The whole test of love and of life is in sacrifice yielded to as the need may come. In God's first plan of life there is no sacrifice. God never chooses sacrifice as His first choice for any one, not even for His Son. But sin is here, an abnormal, foreign thing. Life is shot through and through with its ugly markings. You can't go a foot's length down the pathway of obedience without finding the keen edge of a knife, freshly sharpened, held across the path with its cutting edge toward you, challenging your advance, doing its utmost to hold you back. And only as the breast is bared to the cutting until a bit of your red life stains the knife, only so can there be any of the power of God in, or through, or out of, your life. But turn that sentence around, and smile in your heart as you remember this, as you do push quietly on past the cutting knife, and say never a word about the knife or the sharp pain--the best folks never talk about their sacrifices, they are too intent on the Man just ahead,--as a man so does, there come into his life a fire and a fragrance that burns and breathes out wherever he goes. It is sin that makes sacrifice. Sin did the carpenter work on the cross, our sin. Sin grew the thorns, and then served as weaver to make the mocking, cutting crown--our sin, yours and mine. Love yields to the sacrifice, His love for us, His love in us for the others. Sin is everywhere. Its finger-print is in nature, and its scar on human life. And sin's ravages make cruel need, and need intensified makes emergency, and these involve sacrifice as we rise to meet need and emergency. And love is everywhere. That is, it would be, it will be, if it can find human feet to carry it. It will be if our Lord may have His way. Sacrifice is Love's healing shadow. Sacrifice is love giving the oil and wine of its own life to bind up the wounds that sin has made. The "Follow Me" road is marked red, so you trace His footprints who went ahead, and theirs who follow. What Obedience Has Meant for Some. But, no one can decide for another what obedience may mean for him. You may not tell me, nor I you. It is intensely interesting to note what obedience has meant to some. It led Paul to give up inheritance and family prestige, social standing, fellowship in university circles, a home life of scholarly quiet and research, and to be reproached and ostracized, to be homeless having no certain abiding place, dependent on his own hands for daily bread, as he went burning like a flame from end to end of the Roman world. And at the end it meant a prison, and block and axe.