(Originally Written Sunday, January 22nd, 2006)

Today is Sunday and you know what that means. That means you get another little entry about church, God, Jesus and all that good stuff. Depending on who you are you'll either read this post or skip it. Either one is fine for me, I don't judge what you choose to read. Unless you read Terry Goodkind. Heh.

If you've forgotten, this month's focus is how to get closer to God. The first one was about having a comunitry to help you worship. Last weeks was the painfully short one about service. This week's is about sacrifice. Again, I pray that the words from my mind and the meditations from my heart are forever delightful in God's eyes.

So what is sacrifice? I think the most obvious example is what the Man did a couple of millenia ago when he got himself nailed to a cross. Jesus is well known in Chrisitanity as the Ultimate Sacrifice. Why is that? Because he gave up his life for us. This means he'd leave his friends behind. He'd leave his family* behind. He died so that the people who actually killed him would go to heaven. To paraphrase, He died so that we could live and have eternal life. Imagine that right now. Imagine giving up ever hugging your mother again, ever playing videogames with your best friend ever again. That was something.

So why does sacrifice get us closer to God? God wants us to be like Jesus. Jesus was a good man, He always helped people on the street, healed the sick, prayed for the weak and all of that. He sacrificed his whole life, even while he was living it, for His people. God wants us to be like that too, giving up our time for our people. You can do this in a few ways. The most obvious ones are service and giving money. I wont touch on service as it was more or less fully covered last week and anyone who has questions would likely have asked them by now (though I'll still answer them if you ask them anyway). 

Money is easy to give. It's addictive stuff, once you have some you always want more, but giving is easy too. Ten percent of your pay cheque, before taxes, is the amount asked for by God but if you can't afford it you can always give less. However, God always balances it out. He has promised that he will pay us back for what we give. 

I'm sorry if I'm rambling, it's very hot in here and I'm tired from being up late last night, so it's hard to keep my focus. I'm afraid anything I say at this point will be even less cohesive with what I've writen but I don't want to start over so I'll just stop now and hope my message for this week has gotten through. If it hasn't, if you read this through and say "What is this guy babbling about?" please write something in the comments. 

*I'm sure I meant his mother, I don't want to get into an argument about whether or not Joseph counts as family, whether He had brothers and Sisters, whether He had a wife and kids, I just don't think it's overtly important.