Stay Salty and Shine Brightly

How many of you like ham?

What is one thing you know about ham? It’s salty!

When I was a kid, I went to a rehearsal dinner for an uncle of mine. It was in a dark restaurant, and I distinctly remember watching my brother, who is 5 years older than me, putting a little extra pinch of salt on his ham.

Wanting to be like my cool older brother, I too figured my ham needed some extra salt. I grabbed the shaker, and I poured out some salt. It didn’t look like any came out, though, so I poured a little more…and a little more…You know where this is going, don’t you?

I bit into that piece of ham and immediately felt all the moisture leave my body. It tasted so bad that I didn’t eat ham again for years, and to this day, it still isn’t my favorite.

On that night, in that restaurant I learned the power of two different forces in life.

I learned that once salt gets into something, it will never be the same. I also learned that the more light you have, the better you can actually see what you are doing.

Jesus points us to these two elements of life this morning, and he too highlights just how important they can be.

Before we dive into the text, let’s remember the context of what Jesus has been saying here.

He is speaking while seated on a mountain with his disciples.

Although they are his primary audience, they are surrounded by crowds from far and near with a diverse set of religious backgrounds.

He is laying out, in some ways, a code of conduct for citizens of his kingdom, and he began with a series of Beatitudes - statements about the attitudes and actions that would mark the citizens of his kingdom.

These attitudes are reflections of the blessing of being a part of God’s kingdom, even though we haven’t fully realized all the ramifications of that yet.

Jesus is shifting gears into a new section this morning, and as he does, he is building on what we looked at last week: kingdom citizens need to be prepared to face persecution with joy.

Even in what we have seen over these first few weeks of this series has shown us that those who are a part of the kingdom of God are called to look differently than those who don’t follow Jesus.

This morning, he begins to address how that will impact the way we relate to the world around us, and he is going to use the pictures of salt and light to describe our role in the world.

Look with me at Matthew 5:13-16…

There is a strong push in our society that religious beliefs should be both personal and private. The idea is that because I may differ from you, it’s better if I don’t allow my religious beliefs to impact my work or my public life.

Jesus here completely destroys that idea. Although our relationship with Christ is personal in that it deals with the deepest area of a person’s being, it is not to be private.

Instead, the Christian life is a life of influence. The Christian life is not to be lived just in your home or your church on Sunday morning; it is instead a life to be lived publicly, impacting the lives of everyone we encounter.

Can that be said of you? Are you striving to enhance the lives of those around you by pointing them to Christ? Are you making a difference for Christ?

What about our church? Honestly, what difference would it make if Christiansburg Baptist wasn’t here? Can you give specifics? How would the community change if we weren’t here?

Before we get any further, let’s make sure we are clear: We are not better than anyone in the world around us.

As we talk about being salt and light to a lost and dying world, we are doing this because Jesus has saved us by his grace and his goodness.

We are survivors in the middle of the desert pointing people to the well of water they need and we have found.

As someone has said before, we are simply beggars telling other beggars where to find bread.

We aren’t preserving the world through our goodness, we are letting the goodness of God in our lives point others to him. We aren’t shining a light on ourselves, we are pointing others to the God who died for them.

As our lives reflect Christ, he can use that to transform the world.

Are we clear on that?

With that understanding, Jesus said that we should have a tremendous impact in the lives of those around us. Here, He uses two common pictures to show the uncommon ways believers, kingdom citizens, are to function in a world that doesn’t honor the King we serve.This plays out in our relationships with our friends, our co-workers, our family, our neighbors, people we meet at the store, our doctors, nurses, and the people across the world who are desperate without Christ.

The first picture Jesus uses is to describe us as salt, which means we strive to...

1) Preserve from the inside.

Go back and read verse 13 again.

There have been a lot of different suggestions as to what Jesus meant here.

There are lots of properties of salt that Jesus could be pointing to. John MacArthur, in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, gives several possibilities:

Pointing to purity – salt is white, and we are to be pure in the midst of an impure world

Pointing to flavor – Salt has been a go-to spice for almost as long as the earth existed. Christians, then, are to enhance society by being the best at whatever we do; living and loving the best we can.

Pointing to stinging – “salt in the wound” – salt is to point out the stinging holiness of God in a world that doesn’t want to hear it.

