THE word "sacrifice" implies a giving up of some cherished personal possession, or of a desire thought to be profitable or necessary to one's happiness, if not well-being. Our Way-shower, Christ Jesus, pointed out that only that which is unprofitable or undesirable can in reality be sacrificed. A dictionary gives as one meaning of the word, "To give up in favor of a higher or more imperative object or duty."
Most men will agree that the highest concept of desire or duty is alone truly satisfying, even to human sense. Men want life, but they want it unimpaired. Each one with a true purpose desires to live rightly. What is more, each realizes satisfaction in the degree that he feels he has put the best he knows into life. Whatever his chosen obligation, he strives so to mold his life that he may bring out his highest concept of it, even should this call for much discipline and sacrifice. He wants love. He wants to love and to be loved; but that which is less than the purest sense of love is instinctively repellent. He wants the truth; he wants to know the truth about God, about himself, and about the entire phenomena of existence. This is proved by the fact that men have always been seeking to know the truth about God and about man. To be sure, they have been looking more or less in the wrong direction; and until the advent of Christian Science, the finite mortal concept of life as existent in matter was accepted in the effort to reconcile matter and Spirit. Disappointing as their efforts have been, nevertheless their inherent nature still watches, works, and prays to be led into the truth of all things.
Now Jesus the Christ was the answer to that prayer; because he is the mediator, the one to reveal God to men. By precept and example he proved to humanity that deliverance from matter, with its attendant false claims, would alone bring that which they truly desired or for which they prayed. In substantial evidence thereof, he voluntarily laid down a mortal sense of existence, even allowing his body to be nailed to the cross. In explanation he said: "I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself." Jesus understood better than any one else the utter nothingness of matter. What he really gave up, then,—or, in other words, silenced most effectually,— was every argument of matter, of the mortal or carnal mind claiming matter as reality, and life thereof independent of Spirit, as separate from God. Did not the parting with the false concept for the Christ-idea, made in the image and likeness of God, Spirit, which has nothing to give up but all things to enjoy, constitute Jesus' supreme sacrifice? Hence the supreme joy of which he so often spoke when referring to his union with the Father. Thus Jesus revealed the truth to humanity, making manifest the joy of spiritual existence as a reward for the sacrificing of matter or material concepts.
