Last Wednesday many of you began a discipline that you had planned to carry out for the entire season of Lent. Perhaps you planned to give up caffeine or television, chocolate or red meat. Maybe you had hoped to let go of an old grudge or planned to reduce your spending during lent so that you would have more money to give to the poor. Ultimately your goal had been to show your commitment to the One who both freely gives and freely gave even when it meant laying down His own life. But that was last Wednesday and you’ve already had many cups of coffee, decided television didn’t include the news, made the executive decision that chocolate had to stay and slipped in a steak last Sunday.
Following the One who laid down his life is a lot more work than we sometimes admit. This week as I was breaking my commitment to cut down on my television intake I watched the movie Dead Man Walking and I was moved by a line that came near the end of the movie. One of the characters whose child had been brutally murdered said to the nun, who had cared for the murderer of his child, “I just don’t have your faith.” And the nun responded, “This isn’t faith. This is work.” And I was reminded that the discipline of sacrifice has little to do with the fluffy feelings of faith. Rather, sacrifice is something we commit to even though we don’t feel like it and even when we have little desire to carry it out and that will always require work in direct proportion to faith.
Several years ago I lived in a flat directly above two young men. I had made the decision not only to be a good neighbor but also to go beyond that and care for them in a sacrificial way in the hope that I would be able to introduce them to the Jesus who sacrificed for them. Now these two men had two dogs which spent the majority of their time barking and pooping, neither of which I was terribly fond of particularly because the young men seemed not to notice either. As a result the noise was incessant and the poop was prolific.
Several weeks into my sacrificing I stepped out my door and placed my foot squarely in a pile of poop. Now at this moment my commitment to sacrificial living met its match. I must admit I was not praying for these two men in that moment. “Ricken, schnicken…mumble, grumble…stupid, poopid”(please feel free to add all the words a follower of Jesus tries not to say, at least out loud). It was at that moment that God spoke to me, “Are you going to let a little **** get in the way?”
Now first of all I was shocked because I didn’t know that God spoke in such direct terms but after I recovered from the shock I was able to admit that that was exactly what I was doing. And so I cleaned the poop off the bottom of my shoe marched upstairs and grabbed as many Jewel plastic bags as I could. I returned to the pile of poop and picked it up and then continued the discipline around my entire block, picking up piles that were not my own. When my bags were full I through them in the trash and asked the good Lord to put all my **** in there with it.
Lent gives us the opportunity to move into the discipline of sacrifice. If you’ve stayed with it for an entire week let me encourage you to keep going. If you’ve let go of the discipline you intended let me encourage you to pick it back up again. And let me encourage you with something that I learned from picking up other people’s poop. Sacrifice is rarely a matter of “I want to.” I mean who wants to pick up poop. Sacrifice falls not into the category of want but instead into the category of will as in “I don’t want to, but I will”. Sacrifice is not a matter of desire, but rather a decision to enter into a discipline that will bring you closer to the one who did not desire to die, but made a decision to let the Lord’s will be done by laying down his life.
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