Pointing to thirst – Christians are to live in such a way that they make others hungry and thirsty for the peace, joy, patience, etc. that are supposed to be characteristic of us.

Some of those are stronger than others, but there is one other use for salt that seems likely.

Jesus may be referring to the main quality that was used in that day: salt as a preservative.

Have you ever looked at the sodium content of frozen food? Look at a frozen pizza sometime. Ever eat TV dinners? Did you know that Swanson Hungry Man frozen dinners have over 1,000mg of sodium in them?

Why? To keep the food from going bad. Think about beef jerky…super salty to preserve it.

Salt, when properly used in meat, slows down the rate of decay.

Meat that is salted can last weeks, even months in the right set of circumstances.

In a similar way, we are called to slow down the moral decay of our world. We are the ones who have to stay on our faces before God, living holy lives, voting in line with what he says is right and wrong, and living in such a way that we see him draw those around us to Christ through our influence.

Just as salt gets absorbed into meat and transforms it, our influence should permeate every area of society that God allows us to have a place in.

I am so thankful for the men and women who go into some of the hardest occupations and do them for the glory of God.

We need godly teachers, policemen, politicians, businessmen, physicians, scientists, and everyone else who will live out God-honoring values wherever God has placed them.

That is why God didn’t call us all to be pastors or vocational missionaries—we need godly people working in every sector of society that he allows us to be in!

Do you believe that God, through the Christians in America, can change us from the inside? He’s done it before.

If you have studied much history, you may be aware of the violence and bloodshed of the French Revolution.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in writing on this passage, said,

“Most competent historians are agreed in saying that what undoubtedly saved [England] from a revolution such as that experienced in France at the end of the eighteenth century was nothing but the masses of individuals had become Christians and were living this better life and had this higher outlook. The whole political situation was affected…”[i]

Did you catch that? The large number of believers in England helped keep England from the level of violence that swept across France.

Christians on the inside can change what is going on in a nation.

We can model godliness in our words and actions, and we can lead others to do the same through the way we conduct business or the way we act as parents in the stand at our kid’s games.

That’s what Jesus prayed for us in one of His final recorded prayers:

John 17:15–17 CSB

I am not praying that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.

He didn’t ask that God would move us out of society into little compounds where we couldn’t even begin to be touched by the outside world; rather, He prayed that we would stay in the trenches, sticking it out, standing for the truth.

We don’t do this by screaming at people across picket lines or on blog posts. We also can’t influence from the inside by just going along the flow of what everyone around us thinks is best. Instead, we seek to honor Christ in the way we live, work, play, and treat others.

When God provides the opportunity, we do speak out or vote or otherwise act in a way that will help preserve good, moral laws and seek to overturn immoral ones.

But, by and large, we seek to preserve society from the inside by following Christ daily in everything we say and do, touching lives as we go.

As we do this, we find a great temptation to compromise. Jesus addressed this in that very prayer from John 17: Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.

That word “sanctify” means to set someone apart. Here, Jesus is saying that we are set apart from living life with the priorities of the world around us and instead living to honor Christ as our king.

The only way that you and I can avoid compromise is if we hold tightly to what God teaches us in his word, allowing him to help us apply it correctly to every situation in life.

As we saw last week, we do this in spite of any persecution we may face.

We talked about the fact that persecution may get worse. Really, that is just a symptom of the slide towards more and more expressions of evil as time goes on.

Speaking of false teachers, Paul told Timothy to expect it to get worse:

2 Timothy 3:13 CSB

Evil people and impostors will become worse, deceiving and being deceived.

We don’t know how close we are to Jesus’ return, but we are almost 2000 years closer to it than when Paul wrote these words, so we can imagine that it would be worse than it was then.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a preacher, a missionary, a housewife, doctor, or president of your company; live out your faith in a way that it slows down the decay around us.

If you are, you’ll notice that people around you change. They won’t use the same language; they won’t tell the same jokes. The one who claims to believe there is no God will ask you to pray for his daughter who just found out she is cancer.

Be salt that slows down the effect of sin around you.

Did you see the warning, though? Look at the end of verse 13.

How does salt become tasteless? It seems that Jesus is referring to salt that has become mixed with some kind of impurity that makes it useless for preserving food.

