The Altar of Sacrifice
‘■ If I am offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy’’ (Phil. ii. 17, 18).
What a man is this apostle, in his masculine strength, in his exquisite courtesy, in his constant readiness to spend and be spent for others. Many Christians are satisfied with expenditure in which there is no “shedding of blood.” They give away what they can easily spare. Their gifts are detached things, and the surrender of them necessitates no bleeding. They engage in sacrifice so long as it does not involve life; when the really vital is demanded they are not to be found. They are prominent at all “triumphal entries,” and they willingly spend a little money on gay decorations — on banners and palm-branches; but when “Huzzahs” and “Hosannas” change into ominous murmurs and threats, and Calvary comes into
sight, they steal away into safe seclusion. But here is an apostle who joyfully anticipates this supreme and critical demand. He is almost impatient at his own dribblings of bloodenergy’ in the service of the Kingdom! He is eager, if need be, to pour it out. He has just mentioned his labours in the ministry of the Churches, but he feels as though these labours are scarcely worth the naming, and he turns his eager, ambitious eyes to vaster possibilities still, even to the laying down of life itself. “If I am offered” (literally, poured out as a drink offering) “upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy.”
Let us pause to realise a little more fully the strong and gracious figure which the Apostle employ’s. First of all he addresses these Philippian converts in their newly acquired and gloriously dignified role of priests unto God. He conceives them as standing and ministering at the altar; the victims of the sacrifice are not goats or lambs but their own faith and the fruits of it. It is a beautiful and inspiring figure. Only occasionally could they go to the temple altar, and take their offering with them. This altar was in their own hearts, in the temples of the Holy Ghost, and the fire could burn continually, and the sacrifice never need cease, and these disciples were independent of the official priesthood; each and every man could wear the sweet, clean linen, and stand by his own altar fire, and place upon the consecrating flame the fruits of his own thought and life. It is the privilege of the Christian priesthood to offer everything in the holy sacrifice. We can offer our thought, our purposes, our desires, our affections, our courtesies, our social intercourse, our daily labour, our daily bread, our moments of leisure, the season when merriment breaks through the dreary commonplace like bubbling springs through desert sands, our sorrows and our joys, — we can take them all and with clean hands place them upon the altar so that the offering shall be unending, and the smoke of sacrifice rises night and day.
If on our daily course our mind
Be set to hallow all we find,
New treasures still, of countless price,
God will provide for sacrifice.
And all this is just what these Philippian Christians were doing. These priests and priestesses were busy at their altars, the jailer and his household, and Lydia and her friends of the prayer-meeting who met by the river-side. And now the Apostle, suffering imprisonment at Rome, felt that his own offering was one with the offering made at Philippi; so much so, that it seemed to him as but one altar, and that if he is called upon to die for the faith, it will be like the pouring out of a drink offering upon their own sacrifice. Each sacrifice will be enriched by the presence of the other, and they at Philippi, and he at Rome, will co-operate in sending heavenward “the odour of a sweet smell, acceptable unto God.” And for all this the aged warrior is ready. “I am now ready to be offered.” “If I am offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy.”
And now let us note how the Apostle counsels his fellow-believers to seek and find their joy in one another’s sacrifice. “I joy, and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me.” This is the great secret in imparting a sense of buoyancy and triumph in the Christian life. No man ever sacrificed himself without entering into “the joy of the Lord.” But let us also remember that our own joy is more than doubled when we enter into the sacrificial joy of others, and regard our offerings as placed upon the same altar. Another man’s joy brings tonic to our own, as his joy is braced and invigorated by ours. I wonder, when our Saviour saw the poor widow casting “two mites into the treasury,” and saw that it meant the shedding of blood, whether He linked the deed with the already looming and stupendous transaction of Calvary? Surely it must have been so. Surely our Lord found joy in her sacrifice, as surely in the after-days the poor widow found eternal joy in His. The sacrificial spirit is one, and all the sons of sacrifice are priests at the same altar. We in this latter day are one with the “bleeding saints” of all time; we can rejoice with all the martyr band which in every age has spent its treasure in the cause of the Kingdom of God.