The Sermon on the Mount, Part 4

When Jesus stood before a group of His disciples on that northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, we don't know how many were there. There probably were a few hundred. Some say there were a few thousand, although they didn't take attendance that day, and that was not part of the record. But the group of people that He stood before were primarily people that were not wealthy. They were northern Galilee and peasants. Understand that the Galilee of Jesus' day was not your... it was your kind of your backwoods, your rural area of Judea. Jerusalem was the big city, and Galilee was where the country folk lived. You went to the country when you went to Galilee, and so the people that were there were poor. They were farmers. They were carpenters, some tradesmen, probably fishermen. People who worked with their hands, who had to get up every day, and what they did that day determined how much they might eat the next day or for the next week by what they produced with the sweat of their brow and the work of their hands. So they were blue collar, working class people, and they were not wealthy. They were not rich. They were not the ruling class of the time. And Jesus said something to them that was rather preposterous. He said to this group of poor people, He said, you make a difference in this world. You are significant. You are essential to this world. And when you look at it, when you consider the audience, it was a preposterous statement. No doubt many of them thought about, oh, that's ridiculous. That's a pie-in-the-sky idea. I'm just a carpenter. I'm a tradesman. I'm a farmer. I'm a widow. I'm blind. I have health problems. What do you mean I'm going to make a difference? We're a country of people that are under the yoke of Rome. How can I make a difference? But that's what He said to them. Most of those people had not traveled more than a few miles outside of their hometown and their whole life. And they were adults in their 30s or 40s. They hadn't gone more than a few miles outside of their city limits of their little dirt road village.

They'd heard about Babylon. They'd heard about Rome. They'd heard about Damascus and Athens. But never in their wildest dream would they ever think they would go to those places.

When I was a kid and I read about these far-off places, I used to dream about them. And I know, I remember saying, I want to go to those places. I want to see those places. And I've been able to see some of them. I have been able to by the grace of God as an adult and even in my youth. But these people would never see Athens. They wouldn't even see Jerusalem. They wouldn't see the temple in many cases. Never in their wildest dreams would they imagine they would go there. They were poor people who barely could make a living. And Jesus Christ was telling them they were the salt and the light of the world. Let's go back to Matthew 5 and let's read what Jesus said to them. And let's look exactly at what He said. As I continue this series that I've started on the Sermon on the Mount, today we're going to look at this next section as we've covered the Beatitudes and look at what Jesus said to this group of poor people beginning in Matthew 5 in verse 13. He said to them, You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. Salt of the earth, not salt of the village of Nazareth, not salt of Judea. He said, You are the salt of the earth, the earth that they were never going to see any more than their little neighborhood. Verse 14, He said, You are the light of the world, the light of the world, not the light of Cana, not the light of Tiberius. You are the light of the world, a city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. And so here He takes two interesting metaphors of salt and light to tell these people that you are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world. You know, it's just as much a stretch today to think about you and I and what we have done with our life, or will yet do with our life, to have an impact and to say to us that you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

It's just as preposterous for me to read these words in the privacy of my home, to read them to you, to any other group of God's people, not just to single you out here, and to say you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. But you know, Jesus has always wanted His followers to think big. That's why He said what He did and He meant what He said. And I think it's good and important that we go back and look at these two homegrown ideas, salt and light, that He used here and try to understand what He meant and understand how it does apply to our lives. Because if He said we're the salt of the earth and the light of the world, then we are. And the only other question to resolve is, are we living up to it? Are we, indeed, what He says we are? Because this is how He looks at His followers. And it's how He looked at them in the first century and it's how He looks at His followers in the 21st century. And the only question to resolve is, are we really? Can we be?

Let's look at these. First of all, let's look at salt for a minute. It's an everyday idol. Salt is such a common commodity today, but you know that at one time in the world's history, salt was as precious as gold. Salt, because of its characteristics to preserve food, was traded like gold. If you ever go to Austria and you go to Salzburg, Austria, where they filmed the sound of music, it was named after salt. Salt'sburg, Salt City. And they were able, there was kind of a regional hub, an area where they controlled salt. And the ruler of Salzburg was a very powerful individual, a very wealthy individual in his day and in the ancient times and up into a little bit into the modern times as well, because of the salt. And that's why so many different phrases are part of our vocabulary. If you say to somebody, you're worth your salt. It comes from a very old realization that salt was worth something. Now, today we wouldn't say that, that necessary. We'll say it, but we really don't understand the meaning and it's not necessarily what that, because I don't know what a box of Morton salt calls to at the grocery store today. It's pretty cheap. It's a very common commodity. And salt is in many different forms. I brought my little bag of goodies here today. This is my prop sermon. So I brought a couple of things of salt out here and just to illustrate how common and how frequent it is. This is, it says it's coarse kosher salt. Morton's got the little girl with the umbrella on it. We all grew up with that little girl. And this is kosher salt. I don't know why it, I'm not exactly sure what makes it kosher. If it's cleaner, been blessed, or what, it has the little kosher for Passover on it. I do know that kosher salt, when you buy it, is it's a coarser grind. And at least I think it's a little bit more flavorful or pungent, because you can put it on. And to me at least, I can taste the difference between this and the plain old table salt. Certainly, we can clean that up later. Certainly, table salt is finer, and I think you can, you know, if you would ever do a taste test, it is different. You see a lot of recipes will call for kosher salt years ago. And curing meat, if you ever cure your own meat, they call for kosher salt. This is a salt as well. This is a different kind of salt. They at least, it's still salt. But this is what Campbell's Soup is putting into their soups now. This is sea salt. Sea salt. If you've seen that commercial, that they're really promoting their brand of sea salt soups. And this is Trader Joe's sea salt. Very fine crystals. I like to put this on my popcorn. It's a little finer, but there is a little bit of a difference to it. Now, if you watch some of the gourmet cooking shows, the Barefoot Contessa, for instance, she will even bring out even rare types of salt, like French salt. I wouldn't be caught dead using French salt myself, but if it works fine for some people, that's good as well. But they're all different kinds of salt. And they're all basically the same thing. Don't let anybody tell you that salt, like sea salt, or, boy, get that in your throat. And, Norma, where's my water?

