I Will Not Offer a Sacrifice That Costs Me Nothing

Let us turn to the First Book of Chronicles. Verse 21 of chapter 21, beginning with 21:21, says here: “And as David came to Ornan, Ornan looked and saw David, and came out from the threshing floor”—the threshing floor is a plot of ground, a place where wheat was threshed, where the wheat was separated from the chaff, as when Gideon was also threshing. It was also like a platform where the wheat was separated from the corn and the chaff was separated from the grain itself; that is a threshing floor.

And so Ornan was there. David approaches him, Ornan sees him and comes out from where he is working, and he bows facedown before David, because David is obviously his king, his sovereign. “Then David said to Ornan, ‘Give me this place of the threshing floor so that I may build an altar to the Lord. Give it to me for its full price.’” Look how interesting this is. He says, “Give it to me for its full price”—that is, for what it is worth, exactly what it is worth, no more, but no less either. “Give it to me for its full price, so that the plague among the people may cease.” Wow, I could actually stop right there and preach solely on those words of David: Give it to me for its full price, so that the plague among the people may cease.

“And Ornan answered David, ‘Take it for yourself, and let my lord the king do whatever seems good to him. I will even give the oxen for the burnt offering, the threshing sledges for firewood, and the wheat for the offering. I give it all.’” Look at David’s response. David was a man who loved the Lord intimately and deeply, and who had no limits when God wanted something from him. “Then King David said to Ornan, ‘No, thank you; rather, I will indeed buy it for its fair price. For I will not take for the Lord what belongs to you,’” and then these immortal words, “‘nor will I sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing.’”

“And David gave Ornan for that place the weight of six hundred shekels of gold”—a considerable amount of money—“and there David built an altar to the Lord, on which he offered burnt offerings and peace offerings, and he called upon the Lord, who answered him with fire from heaven upon the altar of burnt offering. Then the Lord spoke to the angel, and he put his sword back into its sheath.” May the Lord bless His Holy Word.

I like this passage because it reflects a value, an important value in the Christian life that is very applicable to the time in which we are currently living as a congregation, and something God is saying to each one of us individually, right? It is this idea that, for some magnificent spiritual process that God has in His heart to take place—for that outcome, that spiritual effect God wants to bring to a nation, a community, or a life to be produced—there has to be some investment; there has to be some costly sacrifice. And many times, there has to be some purchase, some sale of something on the material plane. That is to say, for sublime, eternal, spiritual things to take place on the abstract plane, there is generally, in some way, an equivalent on the material, physical, human, earthly plane. Both things are there.

That is why the Lord Jesus Christ says in one of His promises: Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. There is a correspondence in the universe between the world of the spirit and the world of matter. God does not deny material things; God acknowledges material things. God acknowledges history, God acknowledges politics, God acknowledges culture, God acknowledges economics, God acknowledges the anthropology of races. And He works sovereignly, supernaturally, and spiritually through that matter.

That is why we Christians must always reproduce that partnership, that intimate association between matter, time, and space, on the one hand, and the spirit and eternity on the other. We have to bind the two together so that the results God wants can come about. There are Christians among us who are so spiritual that we want to spiritualize everything. Oh Lord, we love You; my life is Yours. Oh Father, make my life a sacrifice, a burnt offering. But when they are told, “Brother, contribute something to the financial campaign,” it is, “Oh no, I can’t do that, because I don’t have enough money, because I have to think about this, I have to think about that.”

So we over-spiritualize things. And sometimes we believe that, well, if I am spiritual and holy enough, and if I pray and move in the spiritual world, then somehow God will do everything. But many times God wants you to use your efforts, your mind, your culture, your intellect, to carry out the works of God through you in your life. God works in the material through the spiritual, or He works in the spiritual through the material, however you want to see it; the two go together, they are joined.

That is why God somehow gave me this image here, of this Bible with this device. This is hard; it is glass, technology, metal, chemicals—and this Bible is paper, and it is the Word, and it is something eminently spiritual—but the two are joined; they have to go together for the miracle of evangelism in the twenty-first century to take place: growing congregations, transformed young people, transformed lives. In fact, that is going to be my text. Of all countries, I am going to be preaching in Slovakia.

