The Daily Cross--Sacrifice

T. A. Hegre has some poignant words about the life of the Lord Jesus expressed in us for others. This is from his book The Cross and Sanctification:

"This is the way Paul lived. He said, 'I die daily' (1 Cor. 15:31). As we have mentioned before, the context is very plain and shows clearly that this reference is not dying to sin but actual physical death, a daily willingness to hazard his life to death. The preceding verse says, 'We stand in jeopardy every hour.' The following verse says, 'After the manner of men I fought with beasts at Ephesus.' It would require the greatest stretch of the imagination and the greatest liberty in exegesis to apply this to death to sin. It does not at all refer to sin here but to his willingness to sacrifice his life that others might live. Someone has said, 'I once saw the trail of a bleeding hare on the snow.' How that describes the life of the apostle Paul--'in deaths oft.' Wherever he went, he left his blood. He never saved himself, but over and over again literally sacrificed himself.

"Yes, friends, when we are 'taken' by the Cross, we too will live sacrificial lives because we love Christ. The crisis of sanctification, including cleansing from indwelling sin and the filling with the Holy Spirit, merely gives quality to our life so that we can present it to God as a living sacrifice. The crisis of sanctification is no substitute for sacrificial living. Those who have already been made pure, holy, and acceptable are called by the mercies of God to present themselves as a living sacrifice. The crisis of sanctification is not the end but merely the means to an end in the Christian life. God saves and also sanctifies us in order that our lives will have the proper quality that can produce good fruit. Jesus said the same thing in just a little different way: 'Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit' (John 12:24). We plant good seed, purified seed, seed with life in it. But it is planted not for purification but for reproduction. It is necessary first for us to be made pure and made holy so that our lives will have proper quality. Yet we must not stop there, but allow ourselves to be planted into a deeper experience of death so that fruit will be the result.

"That great soldier of the cross, Willis Hotchkiss, was once telling of his early life in Kenya Colony, East Africa. In those days of pioneer mission work (about 1895) missionaries had to live on native fare (even ants), for they could take along little equipment and no special food. Once he lived, so he said, for two and one half months on beans and sour milk. Another time, for weeks on end he was without the commonest of all necessities--salt. He also mentioned his fear of attacks from man-eating lions. They had other sufferings too. After giving a long account of the dangers of living there, of how many lost their lives, and of the costliness of the whole thing, he concluded by saying, 'But don’t talk to me about sacrifice. It is no sacrifice. In the face of the superlative joy of that one overwhelming experience, the joy of flashing that miracle word, Saviour, for the first time to a great tribe that had never heard it before, I can never think of these forty years in terms of sacrifice. I saw Christ and His Cross and I did this because I loved Him.' Then he quoted Watt’s matchless song:

When I survey the wondrous Cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

"'Do you like your work?' someone asked another missionary in Africa. 'Like this work?' he replied; 'No, my wife and I do not like dirt. We have reasonably refined sensibilities. We do not like crawling into vile huts through goat refuse. We do not like association with ignorant, filthy, brutish people. But is a man to do nothing for Christ which he does not like? God pity such a one. Liking or disliking has nothing do with it. We have orders to go and we go. Love constrains us.' Such is the drawing power of the Cross."