Sacrifice Archives - call me pasturescott

why your “why” matters

Which of these is true:

Your life is temporal and ultimately lacks meaning and lasting value
You are imperfect at best so do what you can with what you have
You were created for a divine purpose and your Heavenly Father will perfect your calling and transform your life into a beautiful work of grace
Only the really important people can do the really important stuff

If you’ve been paying attention, you picked ‘C.’ As we saw in the last post, Sunday school teachers, lowly monks, maids, wives, sisters, whoever and whatever, can rise to their calling and find their “beautiful works” (καλὸν ἔργον) remembered forever in the logbooks of Glory.

The Lord of heaven pays attention even to the littlest of mites and smallest of lunches…and leaves space for each in his trophy case. He calls them “beautiful.”

As we discussed prior, a “beautiful” work (also Matt 5:16) is something that is selfless, sacrificial, motivated by love, and blesses the heart of God.

That’s what a beautiful work is, but what does it do? How does it move the needle?

🔸a “beautiful work” brings a bit of heaven to earth

John adds this pleasant detail inside his account of the story: “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” And so it is when we offer anything of loving sacrifice to our little worlds. The echoes of glory reach into that sacred space; the luster of heaven shines where it happens.

The ancient scene before us takes place in a village called “Bethany.” I’ve always thought that name was so lovely, so feminine. It sounds like someone you would want your son to marry. But then you study the name, what it means. You find out it is a combination of two words translated, “house” and “depression.” House of sorrow, if you will.

Now when you see what Mary did that evening, by filling the entire house with the aroma of sweet sacrifice, you begin to understand how “beautiful works” can bring heaven to earth.

In her book, ‘Suffering and the Heart of God,’ Diane Langberg describes a place outside Cairo called “Garbage City.” The streets and roofs of houses are made of compressed garbage and the stench gets in your hair and sticks to your clothes and skin. Rats skitter about your feet. There is no sewage system to wash away the filth.

Garbage mounts and rises to the sky in hills and small mountains. Pass through the streets and they’ll take you to an area about half the size of a football field where trash that can’t be recycled is burned in incinerators. The smell is sickeningly exacerbated; it hangs low and heavy in the air.

But just past all this is an area pristine and clean, with gleaming white walls and floors. “You see a room where woven handbags, rugs, and placemats are displayed,” Langberg writes. “Hanging on the walls of another room are quilted wall hangings, comforters, and pillow covers. Women are there sorting rags according to color and placing them in different baskets. Others work at two looms to create beauty out of the garbage.

If you continue down the steps you will hear the sound of water in large tubs as bags of shredded paper dissolve into pulp. Women in rubber aprons spread the mush into sieves, pull the sieves out of the vats, and stack them into the press where the new paper is drained. The paper is then dried in the sun and cards are made with gold embossing and marbled designs. More beauty created from garbage.

She continues:

There is a Coptic Church in the garbage community that began as a Sunday school nineteen years ago…you will enter one of two cave churches built on this mountain. The larger cave seats 10,000 and rivals the Red Rock amphitheater in Colorado in its dramatic beauty. Thousands of people gather – people whose lives are full of garbage, people who work with garbage, people who smell of garbage – for praise and preaching service. It is beauty in the midst of garbage.
Diane Langberg, Suffering and the Heart of God, 329-ff

🔸a “beautiful work” is borne from the fruit of personal sacrifice

When Mary broke the seal of her perfume, Mark described it by using a graphic term, συντρίβω. It means to to crush or strike together; to smash against, like a ship run aground, battered by the waves. That young woman in our story could not, would not bring her Master something that did not come at great cost.

We read in Matthew, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” Instinctively, Mary knew the death of Jesus was close at hand and what did she bring him? Her broken heart. Consequently, that broken-and-spilled-out-sweet-smelling sacrifice filled a house, surrounded by sorrow and depression, with the aroma of resurrection life.

Beloved, whether you are bedbound, homebound, working a third shift job, raising children, supervising workers, answering phones all day, teaching a Sunday school class, living in a childless marriage, fighting off chronic illness, leading presentations at work, standing in front of church congregations and expounding the truths of God’s word each week, blue collar, white collar, or T-shirt and jeans, tenured or part-time, single or hitched, wherever you fall in the spectrum of life, you can spill the goods knowing whatever you do, even if goes unnoticed or criticized, you do it for the applause of heaven.

