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\u201cYour Majesty, Araunah gives all this to the king.\u201d Araunah also said to him, \u201cMay the Lord your God accept you.\u201d\xa0 But the king replied to Araunah, \u201cNo, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.\u201d (2 Samuel 24:23-24a)

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Hearing the devotion on Deuteronomy yesterday, I had to think of this passage from 2 Samuel.\xa0 This phrase of David is one that has stuck with me over the years.\xa0 \u201cI will not sacrifice to the Lord offerings that cost me nothing.\u201d

I feel like we\u2019ve talked quite a bit in these devotionals and in sermons over the past year about humility and submission before God\u2014that there is a counter-cultural act involved in being a Christian that asks us to commit ourselves in submission to someone higher than ourselves: namely Jesus Christ.\xa0 Since the atom bomb and technological revolution, the assumption of our culture is that we are gods ourselves these days with the power to create and destroy and so have the right to judge the gods of the various religions and call them to account as beings that, if they do exist, are no more than our equals, if that.\xa0

The Christian faith asks for a different posture: to fall on our knees in submission to our God and King, a God worthy to judge us, not we Him.\xa0 The paradox is that this posture of submission before God is the place of deepest freedom and fullest life.\xa0 God also does not ask of us something He Himself did not do: after all, God in Christ first submitted himself to our cruelty, sin, and violent, death-dealing ways before putting these ways to death in his death, rising to a life that we now can receive when we submit to Him.

Submission to God is what we are called to.\xa0 But it\u2019s hard work.\xa0 We need practices that help train us in the rhythms of submission and that give us very real and practical ways to do it in our daily lives.\xa0 Sacrifice and offering are just those sorts of practices.

Offering is an offering not of something useless or that we\u2019ve outlived our need for and are looking to get rid of anyway.\xa0 No one makes a sacrifice when they put something on the buy-nothing group or out in the front yard, free for the taking.\xa0 Offering is sacrifice: a giving away of something that has meaning, value, purpose, and real utility in our lives.\xa0 It hurts a little bit.\xa0 It\u2019s an act of trust that the God to whom we offer something is able to fill up the hole left by the thing we\u2019re entrusting to Him.

That brings us back to David\u2019s exclamation: \u201cI will not sacrifice to the Lord an offering that cost me nothing.\u201d \xa0These are the last words of David recorded in the books of Samuel.\xa0 Not insignificantly: this was the plot of land, purchased for the rightful price and offered in sacrifice to God, upon which the Temple would be built.\xa0

The Temple was not built on the land that David violently conquered when he killed the Jebusites and took their city, the city we now know as Jerusalem.\xa0 No, the temple was built on the land that David peacefully purchased for the rightful price from Arunah, a still-living Jebusite, and offered in true sacrifice to the Lord.\xa0

So, what will you sacrificially offer in submission and trust to God?

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