Matthew 5:13-16
13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Sermon
Who are the people who have really changed your life? ______________________, ___________________, _________________________
What made them such life changing people?
Some of them probably did something great for you. Maybe you were literally rescued by someone who gave you an organ in your body, or just happened to be there when you wrecked your car, or maybe someone pushed you out of the way of a speeding car. Those people literally changed your life.
The life changing people I really remember shared their lives with me. All of their lives – the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the beautiful and the ugly, the pretty and the awful.
Yet somehow, through them, I still got something that changed my life.
Take our seminary’s president. We’re talking about Romans ch 1. Mom said, “It’s just wicked Paul, just wicked.”
Same man looks me in the eye and says, “I’m glad that you are going to pastor my son. I’m glad that you are going to be there with my son.”
We got to do that in 2019. That’s one thing we’ve got to celebrate today. 2019 was a great year and God used his Word to change people’s hearts and lives.
You can be someone who helps change the world.
Basically the question is this: Who are the people that make a difference? The kind of people the world needs, where those people are
Part 1
“You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.” In Jesus’ day, the Near Eastern times, salt was used as a preservative. They didn’t have freezers, so the only way to keep meat from going bad was to salt it like crazy. Light did basically the same thing.
Jesus wasn’t talking about electric lights. He is talking about a candle or a wick in a cup of oil. If you have ever been in complete and utter darkness, not just a little dark, but utter darkness, you get a sense of vertigo and disorientation and my dad had a word when I was a kid – discombobulated. Any of you say that?
The first thing that matters to change the world is that the world needs preserving.
What Jesus is saying when he says the world needs salt and light is that the world, human existence, needs something to preserve it, order it, and locate it. He means human existence left to itself inevitably goes to greater and greater disorder, dislocation, and disintegration. To put it simply, things fall apart. Everything falls apart. Think about it physically. The human body falls apart.
What’s the natural tendency of everything? Everything falls apart. Eventually we die and fall apart. As terrible as that it, everything is the same way. Petals fall of flowers. Their stems crumble. Rocks are crushed, they become pebbles, then sand, and finally nothing.
Think of this relationally and socially. All relationships tend to go bad. Marriages have to be renewed every 7 years or so. Pastor and people relationships have about the same – 7 to 10 years. At that point they need a new vision, a new life cycle. The vast majority of our friendships grow quickly then fade. If you want to have a meaningful relationship with someone, you have to constantly work, constantly pray, constantly talk, and communicate to make sure you keep on connecting.
The minute you stop working like that, things fall apart. There are social systems and classes and races. What’s the tendency? It’s toward disintegration. Disorder. Discombobulation.
Think about energy, the universe. The first law of energy might say that things in motion stay in motion. The second law says that energy itself is running out. Eventually the earth is going to dry up or blow up or something.
I think we feel this more than ever right now. This disintegration, disorder, discombobulation isn’t just physical, or relational, or social anymore, it’s even emotional or maybe even more correctly its spiritual. Just look at the cynicism we all have. There is deep cynicism about doctors and the medical system. We literally mock and scorn our doctors – oh, they’re just out for our money. Look at Americans trust in the government. Only about 1 in every 5 of us trusts the government to do the right thing most of the time.
There is a song I grew up with that perfectly summarizes the American spirit today for many. “It’s called American Idiot. It’s based on the music of a trio, Green Day. One review says. “It’s the depiction of a new American generation … bored, disaffected, cynical about their own cynicism. The chorus of one song is, ‘I don’t care if you don’t care.’ … That’s their default attitude to life in twenty first-century America.”
Some of you are probably saying, well, yeah, pastor you aren’t saying anything that surprising. This is what I’ve always thought. Isn’t this what the Bible teaches? That everything is just going to hell in a handbasket. Yeah, sort of. But this is radical.
See for Jesus the world was cyclical. History was cyclical. Take the Egyptians. There are no biographies of Egyptian pharoahs as best we can tell. They did that because they believed there was nothing unique or interesting about each one. They were each different manifestations of the Egyptian gods. The Egyptians are known to have an incredibly traditional culture to make sure everything returned to cosmic harmony and order each year. It was all about the seasons and the farming.
That lasted until about the 1700s. We are born and bred and raised in a world infused with what sociologists call “the myth of progress”. That means, since we are kindergarten we are told, hey things are pretty good in the world and they’re getting better and you can be part of it. We’re getting bigger, faster, smarter, stronger, kinder, more moral. One of our former leaders used the line “the arc of the moral universe”, implying that the universe inevitably moves in a certain direction. Toward a certain point.
The one thing nobody believes?! That things are good but they slowly fall apart.
That’s the one thing nobody says. Who wants to say that? Who wants to say everything falls apart? No one. That sounds like the epitome of hopelessness and despair.
The people the world needs are people who know the reality of it. You can’t help if you add your voice too all the people who believe in the myth of progress. I'm all for progress. For sure. I use a lot of the developments of life all the time.