How many of you have heard of Slovakia? Someone may have heard of Czechoslovakia, which was a united nation made up of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. They separated—I think it was in 1992; I was reading a little about the history. And I am going to be there with Dr. Elvin Villafañe, and I am going to be preaching precisely because there is curiosity there, or a desire to learn more about the moving of the Holy Spirit.

And one of the things I specifically want to talk about is from my pastoral perspective. Elvin will speak from his more academic, theological perspective, but I want to speak precisely about how, in my opinion—I have been in several European countries—for the Gospel to grow in Europe as it needs to among nations that are so culturally developed, congregations need two things: on the one hand, they must be filled with the Holy Spirit and know how to move in the power, the mystery, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; but they must also be culturally agile and well-informed.

I think that sometimes I see many fundamentalist evangelical churches in Europe, or Pentecostal churches in Europe, that are too gloomy, too serious, too fundamentalist in their Gospel, too rigid, as it were. And they believe that if they are like that, God will somehow make His Church grow because of their faithfulness; yet they are not growing—they are declining more and more every day despite having sound doctrinal foundations. And I believe that what is missing is the other part as well: acknowledging the culture without violating the faith; also acknowledging the culture, the needs of those nations, and the importance of intellect and reason; and finding a way to preach a first-century biblical Gospel in a twenty-first-century way. Do you understand me? The two joined together.

Because one cannot ignore people’s needs, the sensibilities of twenty-first-century humanity, technology, sexuality, questioning, and so many other things. The modern Church has to be both modern and ancient at the same time. So it may seem to you that I have strayed from the subject, but I have not; I am on the subject. What I want to tell you is that, for God’s processes to take place in the world, one must always join matter with spirit. And God requires Christians whose heads are in eternity and whose feet are in time and space, firmly planted in the here and now—feet on the earth, heads in heaven, amen. That, and hearts after God’s own heart; both things have to be present.

So for God to be able to do the things He wants to do through the Lion of Judah congregation, it will require an eminently spiritual Church, consecrated to the Lord, holy—a Church of people radically committed to the Kingdom of God—but also a Church of people who give, people who study, people who commit themselves, people who serve, people who attend church, people who invite others to church. That is to say, pray to God while swinging the hammer, as the Bible says. It doesn’t say that—“pray to God while swinging the hammer,” as the Bible says—but it is a good principle anyway, you know? It expresses a biblical truth.

As they say in English, “Praise God and pass the ammunition”—worship the Lord and pass the bullets. Both things are important, right? (laughs). So we must love God, we must worship Him, we must surrender ourselves to Him, but we must also give to the Lord. And it seems to me that this passage here expresses that truth. Do you know the background of what we have just read? Poor David gets the idea of ordering a census of his people, a census of his people. And his general Joab and his captains tell him, “Do not do that, King, because it will be deeply offensive to the Lord.”

No one knows exactly—we do not know exactly why ordering a census, counting the people, finding out how many people there were, how many men—because the ones it lists are the soldiers, the men who could wield a sword, the men who could use weapons. So it seems that in David’s heart there was a kind of arrogance, a desire to know how many people he really had who were soldiers, who were warriors, who could wield a sword. There seems to have been an element of pride in this, and God wanted His people, as it were, to depend on Him.

And what I theorize—no one will ever be entirely certain what the reason was that this census proved deeply offensive to the Lord—but it seems that, in wanting to count how many warriors he had, David fell into a kind of spiritual arrogance. And this offended the Lord, especially since his own general and his leading men, his officers, warned him, “Do not do it. This will be a sin for you, and God will be offended when you do this.” But David stubbornly decided to order the census anyway. He sent his soldiers throughout the entire land; they returned about nine months later, and they came back with a number. There were about a million men who wielded swords in Israel and about 500,000 in Judah, which were two segments of the Jewish nation.