Don't let anyone tell you that it won't be any better for you health-wise, in terms for high blood pressure or anything like that, because it's not. My doctor told me this. I already knew that, but we were talking one time about high blood pressure when my blood pressure was a little bit high in his office one day. And it's all sodium chloride. It's all salt. There are differences of taste, but one is not any better for you in terms of high blood pressure or whatever. And you might argue the merits in terms of its ability for cooking and all. But it's a common thing, and it's a very necessary and important part of life. But it's all sodium chloride, and it's essential. You have to have it as a part of your life. If you look up a common dictionary, in a very regular dictionary, you'll find a lot of different statements and explanations for what salt is and what it does. One of the definitions will say that it is in a poetic or literary sense, that it adds freshness or pequency, as they say here. It is used to season and to preserve with salt.

It is something that is a common everyday part of life. There are a lot of phrases that have come into our usage over the years that deal with salt. I mentioned one. There are several others. Obviously, the salt of the earth is one that applies here. That's really taken out of what Jesus said here. That would be a person or a group of people who are reliable, they are honest, they are good people. When you refer to someone as the salt of the earth, those are people that you can rely on, that you would want to have around.

If you take something with a grain of salt, you've heard that phrase, it means that you regard something as exaggerated. You believe only part of something. You might take a stock tip that somebody gives you with a grain of salt, which means that you reserve just a little bit. Salt has some very interesting phrases. Again, I mentioned the fact that something is worth one's salt. They are competent. They are very good at what they do. Again, someone that you can rely on.

Salt is a condiment. It's a preservative. It is, thank you very much, something that when used properly in meats or fish, if something is preserved, it will last virtually indefinitely. The dried jerky that we buy in our grocery stores, if it's properly prepared and salted right, the stuff will last indefinitely. In South Africa, they call it biltong. It tastes better. It's different. They say that if you preserve that meat like that properly with salt, that it has almost an indefinite shelf life.

It certainly will last a long time. Salt, obviously, is something that we begin to understand having a very important meaning. Let's look at light for a minute. The light of the world, Jesus said. When you look back in Genesis, the very first act that Christ did, God did, on the creation week, was to separate the dark from the light.

Let there be light, he said. And so it's elemental. If you don't have light, you have its opposite. You have darkness. Light is elemental to life and to physics. I was reading or actually listening to something, a podcast that I subscribed to when I was walking here the other day. They were talking about Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein's greatest man of the 20th century, of course, came up with what is called the theory of relativity. Now, I can't really explain what the theory of relativity is in all of its fullness for anybody to understand because it's rather complicated.

But we've all seen it. E equals mc squared is the mathematical formula for Einstein's theory of relativity. Suffice it to say, it is a theory that has been proven and ratified as much as all the instruments and the scientific knowledge has been able to do to explain some fundamental facts about our world and about this universe. But the c in E equals mc squared really stands for the speed of light.

That's what that stands for. And if you understand a little bit about the theory of relativity, you know that light is a very important part of Einstein's thinking. His thinking about the universe and relativity all began when he began to imagine what it would be like if you could ride out across the heavens and across the universe on a beam of light.

That's how Einstein began to think toward what eventually became his theory of relativity, E equals mc squared. He began to imagine what would it be like if you could ride a beam of light straight up through the universe and never stop. And he thought it through. He was smart enough to do that. But again, light is just an elemental part of life. The ancient Greeks thought that light actually began in the eye. That's why we say that the light of the eye, and have that as part of our phrase, the ancient Greeks actually thought that light originated in the eye.

And that's how we could see and what was about us. Now, obviously, we know much more about that in terms of light. And you and I give off light. We've all seen the shows where they do the spectrometers and understand that as we give off heat, that has a degree of light and energy about it. And that's all part of a lot of things give off energy and give off light. Without light, we're in total darkness. Think about the darkest, stormiest night when the thunder and the lightnings come and the lights go out and the power is knocked off. And we have no lights except for a flashlight or a candle.

Something like this. Here's my next prop. I just brought in a small flashlight. It could have brought in my big mag light, but I just decided to bring in my small one.

And this is all you can grab to give you light. And you may stub your toe, getting to the drawer where you think you've stored that if you haven't made preparations in advance or whatever. But when you get to those points in time, a flashlight is pretty handy. And we find out just how important it is. I've actually done sermons by the light of this little flashlight on a Friday night to finish it out because a storm knocked out the power. And I've taken the thing, turned it upside down, put it on its little pedestal, and written sermons with just that. You're grateful for it.

