually that we have been saved in Jesus through one permanent sacrifice. We have been forgiven, but our individual salvation requires us to make a choice to accept that redemption.
In modern times that means that we chose to be a living sacrifice by offering our whole being to God, our hearts, out minds, our emotions, our all; making ourselves holy. It is all about how we change on the inside.
God struggled with humanity from Creation to the Cross to bring us this salvation. These are the two pillars of our Faith. It is in seeing God through a scientific awareness of God’s Creation and in recognizing that the Cross is all about God’s struggle with humanity that we appreciate the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus and recognize that in that divine sacrifice God has given us a third pillar, Hope for all eternity.