The Joy of Self-Sacrifice

“And when the burnt offering began, the song of the Lord began alsd with the trumpets.” — 2 CHRON. xxix. 27.

IT had been a day of joy and triumph in Jerusalem. Hezekiah, the king, reviving the faith and worship of Jehovah, from which his fathers had departed, had opened the doors of the temple and cleared out all the rubbish of the long neglect, and gathered the priests and lighted the lamps and summoned the people, and to-day there had been a vast sacrifice to the Lord, in which the people had once more declared themselves His servants, and given up again their personal and national life to Him. The burnt offering declared their penitence and consecration. It was the nation’s solemn sacrifice of itself to God. The verse which I have quoted tells us one thing about this sacrifice. It records the joy with which it was made — “When the burnt offering began, the song of the Lord began with the trumpets.” Not in a gloomy silence, as if the people were doing a hard duty which they would not do if they could help it, did the smoke of their offering ascend to God; but with a burst of jubilant music and with a song of triumphant joy which rang down through the crowded courts, the host of the Jews claimed for themselves anew their place in the obedience of God. The act of sacrifice was done amid a chorus of delight.

The old sacrifices are past and done forever. There are no more smoking altars or bleeding beasts; but that which they represented still remains, and will remain so long as man and God are child and Father to each other. The giving up of the life of man away from himself to serve his true and rightful Master, the surrender of his life to another, self-sacrifice, which is what these burnt offerings picturesquely represented, is universally and perpetually necessary. As we study the old ceremony, that which it represented stands before us; and one question which comes up, the question which I want to make the subject of my sermon for this morning, is that which is suggested by the verse in the old book of Chronicles, in which the rejoicing of the people over their burnt offering is written. It is not beasts, but lives that we offer. Can the life, too, be offered now as the beast was offered of old, with song and trumpet? Can self-sacrifice be a thing of triumph and exhilaration? Can it be the conscious glorification of a life to give that life away in self-denial? The joy and glory of self-sacrifice shall be our subject.

You know how strangely such a subject must sound even to many very good and conscientious people. Multitudes of people there are all about us, who thoroughly accept it as the great law and necessity of human life that there must be self-sacrifice. It is not only that they have been taught it from their earliest youth; not merely that they find it written in what are recognized as the highest codes of human living; but their own experience and their own hearts have taught it to them. They see that the world would be a dreadful and intolerable place if every creature in it lived only for his own mere immediate indulgence. They own that the higher nature and the higher purpose every where have a right to the submission of the lower, and they freely accept the conviction that the lower must submit. The different forms of self-sacrifice stand around them with their demands. There is the need that a man should sacrifice himself to himself, his lower self to his higher self, his passions to his principles. There is the need of sacrificing one’s self for fellow-men. There is the highest need of all, the need of giving up our will to God’s. All of these needs a man will own and honor. He will try to meet them all his life. But when you come to talk of joy in meeting them, that is another matter. Self-sacrifice seems to him something apart from the whole notion of enjoyment. It is a disagreeable necessity of life. It seems to be tied on to life by some strange fate, as if it were the result of some terrible mistake. Perhaps the man is a’ble to recognize that the necessity is made use of for some purposes of education, and so is not wholly unthankful that the necessity exists; but to rejoice over it, to give up our own will, to sacrifice our pleasure and take up our task with a song, — that is something which most men, even those who work on most scrupulously at their duty cannot comprehend. “I know it is my duty because I hate it so,” somebody said to me once about some task. That is the look of duty to multitudes of men. The highest dream of the poet is of a state of things in which we shall know that something is our duty because we love it so; the condition in which “love is an unerring light and joy its own security.” That condition, in whatever region of the universe the soul attained to it, would be heaven; and yet it would be only the realization and completion of that which was set forth in the old ceremony of the book of Chronicles, in which the sacrifice was greeted with the blast of the trumpets and the songs of the people.

