Make all your Actions a Sacrifice not a Battle

To reach your spiritual goals, you need to obtain God's love. In fact, for a devotee, pleasing the Lord is itself the goal. It becomes your most important duty. You must make sure that every act you perform will satisfy the Lord. Krishna taught, 'Obey my commands and perform your duty.' In obeying the commands of the Lord and fighting in the war, Arjuna's actions became a sacred yagna, a sacrificial ritual which exalts the divinity and immerses one in the divine flow of grace. In contrast, there is a story in one of the epics of Daksha who wanted to perform a yagna, a ritual sacrifice. However, he disobeyed and disrespected Lord Shiva, and he also violated the commands of the holy sages. With a sense of egoism and attachment, he commenced the sacrifice. His egoism converted that sacrifice into a war.

You see that because Arjuna obeyed the Lord's commands and fought in the war, his battle became a sacred sacrifice. But for Daksha, who performed his sacrifice in violation of the Lord's commands, his sacrifice became a battle. What is a war and what is a sacrifice? All actions that are pure and selfless, and performed as an offering to the Lord, become a sacrifice. But actions which are undertaken in violation of the Lord's command, which are contrary to the scriptures and which are performed with a sense of egoism and pomposity, undertaken only for the purpose of promoting one's desires or hatreds ...all such actions become a war, even though the nature of the action may be that of a sacrifice. When the anguish and hatred in a person takes form in words, and these words, in turn, lead to argument and counter argument, then a battle will soon ensue. The root of all this is attachment and desire, arising from identification with the body.