Sacrifice: Love’s Truest Demonstration
“Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” -1 John 3:16
Just as in John’s gospel, in the third chapter, and the sixteenth verse, he mentions the love of God causing Him to send His Son to die for us: so too in John’s first epistle, in the same chapter, and in the same verse, he mentions the very same concept.
We know that God loves us because He died for us. But John takes this thought one step further, and reasons with us: Jesus Christ commanded us to love one another, and He even went so far as to say that we ought to love one another in the same way that God has loved us.
“This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” -John 15:12-13
So then the apostle John makes a rather bold proclamation: if we are to love others, and if God showed His love to us by laying down His life for us, then we ought to lay down our lives for others.
Whether this laying down of our lives is literal: that we are actually martyred, or if it is figurative: that we simply give up all our own self-interests to serve the needs of our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ–either way, one thing is certain: we ought to sacrifice our own lives in any way we can for others. The Bible says the same thing as well:
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” -Romans 12:1
Something that is sacrificed no longer has a selfish will of its own, but it is given wholly over to the purpose that it was sacrificed to. And really, a sacrifice is dead, yet the apostle Paul tells us to be a “living sacrifice.” We are to be dead to our own selfish motives, yet, somehow, still alive. Paul explains this in another place, when he writes to the Galatians:
“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” -Galatians 2:20
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