Salt and Light
Notes
Transcript
food pantry bananas apples
was going to tell you a joke about time travel but you didn’t like it
Book about glue stuck on first chapter
Ever heard the joke about the jump rope? Nevermind, skip it. Why is dark spelled with a K and not a C? You can’t C in the Dark.
Last week we quickly looked over the Beatitudes from what I called the 50,000 foot view. Now as we move forward, Jesus will be telling the people what discipleship in the world looks like.
13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.
SO Jesus starts out this new section with a rhetorical question, because it is impossible to restore the saltiness; Some translations say how can it be made salty again. What Jesus is really doing here is not talking about salt so much but using it as an analogy of us losing this power walking with Jesus. He is trying to show us what happens when we lose the desire to keep chasing after Jesus and trying to deepen our relationship with him, what happens to us? “You become useless,” Jesus says. If we become the kind of people who are no longer pursuing the God of the universe and only saying Yes to him when it is convenient to us, we have become useless.
Not only that, but we’ve become the kind of people most of us despise having relationships with, those people who never call, never show up just to hang out and want to have a relationship, but only call when we need something.
If we say, “the only time I am going to listen is when it is good for me,” or maybe not be that blatant, maybe what we say is, “I am just going to jump through these check marks, and go no further,” then you have lost your saltiness. What he is really talking about here is losing our witness, and if you lose your witness, it is hard to get it back. Some of us can equate this to other areas of our lives. How many of you remember the time when you were younger and something happened and maybe you broke your parents trust, how long did it take you to get that back?
I had an employee once who I caught lying to me, a bunch, and not about big stuff mind you, just little tiny stuff that in the long run should’t really matter, but he found out I knew, so he came to tell me he had been lying and he wanted me to know, becuase he didn’t want to break my trust, and I told him it was too late, and it would take him some time to get that back. You have to earn it.
Some of you know people who have blown up their marriage, they stepped out on their spouse and you know how hard it was for those people to get their credibility back if they ever could at all.
Someone asked Billy Graham what his biggest fear in life was, and he said it was that God would take his hand off of him and when he preached nothing would happen. Let me just say, what an amazing thing for a man of God to be in fear of, he wanted to make sure God was still working through him if the lives of people.
Let me ask you a question, what if because of unconfessed sin, (As an aside, let me stop here, some of you just want to give people the Bible answer, the answer that you think they want to hear, the safe answer, and you can’t figure out why nothing is getting better in your life. Guess what, we have to talk about get those sins out and confess them. In James 5:16 it says, “come and tell people what you think they want to here, so that you may be healed.” No, its says, “Therefore confess your sins to each other, and pray for each other, so that you may be healed.”) But, what if because of unconfessed sin and unreconciled relationships you start losing your saltiness, and he is saying once the saltiness is gone you can’t get it back. So what he is telling us is we need to stay close to him.
The thing is, when you read the gospels waht you will see is people who got close to Jesus and walked away they slowly lost their saltiness. So on to verse 14.
Matthew5:14
14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden;
15 nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.
16 “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.
So, Jesus here is really offending all of us, he is telling us there is something wrong with us and all of the world around us, he says the world we are in there is this brokenness and what it needs is salt and light. And you and I without him, we are living in this tasteless and dark world. The reason this is offensive, and I guess I should say the reason this is offensive to a non-believing world, a world that doesn’t know what our status is without Him, is because we are living in a culture where sociologist are saying we are being talk the Myth of Progress. Here is what that is. Since you have begun your schooling in kindergarten what we have been told is people as a whole are getting bigger, stronger, faster, more moral and what we learn from this is we have become our own Gods and solved our own problems because we are adapting on our own and we don’t need any outside source to get better.
So Jesus comes right out of the gate and tells us we are not okay. We are tasteless and in the dark, and things aren’t getting better. We think, “Oh, everything will be better, we just need to advance our technology,” like we think hey, we can fix humanity if our technology is a little bit better. Here is the thing we have been to the moon, but here on Earth we are still killing each other. When it comes to humanity and the way we live in relation to one a other we have not progressed an inch. So, Jesus comes out of the gate and says you are tasteless and in the dark and what you need isn’t better technology, more laws, more taxes, more whatever we have let ourselves believe will make our lives better, what we need is a savior.
