The Song of Sacrifice
“Sacrifice and offering Thou didst not desire; mine ears hast Thou opened.... Then said /, Zo, I come.... I delight to do Thy wUl% O my God? — Ps. xL 6-8.
“Mine ears hast Thou opened.” It is as if the Psalmist had caught the sound of a far-off strain of music, a music of preternatural loveliness. It is as if he said, I hear what I never heard before — a song in whose tones there is not a chord of sadness, in whose melody there is not a note of gloom, but only praise — unqualified, incessant praise. And what was the burden of this new song to which the Psalmist listened with open ears? It was the voice of One as yet far distant, but who was drawing ever nearer with a new message to the soul. And the message which He was foreshadowing was this: Ye men of Israel, I tell you that there is a time coming when there shall be no more pain. Your religion is now all pain together; you are serving God with sacrifice, with fear, with trembling. There is no joy in your approach to the Infinite Glory; your very gifts are wrung from you, and you value what you give by your difficulty in giving it. But I am coming to reveal to you a more excellent way — not to abolish the gift, but to abolish the sacrifice. I am coming to give to your Father in heaven a donation that in all the years He has never received before — the delight of a human heart. I am coming to yield up to His service a tribute which was never before thought to be in a servant’s power to give — the offering of a free will, the surrender of a voluntary life. I will not offer my pain but my joy. You have yielded up to your Father only the cries of tortured victims; I shall yield up in your behalf a life whose constant dying shall be its constant song of praise. “Lo, I come: I delight to do Thy will, 0 my God.”
Son of Man, Thou who hast ushered in this day of painless worship, help me to enter into Thy joy. Breathe on me that I may receive the same Divine Spirit — the spirit of surrender without sense of sacrifice. Teach me day by day that what my Father wishes is not my Gethsemane, but my will; not my experience of suffering, but my power to rejoice in Him in spite of my experience of suffering. Reveal to me that my sacrifice is never perfect in my Father’s sight until in the view of my spirit it is a sacrifice no more. Then and only then shall I know what it is to be made coniformable unto Thy death, to have fellowship with Thy suffering, to be in communion with Thy cross. I shall learn that dying is life, that loss is gain, that perfect sacrifice is fulness of joy. There shall be no more death, there shall be no more pain, there shall be no more tears, for the former things shall have passed
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away, when through Thy Spirit I shall be able to say, “I delight to do Thy will, 0 my God.”