The Christian's Influence

A few weeks ago, I got a message from Tracy Agnew, the editor of the Suffolk News-Herald, telling me that her company was about to close on the sale of the newspaper’s old, tornado-damaged building on South Saratoga Street and asking if I would like to join her there for one last look around.

I’m not really a sentimental person, and I’ve pretty much moved on from that life in the newspaper business and into the life of a pastor, so I politely declined the offer, satisfied to remember that place the way I had left it nearly four years ago.

And I didn’t really think about it again until the other day, when I read a column by Tracy about her own memories that were stirred up as she took one last walk through the building before the sale was closed.

As I read through her column, I laughed a bit at the part where she talked about having invested literal blood, sweat, and tears into the job there. I can attest that I, too, shed some of each of those things in that building.

But what stopped me and caused a lump in my throat was this paragraph:

“So many other formative friendships developed over the years, with probably about 20 coworkers too numerous to mention. For the most part, they know who they are, but I will mention one in particular here — Res Spears, who was my editor here for more than nine years and in whose footsteps I now walk. He was and still is a mentor and friend who has helped me become a better person, better journalist and more faithful Christian. He left the paper to enter the ministry and is now the pastor at Liberty Spring Christian Church on Whaleyville Boulevard.” (https://suffolknewsherald.com/2021/07/16/a-different-building-but-were-still-here/)

I don’t know that I have ever felt so honored and humbled at the same time in my life as I was when I read those words from a young woman whom I admire and love very much. Tracy is very much a friend, and Annette and I both think of her as the daughter we never had together.

Now, please understand that I do not share her words to puff myself up or to elevate myself before you. I share them to make a point that I think most of us already know but we often forget: Whether you realize it or not, there is always someone watching you and learning from you.

There is always someone studying your character and being influenced by what they’ve learned.

I hardly ever felt as if I was imparting life lessons to Tracy or the others at the Suffolk News-Herald while I was there. Mostly, I just tried to get everybody to work together to get tomorrow’s edition to press by deadline.

And I feel pretty confident that those times when I intentionally set out to share life lessons — to impart my “wisdom” to everybody — those are not the things that Tracy was referring to in her column. She and the others have probably forgotten those morsels of wisdom, and the truth is most of them were probably pretty forgettable, anyway.

I’d like to think, instead, that she and others saw something about my Christian character while I was editor at the paper and that it somehow influenced them in a positive way.

As we’ve discussed the Beatitudes during the past couple of weeks, that’s what we have been talking about: the character of a Christian.

You’ll recall that we first talked about the marks of a Christian — an awareness of our spiritual poverty, a sorrow over sin in the world and in ourselves, and a submission of our own will to God’s will.

And then, last week, we talked about the mindset of a Christian — mercy, and integrity, and peace-making, and perseverance through persecution.

Those things all constitute Christian character, and Jesus promised Kingdom blessings related to each of them. Six of those eight blessings were cast in the future tense, and that reminds us that the Kingdom of Heaven has not yet come in its fulness.

As Christians, our great hope is in the return of Jesus Christ in His resurrected and glorified body to raise us and give us similarly glorified bodies.

But even more, our great hope is that in His Millennial Kingdom and then in the eternal state of the new heavens and new earth, all will finally be as God meant for it to be from the beginning.

But we do not yet live in the “not yet” Kingdom. Today, right now, we live in the “already” Kingdom that was inaugurated here on earth when God came in the flesh of His Son more than 2,000 years ago.

It is this “already” Kingdom that Jesus was proclaiming throughout all Galilee, when He withdrew to the mountain to teach His disciples what we know as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, chapter 5.

And it was this “already” Kingdom that He promised as the present, current blessing of those who followed Him in faith and those who suffered for His name’s sake.

Those who demonstrate the character of Christ as He described it in the Beatitudes, the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, are blessed to already be subjects of His already/not yet Kingdom.

And just as our King’s character influenced those around Him, so should the character of we, His subjects, influence the lost world around us.

That’s the theme of the transitional passage we will study today in Matthew 5:13-16.

Now, as you are turning there, let me set your minds at ease about something: We will cover more than four verses a week as we get into the meat of the Sermon on the Mount. But if you were hoping for a quick run through it and then hoping we would move onto something else, I’m sorry.