There are some people in this world, and I doubt its anyone in this room, but there are people who think, “I don’t need any help, I’ve got this, I’m good.” This whole idea has been pushed in us because of this Myth of Progress, we just have to get a little bit better, run faster, work harder, whatever it is. Reach deep inside yourself and you can make your life better, and the world tells us just follow your own truth and follow your heart and it will all be better and we can be the hero of our own story, but Jesus says without Him we are in sinful and in the dark, and here is the thing, Jesus tells us if we don’t see that, if we don’t see our need for him we will never get out of the situation because we will always be trying to fix it on our own.
There comes a moment in your life when you come to realize blessed are the ones who mourn because you realize you cannot save yourself and you actually need God.
It reminds me of the movie Inside Out. Its all of these emotions and they have Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, and Joy and they all have the controls in your life and these emotions are in control of us. In our younger years they kind of let Joy take the control of everything and she helps you through life. But one thing is sure, they don’t want to let sadness ever get to the controls, because she will ruin everything, because there is this idea, especially in men, that mourning is against what we want to accomplish. So they take sadness and they put her in this circle they have made out of chalk and they tell her not to move out of the circle. So the plot of the whole movie is sometimes sadness needs to be in control for a while. It takes Joy a while to realize if she is always in control nothing will ever get accomplished because you’re just floating around on cloud 9 all the time happy about everything so it is hard to get to the point of what needs to be done. The point is with Sadness in control we can find the ability to deal with stuff so we can live with Joy forever.
If you need evidence we are not getting better but we are socially and spiritually, physically in decline. Let me ask you as you get older is your body getting better? Are your eyes getting more clear? Are you moving faster? Many years ago, I found my first gray hair on my head.
Truthfully, as we getolder things just fall apart.. The same is true with relationships, if you don’t take care of them as time goes they will also fall apart if we don’t work on it.
In Romans Chapter 8, Paul tells us, we are in decline, the world is dying cyclically, one day the sun will die. What Jesus is saying, when he is telling us we need to be salt and light, is don’t live in a bubble and try to think its all getting better. That the world around you will figure itself out on its own without any intervention.
Turn on the news, you will see people on each side of the political spectrum blaming the other for all of the hardships in this world. We see murders, death, and terrible sickness all around us. Studies will tell us there has never been a higher rate of divorce and adultery than we are seeing now, and I know some of you may push back and say we just are able to catch those adulterers more easily now, and that may be true. But the world is not the same, and it isn’t getting better.
Read an article a few years ago, it talked about the downfall of sexual morality amongst people. For young kids as young as 12 years old, sending nude pictures is the new flirting, they just think its normal, we throw kids into adult relationships and then are surprised when they act like adults. And this has just become the norm, and we as a society celebrate so much and most of you wouldn’t believe the way some of the people in this generation talk about and act on these kind of things.
There is this shift that is happening in the world around us and its not just with that, its with all kinds of different things, what we people would have once only done in the shadows, is now being done in the fullness of day.
What are we supposed to do, what is the response of the people of God, in light of the darkness of this world growing and spreading around us? This is part of what Jesus is talking about here in this passage. He is saying, “Look,I have people who are salt, and they are supposed to show people this is not the way to be human; this is not how we are supposed to live our lives.”
Do you know what Salt did in the ancient context? They didn’t have any refrigeration so they would put salt on meat to keep it from going bad; it would persevere something that would decay if it was left by itself. By talking about kingdom life and how to live, Jesus was saying, “I am going to be leaving but when I go, I will be leaving behind a group of people who are going into the world to show there is a different way with sexuality, there is a different way with money, and we have to spread the salt to preserve this place. You cannot let this place decay.”
Then he says, “You guys are the light, you are supposed to shine into the darkness.” What happens for us as Christians far too often is we say look everything is so corrupt lets hide away from it and lets create our own Christian sub culture apart from the world. That way we can get away from these people who are living horible lives. Lets be scared of the world and live secluded from it.”
Jesus takes that idea, of us living away from all the darkness on our own and almost mocks it. Scholars tell us when he is talking salt and light its a historical reference point. Just 100 miles from Jesus is the Dead Sea; So full of salt nothing lives in it. The salt is also supposed to have this cleansing effect. But right by the Dead Sea are these Qumran caves, and decades ago there were these archeologist who dug in the caves and found out about these people called the Essenes. The archeologists found all their scrolls and the scrolls said the world is so corrupt out there that we will live in here and call ourselves the sons of light. So what Jesus is doing is talking about this group of people who existed right beside a sea and saying don’t be them. Be the salt of the earth; be the light of the world. Which means you can’t run and hide and create sub culture. You have to go after the world.