If you don't have a flashlight, find yourself in a different situation. You may rely on the old-fashioned method, and that is something like this. I mean, if you know what this is. Anybody have any guesses? It's a lamp. It's not a common lamp like today. It's an ancient lamp. When Jesus used the phrase, you are the light of the world, these people would have immediately thought about this. They wouldn't have thought about this because it hadn't been invented. They didn't know that. They would have thought about this. This is an ancient lamp. Actually, it's a replica. I bought this when we were in Israel a couple of years ago. You could buy the real ones that have been excavated. In some of the shops, they have the artifacts that are the real ones, but some of them could cost several hundred dollars. This was only about $2. I figured I could use this just as well to illustrate in a sermon as I could the $200 lamp that they wanted to sell me in one of these stores. They had a whole bin full of these in the place where we were. It's a replica, and it does the same thing. What would happen is you would put oil into this hole right on top, and there would be a wick down in there that would come out through this smaller hole at the end of it. That's what you would light, and this is what you would carry around. You carry this through your house at night. Can you imagine doing that? You'd set it on a shelf. You'd set it on the table in front of you, and you might have a bigger one that would give you a little bit more light with a bigger wick, but this was a common everyday lamp to give light in a house in the ancient world. They dig them up all the time, and you can buy the cheap tourist version like I do if you ever go over there and have an illustration of what the light was all about. That's what they would have thought about. When Jesus used salt and light to explain to these people, he was using two metaphors to tell them an essential truth, an essential truth, that the world and the church are distinct communities. One is light, one is darkness. One is salt, and the other is without salt. And without salt, you're going to decay. You're going to just waste away. You will rot without it. That's what they understood. And he was using this to illustrate that. He was telling them, that group of people, you can't, he said, you can't blur the identity. You can't mix the two. It's one or the other. And just as light is the total opposite of darkness, so are you, and so is the world. And so as if you don't have salt, you're going to decay. You're going to rot quicker. And if, whether they knew it then or not, certainly, I'm sure they did. But if you don't even have that as a part of your daily diet, you will suffer as a result of that. And you could die. If you exert, even today, if we would exert ourselves and exercise too much and sweat out and disrupt the salt balances of our body and the electrolytes of our system, we could die. We could have a heart attack and we could die without it. So it's an essential part of life, but if you don't have it, you're heading quicker into decay. He was telling them that the world is a dark place, but you're the light. And in spite of all the claims of the world of being enlightened, it's still a very dark place. There are bad things that go on. And he's saying the world is deteriorating and the world is passing away. When Paul wrote about this over in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, hold your place in Matthew 5 and let's turn over to 1 Corinthians chapter 7.

1 Corinthians chapter 7.

Begin in verse 29, he says, So Paul was just picking up on the theme that Christ brought out in the Sermon on the Mount. The world is passing away. The world is darkness. The world is decay. And without salt, it's going to rot. And so be very, very careful. This present world is not God's.

This world can't be remade in God's image. No matter how many good, well-intentioned people there may be, and the organizations and the foundations that they will start, and all of the good works that are done, this world is not going to be remade in God's image. And that's what Jesus was telling. Remember, when we started this series, we started in Matthew chapter 4. And we saw that Jesus had to deal with Satan. And then he began to tell his disciples what the kingdom is going to be all about as he came into the land, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. And then he went right into this sermon in Matthew 5. He's talking about the qualities of the people, the character, the attitude of the people of the kingdom of God. This is our Constitution, beginning in chapter 5 of Matthew. This is what those who will be in the kingdom will live like and will be like. This is a description of those who will be in the kingdom of God, the very message that he was preaching. And he went into very specifics. Jesus did not come to reform the world of his day or the subsequent centuries. And the church, the people, the elect of God, the salt of the earth, the light of the world were not going to be those who would reform the world. And that's an important distinction as we understand what he is saying here. The church is not to reform the world. The church is to preserve the world. The church is to be a light to the world, but it is not going to dispel the darkness. It's going to shine a light in the darkness. And so all of the good works, all of the fine things that can be done, are not going to make this world over in the image of the kingdom of God by human effort. This is what he is saying here. And this is a very clear distinction that he is making. The idea of the salt is that only salt introduced from the outside can stop the decay. Can stop the decay. And he says, you're that salt.

And so you preserve by your presence the world. And the people of God have done that by their presence. And it's important to understand that the people of God do not have to bring into being the kingdom of God. They can't. The church is not the kingdom of God.

Carl was talking in a sermonette about that period of time when the Council of Nicaea and the changes were taking place that were locking in place, a great false religious system in this world.

It is the most unique and interesting period of history. Probably there is to study from a church history standpoint, that fourth century, that time of the 325 and the Council of Nicaea, because that's when the truth of salvation and of the church was finally extinguished in a large part. Not completely, but when another form of Christianity took over, that changed it all. And the idea that the church was the kingdom of God on the earth began to grow and to develop. And the subsequent ideas that are still with us today that are completely false. That the church is the kingdom of God. And the church age and the church period is that kingdom and we'll bring it bring it about is a false idea. It is not what Jesus taught. It is not that message that we find rooted here in the kingdom of God. Salt, the people of God, are brought in from the outside to arrest the decay. The church has a double role of being a preserving agent and a light that drives out the darkness wherever it goes. You are a light when you hold to the truth of God. And wherever you are, wherever you live, wherever a group of God's people are, that is a light. That's not meant to be a light that dispels all of the darkness. We have to keep that light shining. We have to keep the fuel burning in order for the light to be there. We have to keep the batteries charged up.

