A little sacrifice wouldn't kill you.

How far would you go to prove your love to God?

I really like the WWJD bracelets and books seen everywhere today. "What Would Jesus Do?" is what they ask. The four letters remind us Christians to ask ourselves: What's "the Jesus way" to respond to life's big and little questions and challenges?

My hunch is that in the Old Testament days the people might have worn WWAD bracelets: What Would Abraham Do? After all, Abraham--like Jesus--set one incredible example for all who struggle to believe and act on their beliefs. It's an example so dramatic it stays with us all our lives.

I remember the feelings I had the first time I read the Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis 22. It changed my picture of God and what it means to be a "God fearing" human being. After all, what kind of God could ask such an extreme and dramatic demonstration of obedience? Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said of this epic biblical account: "Now the story of Abraham has the remarkable property that it is always glorious, however poorly one may understand it." Even better, in his book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard perfectly sums up the Abraham story for us moderns: "Abraham I cannot understand: in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed."

The amazement is rooted in the story's abject simplicity. It's the story of a man who had waited forever for God to give him what he wanted more than anything--a son--and then is asked to give the child back to God, to sacrifice him, to kill him--no questions asked:

"Now it came about after these things that God tested Abraham, and said to him, `Abraham! Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you'" (Gen. 22: 1-2).

What makes the story so dramatic, of course, is that Abraham complies, no questions asked. As a matter of fact, he's in the very act of sacrificing the child, for God's sake, when he is stopped suddenly by an angel of God, who tells him that he has passed God's test of love. And he did it with flying colors! He has demonstrated that he would give up in a heartbeat the thing he has loved the most--the son he has waited and prayed for endlessly--simply because God asked him, and for no other reason.

Like all truly great and compelling literature, one feels it is written "just for me," the reader, and my benefit. The story speaks to all of us--especially the waiting and the sacrificing parts of the story. We know about those. It certainly speaks to my wife and me: We waited and waited for a child to come into our lives. Our forever wait was for five years; we were beginning to feel like Sarah, and like Abraham, "who was 100 years old when his son was born to him." We were feeling just short of 100 when our adopted son came to us (and 150 now that our other two children are on the scene!). No, please God, we have not been asked to sacrifice any of our children, as perhaps you or someone you know may have through some tragic circumstance. But we have been asked to sacrifice ourselves, just as you have.

That's the Abraham lesson. And that's also the Jesus lesson, of course. Every day, in some ways large and small, we're asked to put everything on the line for God--including all that we love the most. It's all about making sacrifices. But even more, it's about living a life of faith that far exceeds our human understanding. Just as Abraham and Jesus did. By the way, it's good to remember, for very human folks like me, that, while Abraham complied with God's request, according to the story, without ever even asking why, Jesus himself was human enough to pray in the garden, "Let this pass, Father, if possible." But finally, "Not my will but thine be done."

This notion of sacrifice is a tough one in today's world. We don't even talk about it very much. Says Stuart Clark, writing in The Church Herald: "The concept of sacrifice was all over the Old Testament, but in the New Testament it seems to take a second seat. Most people born after 1960 are more familiar with the sacrifice play in baseball than they are with the Old Testament story of Abraham taking his son up the mountain as an offering to God. Is there something missing in today's faith?"

Clark says that the mistake we make is to assume that what God wants from us is a sacrificial death. "What God really wants is not our deaths--but our lives." And the truth is that this is sometimes even harder because it is constant. Giving our lives to God isn't usually dramatic or glorious, but rather we do it in small and constant ways, little by little, again and again. Remember when Abraham and Isaac were heading up the mountain and Isaac innocently asked, "But, Father, where is the offering?" Abraham replies, "God will provide."

Well, God will provide plenty of everyday opportunities for us to sacrifice--and to believe and trust. We believe, we trust, and we sacrifice when we surrender our children to the school bus, the school, and the bullies sitting next to them; we believe, we trust, and we sacrifice when we surrender our frail mothers and fathers to the doctors and the nurses and the nursing home and the grave; we believe, we trust, and we sacrifice when we get out of bed in the morning to face today's harsh realities, emptying ourselves of so much ownership and control and watch to see what God will do.

But there is joy in this sacrifice, too. By the time Abraham took his son and his knife to that high mountain, he had known often the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. He had received from God the promise of progeny and property, and the ability to be a blessing to all. Was Abraham just trying to delay announcing the bad news to Isaac when he answered, "God will provide himself the lamb"? Was he just whistling past the graveyard, trying to keep his own doubts and fears disguised? No. It was because of his clear memories of a previous covenant--a promise from his very God--that Abraham declared with such conviction, "The Lord will provide."

Abraham had no idea of just how this was going to be done, how the Lord would provide. But, lo and behold, at the end of the day Isaac was still standing in the land of the living!

And that's where we want to stand, here and now--ready to sacrifice, because we, too, have known and come to believe in God's promises. We've seen them come to pass in our very lives, just as Abraham did. And that makes it easier for us to trust. Thus, in a sense, we come to define sacrifice as not just something we do for God, but as a presenting of the stuff of our very lives for God to do with what God wills.

Writes Clark: "God doesn't need food, nor does God need any physical present any one of us could give." Rather, God wants us to remember that everything we have is a gift from God and that we are only caretakers of what God has allowed us to wear, eat, breathe, and tend. With this realization comes the understanding that all these are a means of God's grace to us. And if it's God's and not ours, then it must be God's perfect right to order the disposition of everything--including you and me and all we hold dear.

That which (and whom and Whom) we love, we will make great sacrifices for, indeed. Even so, sometimes we will find ourselves feeling sorely disappointed with the "results" of our sacrifices. We may sometimes cynically ask ourselves such questions as: "I gave four years of my life in college for this?" Or: "After all I've done for my son, I get this in return?" Surely God must feel the same way about us sometimes. In the Old Testament we read: "I gave you a land that you never toiled." And in the New Testament we see the ultimate sacrifice of Christ on the cross, only to have disciples scatter far and wide and frequently join Saint Peter in saying, "I know not the man."

But we do know the man; we know the men. We know the heart of the man, Abraham, because we can so clearly relate to him and his story of putting on the line all that we love and hold dear. We know the heart of the man, Jesus, because we can relate to the greatest story ever told, the story of what God did on the cross for love.

And love--love only--is the "payoff." It's the payoff we give as Christians, and it's the payoff we receive as Christians. Abraham started his journey to Mount Moriah as the father of a great nation but returned as the father of faith. When we make a conscious sacrifice of our everyday lives to Christ, we start out as sons and daughters of our mothers and fathers, and come down from the mountain as sons and daughters of our loving God.

LINUS MUNDY, author of A Man's Guide to Prayer (Crossroad, 1998) and publisher at Abbey Press, St. Meinrad, Indiana.