The thing about sacrifice is that it’s often hard or inconvenient.  

Maybe a friend expresses that she needs help moving into a new apartment; you really don’t want to make yourself available because you already have a full week, but you know that offering to help would be a way to show sacrificial love and die to yourself.  

Or perhaps you’re aware of someone in your church who needs a place to stay for a few weeks. You sense the Spirit’s prompting you to offer up your guest room, but you fear the discomfort of your personal space and routine being threatened. 

Even just ordinary life as a mother, roommate, or church member requires continual large and small sacrifices. We don’t have to live an extraordinary life to feel the tension between our comfort and what God might be asking us to give up, at least for a time.  

Jesus of course showed us the ultimate example of sacrifice as He lay down His life for us, and He asks us to love each other as He loved us. That means that sacrificial love is foundational to the Christian life. Paul furthers this thought in Romans 12 when he asserts that presenting our bodies, our whole selves, as living sacrifices is an act of worship that makes sense given our status as redeemed people.

This doesn’t mean that we’re obligated to say “yes” to every need or that we should throw out any sense of boundaries in our lives. We are finite creatures with limited capacities, and those limits are different for everyone. But even though the specifics will differ from person to person, the words of Scripture apply to everyone: we must be ready and willing to lay down our lives for others. 

Dying to self. My life for yours. 

These are Biblical images and concepts, and nothing about them sounds easy. But then again, we’re not promised ease. We’re promised Jesus.