Heaven seems impossible, and yet there are promises and prophecies of heaven on every side of us. There are always glimpses of man’s highest life which show us, like the first streaks of light before the dawn, what it would be if all the sky were filled with glory; and so there are always exalted lives, and exalted moments in the lives, I hope, of all of us, in which we do catch sight of the joy and glory of self-sacrifice. Not many years ago, when the young men went to the war, was it not true that the fact of sacrifice intensified the joy? It was a joy to save their country, to feel sure, as it is not often given to men vividly to feel, that they were doing a real and valuable part of her salvation. But tell me, what made the difference between their going and the patient plodding of the clerk up to the State House, or the quiet journey of the congress man to Washington to-day? They too, if they are honest and faithful, are saving the country just as truly as the soldiers were. Why does the one trudge the streets unnoticed, while before the others trumpets blew, and around them the crowd shouted, and in their bosoms their hearts leaped for joy? It is easy to say that it was the poetry, the romance, the enthusiasm. Those are mere words. The essence of it was that in their going the self-sacrifice was vivid and distinct. They were leaving home and friends and safety and comfort. Ah, you are very young, too young to remember the spirit of those days, if you do not know that that self-sacrifice was not a drawback on the joy of the truest men’s enlistment; it was a part and parcel of that joy. No safe and easy task could ever have filled the heart with such a sober and deep delight.

Or think about a man who does something which you choose to call a piece of superfluous mercantile honesty, but something which, under the higher compulsions that press upon his loftier nature, he thinks that it is absolutely necessary for him to do. He has failed in business and he has settled with his creditors; and they are satisfied with what they have got from him, and give him a full discharge from all his obligations; and by and by the man succeeds again and then, as he begins to grow rich once more, he takes upon himself the payment, principal and interest, of his old debts. He lives like a poor man still. He will not let his life grow sumptuous till first it has grown ’ honest. Do you say, “What a slavery! What a tyrant his conscience is to him!” But to him it is the most enthusiastic freedom. He goes his way with his heart making music to him all the day long, and following his conscience as no most devoted soldier ever followed his half-worshipped captain. Every time that another comfort is laid upon the altar of his honesty, the song of the Lord begins with the trumpets. There may be in it some mixture of unworthy pride; but, if there is, it is an alloy and not a refinement, a decrease and not an increase of the joy. It makes it nervous, restless, and impatient. But leave that out. Let the man simply want to be honest, and then the self-sacrifice, by which alone his honesty can be done, is a true element in his delight. He is happier in his slow payment of his self-recognized debt, in which each dollar that he pays means some distinct piece of self-sacrifice, than he could be if boundless wealth had suddenly tumbled upon him from the skies, of which he, without an effort, had easily handed over a little fragment to his creditors.

The words of our text then, however strangely they sound at first, are literally true as the history of many a man’s life. Many and many a man has gone on year after year, with little or no zest in his existence, perfectly self-indulgent, seeing no need, hearing no call to be anything else than self-indulgent, until at last there came some change which seemed at first to be a terrible misfortune, something which threw the whole heavy weight of other people’s lives upon the shoulders of this one life, so that it had to forget itself and live completely for these others. And then how can you tell the story of the difference which came into that burdened life? What words can tell it more perfectly than these, “When the burnt offering began, the song of the Lord began also with the trumpets “? From the moment that it began to live for other people, this nature, which had had no song in it before, became jubilant with music. The young self-indulgent man becomes the head of a family that taxes his thought by day and night. The merely selfish thinker, who has worked out his thoughts for the mere luxury of thinking, suddenly finds the world calling for him to plunge into the detail of some work of charity or education. Anything comes which makes a man take up his life as it were in his two hands and give it away to be thenceforth lived not for himself but for others, who, he has to acknowledge, have a better right to it, the right of an imperious need. At first there is reluctance, hesitation. The teeth are set. The hands are clenched. The eyes look back as if they were leaving all the happiness of life behind them. But ask the man a few years later; nay, look at him after he has thoroughly lost himself in his new work, and when you see what life has come to be to him, what spring there is in every movement, what sparkle in every thought, what eagerness, what interest, what hope; is it not clear that just that which has come to him, just the abandonment of selfishness and some strong impulsive giving of himself away to other people, was what was needed to fill all the accumulations of his life with joy, and to clothe all the qualities of his character with glory?

