To Encourage You

Hebrews 13:15 “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.”

Do you realize that every Old Testament sacrifice pointed to Christ?  A sacrifice is an act of giving something to God that is of value to us.  Typically sacrifices were burned in the Old Testament.  In this way the life of an animal was given up as an offering to God.   It all pointed to Christ who offered up His life as a sacrifice to the Father on our behalf.  His act of coming to earth, in and of itself, was sacrificial, for in heaven he was worshipped. He was exalted. He was praised. But when he came to earth, He gave all that up and humbled himself. He came to be despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.  He Who could say, “the earth is (mine), and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein” (Psalm 24;1), gave it all up to the degree that He would come to say, “foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).  And ultimately, He Who is the very author of life gave up that life on the cross. He lived and died in a continual act of sacrifice. He laid it all down, everything He had, to the glory of God.   In all of this, He demonstrated that while He walked on earth, His eye was continually on heaven.  Indeed, we are told, that “for the joy that was set before him (he) endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).  He knew that all His loss, no matter how great, would be overwhelmingly compensated in heaven. 

Jesus’ life of sacrifice was the ultimate demonstration of trust. Anything God the Father required of Him He did willingly, for He fully recognized that His very life was a gift from God to man, and as a man, He sacrificed that life back to God. It was through that sacrifice that eternal life came to the world. 

The apostle Paul saw his own life in the same light.  All he had known – his prestige as a “righteous” Pharisee and all the privileges that came with it, he gave up. He writes that it was “for his sake I have suffered the loss of all things” (Philippians 3:8).  Now he saw his life as a sacrifice and he calls us to join him, “to present (our)selves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and (our) members to God as instruments for righteousness” (Romans 6:13). Our members, i.e., our hands, our feet, our eyes, our ears, and our lips, not as instruments for our own glory but as instruments of sacrifice to the glory of God. 

Which brings us to the passage above from Hebrews 13. Here the author calls us to “offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.”  Think about how we typically use our mouths, the mouths that God gave us, by the way.  James tells us that “we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body” (James 3:2). In other words, our mouth is the one part of our body that is the most difficult of all to control.  We can do with it whatever we want, but how much of what we use it for is to the glory of God?  So many things come naturally from our mouths, things that feel good to us – at least at the moment.  We can talk about and glorify ourselves with it. If you don’t think so, just try to keep track of all the times you say “I” each day.  We can also elevate ourselves by putting others down.  We can use it to “get THAT off our mind,” and to “tell so and so, what we think about this or that.” But how much do we use our mouths to bring glory to God? How often do we pause the self-glorifying use of our lips to praise the God Who made us, the God Who has given us the ability to speak? How wonderful to consider that we can use our mouths continually to give an offering of praise to God.  How wonderful that He’s given us the privilege to use it in this way. 

And then we can also use our mouths to encourage and lift up others. It is as we do this that we bring glory to Jesus Who identifies so closely with “the least of these” that whatever we do to them, we also do to Him (Matthew 25:40). And it is as we live in this way that we can be a source of blessing and joy to everyone else that our life may touch.  It’s something the verse above tells us we can do continually, moment by moment, each and every day.  It is in so doing that we can “present (our) bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is (our) spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1). That’s how Jesus lived. That’s how He would have us to live.  May God help us to follow His glorious example, so that in the end we can say with Paul, “my life has been ‘poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come’” (2 Timothy 4:6).