Well, the census took place, but what happened? God was indeed offended and sent the prophet Gad, who was David’s official seer, to give him a message. The Bible says it was the second time someone went to tell David something after he had sinned. Do you remember the other one? It was Nathan, when David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and God also sent a prophet to warn him: “You have sinned.” Again, this is actually earlier. And they go and inform David: “God is angry with you, and He gives you three choices.” The Lord did David no favors by giving him three choices, because all three were equally terrible.

The first was three days of pestilence in the land—a plague, a terrible disease that would spread and rage throughout the whole land for three days, and those who died would die. Or three years of fleeing before his enemies, three years of continual defeat. And the third was—now I cannot remember; it has slipped my mind for the moment. Does anyone remember? The sword of the Lord—yes, exactly. Okay, so they were three equally terrible, equally destructive choices, and David says, “You know what? I would rather entrust myself to the hands of the Lord, because God is merciful. I do not want to fall into the hands of my enemies.” And he decides, well, let the pestilence come upon the land.

And God does so, and for three days, the Bible says, the angel of the Lord—a mysterious figure in the Bible who was almost like an emanation of God Himself, or a very powerful angel, a chief angel over the entire heavenly host—sweeps across the whole land for three days, killing people. Of course, on the physical level it manifested itself as disease, but behind it, in the spiritual world, there was an angel with an outstretched sword crossing the land, cutting lives short and striking down lives everywhere. It is interesting, isn’t it? That happens many times in the world. One sees the material aspect; one sees the biological aspect—for example, in our societies right now.

For example, yesterday there was a tornado in New York that apparently even lifted and destroyed cars—in New York, of all places. I could see that in Alabama or around Oklahoma, where those storm demons are, but New York? There are other demons there, but not necessarily those—there are other demons, some very big ones, in fact. But storms like that, all of that—you see hurricanes, you see tsunamis, you see cataclysms upon the earth, war, rumors of war; you see societies in turmoil, nations are restless, there is terrorism, uprisings and revolutions everywhere; there is questioning of the relationship between man and woman, sexuality; there is crime, there is a breakdown of the family in many of our cities; there are young people scattered and disoriented; there is division everywhere in the world, conflict.

We are living in a time when, outwardly, on the plane of time and space, of history, of human sociology, we see precisely a terrible amount of death. War, thousands of people continually dying, drug addictions, neurosis, madness everywhere—all of this is, on this level, a plague; it is a plague, a pestilence that comes precisely from sin, from a God who is angry with His creation, with His people, with His creatures, because they have forgotten Him, offended Him, denied Him, humiliated Him in the sense that they have not acknowledged His Glory; and God, as always happens, has sent His judgments.

What is more, I believe that nature simply rebels. When human beings persist in sinning against God, sometimes it is not even God who is sending the punishment; it is nature, because nature feels. The Bible says that nature feels, that nature groans for the day of its creation; there are mysteries, brothers and sisters. Animals understand many things. I believe that trees and the very chemistry of the universe understand things. The planets of the universe move and are shaken when there is sin on Earth, when creation separates itself from God, who is the One who sustains it and gives it coherence, who keeps it in order.

When God withdraws, disorder comes, conflict comes, incoherence and chaos come. It manifests itself at the level of nature. When a nation has injustice and immorality and things like that, the land itself is cursed. The Bible speaks of that, doesn’t it—that the land is cursed, accursed, when there is sin in the nation. So, on the natural plane, people were dying; there was a plague. And I imagine that if this had happened in the twenty-first century, there would have been doctors everywhere analyzing the people, determining which virus they had died from, and trying to find a cure, a vaccine for the plague, or whatever. But on the spiritual plane there was an angel of death, as happened with the firstborn of Egypt, with his sword outstretched, going from house to house and taking lives under God’s judgment.

And a moment comes when David’s heart cries out. There is a moving moment there in this passage, in chapter 21—read it on your own time—when David says, “Lord, have mercy,” as he sees his people dying in that way. “I was the one who sinned; turn Your sword against me, against my household. Do not punish the people for the sin I committed.” The fact is that David said, you know, originally, when he had to choose among those punishments, he said, “I am going to entrust myself to the Lord, because at least God’s mercies are great, and perhaps He will have mercy.” The Word says that this is exactly what happened: God had mercy and ordered the angel to stop and to cease killing people.