🔸a “beautiful work” disarms folks and exposes their heart orientation

Mary received some startlingly negative feedback after she offered her service. First off, how dare she? and second, what in the world?? Imagine looking to buy something on Amazon and seeing every reviewer giving one star because there was no option for zero. That would be the disciples in the room. Then imagine a single raving review of 5 stars! That would be Jesus.

Side note: sometimes ‘the church gonna church’ but Jesus is the only vote that counts.

2 Cor 2:15-16 tells us we (the people of “good works”) are are an odorous folk who either make people sick to death of us or drawn to the Life of Jesus in us.

Because of Christ, we give off a sweet scent rising to God…
2 Cor 2:15, The Message

Just as Mary discovered, you too will find not everyone will be a fan of your beautiful deeds. Some will assume the worst. You weren’t sincere. You did it to be noticed. You want something in return. I wouldn’t have done it that way…

Do it anyway. Let them question. Let them criticize. So what if you don’t get the result you hoped for. One thing is certain: every “beautiful work” is seen and remembered in heaven.

🔸a “beautiful work” receives the approval of the Master and reaps eternal rewards

Which brings us to my favorite, most mind-blowing part of the story:

…wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.
Mark 14:9

The gospel story has been published and preached in thousands of languages, spanning two millennia. Every continent and country has heard the good news in some form….and everywhere it’s been told, this woman’s “good work” has been remembered.

Imagine! Having yourself offered special mention in the gospel story! Having future generations talk about your story being instrumental to the global spread of the gospel!

Astounding!

Hey you. Doubting lamb. God has written you into his great gospel story, too.

You are his masterpiece, created for good works.

You are an aroma of grace.

There is a shine inside of you that only gets out when you realize you are nothing without Christ, eternally indebted to him, and yearn to be “wasted”on him for no other reason than he is your “Why.”

Perhaps your story won’t be mentioned worldwide, but many years from now, your children and your children’s children and their children will point to a photo of you and say, “That’s my grandad. That’s my dad’s great-aunt. They loved Jesus and that’s why I’m a Christian today.” Others will pick through stories of your life and marvel at how you loved and they will be pressed to pick up the mantel and, in so doing, find their “Why” too.

May your story (and mine) always be a story of prodigal love. Selah, beloved.

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God’s Job With Me

I have a disability. I am not, however, defined by it so I don’t consider myself a disabled person but, rather, a person with a disability. More to the point, my paralysis is what God is using – my platform – to demonstrate the out-raying of of His glory to the broken and hurting world around me.

Regrettably, in 1981, before I was introduced to handicapped status, my life was anything but a bright and shining testimony. Rather than traversing about about as a vessel of honor, I was a shipwreck waiting to happen. Had I stayed that course, you would not be reading this version of my testimony, but God, who is wise and merciful, saw an opportunity and put me in dry dock for some woefully needed reparation.

Before our man Job’s colossal Trial, he was a man of moral honor and of blameless character. Here, he and I part company really fast, with a wide berth between us! Before my own divine appointment, while supposedly preparing for a life of ministry at a Christian school in Tennessee, I opted rather to trip the light fantastic my junior year and explore options more cosmopolitan and earthly. Actually, I was more titillated by the prospect of a season in sin than falling headlong into it for fear of turning permanently away from God. That notion did horrify me. So maybe not the far, far country, but a few zip codes away suited me just fine.

Soon, however, the gravitational pull of Vanity Fair overtook me and I reached inside my soul and eagerly picked out some coins and paid the fare of some of its carnival attractions. The labyrinth of neon-lit avenues soon led me down darker alleyways and the introduction to even more seedy venues. These dens of iniquity were not for those who were merely playing at sin but for those looking to be actively employed by it.

Here I felt less in control. No longer was I picking the rides and selecting booths for momentary pleasure but felt they were somehow choosing me. Thanks be to God, my skin prickled. My gut told me to run for dear life. There opened before me a way of escape and I gladfully took it.

Wending my way outward through the maze of attractions, penitently reversing my travels, the carnies looked less friendly than at first, the places and atmospheres more insidious. Just you try and leave, they threatened.

