God hates all types of stealing and robbery in giving and offering, especially those who take something that is not their own and offer it to God as an offering.
1 Samuel 15 tells us how the children of Israel took the best of the sheep and oxen that God had told them to destroy. They did it with a good motive to sacrifice them as burnt offerings to the Lord. But it was disobedience.
1 Samuel 15;22, 23 says: “And Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.”
Conversely, we read how when David went to offer a sacrifice to stop a great plague, caused by his own sin in numbering the people, that he refused to sacrifice something that would not cost him something.
In 2 Samuel 24:24 David says: “Nay; but I will surely buy it of thee at a price, neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my God of THAT WHICH DOTH COST ME NOTHING. So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the LORD, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So the LORD was entreated for the land, and the plague was stayed from Israel.”
God accepted David’s offering because it was a true sacrifice.
When we cheat our employer’s time to pray or witness, this is not acceptable to God. God desires us to sacrifice to Him the things which mean a lot to us. The things that do not cost us anything, or we will not miss if we give them, are not a true sacrifice. True sacrifice is determined by how much it costs us to give.
David prayed in Psalm 51:16, 17: “For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
We need to ask ourselves: Have we, like David, offered this type of sacrifice for our sins we have committed? I feel challenged as I write. We may not have committed sins as great as David did by his sin in taking another man’s wife and having her husband put in the most dangerous part of the battle to be killed. However, David repented when exposed by the prophet Nathan.
David’s sacrifices for his sins were a broken and a contrite heart which the whole of Psalm 51 describes. All other types of sacrifice would not have been acceptable to God. Read the whole Psalm.
Luke 18:10-14 also shows the heart God wants us to have: “Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, that this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”
True repentance is, in a sense, a sacrifice to God, especially when it is coupled with godly sorrow (1 Corinthians 7:10). I wonder if much of our 21st century repentance is but a shallow repentance. Many just walk forward at an evangelistic meeting and are clapped and applauded by the congregation as if they were heroes for going forward. Is there any repentance?
Men, we must teach our families what it means to give sacrifices that are acceptable to God and the meaning of true repentance.
Be encouraged,
Colin Campbell