The Dead Sea is the saltiest body of water on the face of the planet, yet much of the salt you get from it is inedible. It is mixed with gypsum and other minerals that gives it a bitter flavor, so you can’t use it as a preservative or seasoning. If you threw this salt on your garden, it would kill anything in it.[ii]

In the same way, when we become stained with sin, we lose our effectiveness. When we make small compromises on moral issues, we stop looking like kingdom citizens and start blending into the world we are no longer fully a part of.

When we compromise on what the Bible says, we bend Jesus’ words, we fall flat. Although we cannot lose our salvation, we can lose the ability to influence the world around us.

That’s why we are to be in the world and not of the world.

The reality is that as we influence, we will also…

2) Illuminate from the outside.

The influence from the inside cannot stay secret. That’s the point of the next picture Jesus gives us, where he calls us to be a light that is unmistakable.

Whereas the salt primarily keeps the bad from getting worse, light helps make the things that are worse get better.

Light leads a ship through rocky, stormy seas. It guides the rescuer to the lost hiker. It shows the edge of the road to the weary driver. Light exposes danger and leads us to safety. It even helps you see how much salt you are putting on our ham!

However, Jesus isn’t referring to just any light.

John 1:9 CSB

The true light that gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

The light we are shining is the light of Christ.

Jesus came to the world not only to point out our sin, but to point us to the way out.

If we surrender to Christ as our Lord, leader, and boss, then our lives are going to start looking different.

We are going to live with a brokenness for our sin, a hunger for righteousness, meek hearts that submit to him as the one whose voice we hear and follow.

When we do this, we will stand out like sore thumbs.

Our world prides itself on telling everyone to follow their own light; their own path.

Christ makes it clear that He is the only light, the only path, the only way to salvation.

He has called us to reflect that light; to proclaim boldly that Jesus is the only way; to live it out with our deeds and our words.

Philippians 2:14–16 CSB

Do everything without grumbling and arguing, so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world, by holding firm to the word of life. Then I can boast in the day of Christ that I didn’t run or labor for nothing.

God is calling you and me to shine like stars in the night sky, points of light that stand out against the darkness around us.

Like we said during the introduction, this isn’t about you and I making a name for ourselves by proving how good we are.

Look back again at verse 16...

As we live the lives God has called us to live, we will be doing good deeds. These deeds aren’t just random acts of kindness, they are us doing the right thing in the right way at the right time.

We do them to obey God, but we also do them to display him to the world around us.

The light we are shining is to put a spotlight on the God who loved us so much that he would die in our place, who brought us into his kingdom, and who now enables us to live blessed lives of unshakeable joy.

Will you humor me for an illustration? You may be sitting here thinking that you can’t possibly make an impact; you can’t possibly make a difference.

Moms and Dads: if you have little ones, I would go ahead and make sure they are close by. I’m going to ask the guys in the booth to go ahead and turn off all the lights in the room. I want it dark in here for a moment.

Did you know that we had 75 light fixtures on throughout this service? There are 75 bulbs that should be burning brightly, lighting our way.

Now, there are none. In this blackness, you cannot see anything, and cannot tell one person from another.

You wonder what difference you can make, just one person in a world of over 7.5 billion people?

This much of a difference. <plug in>

Most of you didn’t notice that there was actually one bulb that was burned out in the sanctuary this morning, because in the midst of a lot of light, it may not seem like much.

However, in the midst of the darkness, one light changes everything. It seems piercingly bright, and the whole world is changed.

What can we, a small church in a small town in VA with a small budget do to impact the world? We can let these lights shine. When these lights shine, God can use them to expand His influence, pointing men to the cross.

And, as the light God shines through you joins with his light through me, and more lights, and more lights, together, we can see God exalted in every corner of the world.

Don’t hide your light. Don’t hide behind any fear, any relationship, any material thing, any job or position. Instead, boldly share the light of Christ.

Do you believe that God can change the world through you? Influence it from the inside as God uses you to keep everything from sliding off to the depths of depravity.

Through the word of God, shine light into every corner of the world, bringing people to Him.

Endnotes:

[i] Quoted in MacArthur commentary on Matthew 1-7, pg 243

[ii] Ibid, 245