And the light perhaps a little bit bigger. I prefer a really big mag light when I get out into the woods because you can shine that up into the trees and see the the the coons and the owls that are up there. And you can see things going off. You just the safer feeling. This is good for around the house or in the tent at night. But if you really want a torch, you get the three or four cell mag light. And then you can really keep the light at bay. Or you pour the coal monogas into the lantern and you crank it up with the pump that little knob and you keep your campsite lit. And the darkness is out there all around. But as that light diminishes because the fuel is used up, the light goes down and the darkness encroaches. If we don't keep that firm in our own life and in our own mind, that's what's going to happen. Excuse me. Now you know what I have on my cell phone as far as my music is concerned.

Got to put that on silent before you come up. Okay.

Let's go back here into verse 13 and let's look at this salt of the earth a little closer. The New English Bible has this translated this way. They say that you are the salt to the world, which means while the world decays like a dead fish in the hot summer sun, the church can hinder that decay. It can be what is rubbed into the meat and the flesh in order to keep that decay from overcoming and overtaking. You know, when you look at society, there are two institutions that keep order in society and they keep anarchy from ruling in whether it's our American society, European society, or any major developed area of the world. There's two institutions that are essential to keeping anarchy from ruling. One is the state, a government, that can create laws for the good of the common people. And when people have a good government that does that, they're going to have peace and stability. As we see in other parts of other countries, if they have a government that doesn't do that, they have problems. Zimbabwe is one, for instance. They have a very corrupt leader right now in Robert Mugabe and they suffer. We've had a history of, by comparison, very good governments in the United States and we've had a stable society built.

A good government is essential to keeping anarchy from reigning. The other institution of society that's important is the family. The family. The home. Married life. Again, this is common knowledge to anyone dealing with sociology and how anthropology and how society develops and how our world works. A government and the family. The family is a very important, a very powerful societal influence. It domesticates, it controls, it provides for stability, happiness, harmony, provides for the next generation, it keeps things together. If either one breaks down, you have problems. That's why, especially with the area of families, with all the attempts that are being made today to blur the distinctions of what really is a traditional family, with same-sex marriages, with polygamous marriages. I was reading last night that then it was something that, again, just didn't hit the radar of the mainstream media that England, Great Britain, has now made legal polygamous marriages. I didn't realize that. You probably didn't either. But the laws that keep the traditional, biblical model of the family intact help to keep society together. But there's one other element of restraint that is in God's eyes and from the Bible even more important. And that is the group of people called the elect, the church, the people of God. Because this group of people we are told in Scripture ultimately will preserve the world from total destruction. Let's look at Matthew 24.

Christ Olivet Prophecy.

Matthew 24. As he talks about the events that would be in the world before his coming, the time of the close of the age, he mentions comes down and he mentions the tribulation.

And an abomination, verse 15, of desolation and a period of time of trial and trouble. In verse 20 he says, Pray that your flight be not in the winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no nor ever shall be. And so he leads up and he shows that there will be a time of trouble that will be unlike any past world war, any other 30-year period of war, any other period of strife. What happens at this point in the time of the close of the age will be unlike any others, a time of tribulation. And he said it is so great that unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved. Nuclear bombs make that possible today, as in no other age in the past. There's one reason to understand that what Jesus was saying here applied not to the first century, but applies to the 21st century. It applies to our time because the ability to destroy all human flesh did not exist then. It does now. And he says that if, unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved, but for the elect's sake, those days will be shortened. The elect are the people of God. The elect are those who are the Church of God, the spiritual body of Christ, the people of God. And they are a preserving agent. They are a force for preservation of all human life. Not just the family, not just one nation by good government, but all of human life is what the elect are to do. Is that not the salt of the earth? Is that not a preserving agent?

That is why, in large part, he said what he did regarding those who were part of the Church. You are the salt of the earth. This will preserve the world from total destruction.

But then he said, going back into Matthew chapter 5, he said something else that we have to keep in mind for all of this to happen, for it to be true. In verse 13, he said, if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. Salt must keep its flavor. Now, salt is a pretty... sodium chloride. No matter whether it's sea salt, kosher salt, regular table salt, or some other type of seasoning salt, basic sodium chloride is a very stable element and compound in nature. It's virtually indestructible.

It can be contaminated with other pollutants. You can mix other things into it, and it's not the same anymore. And that's why it would lose its flavor, because it would be mixed with other things. You go down to the Dead Sea, and again, Jesus's followers would have thought about this at this time, because their source of salt was from the Dead Sea, which is a very high mineral content, not just sodium chloride, but other minerals. But the process then of separating the sodium chloride out of the waters of the Dead Sea was not exact. And you would have had, as you would today, if you would go on the shore of the Dead Sea, you'll see a white crusty substance. And if you were to taste it, you'd taste the salt. But it wouldn't taste like any of these salts completely, because it's got a lot of other stuff mixed in with it. And if you could separate that out, you'd just have dirt. You'd have dust. That would be good for nothing more to be thrown out. And, as he said here in verse 13, trampled underfoot. In other words, you've got to keep the salt pure, uncontaminated, from anything going on around it. That is the point.

To be effective as Christians, we have to retain our saltiness, a resilient character that's untainted from the world. When we speak and live like Jesus, then we have and can have an influence in our life. We can be a preservative agent, only when we follow the teachings of Christ, only when we obey God's Word, only when that is the center of our life are we then the salt that is untainted from the world around us. And we don't have all of the other impurities mixed in, and then we make a difference. Now, it may not be readily understood, and people may not always like it. People are going to hate our message. They're going to reject it. They're going to reject you for your actions when you live as Jesus taught in his fullest degree. Which means, in our world today, one of the things that kind of sticks that out is when you keep the Sabbath.