You are trapped here forever…

The tangle of sideshows kept rearranging themselves, confusing the senses, prompting me to feel less hopeful about leaving. I kept running down promising lanes, expecting to pop out onto main arteries only to run into dead-ends leaving me exasperated and hopeless.

The profane grinding of a carnival organ and its incessant melodies sped up creating even more confusion. Sadistic people with snarkish smiles whirled about me and their faces blurred and morphed into visages macabre and demonic. There, in a grotesque blend of Grimm-worthy music and amusement, in the very nexus of Vanity Fair, I stopped and cried out for a supernatural deliverance from my agonies, to the only One who could. If He would even have me.

Miracle of miracles, not only would He, but He came to me with great tenderness and mercy.

The Call of the Carnival is undeniable but the Rescue of the Redeemer is epic!

It was during this episode of Divine Intervention that a friend placed in my hand a golden gift. This friend was well aware of my forays and foraging in the far country and came alongside me to buttress me as I wobbled on renewed legs. His “gift” was a plastic case, no larger than a paperback book, containing four cassette tapes, each a separate sermon from a pastor out west. The sermons were a four-part series of encouragement for those who were hurting.

The title on the cover read, “Gold In The Making”. I was captured.

My friend told me he had listened to Pastor Swindoll’s sermons over the summer and had also been accosted by the teaching that had seemed so alien to our theology: that God uses and even prescribes suffering for His children, that they might deepen in value and expand in power, being made weak in their trials. In short, we need fire in our life to purify, mold and empower us.

The fire softens us toward God and others.

The fire turns us to God in absolute dependence.

The fire increases the brightness of His glory in us.

Whatever this “fire” was, I knew I wanted it. I needed it. One of the sermons was a gem about Job. In that particular homily, Dr. Swindoll focused on Job’s crowning confession as we near the final stages of the debate with his trio of counselors, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar.

“He knows the way that I take and when He has tried me, I will come forth as gold.”*

The insightful pastor offered an unforgettable lesson, zeroing in on one of the primary Hebrew words in the text. He said the word “way” translates the word ‘derek‘ in the original. He explained it means “bent” as in the bent area of an archer’s bow. When an archer crafted his bow, he was well-acquainted with how much force of pull was needed to create the arch without breaking it. With great care and exertion, the craftsman would pull on each end with his foot unyieldingly positioned in its center, applying just the right amount of pressure so as not to completely break the object, but enough so as to achieve for it maximum effectiveness.

Dr. Swindoll imagined for the listener what the bow might say about the process if it could feel. Perhaps it would question why such merciless mistreatment! But, carrying the parable further along, he explained it is not the archer’s desire to destroy his instrument as that would defeat its purpose, but to fashion it according to his own need.

The point is well struck when we yield to the truth that God applies trials in just the same way for His own instruments of righteousness, always stretching us beyond our own natural ability to learn His super-ability in us. All of this, we realize, is for His own purpose and pleasure, but also our value and effectiveness.

As I listened with heart swelling and eyes blurred by the onslaught of emotion, I decided then and there I wanted my life to hit the mark, whatever it cost me, and utterly for His own glory. Forever and ever, amen.

And so, that’s how I initially became a marked man. My story doesn’t begin at the Ingle’s Memorial Hospital in Harvey, Illinois on the third of September, nineteen hundred and sixty. I like to think it began on the floor of my college dorm room about the time I was introduced to Job, sometime just before midnight in late September, twenty-one years later. I may as well have been a figment prior to that night, artificial and existentially challenged. Trueness didn’t find its way into my empty shell until I laid myself, body, spirit and soul, as a sacrifice to the Lord on an altar of industrial-grade carpet while my roommates slept the sleep of dreaming freshmen.

From my perspective, however, the sacrifice was an embarrassment. I seemed like an inferior lamb, a blind goat, a lame offering in the scheme of things. Would my heart’s Governor accept me on His table?** I carried the stink of sin, the scent of a far country, my carcass pitted with decay from the inside out.

Even so, the Holy One received me, warts, leprosy and all, lock, stock and barrel, though befouled and obscene, because He knows His fire will consume all my worst and produce His artistic best, transforming my drudge and dross into pure gold.

That’s God’s job and He takes His work very seriously. It’s my job to let Him.

From Job’s apogeic confession, I inherited three gleaming truths that still flank and support me as I accept life with a serious disability.

