There are, I want to suggest, seven keys to sustainable sacrifice. And we turn first to four implications of this foundational truth of our mortality and our dependency upon God. Four ways in which God keeps us alive in this age, four needs we have that God does not share. We need sleep, but God does not. We need Sabbaths, but God does not. We need friends, but God does not. We need food, but God does not. God has, as someone put it to me, “put the medicines on the table and we need to take them”. So let us consider each in turn.