But when you do those things, when you keep the Sabbath and the Holy Days, for instance, you will stand out and go beyond just being a good, moral, upright citizen of your community. You will stand out. Some people will not understand it. Some will not like it.

But they will know you're different. They will know by your actions. And in times, some will come to respect that. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that I had to grapple with when I was a teenager and working my way through the Church and the issues of this way of life as a young person. And the one thing that eventually made me stand out was when I didn't do the things on Friday night with the rest of my friends. And I waited until sundown on Saturday evening to engage in whatever else might be going on.

And you can only hide that so long. You can only be sick so many weeks, you know. You can only claim so many excuses, and eventually your closest friends are going to say, What's going on? And you have to eventually be honest if you're a good friend, and you tell, Well, you know, it's the Sabbath. Or, you know, this is what we believe. This is what I'm doing. And they may not understand it. In most cases, they won't. And some might drop you. I lost friends because of it. But it will make you stand out. And it will make you different. It's the pungency of salt. You don't need a whole lot of salt. You don't use a lot of it. You use just enough to season your food. You put too much on, and you know the problems that you can run into. It's not fit to eat. It runs your high blood pressure off the chart. But just right, and it's pungent. It's a seasoning that brings things alive, makes things different.

Preserves. Stands out. It's not honey. Salt is not honey. Jesus did not say you are the honey of the earth. You're not the sweet thing of the earth. You are the salt of the earth. And there is a difference even there. We have to look at our actions and the message we send in our actions.

In time, people will come to respect and appreciate. And some might even come to listen to what we say. If we are indeed what we say we are by the actions of our life.

You know, the message of the church has to be something that can be distinguished from other religious messages. If we, in our writings and talk about the church and what we believe, and whether it's a Bible study, a sermon, an article, a talk around a campfire at camp, a youth Bible study, a seminar that's given someplace, if we don't make that message and the life and everything that's behind it, something that's distinguishable, it'll blend in with all the other religious messages that are out here in the marketplace. One of our staff at camp a few years ago brought that out to us. When we were critiquing the Bible studies, we would give the kids every morning at camp. And one staff member said, you know, sometimes some of the things that are said, they're all good. You know, the messages are fine, but you might hear that message at the Nazarene camp. You could hear that message at the Catholic camp. And what's the difference between our message? And if what we're giving our kids, if what we're talking about is not distinct, then who are we? And what are we all about? I've always remembered that. It was a point well taken.

Our message has got to be able to be, it's got to be distinguished from other messages. Otherwise, it just blends in. It'll be ignored, and it's useless. There's no distinctiveness to it. Like the salt gives distinctiveness to the dish when it's properly applied. The salt of the kingdom, the message of the kingdom of God has got to cause that message to stand out. When we focus on the hope of the kingdom, the true message of the kingdom of God and what it means, the full message of salvation to the world as God offers it, a future time of peace and harmony and the good news of the kingdom of God, when we focus on that and really make that come alive, people know that they've heard something different. You knew, some of you, knew that you heard a different message in your youth compared to where you are now, and you knew that it was different. Your parents knew that it was different.

And that's why we, you know, I have to fight this when I write and when I speak to make sure that what I say excites people, energizes people, gives people hope, and is so distinctive that it compels to action to do something. That's what the message of the kingdom of God has to do. That's what the salt of the message accomplishes. The choice of each generation of the church is either to be a vessel of God's message or something to be ignored and discarded, thrown out the door, trampled underfoot. We have to have a distinguishing message. And then when that happens, and people are drawn to the church because of the nobility of the message, because of the hope that it gives, it's important that we don't get caught up in the sausage grinder of issues that can divide. We have to be careful about that as well. Sometimes the church has not always lived up to its mission, and issues of any particular time and place have blurred the real message of the gospel of the kingdom and caused people to lose hope, lose confidence, drift away, drift back into the darkness. And the church at times, historically, even in our own time, the church has lost its saltiness. That is a constant challenge. It's a constant challenge for you and I in how we even talk and how we express ourselves. There are so many things that are said in Colossians chapter 4. There's another reference here to salt. Colossians chapter 4, verse 6. It's always been a very fascinating scripture. Paul throws this in here and he uses salt with our speech. Colossians 4, verse 6, he says, let your speech always be with grace, meaning peace, meaning hope, meaning the concept of gentleness, that grace imparts, a divine favor, pleasantness, charming, attractive. Let your speech be attractive in that way, but then he said, seasoned with salt. Just enough salt sprinkled onto your speech.

Now, what's he talking about here? He's talking about that your speech has got to be gracious. There needs to be something pleasant about it, encouraging, comforting at the right time, something that draws people to you or to your family or toward the church or the fact that you're a Christian. They like to talk to you. You're not always negative. You're not always critical. You're not always gossiping. Your speech is something that draws people to you. But then he says, seasoned with salt, that it's different. There's a piquancy. There's a purity about it that rings true, and it is distinctive. It's never something that is bland and insipid.

It's not offensive. It doesn't push people away. But there's something about it that people know that you're different. You're a different person because of who you are. And the gospel, the message of the Sermon on the Mount, is so ingrained and so deep in your heart and in your life that it is reflected in your speech. That there's a poorness of spirit, but there's also a care for people. There's a care in the right way for the world. Speech that allows us to know how to answer people. What he says here at the end of verse 6 probably helps us to understand. He says, let it be seasoned with salt that you may know how you ought to answer each one. How we give an answer, how we answer any type of situation that comes up, it's not just an answer about why you do what you do in terms of a church, but you get the right answer to people. When they're down, you sense it and you know how to lift them. Just in the moment, if it's just passing in the hallway at work or church, you sense that and you know what to say.