1. God Knows Where I Am
2. God Knows What I Can Become
3. God Knows What He’s Doing To Bring Me Into Fullness

Beneath the thick viscous sludge of dross that clung (and yet clings!) to me, the Divine Assayer saw a vault of priceless gold and made it His perfect plan to get to it. To that end, I made it my constant plea to call upon my Sovereign to administer His Fire to do its necessary work in me, of bringing out a fully transparent sheen, the out-raying of Christ, and making my life a glory to my God and an encouragement to His people.

One thing about ashes, they are visible reminders of a former existence, so when scripture says Job “sat down among the ashes”***, it could also point to a deeper reality that they were a graphic eulogy over his former days, that a new era was commencing, taking him from good enough**** to better, from great to greater, from former glory to grander glory, from fear to faith, from bronze to gold.

“Gold, God,” I sobbed, face buried in the threadbare carpet. “I want to be gold!”

Then: a holy, pregnant pause. “Take my life, take my legs…whatever it takes…”

My prayer ended. I’d said enough, it turns out.

The benediction over my funeral pyre that night, some thirty-two years ago as I rose on Amen legs, could only be heard in the Unseen Realm, sufficing as a Divine Directive, passing from Throne to the powers that waited:

“The kindling and the sacrifice are ready. Start the fire.”

A hasting to do the Father’s will, and these words followed His fiery cohort out of the Heavenly Temple:

“Quickly, now. There’s gold…”

__________________________________________________

*Job 23:10
**Malachi 1:8
***Job 2:8
****Job 1:1

God’s Job

“Are you still holding to your God?” she blurted.

The question, so venomously delivered, floored him both in its substance and tenor.

A pause. A pestering fly buzzed and lit, and with a grotesquely misshapen hand, like the rest of him, he swatted at it and instantly recoiled as the motion shot pain traveling down the bone of his boil-covered forearm.

His wife’s dark-chocolate eyes were a mix of pity, disgust and desperation and they held onto his own in unapologetic defiance.

Then, over lips cracked and oozing from painful blisters, were dislodged a brief salvo of words, measured but molten nonetheless, meant not to injure but correct.

“Woman!”

A wracking cough.

“Wife!” he chuffed, liquid pooling in his eyes, “even in the whirlwind He is still God!”

She opened her mouth as though to protest but no words could be conjured. Instead, she balled her fists until they were whitened from blood-loss, the skin over the knuckles stretched as tautly as they dare, and she swung them downward in a violent arc as she collapsed on folded legs. She landed with such force her knees were bloodied by bits of rock and force and, simultaneously, a cloud of dust went up as the sides of her fists pummeled that sad patch of earth again and again.

Her husband reached for her imploringly, but every movement spilled fire throughout his ravaged body. As he stooped lower to the ground more pustules opened along his spine causing milky fluid to spurt and run then coagulate with other rivulets of ooze. No position was comfortable, no shift in posture without serious repercussions. Some boils had burst and the viscous discharge began to dry-cake over large sections of his body, yet still he struggled to kneel beside the love of his heart. By then her face held a layer of chalky dust, through which the streaks of tears etched pitiful lines across and around her sallow cheeks.

Down there, in the ash, beside his wife, the broken man cried silently. Aside from the Great Cosmic Truth, he had no answers for their recent downturn of events and his pulverized soul was dying by degrees.

A horrifically Perfect Storm had converged on husband and wife in a single day and changed them forever. No inner resource imaginable could be summoned to counteract the briny poison they tasted as they helped each other up from wobbly knees. In a still-recent scene, both pairs of red-rimmed eyes willed the freshly dug graves to suddenly, somehow tremble and their ten resurrected children break through the tender, packed soil.

If only…

And not just their offspring but most of their household as well, silenced by marauding terrorists, their souls cut off with unspoken words henceforth trapped in their throats. In the melee of catastrophe, all was lost: household, livestock, wealth – their very subsistence! – ripped from their clutches! All that remained were fields of blood, the flotsam of tragedy, plumes of hellish smoke, ashes of heartache. The aftermath. And all this in a single day.

That was yesterday.

In the early morning of a sleepless night, a veil of unnatural blackness passed over the piteous man’s body and his skin prickled as fear squeezed his spirit.

What’s this — ?