I spent some time this week mapping out how to break down what I’ve taken to calling “A Manual for Kingdom Life,” and the truth is that what Jesus says in these three chapters of the Gospel of Matthew is so important that we need to consider it carefully.

Currently I expect for us to complete this study in mid-October, but I reserve the right to adjust that timeline one way or the other, and if Jesus returns in the midst of it, then we’ll hear the rest from Him, and that will be much better.

Seriously, though, the desire of the Christian should be to become ever more like Jesus, and it would be hard to find in the gospels a better description of what that looks like.

So we’re going to camp here for a while and learn from the words of the Word who was in the beginning with God. We’re going to learn about life from the One who IS life and whose life is the Light of men.

Matthew 5:13–16 NASB95

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; 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. “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.

In His introduction, Jesus described the righteous character of those who are subjects of His Kingdom. Here, He describes their righteous influence.

Next week, we will talk about the source of their righteousness, and then, later, we will spend a few weeks talking about how that righteousness is to be manifest in their hearts and how it is to be manifest in their actions.

But first, Jesus reminds us of what we already know: Character counts.

There is a story about E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India who once met with Mahatma Gandhi. Now, it may surprise you to learn that this great man of the Hindu religion was a student of the Bible, and especially of the New Testament, and particularly of the Sermon on the Mount.

Judging from his writings, it seems clear that Gandhi was not a Christian, but he had carefully read the New Testament and often even taught from the Sermon on the Mount.

When Jones, the missionary, met Gandhi, Jones asked him how Christianity could become more acceptable in India. Gandhi is said to have responded: “I would suggest, first, that all of you Christians … begin to live more like Jesus Christ.”

In other words, our character should reflect His character, and if it did, then we would see fruit borne, even among the pagan people of India.

It might seem strange to think that a Hindu could state such an insightful truth about Christianity, but all truth is God’s truth, and if God could speak truth from the mouth of a pagan prophet’s donkey, He can speak truth through the mouth of a Hindu political leader.

Character counts.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

Jesus made these statements to His disciples, but they apply to all of us throughout the centuries who have followed Him in faith.

Just as His own perfect character influenced them to take up their crosses and follow Him, our character as His followers should ultimately cause others, in the words of verse 17, to “glorify [our] Father who is in heaven.”

But for this to happen, we must be salt and light.

Now, the first thing for us to recognize in these two metaphors is that Jesus is describing two different and distinctive communities here. The first community is composed of those who are salt and light. The second community is the earth and the world.

To be sure, those two communities are related to one another, but once again, we see that Jesus calls His followers and His church to be different from the world, to be a counterculture on earth.

In the ancient world, salt was used, just as we do, to flavor food, and in small amounts, it was even used as a fertilizer. And so there is the sense in verse 13 that Christians are called to be a blessing to the world, a reading which seems to be confirmed by Jesus’ mention in verse 16 of good works and by His warning against becoming “tasteless.”

We are to be people whose words and actions invite the world, in the words of David, the psalmist, to “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.”

But the primary use of salt in the ancient world was as a preservative. When it was rubbed into meat, it would slow or stop decay, an important quality for a world without refrigeration.

And I think Jesus was looking at all three of these uses for salt when He said, “You are the salt of the earth.”

We have been called to be a blessing to the world, and we have also been called to be a “moral disinfectant,” a preserving agent that stops the spread of evil, that stops, or at least slows, the decay that sin brought into the world.

In His letter to the church at Thessalonica, the Apostle Paul talked about the coming of the Antichrist during the Great Tribulation, calling him the “man of lawlessness.”

But he also said that “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.” In other words, sin and lawlessness still reign on this earth while we await the coming of our Lord.

But during that time, Paul said, there is one who restrains lawlessness. There is one who keeps humanity from completely destroying itself.

In Paul’s theology, which clearly is based on the teaching of Christ, this is the Holy Spirit working through the church. This is the church performing its role of preservation through the power of the Holy Spirit.

“One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: where is the salt?” [John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 65.]

We can look at the world and throw our hands up and complain about how terrible everything is, or we can be the church, and go out and rub salt on the decaying meat.

