Three Kinds of Love, One Standard of Sacrifice, and the Church That Has No Building

The Need to Sacrifice Grows From the Need to Love

The need to sacrifice is a direct outgrowth of the need to love and to be loved. There are three words in the Greek New Testament for love. The highest form of love is agape — love without any selfishness and intention of gain. Agape love is divine-type love. The kind that God loves us with. It is a love that is pure and holy, freely given, and willing to sacrifice for the person or people or goal that is loved. The second type of love is philia — love between really good friends. Like the city of Philadelphia, which means "brotherly love." This kind of love has a sincere desire to spend time and to fellowship, and to give to friends and receive from friends. The third kind of love is eros — erotic love. A love that depends on what you take and what you give, what you gain and what you share. Now all three types of love sacrifice. But agape is giving of the best, without any motive to gain a selfish gain. The reason that one sacrifices and the motive for the sacrifice is of prime importance, and it makes all the difference in how the Lord receives the sacrifices that we make for the Kingdom.

The story of the Good Samaritan is a demonstration of what it means to love people with agape love. The Samaritan, who was not considered a friend of the Jews, took that Jew who was wounded and damaged on the road to Jericho. He picked him up and took him to the inn, and was willing to pay for the inn and the medical care of this stranger who was robbed and wounded.

Reconcile First — Then Sacrifice

Yeshua gave us one of the clearest lessons on sacrifice in the Sermon on the Mount:

This shows Yeshua's clear emphasis on man-to-man sins as being of number one importance — not atoned for by the sacrificial system. It is up to the individual to resolve his or her debt to his or her brother, and only then can sacrifice and worship of God be put in their proper place.

Moses and Paul both understood what the highest form of sacrifice looks like. Moses, after the sin of the golden calf, said to God:

Moses and Paul were both willing to give up their salvation for the sake of the nation of Israel. They were willing to damn themselves for the salvation of the people of Israel.

The Sacrifice Must Be Without Blemish — And So Must Ours

Put yourself in the time when there was a Temple in Jerusalem, and you would give an animal — a bull or sheep or goats or birds. You would bring your animal, and before anything, the priest would inspect the animal and see if it is healthy and whole, without blemish. If the animal had a broken leg, a skin illness, or was breathing heavily — your sacrifice would not be accepted. The Word of God commands us to give and to give sacrificially. The same requirement that the Israelites had in the Torah is valid for us today. We have to give to the Lord what is without blemish and without damage. We must give the Lord our best — the best of our life, the best of our time, the best of our money.

The Church Has No Building

There is one more paradigm that the book of Leviticus forces us to confront. The first so-called "Church Building" was created — not built — in the second quarter of the 4th century in Asia Minor during Constantine's time. The New Testament Church was people, not buildings. The place most often mentioned in Acts and Paul's letters as the place where disciples of Yeshua went to worship was the synagogue. The other places mentioned are by the river — where Paul met Lydia on the Sabbath, because they had no synagogue in town — and people's homes: Acts 2:42, 12:12, 18:7, 21:8. They had no church buildings.

Our sacrificial service to the Lord is much more than just investing in buildings. Buildings are not the church. Only the people are the church — those who are a living sacrifice to the Lord. Paul says this in the clearest way to the Athenians in Acts 17:

May we all take this lesson to heart and invest with our best into our fellow brothers and sisters - who are the Lord's 'church'.