There is no point going back to be a person who says, “All of history, all of life is cyclical.” Yes, that person adds some insight to life. You’ll teach us things.
The person the world needs looks at life and says, “A lot of things are good, but they slowly fall apart.”
Take an example. What kind of person does my family need?
I leave my kids home and I say, okay, finish eating dinner, then clean everything up. Pick up the house a little bit. Put your pajamas on. And get into bed. I’ll be home about 8. I’ve got some meetings. Am I surprised and sad and angry when I walk in the house at 8 and the table is covered in food and the oven is still on and the living room floor is literally covered in legos. And as I turn to head up the stairs I hear audio books blaring from one room and the other room has VBS music. That’s not surprising. That’s just the way it is.
You don’t walk into a house that was messed up by a bunch of kids and say, bad house, bad kids. You say, where is the positive influence? You don’t walk into a dark room and say, “bad darkness”. You walk into a dark room and say, “where is the light?”
Where is the light?
If the world needs preserving, who or what is the best thing for it? Or if the world needs ordering and
Or rather it is God the Holy Spirit at work in you and through you by the Word.
See, we radically underestimate the challenge of simply renewing things. Of bringing new life to something old. It is much easier to make new. And I’m all for progress and new things, but we just said that ultimately what the world needs is preserving, ordering. It needs renewal, not new. And we radically underestimate how hard that is.
Take Coca Cola bottles. When I was a child, the icon of soda was dieing. The glass Coca Cola bottle. It was just fading out. I always liked going up north to my grandparents because their small town always had a few places that still had the old bottles. Everywhere else gave up on them. Too expensive. No on wants to return them. Too hard to refill. So much easier to fill a metal can onece and move on.
A much better example is Sears. By my count ex CEO Eddie Lampert has spent closing in on 10 billion dollars on Sears trying to revive. It hasn’t worked one bit.
Now realize what we got to see at Peace this last year.
You and I, we got to see, not one, but multiple people do something amazing. They grew up hearing God’s Word. They heard the gospel and they believed it was true. Then who knows how many years went by and they gave it up. Did all kinds of other things.
10, 20, 30, 40 years later they are back saying, not only do I believe in Jesus. I have this renewal and strong sense that I should connect with other people here at Peace under God’s Word. I’m going to put up with other sins so I can forgive and be forgiven. I’m going to repent so I can call others to repent.
Do you realize how amazing this is?
God has said there is a very limited, a very specific kind of person who is really going to do the most good in life. It’s the person who can bring out the best in something else. It’s the person who can
Think about the best steak you’ve had. You can always tell how much I care about you based on how good the meat is when you come over.
If I’ve made the time, I’ll put a rub on the meat and rub it in hours in advance, maybe days if I really have the time. And you’ll taste it. That steak, that roast will be so tender, so juicy.
If I’m in a hurry, I’ll throw some salt on the top and quick beat it. Throw it on the grill. Call it good. It’s just not the same. You’ve got to let the influence deep down.
Psalm 66:9-10
9 he has preserved our lives
and kept our feet from slipping.
10 For you, God, tested us;
you refined us like silver.
For
You don’t become salt and light by just waking up one morning and saying, I think I’ll be salt and light. You are salt and light.
Whatever deep work comes after that, whatever testing, whatever trial, whatever hardship, that is always something to come back to and say, the gospel that God loves me in Jesus not because of what I do but because of Christ.
Only he was the salt that was considered trash.
Only he was the light that was snuffed out.
Realize that? On the cross, darkness covered the whole world. Why is that? It’s because the light of the world gave up his light to fill your world with light.
I don’t think I realized, when I professed faith in Jesus, just how long it was going to take to work the gospel all the way into my life.
The chief influencer makes us great influences.
Funny story drove this point home for me.
What’s good parenting? Good parents face their own failures to do what is hard in the moment to have long term beautiful effects on a kid. If you just give your kid what they want, they’ll be a disaster.
Momentary pain in yourself and someone else for long term gain. Momentary pain long term gain.
Imagine a six year old daughter. She has those 2 teeth, right here, just dangling. Just hanging by a vein. All you want to do whenever you see her, you just want to flick em out. “No daddy, no, she screams. They’ll fall out.”
It’s so bad, when you’re at dinner time, I snuggle up next to her and put my arm around her and poke at the teeth.
That was real for us. Here is the part I didn’t do, but another dad told me about this.
One night, he is reading. His wife yells from another room, “Steve”. He runs in. She is wrestling with the kid. His job is to pin the kid’s arms down while his wife grabs the tooth. You know this isn’t my story because my wife would never do that. She is too kind. The girl is writhing on the ground and she is just crazy.
All before that she says, “I hate you I hate you I hate you. I’m never going to support you when you get old. You can’t live with me.
As soon as the tooth is out, I love you, I love you I love you. Ooo, it feels so funny, so weird.
This is the job of parenting.
This is the job of Christianing.
"Love without truth is sentimentality. … Truth without love is harshness. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent.” (Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage)
Let God deep in your life so he can help the world.