“Build homes, and plan to stay. Plant gardens, and eat the food they produce. Marry and have children. Then find spouses for them so that you may have many grandchildren. Multiply! Do not dwindle away! And work for the peace and prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare.” This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let your prophets and fortune-tellers who are with you in the land of Babylon trick you. Do not listen to their dreams, because they are telling you lies in my name. I have not sent them,” says the LORD. This is what the LORD says: “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again.” ~Jeremiah 29:5-10 (NLT)
We’ve all heard the well-worn phrase: “Sacrifice for the community.” It sounds noble, even biblical. But what if this idea—so often repeated in pulpits and platitudes—is actually a trap? What if the deepest service to others begins not with self-erasure, but with self-creation? A recent sermon on Jeremiah 29:5-10, where a pastor claimed the passage demanded “sacrificial love,” reveals a dangerous misunderstanding. The text doesn’t call for sacrifice—it calls for building.
Jeremiah’s message to exiles is strikingly practical: Build homes. Plant gardens. Marry. Multiply. Work for the city’s peace—because its welfare determines yours. This isn’t a call to martyrdom. It’s a command to invest in your own life and future within the reality you face. The exiles weren’t told to abandon their needs for Babylon’s sake; they were told that thriving personally was the very path to communal health. When your garden flourishes, it feeds the neighborhood. When your family grows, it strengthens the community. This is self-interest as life-giving force—not selfishness as destruction.
Crucially, the text anchors this action in divine purpose: God didn’t just say “survive”—He gave them a mission. “Work for the peace of the city,” He commanded, “for its welfare will determine yours.” This wasn’t a demand for self-erasure; it was an assignment of profound meaning. Purpose became their lifeline. When exile threatened to reduce them to victims, God handed them a compass pointing toward creation: “Build. Plant. Multiply.” This refused to let them settle into despair. A victim mindset traps you in helplessness; creativity moves you forward. God framed their survival not as passive endurance but as sacred making—turning bricks into homes, soil into gardens, strangers into community. It sustained them through seventy years because it fused self-interest with creativity, making every seed planted an act of hope. Purpose like this doesn’t drain; it fuels. It turns “I have to survive” into “I get to create.”
The confusion starts when we mistake sacrifice for stewardship. Sacrifice implies giving up something essential against your rational interest—like burning your house to warm a stranger. Stewardship means tending your garden so it overflows to others. The pastor missed this distinction entirely, projecting a worldview where self-denial equals virtue. But Jeremiah offers no such demand. He speaks of intentional creation: building, planting, multiplying. This isn’t selflessness—it’s the opposite. It’s recognizing that your survival and contribution are inseparable.
Consider Buckminster Fuller’s insight: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. Build a new model that makes the old one obsolete.” The exiles weren’t told to rage against Babylon or die for it. They were told to build within it. To create gardens where there was desert. To plant seeds of community while preserving their identity. This is the work of the rational self: meeting reality head-on, not with fists or surrender, but with creativity. It’s the difference between tearing down walls and laying new foundations.
At its core, this confusion harms us all. When we’re taught that “sacrifice is virtue,” we learn to abandon ourselves. And when we abandon ourselves, we inevitably abandon others. As I’ve observed before: “If I won’t abandon myself, I will not abandon you. If I will abandon myself, I will also eventually abandon you.” The exhausted parent, the resentful caregiver, the burned-out activist—all began by believing they had to diminish themselves to serve. True service flows from fullness, not emptiness.
This isn’t about cold individualism. It’s about recognizing that you are the ground from which God’s purpose can manifest on earth. Ayn Rand challenged the myth that “selfishness” means trampling others. Real selfishness—the kind rooted in reason—is concern for your actual interests: your health, your integrity, your capacity to create. It’s the opposite of the “sacrificial animal” mentality. When you secure your oxygen mask first, you’re not narcissistic and self-absorbed—you become capable of helping others without dragging them into your collapse.
Transactional Love is a conditional exchange where affection or care is offered with the expectation of receiving something in return, such as validation or reciprocation. It operates like a contract, driven by external motives and often tied to a sense of obligation or debt.
Non-Transactional Love is given freely without expecting repayment, rooted in genuine care and intrinsic motivation. It prioritizes authentic connection and truth, unbound by calculations or external rewards.
The word “transaction” originates from the Latin “transactio,” meaning “an agreement” or “completion,” derived from “trans-” (across) and “agere” (to act or do). It refers to an act of carrying out or settling an exchange between parties, often implying mutual action or performance.
Agape love, in traditional Greek usage, refers to a form of love that prioritizes the well-being of others without expecting anything in return, often associated with divine or universal compassion, and is distinctly non-transactional as it seeks no reciprocation or zoomed in personal benefit, deferring instead to a zoomed out “bigger picture” personal benefit. In the New Testament, agape is elevated as the highest form of love, exemplified by God’s empathetic love for humanity and Jesus’ teachings, such as loving one’s enemies and neighbors as oneself, transcending the transactional debt accrued by sin.
The deepest error in the “sacrifice as virtue” narrative is its hidden transactionality. It treats love like a ledger: I give up X so you owe me Y. But this creates debt, not connection. Healthy communities aren’t built on guilt or obligation. They’re built when individuals, secure in their own worth, choose to contribute their value voluntarily from their own creativity and abundance. As I’ve noted before, true non-transactional agape love flows from “pride in creation and responsibility to restore”—not from keeping score. It’s the difference between giving because you must and giving because you have more than enough already and voluntarily choose to give from your surplus.
This reshapes how we read even the most misunderstood stories. The idea that Jesus’ sacrifice demands endless repetition—a call to perpetual self-immolation—is a distortion. If His act had meaning, it was as a one-time liberation from transactional thinking: a declaration that our worth isn’t earned through suffering. To “die to the old self” isn’t about daily self-sacrifice; it’s about shedding irrational beliefs that chain us to guilt and shame, and replacing them with the innocence that Jesus won for us on the cross. It’s the death of the myth that we must bleed to be loved.
So where does this leave us? Not as martyrs, but as builders. Jeremiah’s exiles didn’t save Babylon by starving themselves—they saved it by refusing to die. By planting seeds in foreign soil. By choosing life for themselves as the path to life for all. This is the radical alternative to sacrifice: the courage to say, “I will tend my garden so the whole city may eat.” It requires boundaries, yes—but boundaries aren’t walls. They’re the fences that let gardens grow without being trampled.
True community flourishes when individuals stop apologizing for their needs. When the parent says, “I need rest to love you well.” When the worker says, “I won’t burn out to meet unreasonable demands.” When the neighbor says, “I’ll help you—but not at the cost of my own home.” This isn’t coldness. It’s the only sustainable love. Sacrifice drains the well; stewardship keeps it flowing.
The world doesn’t need your ashes. It needs your flame, burning bright with purpose. Plant your garden. Build your home. Raise your children. Work for peace—not by diminishing yourself, but by fulfilling the assignment that ties your personal thriving to a higher purpose. As those exiles discovered, purpose transforms survival into legacy: when you invest in your flourishing with intention, you don’t just endure the desert—you make it bloom. And that, not sacrifice, is the truest gift to the world.
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