And do you know where the angel stopped? He stopped at the threshing floor of Ornan. All of this is happening on the spiritual level. Perhaps not everyone could see this; what they were seeing was perhaps the plague, the pestilence, on the biological and physical level. But this angel on that level—imagine—it is as though there are things on the spiritual level; it is as if you had an X-ray and suddenly could see another dimension. It was like what happened with Elisha and the Syrians: when his servant was filled with panic and terror, Elisha said, “Lord, open his eyes so that he may see,” and he saw a mighty army protecting them from the enemy army that was coming to kill and capture them.

Many things happen on the spiritual level right here. Right now there are parallel things taking place; there are parallel worlds of the spirit active right now as I speak here. Who knows how many angels are walking around this place right now—amen? Glory to the name of the Lord. And there are also a couple of rebellious demons around here that have to be cast out in the name of Jesus. Because the spiritual world is very mysterious, brothers and sisters, very mysterious. I live in that mysterious world, and you should live in it too.

The fact is that God orders His angel to halt the sword, and the angel stops at this place, which is the threshing floor of Ornan. In another passage he is called Ornan Araunah; it is the same person in two different languages. He stops there, and Ornan sees him. Ornan sees the angel, who still has his sword outstretched. David sees him and understands, and through His prophet God sends word to David that he is to sacrifice some oxen there, on that spot, as a peace offering, an offering of reconciliation, an offering of confession of sin and acknowledgment that the justice and holiness of God have been violated, so that the wrath of the Lord may be appeased.

Once again, you see this idea that for something to happen in the spiritual world, there has to be something equivalent in the material world. For God’s definitive forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing to take place, and for God’s heart to be applied, He requires that a sacrifice be offered. So David, having been alerted to the need to make a sacrifice, approaches the owner of the threshing floor. Because, brothers and sisters, everything in life has its laws. David had to respect the laws; he was not going to go and steal this man’s land simply because of God.

Notice that this is important: we have had to deal with many things here. We have to buy the materials. We do not go into a store and say, “You know, the Lord says”—as in the case of the disciples, right?—“that He needs the donkey.” If I went in like that, they would say to me, “Hey, who is the Lord?” Here, the lord is the owner of the store. So we have to pay the price; we have to buy materials, we have to pay the price, we have to deal with different city agencies, we have to obtain permits, and we have to use natural processes. And David goes to Araunah Ornan and says to him, “Sell me your property,” because that property needs to be used here to offer a sacrifice. And David was already seeing other things as well, which we will look at later.

So things have to be done in an orderly way, brothers and sisters. We have to pay a price for this construction, and that is why we need to do these things. God does not mysteriously choose to make money rain down from heaven; a process has to be used. And you are the key to that process, on the natural plane. And David says to Ornan, “Sell it to me for its fair price. I do not want you to show me favoritism or anything like that, because this is something that requires total integrity. What we want to do is something great, and it requires us to do things legitimately.”

Araunah, or Ornan, who knows what is happening—he sees the angel and all of this—knows that this will be the key to making the dying among the people cease, and he says, “No, sir, absolutely not. Take the land. In fact, I will offer you the oxen with which I am threshing, and I will offer you the firewood—the wood with which I guide them and the oxen’s yokes, all of which was made of wood. Take it and use it as firewood for the sacrifice. I give it all to you.” But David insists, “No, because I have to obtain this; there has to be legitimacy.” Certain things have to be fulfilled, brothers and sisters.

I believe that a day may come when the Lord sends incredible amounts of money to this congregation. You know, we have had many prophecies that God is going to send it. And let me tell you something: several years ago, several years ago, people were prophesying that Lion of Judah was going to receive a million dollars, and this and that, and that it was going to happen. And I would listen and say, “Amen, glory to God. Well, Father, if You want to do it, here I am, of course.” I even bought myself a very large baseball glove, just in case. (Laughter.)

