This morning I was reading Psalm 51 as part of my time with the Lord. It’s a very well-loved Psalm, and the central verse, “Create in me a pure heart O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me” has found its way into songs and sermons alike.
Reading it this morning, however, I saw something towards the end that I’d never really thought about before. In verse 16, the Psalmist asserts that the Lord does not delight in sacrifice or take pleasure in burnt offerings. He’s referring to the system of animal sacrifice we find in the Old Testament Law—a system that the Lord himself instituted—and his point is not that the Lord rejects these offerings, only that they are meaningless unless there is a genuine heart transformation behind them. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” In other words, God’s not interested in phoney-baloney shows of empty religious devotion that have nothing to do with the real condition of our heart. He’d rather, actually, we didn’t sacrifice anything, and give him a repentant heart, than have us put a flashy gift on the altar while our hearts are still miles from him.
Well: so far, so good. But here’s the part I noticed anew this morning. Because in the very last verse of the psalm it calls on God to bless Zion and rebuild Jerusalem, and then, it says, if God does that, then (and presumably only then) “burnt offerings will delight Him and bulls will be offered on the altar.” It’s strange because verse 16 seemed to imply that God didn’t really want this kind of sacrifice, but then here, in verse 19, we see the Lord truly delighting in it again.
What’s changed, I wondered this morning, from verse 16 to verse 19? Well: the only change I can see is that in verse 18, the Lord acted decisively to bless and restore his people. He healed them, and only after doing so did he delight in their offerings. The reason that stood out to me is because it suggests our acceptable offering depends entirely on God to make it acceptable. Only if he moves in us, and among us, to restore us and heal us—only then could we ever offer any sacrifice to him that he would be pleased in—and when he does that, he actually enables us to make the pleasing sacrifice to him.
Anyone who has been following Jesus for a while will probably see where I’m going with this. Because if you’ve come to know Jesus, you will know how, before his Spirit came upon you and got to work on you, you didn’t really know how to offer anything pleasing to God, and how it’s only been as the Spirit of God has been restoring you that you’ve become able to make any kind of offering that does please him.
The whole Christian life, in other words, beginning to end, every sacrifice and offering and gift and act of service we ever make, if it’s going to be pleasing to God, it has to come from God first, and go back to God, through God. We are, in this sense, merely conduits of the life of God, giving back to him only what we’ve already received from him, and—thanks be to God—because it came from him in the first place, we can rest assured that as we give it back, it will truly be pleasing in his sight.
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