Spiritist Society Towards the Light

The Most Pleasing Sacrifice to God

January 6, 2017

 

Many wonder how they could truly please God. Would it be by doing charity? By making efforts for the good of the community? By participate in donation campaigns for food and clothing for homeless and helpless?
 

The answer is clear and straightforward: the most pleasing sacrifice to God necessarily involves the practice of forgiveness and reconciliation with one's neighbor, according to the biblical passage: “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.” - (S. Matthew, 5:23, 24.).

In the Book of The Gospel According to Spiritism we have the conclusion regarding the above passage, for when he says: "Go and reconcile yourselves with your brother or sister, before you lay your offering on the altar," Jesus teaches that the most pleasing sacrifice to the Lord is What man makes of his own resentment; Who, before presenting himself to be forgiven by the lord, must have forgiven and repaired the injury he has done to one of his brothers or sisters.
 

Only then will your offering be well-accepted, for it will come from a heart freed from every evil thought. He materialized the precept, because the Jews offered material sacrifices; He was obliged to conform his words to the uses still in vogue. The Christian does not offer material gifts, since he spiritualized the sacrifice.

 

 With this, however, the precept gains even more strength. He offers his soul to God and that soul has to be purified. Entering into the temple of the Lord, he must leave out all feelings of hatred and animosity, all evil thoughts against his brother. Only then will the angels take his prayer at the feet of the Eternal. Here is what Jesus teaches by these words: "Leave your offering at the altar and go first reconcile with your brother, if you wish to be pleasing the Lord."
 

The curious thing about this is that generally our idea of ​​sacrifice is linked to suffering and pain. By re-adjusting the gospel concept to common understanding, the most agreeable sacrifice would seem to be a paradox (self-contradictory idea) as something that reminds us of pain or suffering and which obviously would not seem agreeable at first sight.
 

In the human condition in which we find ourselves we react vigorously to situations, people or things that make us suffer. We prance, we cry, we complain a lot against the pain or something that seems wrong.
 

But the precept of Christ is completely different. He places sacrifice as an offering, according to the dictionary concept, a tribute to the Divine, based on the renunciation of our lower instincts. And it can not be otherwise, considering that we possess nothing that is material, since everything is lent to us, including the body and the material goods that many, mistakenly, associate to happiness.
 

Every sacrifice proposed by Jesus must be spiritual, of what we really possess in ourselves. What would please God more than our inner improvement, that is, the dreamed inner reformation, overcoming all the feeling of pride, vanity and so many other spiritual ills that impede the development of each one?
 

I conclude with the logic that is implicit in the concept that renunciation can be voluntary or forced, after all the understanding of the true life next to Christ can be by love or by pain, however, it is evidenced that the renunciation of the moral defects of Spontaneous form has a substantially higher value.

Edu Medeiros