But there was a little skepticism. We are talking about around fifteen years ago, when we began in this place. You know, brothers and sisters, the federal government recently gave us three million dollars for the purposes of the Kingdom, to work with Vale Esperal, what Delmi was announcing. And we have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in different ways over the years, and this congregation has processed millions of dollars. You will have given almost two million dollars when this process is over, and you will still have to give many more millions in the future, so get ready. (Laughter.)

Okay? But they will come. That is to say, I have already grown accustomed to talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, about millions of dollars. Our budget is one and a half million dollars, but that is how the money goes: it comes in and goes out. So be careful: “Ah, one and a half million, so I do not have to give anything.” All of it is committed from the moment it comes in, immediately, because of all the expenses and the things we have, all the investments we have made.

The point I want to make to you, brothers and sisters, is that I believe God will one day bring even greater amounts of money. I am always receiving prophecies about that. But I believe that first, in a sense, God’s justice has to be satisfied. And before what I believe will be the great prosperity comes, a precedent has to be established that we have given generously, in faith and sacrificially, to the Lord. I believe that before the great prosperity comes, there has to be, in a sense—there has to be a time of living by faith, moving in faith, giving to the Lord. Because it is very easy to give a lot when you have a lot of money, but how important it is to give to the Lord when it hurts, when that abundance is not there—to give to the Lord legitimately.

And that is how God has always spoken concerning my life. God says, “Roberto, I want you to do things at the basic level, at the level of wisdom, justice, knowledge, institutionalization, and integrity, and afterward the supernatural will come in great quantities.” Because sometimes we want the sports car before learning to ride the bicycle, don’t we? And God wants us to learn to apply the principles of the Word of God humbly and simply, and then He will unleash supernatural power, because God’s justice has already been satisfied.

The fact is that God is very orderly, brothers and sisters. When He is moving legitimately among a people or in a person, He does things according to the patterns of His Word. And I see that all the time. So David said, “No, this is something wonderful and important; it has to be done in accordance with integrity, with the laws of justice. I am going to buy it from you. I will not receive it from you. Thank you for offering it, but I am going to pay you the price it deserves. And first of all, I am not going to give the Lord a sacrifice that is easy for me, a sacrifice that costs me nothing. If I am going to give a sacrifice to the Lord, it has to be an expression of my love, my surrender, my tears, my sweat, my struggle.”

And that is what I believe we have to understand. God is not going to give us that building for free. He is glorified when we give Him a sacrifice that costs us something and reflects the true love and integrity of a people who believe the Lord and give to the Lord. And I want you to be part of those tremendous processes. Then, when that moment comes, when David pays the price and buys the materials, the dying ceases.

And I will close with this, with a couple of things here that I want to establish in you. Number one: that place which was mysteriously designated by God, that place which later, after the sacrifice, becomes the site of the tabernacle that was still in Israel, the one used in the wilderness, and then becomes the place where Solomon’s temple is built—that place, do you know what? It is where the ruins now stand in Jerusalem, where the golden mosque stands, where the sanctuary, Solomon’s temple, was, where the wall, the Wailing Wall, stands. That is the place where this drama took place.

And history attests to that; there are quantities of geological and archaeological documents that clearly attest to it. That humble place where an angel of death halted his sword and a king sacrificed to the Lord some oxen bought with his own money so that the dying would cease acquired a kind of magical, mystical, mysterious, sublime, spiritual value. It then serves as the place where the dying ceases and where God’s love can once again be manifested among His people.

So I see a parallel there. You know that what I am going to say is nothing new for me; I am not forcing things. This place where you are sitting right now, this land, is a holy place for the Lord; it is a place chosen by God. That place there where that sanctuary stands is a place chosen by God. This place has been reserved from eternity so that a group of crazy Latinos and people from other countries could worship the Lord here, crazy with love for Him, and worship Him in strange and spiritual ways. This is a magical place here.

You remember that when God gave me that vision of the Lion of Judah, that dream of the Lion of Judah exercising lordship and authority over this city, over those demonic hosts that were above the city’s buildings, I got up that morning with this sense that God had given me a vision of the Lion of the tribe of Judah and that our church, which was in Cambridge, had to move to Boston. It is a long story, but before we obtained this place, I told the church that I felt God was calling us to change the name of our church to Lion of Judah Congregation instead of Central Baptist Church—to become Lion of Judah Congregation and come into the city.