John Stott said the church shouldn’t be walking around saying, “what’s wrong with he world why are they like this.” He said listen darkness is just being darkness; its just doing what it does. You wouldn’t go into a dark room and say, “bad darkness,” or look at meat that is going bad and say, “bad meat,” because that’s what meat does, it goes bad. He says when you walk into a darkness the question should be, “where is the light,” or even better, “where is the church?” It should not be hiding in the caves. See that is exactly what salt does, it integrates itself in the thing that is supposed to go bad and keeps it from being corrupted. It doesn’t become part of the spoils, it doesn’t become meat, it protects it from it. This is where we get the saying, it is in the world but not of the world, but to take that further we should say, “It is in the world, but not of the world, and it makes the world better because we are here and running after Jesus.”
And we are supposed to look at the world and say, “Hey, I am here, we are going to fix this, we will make it better.” But for most of us we don’t tend to actually relate to the darkness. For instance, most of us don’t have any friends that don’t know Christ. When we baptize people we get all excited and I tell you all the time we are going to celebrate with these people, and we should, but I hope we get to a place where when people come in, you can say, “Man I am so glad I invited her to church,” or “Man, I am so glad I stopped and shared the gospel with them,” or, “Man, I am so glad I pinned their name to a cross and promised to pray for them every single day until they cam to know the Lord.” The only way we can do that is if we know people who are actually in the dark and we don’t run from them but stand beside them. Here is what I want you to know too, when we start inviting people in the dark into the church, we can’t get mad when they start acting like people who are living in the dark, because that is what darkness does. I love the way my mentor used to describe it, he’d say “We can’t clean the fish before we catch them,” and we cant blame the darkness for being dark.
Go back to verse 14,
14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden;
Jesus says, “Here is your job, you are the light of the world,” and light exposes darkness. We should be the one in the office that exposes the gossip, we should be the ones that shuts down the racism in conversations if it happens around us. Men when you are in a group of married men, and one of them starts talking all kinds of bad about his wife, you should be the one that says, “Don’t dishonor your wife that way.” Not only that men, but if you know a guy that is stepping out on his wife, call him out, tell him to step up and get his junk together. The thing is most people in the darkness don’t care, and they need someone to tell them to get it together. Jesus said, you are the light of the world, we have to expose the darkness, and we live in a world that says that isn’t loving. And let me say it isn’t loving to stand ten feet back and scream about the sin in someones life and just tell them they are a sinner. What is loving is walking into the darkness and telling them there is a better way and then walking beside them until they get there. Sometimes, the most loving thing we can do, is expose the sin in our brothers and sisters lives.
I remember years ago, Truitt decided, while we were carrying our groceries inside, to stick two Lego coins up his nose. I tried everything, the plug one nostril blow in his mouth method, and it wasn’t coming out. We got to the quick care and the doc says she thinks she can get it out, as long as he’d sit still. She grabs these locking tiny forceps and is ready to get it out, but guess what, he was terrified of these things up his nose and he wasn’t having any of it. So you know what had to happen? I had to lay on top of him while another nurse held his head so the doctor could get this out, and he screamed bloody murder the whole time and tried to move. You know what that is? That’s good parenting, because I had to hold him down so the good thing could come into his life and get him to the right place.
The same is true for some of the people walking around in the darkness, the best way for you to love them is to pin them down and give them hard truths.
Team
Tim Keller says here is the balance between love and truth, “Love without truth is sentimentality; (You aren’t really loving you are just being sentimental) it supports and confirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws (no one ever tells us what we need to figure out). He says truth without love though, is harshness.. (you’re not journeying with them) it gives us information, but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. (It a God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked with radical truthfulness about who we are and also an unconditional commitment to us. There merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent.”
Listen, this morning, we have done a lot of talking about being in the darkness and when we are there how awful we are as people, but here is the truth on the other side of that, no matter what the world tells you, you are valuable, yes, we mess up, yes we sin, but thanks be to God, that while we were still sinners Christ died for us, he paid the ultimate price for each and every one of us, because you are worth it, You are valued, you are loved.
Here is my hope, if you are here and you are a Christian and you are just exploring, maybe you are asking questions about your life and we all are maybe today is the day you realized your intense need for Jesus; for him to pluck you out of the darkness and bring you into the light. If that is you I want to give you an opportunity to give your life to him.
Secondly, We are all looking for the purpose in our lives. You are here to be salt and light, to point people away from themselves and toward the glory of God. You are here to be sacrificial, toward the glory of God and not yourself. You are here to shine and expose and push back darkness maybe at the cost of your own life. Maybe you are realizing today you need his help to go and do what he wants you to do, to give you power and wisdom you will need. I would love to pray to that extent.