You know how to compliment. You know how to say thank you at the right time and in the right way, because you know how to answer people. You've thought it through in your prayers, in your life, as you think about how you react to people. You've internalized the message of the sermon on the mount to where you are not afraid to speak honestly. Salt is a very, very deep subject in this sense as we understand it from what Christ tells us. Let's move on to the light. Let's go back to Matthew chapter 5. Let's look at the light. He said, you're the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand and it gives light to all who are in the house. This little version of the mag light, really neat. You can unscrew it, turn it upside down, put it on a little lampstand and it gives light to all who are in the tent, at least, or maybe a very small room. This wouldn't do much if we totally blacked out this room here. So let your light shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. You are the light of the world. Now, you can do a very brief study on light. Just go to Wikipedia and it will give you a pretty good basic thumbnail description about light and more than you might want to know, more than we remember from our high school classes.

But one thing you learn is that light has a number of different sources. The sun, the moon is a reflected light, the stars give off light as their energy is burned and consumed, various forms and origins and sources of light in our world. When we look at what it says here in the scriptures, we understand that Christ is the true light of the world. John 8.

John 8. In verse 12, Jesus spoke to them again and he said, I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life. Spiritually, Christ is the light and whatever good we do is merely a reflection of Him. Our righteousness is merely a reflection of His righteousness. Just as the light we see from the moon is a reflection of the light from the sun. Every elementary science student learns that. We never forget that. In that sense, it teaches us something about the light that Jesus is in a spiritual sense. In Philippians 2, Paul spoke to this. Philippians 2. In verse 14, he said, Do all things, in verse 14, without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God, without fault, in the midst of a cricket and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world. We shine as lights in the world because we are the children of God and we follow His teachings. Christ said, Let your light shine before men. If we do that, then we will reflect Him. If we veer off of that, if we lose the passion for it, lose that energy, we can go into darkness. Back in Matthew 6, verse 22, Jesus carried this on into the sermon and He said in verse 22 of chapter 6, The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.

The eye is the mirror of the soul. That's another one of those sayings. But if your eye is good, in other words, if your thoughts, your heart, your character is good, then your eye will show that light and your body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness? When we let ourselves stray from the light of Christ's teaching, the light of God's Spirit, the energy that that Spirit provides to keep us focused on God, thinking of God, wanting to obey God, using God's Spirit to fend off the challenges that come come at us every day and the struggles that are there, then if we don't do that, what's inside is going to be, it's going to grow dimmer. And we'll struggle more and we'll be a bit more critical, a bit more fearful. We will get to what verse 23 is describing in the darkness. You know what that's talking about? It's describing depression. More than just melancholy, how great is that darkness? Any of us that have ever struggled and fought with depression, in all of its guises, in all of its forms, know just how dark a day can be.

In a night, in a week, in a bedroom, sometimes people get so depressed they don't even want to get out of bed. They literally stay in bed for days at a time. I've had calls for people in that situation, come help, my mate's in bed. They won't get up, they're so depressed. There's no energy to deal with life. That's pretty dark. And anyone, like I say, who's even skirted the edges of depression can understand what this verse is talking about. But we deal with different gradations of light and darkness in our life. We can be up in the morning, we can be down by four o'clock. And it's more than just the sun going down or the chemical changes that are taking place. One of the secrets of our success of our life is just to learn how to manage that as it comes and goes and know what to do. There are ways to do that physically to deal with those challenges.

But ultimately, what the Bible here is talking about is in a spiritual sense. And we have to reflect the light of God, and that has to be written on our heart. That has to be in our mind. And we have to continue to go to the source to have that. Otherwise, we can burn out.

You know, in John chapter 5, John the Baptist's life is described. It might be good to turn there and just look at what it said there about this. John chapter 5, verse 35.

Verse 31, he says, If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. There is another who bears witness of me, and I know that the witness which he witnesses of me is true. You have sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. John testified. John turned people to Christ. He recognized that Christ was the real light. He was nothing more than a forerunner, a messenger, but Jesus was the real thing. He said, I do not receive testimony from man, but I see these things that you may be saved. Verse 35 was the thought to focus on. He, meaning John, was the burning and shining lamp. And you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light. But I have a greater witness than John's for the works which the Father has given me to finish, the very works that I do bear witness of me that the Father has sent me.

John was like a blazing comet that dashed across the sky for a brief period of time in his ministry in his life. And he did a good thing. He did his job. He did a good thing. He baptized people. He set the stage in his period for Jesus, Jesus's ministry. And Jesus describes him here as a burning, shining lamp that you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light. You know, sometimes our light will shine brightly for a time. And sometimes it might be dim.

Now, we're not necessarily... I'm just taking this description of John's ministry to help us understand that times we might burn out. Our light might not shine quite so strongly. We may shine at our brightest, maybe for a short period. I don't know.

I know that it should always shine. I know the vagaries of our life and human nature, and sometimes we're going to be stronger than we are at other times.

And it's important that we all recognize that and not be so discouraged thinking that, my light's not shining quite. My things are not going so well in my life right now. And we will all hit troughs of productivity, of spiritual effectiveness and spiritual energy.

And we may not be producing as much. And then at times we might produce quite a bit. And we know that we have been serving. We have been contributing. We have been on our game, as we say, spiritually.