And you remember that when we found this building, I had not even noticed it, but there was a lion there, and it is still there, roaring at the main entrance, out front—a sign that God has a purpose for this place. And I have had dreams and other things that clearly reveal to me that this place here is magnetized, to borrow a word from magic; it is a spiritually magnetic place, this place here where we are, and many things about this city attest to it. This place here is a spiritually charged area, and God has a purpose for this place.

If we could take an X-ray of the spiritual realm, we would see many things about this place. God has chosen this site for sublime and eternal purposes that He has. So, like David, we too are here in this place, and God wants things to be purchased, things to be built, things to be done so that the death in the city may cease. In the city there are people who are perishing for lack of the Gospel. People are going to hell for lack of the Word of God. Families are falling apart; young people are heading into total corruption, with no direction, no purpose in life. There is death in the city, there is deterioration, and a sacrifice is required—a place that can make it possible for death to cease and for the Grace of God to come to the city once again.

I believe that God wants to use us. I do not mean that He is going to use only us. There are other very good churches, beautiful ministries in this city that are doing many things for the Kingdom of God. But what concerns me is what God wants to do with us; as for the others, glory to God, may God bless them—we work with them, we do wonderful things—but God wants to use this people, and He wants to use that sanctuary for His Glory, so that the death may cease, so that sacrifices may be offered to the Lord: sacrifices of peace, sacrifices of healing, sacrifices of life. And men like David and Ornan are needed, men who say, “Give me the privilege of building that sacrifice for the Lord and raising that structure for the Lord.”

Then David gave his son Solomon all the materials that he had set aside over the years and had been storing for the construction of the sanctuary in that place. That place was sanctified by the Lord, and for century after century it served as the place where the King of kings and Lord of lords was worshiped. There is still a remnant there; there are ruins that remind us that one day that place—the temple of God—must still be rebuilt there in Jerusalem, there where the ruins are, where the Muslims, the Islamic people, do not want it; there a temple will once again be built for the Lord.

In the meantime, I believe there is an equivalent here. This temple here is a declaration that God is still moving in this region. And there are things that must be done, and we have to pay the price. The mission is great, brothers and sisters; the price must be great. Let us not offer the Lord sacrifices that cost us nothing. Receive the blessing that comes from generosity toward God, because what God wants to do is transformative and powerful.

God bless you. Bow your head for a moment now. Let us surrender our lives to the Lord; let us commit ourselves to God. There is nothing so great that you cannot give it to the Lord, my brother, my sister. There is nothing so extravagant that you cannot give it to the Lord, because God’s purposes deserve our very best. So if you have not yet made your pledge, if you have not conceived there in your heart a commitment, a significant offering to the Lord, do so at this moment. As if you were David, God is telling you, “Raise up an altar for Me so that I may cause the death to cease, so that there may be a place where My Word is proclaimed and many may come to know My Son Jesus Christ.” And we are going to make this possible, my brothers and sisters.

I am not very good at financial campaigns or at asking, but I depend on a people who are tender toward the Word of God and who allow themselves to be impacted and influenced by the truths of the Gospel, of the Word of the Lord. And I do not believe that I am asking for anything illegitimate or excessive, but rather for something God wants, something I am certain is in His heart.

Father, we love You. Thank You for the privilege of moving in those sublime realms of Your Word. We want Your Glory, Lord, to spread throughout this place. We want Your purposes to be fulfilled, Lord, and we want nothing that You desire from us to remain withheld within us, but rather to give You everything You require of our lives. I bless this people, Father. Raise up for Yourself a people who measure up to the righteous, holy, powerful, sublime, majestic God whom we serve, and make this Church an exemplary church, Father, so that at this time in history there may be a community that reflects the values of Your Kingdom, Lord.

Have mercy on us and work in our lives so that we may honor You by being what You want us to be, Lord. We worship You, we bless You, and we give You thanks. In the name of Jesus we pray, and the people of God say: amen and amen. God bless you, my brothers and sisters.