making lighter
their load.

When You Don't Have To.

The second outward trait of our Lord Jesus' character was _sacrifice_.
This is not something different from what has been said; it is only going
a step further, indeed going the last step that He could go, in both His
sympathy with men and His obedience to His Father. It helps to remember
what sacrifice means; not suffering merely, though it includes suffering;
not privation simply, though it may include this, too. There is much
suffering and privation where there is no sacrifice. Sacrifice means doing
something to help some one else when it takes some of your life-blood, and
when you don't have to, except the have-to of love.

Sacrifice was so woven into the very fabric of Jesus' life that wherever
you cut in some of the red threads stick out. It was the never-absent
undertone of His life, from earliest years until the tragic close. But the
undertone rose higher and grew stronger until at the last it became the
dominant, the only tone to be heard. He gave His life out on the cross
that so men might be saved from the terrible result of their sin, when He
didn't have to, except the have-to of His great heart.

I have spoken of sacrifice as one of the two outward, manward traits of
His character. But the truth is His Calvary sacrifice faced three ways:
upward, inward and outward. It faced toward the Father, for it was
carrying out the Father's plan, and that lets us see not only the Father's
love, but His estimate, as the world's administrator of justice, of the
horribleness of the sin which He was so freely forgiving.[15] It faced in
toward Himself, for it was the purity and perfection of the life poured
out that gave the peculiar meaning to His death, and it was His
sympathetic love that led Him up that steep hill. It faced outward, for
the love of it was meant to break men's hearts and bend their stubborn
wills, and so it did and has.

His sympathy--love suffering--came to have a new meaning as He went to the
last extreme in His suffering. Sympathy is sometimes spoken of as putting
yourself in the other's place so as to help him better. Our Lord Jesus did
this. He did it as none other did, or could. He actually put Himself in
our place on the cross. He experienced what would have come to us had He
not taken our place. He suffered the suffering that belongs to us because
of our sin. He felt the feelings that came through sin working out to its
bitter end.