As one looks round upon the community to-day, how clear the problem of hundreds of unhappy lives appears. Do we not all know men for whom it is just as clear as daylight that that is what they need, the sacrifice of themselves for other people? Kich men who with all their wealth are weary and wretched; learned men whose learning only makes them querulous and jealous; believing men whose faith is always souring into bigotry and envy, — every man knows what these men need; just something which shall make them let them selves go out into the open ocean of a complete self-sacrifice. They are rubbing and fretting and chafing .themselves against the wooden wharves of their own interests to which they are tied. Sometime or other a great, slow, quiet tide, or a great, strong, furious storm, must come and break every rope that binds them, and carry them clear out to sea; and then they will for the first time know the true, manly joy for which a man was made, as a ship for the first time knows the full joy for which a ship was made, when she trusts herself to the open sea and, with the wharf left far behind, feels the winds over her and the waters under her, and recognizes her true life. Only, the trust to the great ocean must be complete. No trial trip will do. No ship can tempt the sea and learn its glory, so long as she goes moored by any rope, however long, by which she means to be drawn back again if the sea grows too rough. The soul that trifles and toys with self-sacrifice never can get its true joy and power. Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give.

One would not seem to be so foolish as to say that self-sacrifice does not “bring pain. Indeed it does. The life of Christ must be our teacher there. He carried the song and the trumpet always in his heart. That life, marking its way with drops of blood, on which the pity of the world has dwelt more tenderly than over any other life it knows, has yet always seemed to the world’s best standards to be a true triumphal march, radiant with splendor all along the way, and closing in a true victory at last. Indeed I think that one of the brightest insights which we ever get into the human heart and its essential breadth and justice, and its power, when it is working at its best, to hold what seem contradictory ideas in their true spiritual harmony, is given to us when we see how men have been able to see together both sides of the life of Jesus, to pity His sorrow and to glory in His happiness, and yet to blend both of these two thoughts of Him into one single idea of one single self-consistent Christ. It is a sort of witness of how truly men, in that highest mood into which they are drawn when they try to study Christ, easily see the real truth with regard to human life, which is that in it joy and pain, so far from being inconsistent with and contradictory to one another, are, in some true sense, each others’ complements, and neither alone, but both together, make the true sum of human life. There is a conceivable world where pure, unclouded joy can come, just as there are countries where the mountains are very lofty and all nature is on so grand a scale that it can bear a pure, unclouded sky, and in its unveiled splendor perfectly satisfy the eye. But there are other lands whose inferior grandeur needs for its perfect beauty the effects of mist and cloud that give its lower mountains the mystery and poetry which they could not have in themselves. So one may compare the Swiss and the Scotch landscapes. And something of the same sort is true about this world and marks its inferiority, proves that it is not yet the perfect state of being. It needs the pain of life to emphasize its joy. Its joy is not high or perfect enough to do without the emphasis of pain. And so, to come back to the point whence we digressed, it is not strange that that which is the necessary condition of joy in this human life — namely, self-sacrifice — should be also inevitably associated with suffering and pain.

There is another reason why it would seem to be absolutely necessary that man should have the power of finding pleasure in his self-sacrifices, in the actual fulfilment of his compelled tasks, the actual doing of the necessary duties of his life, and that is found in the fact that joy or delight in what we are doing is not a mere luxury; it is a means, a help for the more perfect doing of our work. Indeed it may be truly said that no man does any work perfectly who does not enjoy his work. Joy in one’s work is the consummate tool with out which the work may be done indeed, but without which the work will always be done slowly, clumsily, and without its finest perfectness. Men who do their work without enjoying it are like men carving statues with hatchets. The statue gets carved perhaps, and is a monument forever of the dogged perseverance of the artist; but there is a perpetual waste of toil, and there is no fine result in the end. A man who does his work with thorough enjoyment of it is like an artist who holds an exquisite tool which is almost as obedient to him as his own hand, and seems to understand what he is doing, and almost works intelligently with him. If the only loss of a man who hates his work were the mere loss of the luxury of enjoying it, that would be bad; but if, in the loss of the enjoyment of his work, he loses a large part of the power for the most effective doing of his work, then it is a matter far more serious. I passed, the other day, a pawn-broker’s shop in an ob scure street here in our city. Its windows showed the usual shabby and wretched refuse which belongs to such places, that sort of battered and broken driftwood which the tide of, human energy and hope and success has left stranded on the beach when it has ebbed out to sea. But one window was a great deal sadder than the other. In the first window there were tawdry and faded trinkets, old jewelry and bits of cheap personal finery, which poverty had confiscated from their desperate or careless owners; but in the other window there were piles of workmen’s tools — hammers and saws and planes and files and axes — the things with which men do their work and earn their living. That was the sadder window of the two. To lose a trinket is mortification and disappointment, but to lose a tool may be ruin. And so if joy in work were a mere polish and decoration of life, it would be sad that man should not have it; but if it is the means by which alone the work of life may be effectively and nobly done, then its loss may be the very loss of life itself.

