What makes you give?

Salvation, redemption, healing, and cleansing make you give—spur you, like a goad, to sacrifice. The sacrifice is actually given as a result of forgiveness and mercy, not for it. It is an external display or “re”-presentation of what has already occurred internally or spiritually or actually. It is thanking God for his mercy.  It is a reaction to the action of God. 
This is Cain’s mistake: “I sacrifice, like my brother Abel, to receive grace, mercy, and favor—I sacrifice so I can receive Joy.”
Rather, here is Abel’s perfection: “That’s not what I’m doing, Cain.  It’s the reverse.  Since I receive grace, mercy and favor—eternal, extant—since I get Joy (in the same way I get a joke, which is impossible to receive by looking at it directly, then grasping for it; but rather, is seen indirectly, in the sense of experiencing it, and only received by somehow understanding and recognizing what was suddenly always there), since all this:  I can't hep it.  I laugh until  I cry and cry until I laugh.  I'm all in. I sacrifice.”

Noah falls on his knees and kisses the earth, pouring out sacrifices after he is saved. He may have poured them at the beginning--who knows--but his most emotional and poignant and redemptive picture of pouring out was, as is always the case in the best stories, at the end. 

The Man with Leprosy is given not only healing by Christ, but an injunction: “Don’t talk. Go sacrifice.”
Mark 1:40ff

The slave of the world isn’t set free by a signatory and a sergeant-at-arms, he is set free by surprise. The chains simply break free from an earthquake. His freedom IS the recognition of his slavery in that shattering moment. The realization: “I was dead!”  And the reaction is to thank the heavens for life! To grovel and beg for mercy and freedom—again—but this time confessing and bearing witness to understanding the truth.  This time to sacrifice, not for a spoonful of favor in an ocean of opposition, not for longer and lighter chains in prison; but in response to something; in response to the great Master and freer of our souls.  This time to sacrifice out of the fullness, not lack, of His mercy; out of a spirit satisfied, not thirsty.

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