And it's important, I think, just to understand that about ourselves so that we know what to do.

John had to recognize, and he did in his own unique way, that he was merely reflecting the light of God. And that is, in the end, what is most important. We are vessels that allow the light of God to shine through. This is a clay vessel. This lamp of the first century ancient world. It's clay, even this one. And it's made out of the dirt and water of the earth, just like an original one would have been. And they had different shapes. Some that were even smaller than this. Some were more open. And they had just a little bit of curvature to hold it by. And it was basically just opening. And this is more closed off than some. So they had their design people hard at work in that day and age coming up with different ideas. But in the end, it's a piece of earth. And you can walk over... You can walk down a street in Jerusalem and you can pick up a pot shard. If I were to throw this on the ground and break it into 10 pieces, one of those would be what they call today in the archaeological lingo a pot shard. It's a broken piece of pottery.

And you can pick those up just about anywhere you walk in some of those sites over there to to this day. I picked up a few. You're not supposed to do it because it's taking an antiquity away. And I guess if you got caught at the border, you could be fined or whatever. I put a few in my pocket. Made it back here with them. But in cleaning house one of these recent months, I tossed them away because I looked at them again. I said, why did I bring that back? You know, you thought it was good at the time. And I even had a still guy. I think we still have the Black Rock from the Dead Sea. Do we still have that on there? Or what they say is the site of Sodom and Gomorrah. Whenever they take you to Petra, the tour guide we have there in one of the Jordanian tour guides, he always has the buses stop at a field out in the middle of nowhere, just a few miles from the entrance to Petra. And he says this is where Sodom and Gomorrah was. And it's nothing but Black Rock out there. So everybody trots off the buses, runs out there and gets a Black Rock. Well, first time, two years, three years ago, I got my Black Rock. Last year, when he stopped, I stayed in the air-conditioned bus this year. Because I figured out that what he's trying to do is he's trying to get that whole field cleared. He stops every tour bus that he has at this spot. And he's got some plan in mind, some other scheme there. He's trying to clear all this off. But it'll take three lifetimes to do it because there's a lot of Black Rock out there. So if you ever take that trip to Petra and your tour guide stops you there, you can get you a Black Rock. But it's not... I could tell you, I don't think it's the site of Sodom and it's done anything from Sodom. It's just a Black Rock. And you bring these things back and you wonder what have you got. And I'm wondering right now why I even went off on that story. Because we were talking about an earthen vessel. The light is contained in an earthen vessel. God's light is within us.

And it shines to the degree we keep that light shining strong. So what do we learn from this? What do we take away? One thing we take away is this. There is a major difference between God's elect and religious people of the world. There is a major difference between the church and the world. Christ's main assumption with the Sermon on the Mount is that the elect are different. His teachings urge us to be different. We don't serve the world by compromise with the world. When we let the darkness of the world encroach and extinguish our light, when we let the impurities of the world around us mix in with our saltiness, we become worthless. When we compromise, whether as a teenager or as an adult, we become less of an instrument, virtually worthless. And we are not strong as a tool of God. We're in a daily struggle with the spiritual forces of evil that dominate this world. The Kingdom of God suffers violence each day.

Christ said at one point, He said, the Kingdom of God to this day suffers violence.

It's one of those phrases I've always read and I've preached on it. And I, 25 years ago, 30 years ago when I remembered preaching on Matthew 11, verse 12, I didn't know what I was talking about. I thought I knew what I was talking about, but I've learned more about it since.

The Kingdom of God suffers violence. Life in this way of life is a daily struggle. You think at age 17 or 16, it's a struggle that's going to change in that sense? You're wrong.

Now, you can know how to manage it, but living this way of life, there's always going to be attention. I'm not trying to say that it's not a better way of life because I think that it is a better way of life. I'm not saying that we are not going to have our successes and our highs because you can, and we will, and I have, and you have. But one thing I have learned is there is always attention. If there's not attention between this way of life and the world we face every day, then we better ask ourselves very clearly how much are we compromising, how much of the darkness is really there that we think is light, and how much impurities have we allowed to seep in amongst the salt that we're supposed to be. Because if we're not experiencing a struggle and attention and realize that we're at kind of at odds with this world because of who we are, the way we live, and what we have to resist, then we're not living it. And you're kidding yourself.

You will live a lifetime like that. Baptized with God's Spirit, you will live a lifetime like that. It's part of the cost that we have to count, but it is part of what we have to live. The rest of verse 12 of Matthew 11 says, but the violent will take it by force. By force. There's a struggle, and there's a force we have to exert to take and to seize and to achieve the kingdom of God.

We can't compromise. There's a difference between the elect. That's why Jesus said, you're the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. The second point to learn is that we've got to accept the responsibility of this calling. There is a responsibility that comes to this. Our obedience, you're living this way. You're choosing to obey God, to be a part of the church of God, the work engaged in the work of preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God.

Your election to do that, your decision to do that, to support it with your tithes, your offerings, to support it with your prayers, to support it with your whole being.

Some of you have said to me, you want this is your church. You want this to work. This is what you've committed your life to, and you have, and you're here.

That is a responsibility. Understand that our being faithful to that calling serves the world. We are salt and we are light, and we have to be faithful to what we are. Don't conceal it. Don't let sin and compromise, don't let laziness or fear cause you to distinguish that light, or to put it under a basket to where it can't be seen. Sin will do that.