I think we want to urge most strenuously upon young men the need, the absolute necessity, that in the appointed and demanded work of their life they should look for and should find the joy of their life. To do your work because you must; to do your work as a slavery; and then, having got it done as speedily and easily as possible, to look somewhere else for enjoyment, — that makes a very dreary life. No man who works so does the best work. No man who works so lingers lovingly over his work and asks himself if there is not something he can do to make it more perfect. “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work,” said Jesus. No doubt it was the intrinsic nobleness of His special work that made it peculiarly abundant in the enjoyment which it furnished Him; and no doubt any young man who has the choice of several occupations ought to choose that which is intrinsically highest, that which is occupied with the noblest things. This indeed is what makes some professions more liberal than others, — the greater power which they have to satisfy and cultivate the nature of the men who live in them; but our counsel must not be confined to them. To any man engaged in any honest, useful work, we want to say: Try just as far as possible to find the pleasure of your life in the work to which it has been settled that your life must be given. Study its principles. Let your interest dwell on its details. Make it delightful by the affections which cluster round it, by the help which you are able through it to give to other people, by the education which your own faculties are getting out of it. In all these ways make your business the centre and fountain of your joy, and then life will be healthy and strong. Then you will not be running everywhere to find some outside pleasure which shall make up to you for your self-sacrificing toil; but the scenes of your self-sacrificing toil itself, your store or your office or your work-bench, shall be bright with associations of delight, and vocal with your thankfulness to the God who has given you, in them, the most radiant revelations of Himself. This is the only true transfiguration and success of labor and of life.

And now, what is to be done about all this? Men say, “0, yes, it is easy to talk about finding your joy in your self-sacrifice and work; but I have tried it, and it cannot be done. Self-sacrifice is dreadful and unnatural. We know that we cannot escape it; but there is no joy in it. The only thing to do is to get through with it as doggedly and speedily as possible, and then go off and in some self-indulgence find the real pleasure of your life.” But surely that is shallow, superficial talk. To talk so is to take for granted that self-sacrifice is one invariable thing, and not to see that it is infinitely various according to the difference of the men who make the sacrifice, and the difference of their relations to the thing for which the sacrifice is made. Understand this and then the difficulty disappears. Is the sacrifice which the most scrupulous and faithful servant makes for a child the same thing as the sacrifice which the loving mother makes for him? Is the self-sacrifice of the hired mercenary the same thing as the sacrifice of the enthusiastic patriot? There is the key to the whole truth. If you can change a man’s relation to the thing or the person for whom he makes his sacrifice, you may change the whole character of the sacrifice itself; and you may open in it fountains of delight which would have seemed before to be impossible. Nothing less deep than that will answer. You cannot go to men to whom self-sacrifice is misery or drudgery, and exhort them to be happy, and tell them and bid them believe that self-sacrifice is joy. That is treating them like children. That is merely beating a drum before them at their work, and asking them to make believe that work is play. Nor can you trust to mere animal spirits, and that happy temperament which will let some people find joy in life in spite of any sacrifices that they are called to make. You must have something a great deal realler, deeper, and more universal than either of these; and that can be nothing short of such a relation of a man to the object of his sacrifice, such an honor for it, such a sense of its dignity, such a sight of its possibilities, as will make it a delight to give one’s self up to it, and will make every pain that is involved in such surrender a welcome emphasis upon his value and honor for it, and so an increase of his joy. Earlier in this sermon I spoke of the three great classes into which all the sacrifices which men are called upon to make may really be divided. There are the sacrifices which a man makes of himself to himself, of his lower nature and needs to his higher nature and needs; there are the sacrifices which he makes for his fellow-men; and there are the sacrifices which he makes for God. In these three services the world of conscientious men lives and works. And very often these services are bondages. Very often the world groans bitterly under these burdens which it will not cast away, and yet which press very heavily upon its shoulders. Can anything relieve all that? Suppose that some new power, some new revelation or new fact, should come into the world, which should change a man’s relation to his own self, and to his fellow-men, and to God. Then everything would certainly be altered. Let some new light shine forth, within whose radiance man should see his own spiritual self in all its possibilities; and see his brethren with their souls, and all that their souls might become, burning and glowing through their coarse, dull bodies; and see God as the dear Father and glorious centre of the world; — let all this come, and then the impossible may surely become possible, and the self-sacrifice for things so glorious, while it does not lose its pain, may find within its pain a joy of which its pain shall be mysteriously a