The chill quickly gave way to a blazing fever that produced head-splitting pyrotechnics of fire and lightning. Instantly, his hands went to his head and the stultifying discovery of even more rising boils, these more monstrous than what earlier plagued him. In the light of a revived oil lamp he was literally watching as blister after blister began bubbling all up and down his arms. He clawed at his nightshirt as the pus-filled eruptions spread across his torso and brought multiplied agonies.

Oh, my God in heaven — !

By the first rays of dawn, there was not a single inch of his body that was not ravaged by festering boils. From crown to sole, he was tormented. Terrors invaded his mind and he knew only death could bring relief but death was obstinately elusive. Tortured to the point of wracking sobs of which he had no control, he sought comfort from the only human touch available, but she was closed in by her own grief.

Incredulous that her husband would persist in persistent worship of the One she held responsible, ire burned deep within, tempered only by despair and guilt. At one point, holding rags of gelatinous blood from her helpmate’s sores, she shut down completely and removed herself from the stink of the room and sloughed heavy-heeled out into the stale, rancid air, each step taking her lower to the ground until her body fell in a heap twenty paces from the front fold of their tent. She lay there, in the dirt, motionless.

The candle of her once-bright spirit had flickered out; all life, save the doleful beating of her heart, had begun its slow, mournful descent into hades.

A single slit of light from the tent-fold shone like a thin, glowing sword on the floor as the broken man gathered himself for the silent pilgrimage where his unsightliness and suffering would be shielded from view and his groanings well out of ear-shot. Yard by agonizing mile he shuffled and struggled, distancing himself from his wife who lay face-down, crumpled in suspended shock, arms stretched and hands clawing at the ash.

At the outer edge of all that was once familiar and pastoral, on the outskirts of the main settlement, were the dumping grounds, where a pit of fire burned refuse day and night.

Here, he could wail.

Here, he could formulate his arguments.

Here, he could make his final altar to his God, whom he clung to for dear life and, if necessary, to its bitterest end.

As the sun baptized itself beneath the craggy horizon, a pitiful silhouetted figure of a patriarch, a dark smudge against the monochromed dusk, bowed atop a heap of ash and worshipped Elohim with the music of broken shards of discarded refuse scraping against his diseased flesh, taking great care not to curse deity with his blistered lips.

And thus it is that this greatly suffering servant of Elohim soon discovers his great value to the Almighty and wealth that has little to do with ledgers and portfolios.

Days?

Weeks?

Longer? (Who knows?)

Months? Probably not months. The Trial of Yob was underway and his Character Witness had not shown up to take the stand on the defendant’s behalf. There was, however, a team of deftly-trained prosecutors who postured themselves on the opposite side, tilting the courtroom floor on the wizened merits of their own arguments. Back and forth it went, each round-robin of questioning getting more and more aggressive and viciously personal, but the lone man Yob maddeningly (for them) deflected each diatribe and proudly held his ash-laden ground.

How obscene that a man of such inarguable distinction should suffer such relentless and ignominious persecution and proverbial salt-rubbing! How unkind their condescensions! Was there no end to their delusions that they would be hand-picked by the Almighty to protect the honor of His Name?

While these self-promoting sages wrestled their opponent with predictable wisdom and quasi-rational rhetoric, the beaten-down man sought audience with Higher Counsel and Transcendent Revelation, so, at times, the gallery (you and I) catch him in a different dimension almost, the dronings of The Three becoming a collective mist dissipating against the rising warmth of Yob’s impassioned appeals to a Majestic-Though-Silent Cosmic Court.

“I cannot see You!” he barks to the heavens, “but I know You can see me!”

A couple of flies strafed the pitiful patriarch, who had barely enough strength to swat them away anymore, by which they lit again and again, having no decency to stay away from the victimized man. Yob’s red-rimmed eyes lowered in resignation. He sighed.

Then, marvelously and mysteriously, his slumping head raised again as he sucked in a half-lungful of steamy air. Summoning strength he did not have and, with lowered voice, formed his next words with great care.

“And I know this…”

A series of choking coughs.

“…I know…”

Another brittle, cracked cough.

“…He knows I will come through this…”

A corresponding, but very weak wave of a ruined arm.

“…like…like…”

A spasm of pain, drawing a deeply pained expression.

“…like…gold.”