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The attitude behind: The wish to offer sacrifices …

Often man does not assess his life—his hid­den bad atti­tudes, secret evil motives, lies, pride, lust and all the oth­er things which are not pleas­ant in God’s sight. These things grad­u­al­ly start deform­ing his being. This deformed state of man is not in har­mo­ny with his orig­i­nal being, the way he was cre­at­ed by God.  And then, to solve this inner dis­so­nance he looks for sat­is­fac­tion in out­ward things like jobs, stud­ies, per­form­ing cer­tain rit­u­als, offer­ing sac­ri­fices, doing char­i­ta­ble works, giv­ing alms…etc. and feels good about him­self and is reluc­tant to see the real­i­ty. If some­one is hon­est to him­self he can very well see through these things in him.
We can see that peo­ple are eager to offer dif­fer­ent sac­ri­fices to their gods. In return they expect bless­ings from the gods on their own ambi­tious plans and activ­i­ties. In the assump­tion of secur­ing their posi­tion by their own endeav­our, so that they can always say that “I did what I had to, now the gods have to bless me.” This resem­bles a busi­ness rela­tion­ship based on mutu­al inter­est or a mar­riage of con­ve­nience, but the rela­tion­ship with God as our lov­ing father can­not be like this.
He is not impressed by just what we do, He looks at the heart, He looks at the inner atti­tude which we have towards Him. He wants to have a deep­er rela­tion­ship with us. He wants us to love Him with our whole heart and serve Him out of love. We can know for cer­tain that He is com­plete­ly pure and holy; with our bad atti­tudes, self­ish motives, defiled think­ing and impure wish­es we can­not have part in the rela­tion­ship with Him unless we deeply change and regret all our sins.
Our sac­ri­fice should be our whole life which we sanc­ti­fy and puri­fy from all sins and wicked­ness so that it may be pleas­ing to Him. He takes delight in such a sac­ri­fice and in this way we will enjoy His pro­tec­tion and the bless­ing of His pres­ence in our lives.

God is the creator of everything …

God has cre­at­ed every­thing and every­thing belongs to Him. We can­not give him any­thing. A ten­ant can­not put his own­ers belong­ings as deposit for the house.
So, what can we offer to him ?
God is not some­one who would need our mon­ey or ani­mals, He wants our lives humbly devot­ed to Him. To hon­our Him with our lives and to be thank­ful for every­thing He has giv­en us. This is the only thing which we can give in return to God for all His pro­vi­sions for us, this is the most pleas­ing sac­ri­fice in his sight.

Can we make an agreement with God?

No! Through our sin­ful lives we have done great harm to His cre­ation. Through our self­ish ambi­tions we have reject­ed His guid­ance for our lives—the way in which He want­ed things to be. He does not force His demands on us, but respects our free will, He gives us free­dom to decide and that is why the world, mis­us­ing this free­dom, is so evil, filled with unright­eous­ness, cor­rup­tion, strife, lust, quar­rels and fights. Now, it is  not pos­si­ble to com­pen­sate this harm by giv­ing some amount of mon­ey, prop­er­ty or time. The harm we have done is not phys­i­cal, so it can­not be mend­ed by phys­i­cal things.
We have to seek and love him with all our heart, mind and strength. To give our best to serve him. He is ready to for­give us if we want it, if we accept our sins and con­fess them. The amount of ener­gy, strength and thoughts we use reflects our long­ing for his for­give­ness. This means we have to devote our­selves com­plete­ly, to deny our­selves to serve Him and to love oth­ers. God wants to show His grace and mer­cy towards us although we are not wor­thy of it.
So, we are com­plete­ly respon­si­ble for the way we live. If we take plea­sure in what God hates and do what is dis­pleas­ing to Him then it is our own wrong deci­sions which puts us far from Him and not His judg­ment, because He loves us and would always want that we live with Him. He wants us to decide by our own to want to build a rela­tion­ship with Him. It is not pos­si­ble unless we want it.

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