We sang a song in church yesterday that we sing often, and I am really glad that we do.   The message of it must continually echo in our hearts.   It starts like this:   “Are you hurting and broken within? Overwhelmed by the weight of your sin?”   There is a rhetorical quality to the questions – Hurting and broken?   Obviously.   Overwhelmed by the weight of my sin?   Almost always.

You feel it too.   I know that you do.   We live in a broken world.   God didn’t make it broken.   In fact, it was the picture of perfection when he created it.   We broke it.   We chose not to take God at his word.   We believed that there was another way - a better plan than what God had laid out.   What a tragic mistake, the effect of which has plagued us ever since.

But Jesus is calling: “O come to the altar. The Father's arms are open wide. Forgiveness was bought with the precious blood of Jesus Christ…”

What an invitation that is – perfect God calling imperfect man, arms open wide.   The invitation is to healing, to mending, to being made new - restored by the precious blood that Jesus spilled.

I see more than one reason for the altar.   First and foremost it is upon this altar that Jesus, the very Lamb of God, was sacrificed.   The just for the unjust as the Bible tells us.   It is a gruesome and bloody scene fraught with deep sadness and bright hope all at once.   And it was absolutely necessary.   Jesus had to give his life on that altar to provide healing for human hearts devastated and separated from God by sin.   There was simply no other satisfactory solution.

But it’s an altar of self-sacrifice as well.   It is upon this altar that I lay all of my personal ambition, my pride, my “regrets and mistakes” and my futile attempts to pleasure myself in ways that seem immediately gratifying but leave me empty in the end.

This sacrifice seems painful in the moment.   But the peace and comfort of reconciliation with God for which we trade our selfish schemes and striving is incomparable in magnitude.    And, incidentally, it’s forever.

You’ve been invited. Come… This altar is for you.