part. And, 0 my friends, the truth of these days, the truth of this week, is that such a light has shone and is forever shining on the earth. “The time draws near the birth of Christ.” This coming week is rich with Christmas glory. The thing that makes it glorious, the only thing that can give dignity to all this annual outbreak of thankfulness and joy, is that the Christmas days are full of the truth of Christ’s redemption of the world. Christ’s redemption of the world means, for each man who truly believes in it, just these three things: the revelation to the man of his own value, and of the value of his fellow-man, and of the dearness and greatness of God. The man who has despised himself and thought his life not worth the living, learns that this human nature of his is capable of being inhabited by divinity, and sees in the cross of the Son of God what God thinks is the preciousness of his human soul. Must not that man then stand in awe before himself, and rejoice if, by the sacrifice of his appetites, he can help this regal soul to its completeness? The man who has despised his fellowmen and asked himself, “Why should I give up my pleasure for their pleasure, or even for their good?” sees in the redemption how Christ values these lives, and is not so much shamed out of his contempt for them as drawn freely forward into the precious privilege of honoring them and working for them. The man whose God has been far off and cold sees God in Christ, and loves Him with a love which makes life seem worth the living, simply that it may be devoted to work for Him. This is the power of Christ’s redemption. It transfigures to a man his own soul and his brethren and God; and, seeing them in the new light of Christ, the man lifts up his head, and his old tasks are altered. To work for such masters becomes the glory of his life. Not how he may do as little work as possible, and then escape to find his pleasure in some region of self-indulgence; but how he may do as much work as possible, because in work for such masters is the seat and fountain of his joy, becomes the problem of his life. To be shut out from any chance of signifying by self-sacrifice in their behalf his value and honor for these masters, would make his life seem very worthless. When a new chance to put his passions down that he may win character, or to give up some pleasure of his own out of the wish to honor his brother man and help him, or to sacrifice his own will to the will of God, — when such a chance is seen coming towards him in the distance, it is not, as it used to be, as if the culprit saw the executioner approaching him with the sword all drawn to take his life. Kather it is as if the born king, who had just discovered his royal lineage, saw the priest coming towards him with the crown which was to be put upon his head and make him thoroughly and manifestly king. He claims his self-sacrifice. It is the badge and means of his enthronement. And when he takes it; when he enters, for his own soul’s good, or for the help of his fellow-men, or for the glory of his God, upon some path which men call very dark, or some work which men call very hard; it is with a leap of heart as if now at last the king had found his own. When his burnt offering begins, his song of the Lord begins also with the trumpets.

It is a wondrous change. The man who really lives in the world of Christ’s redemption, claims his self-sacrifices. He goes up to his martyrdom with a song.

To live in this world, and do nothing for one’s own spiritual self or for fellow-man or for God, is a terrible thing. I have a right to give the less as a burnt offering to the greater. There is no happy life except in such consecration. No one shall shut me out of that privilege of my redeemed humanity.

I wish that I could speak to the spirit of the most selfish creature here to-day. I wish I could show him what a vast region of pleasure and delight lies close at his side, on which he has never entered, of which he has never dreamed. The door that shuts him out of that great region of joy is his own contempt. If he will let Christ fill the world for him with the light of His redemption, contempt must fall to the ground, and the closed door must fly open, and then, “with the song of the Lord and with the trumpets,” the selfish man must go out from his selfishness into the untasted and unguessed joy of self-sacrifice. He must “enter into the joy of his Lord,” the joy of that Christ whose meat was to do His Father’s will, who gave His life for His brethren, and whose throne was a cross.