That means denouncing evil, just as surely as it means proclaiming the gospel.

One scholar from the 20th century said we haven’t been called to spread honey on the world to make it sweeter. "To look at some Christians, he says, ‘one would think that their ambition is to be the honeypot of the world. They sweeten and sugar the bitterness of life with an all too easy conception of a loving God … But Jesus, of course, did not say, “You are the honey of the world.” He said, “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt bites, and the unadulterated message of the judgment and grace of God has always been a biting thing.’” [John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 66.]

Martin Luther said, “If you want to preach the Gospel and help people, you must be sharp and rub salt into their wounds … denouncing what is not right.… The real salt is the true [presentation and explanation] of Scripture, which denounces the whole world and lets nothing stand but the simple faith in Christ.” [John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 66.]

Will that message make you popular? Well, it got Jesus crucified, so you be the judge.

But “blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.” And “blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

So, Jesus calls us here to both bless the world and curse unrighteousness as people who are “the salt of the earth.” But we are able to fulfill this role insofar as we remain distinct from the world. Salt that has become tasteless is no longer good for anything.

And it’s interesting to note that this word that’s translated as “has become tasteless” can also mean “has become foolish.”

That’s the sense of it in Romans 1:22, where Paul writes about the unrighteous and ungodly who turned from the truth of God and failed to honor Him or give Him thanks. “Professing to be wise, they became fools,” he says there.

I think Jesus is using a play on words in verse 13. If we who have followed Jesus discard the distinctive “saltiness” that we have as His subjects, then not only have we become useless in our calling to display His Kingdom here on earth, we have also shown ourselves to be fools.

When we trade our Kingdom blessings for the pleasures of this world, we demonstrate just how foolish we are.

But if it is foolish for we who are the salt of the earth to lose our saltiness, it is also foolish to light a lamp and then hide it under a basket.

That’s what Jesus addresses in verses 14-16.

Jesus described Himself as the Light of the world in one of the great “I Am” statements in the Gospel of John. And we who are in Christ are called to shine His light in this dark world.

“it is one thing to stop the spread of evil; it is another to promote the spread of truth, beauty and goodness. … The world needs both. It is bad and needs salt; [and] it is dark and needs light.” [John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 64–65.]

We have the light of Christ so that we can share it with the world. The good works here are all the Christ-honoring deeds we do and words we speak. This is service AND evangelism.

Our good service to the world, and our evangelism to the lost are both outward expressions of the righteousness that we have in Christ. They are the loving and grateful response to the grace by which we have been saved.

Paul put it this way:

Ephesians 2:8–10 NASB95

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.

We who have followed Jesus in faith have been made into new creatures in Christ FOR good works.

We weren’t saved so that we would hide the light of Christ within the walls of this building or in our homes, where we read our Bibles and then go out and see the beggar and say, “Go in peace, be warmed, and be filled.”

That’s what James the half-brother of Jesus called faith without works. And faith without works he called dead faith.

We cannot hide ourselves from the world’s brokenness or from its darkness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow Him.”

But a community of Jesus that shines the Light of Christ in the darkness is one that will bring glory to His Father in heaven, and that is our chief duty as Christians.

Do you have someone in your life whom you want to come to Jesus? I hope you do. Every one of us here should have one or more people whom we are praying for and asking God to soften their hearts to the message of the gospel.

But prayer shouldn’t be your only approach. Nor should your approach be one of simply badgering them with the Good News. If you really want someone to hear the message of the gospel, you’re going to have to love them and love them well.

Show them mercy and compassion, because these are the things that give the gospel its credibility in the eyes of the world, not preaching and exhortation.

There’s one other thing I want to note about this passage before I wrap things up today.

Both of Jesus’ statements about salt and light start with the pronoun “you.” In the Greek text, this word is emphatic by its placement at the beginning of the sentence.

So the sense here is “You and only you are the salt of the earth. You and only you are the light of the world.”

Only the followers of Christ have the character of Christ within them, and only the character of Christ will influence the world in such a way that it resembles His Kingdom.

Character counts, and you never know whom your character will influence or how it will do so.

Put on the character of Christ. BE what you ARE in Him. Be the salt, and be the light. As Gandhi put it, live more like Jesus.