arunangelo
Member
To love is to sacrifice self in order to unconditionally help others. Love for God, therefore, is not a feeling; rather, it is to dedicate our life to God by entering His life and forming oneness with Him. Since God is love, to love God, is to makes love the desire of our whole being. Similarly, to worship God is to offer our entire life as a sacrifice to Him. As sinners we are incapable of making this sacrificial offering. However, Jesus, who is pure and sinless, made a perfect sacrifice of His life to the Father on our behalf and allows us to join in His sacrifice by sharing His sacrificial body in the form of bread and His sacrificial blood of the new and eternal covenant in the form of wine (Matthew 26:26-28) with us. Furthermore, He asks us to offer this sacrifice, so that His presence in our heart is never lost (Luke 22:19) and we may thereby have life (John 6:53). This fulfills what Malachi had prophesized (Malachi 1:11): “from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblationâ€Â. By joining in this sacrifice, we empty our lives completely, in order to love and serve others. In this sacrifice, therefore, we have an intimate communion (1 Cor. 10:16) with Jesus. This sacrifice, therefore, is the wedding feast of the Lamb (Revelation 5:6) in which Christ unites with His people.