People, you know, are today are rallied to political causes and social causes. I'm really amazed as I watch this year's election cycle to see the energy and the excitement that has been generated by Barack Obama. It is an interesting thing to watch. I don't think he said one thing of any substance that people think that he has. That's the art of politics.

He can say, hope, hope, hope all day long. But I haven't heard anything of substance, and I haven't seen anything in looking back at what has been available of his past record. But he excites people, and he energizes people. My fear is, as some others have expressed, that people won't wake up until the day after inauguration day and see that.

That is a very real possibility. But I think that if that, if he does get in, I think that people will find out very quickly how empty and hollow he is in terms of what he stands for and what he wants to do.

That's something we'll have to watch and see and maybe even pray about. But people get caught up in a cause, and they rally. They'll invest hopes and dreams into a person or into an ideology. And most of those will fail. They'll leave people empty with frustrated lives. It can seem at times that if we look at our calling only as religion, that we might do the same thing. Our calling goes more than just to church. Our calling is more to religion or just being spiritual and having a good feeling about ourselves. Our calling is really to the power of the kingdom of God.

It's the power to do the work of the kingdom in deed and in action. And we have to be scrubbed and salted with this salt so that we are preserved from the corruption of this age. Once we're preserved, then we're ready to be light that illuminates the spiritual darkness. We don't fold up. We don't retreat. We don't go into a bushel, a basket, and hide our light. We don't retreat someplace to where people can't see us. We don't run off and hide to someplace that gives us safety. You know, one of the things that's instructive that was very instructive to me, it was a place that we were revisited this year on our trip to Israel.

It was the third time I've been to this spot. And first time was as a student in 1971. Second time in 1905 and then this past year. It's a place right next to the Dead Sea. When you go there, you're maybe a mile, mile and a half, you can see the Dead Sea. It's built up on a little plateau. And you're right there down in the desert.

The Dead Sea is right next to it. And it's a fascinating place. It is called Qumran. It is where they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-1948 when a little Bedouin shepherd boy somehow fell into a cave in this area and he found some clay jars which contained the scrolls of Isaiah and other texts and set off this huge search. And they found many, many more in various caves in this region, clay jars that have been there since about 70 AD. And for years they didn't even know where they came from until they started, they saw some ruins right there.

And then they started excavating and they uncovered on this little plateau a community. And they found other things and they remains of buildings and baptismal places and all that were there in this place called Qumran, the place of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I made three trips there. And to be honest with you, just didn't connect. I know why it didn't the first time I was there because I was too busy interested in the girls and I was not listening to what they were teaching us there.

And that was when I was a teenager. I went back a few years ago and the tour guide and some of the other church members got caught up in some conversations that detracted from the, and distracted from the what she wanted to teach us.

This year we had a different tour guide. And in about 10 minutes in a whirlwind talk, it all came together as to just a few of the basics there. I mean, you know, you can do a whole lifetime of study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but what it was, here was a group of people. They were all men who lived here for, oh, maybe 200 years or so until about 70 AD. They had a little monastic, hermit-like community. They got turned off with the power, religious power structures in Jerusalem, up the hill a few miles away in Jerusalem, the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the temple structure.

They got turned off with organized religion and they went to the desert and formed their own community. Some say that Jesus came among them and John the Baptist, but that's not the case. But there they copied scrolls. They brought in other scrolls. They had their own writings. They had a person there, they know from their teachings, they had a person there called the Son of Light. One of their leaders, their hero, was called the Son of Light. Some speculate that when Jesus said, you are the light of the world here in Matthew 5, that they would have been thinking and understood the connection to this group of people called the Essenes down at the Dead Sea, which everybody knew about in Qumran.

Maybe, maybe not. But some of them could have made a connection there. But this group of called the Essenes, they were living their life and they were waiting for the end to come. They believed in the end times. They believed that their period there in the early first century, first decades, they were living in the time of the end. Their writings indicate that. And what happened was they just disappeared. And this is what I didn't understand because I really had not focused on the story there, but our tour guide brought this out to us.

When the Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem in 69 AD, there were a group of zealots that escaped Jerusalem and they went down to a place called Masada. Those of you that know the story of the Jewish revolt then know that this group of armed zealots retreated to a mountain fortress down in the desert south of Qumran, just a few miles, the place called Masada, where they held out for a few years against the Roman legions and they all committed suicide. You know that story.

Well, what I didn't make the connection was is that for the Roman legions to get from Jerusalem to Masada, they had to come down the hill, down the Red Sea, and go right by Qumran, where this group of men were holding out. They were in their little place of safety, if you want to put it that way. They had escaped the world and their light was there. They had their sun of light. They heard that the Roman legions were coming. Here comes the 10th legion of Rome, lumbering along the cohorts, the chariots, and the great works of the armies. They saw them coming down the road because you can stand where they lived and you could look up the road and you know that they saw them coming. They knew they were on their way.

They didn't know what was going to happen. So what they did is they took all of their scrolls, put them in clay jars, and put them in the caves, which were just up the hill from their little village, thinking that they could kind of, you know, they might have to deal with the Romans for a little while, but then they could go back and get their clay jars and unroll their scrolls. What happened, the Roman legions just came right down. They looked at these hermit-like men, thought they were kind of strange, and swatted them like a gnat into extinction. They killed them, rolled right over them, destroyed their community, and the world forgot about them until a little Bedouin boy in 1947 found their scrolls that they thought they were going to go back and get. And that's essentially the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls and this group at Qumran who thought they were the light of the world, but they'd gone off away from the world.

And the beast got them anyway. You can't run and you can't hide.

Some of you can make the obvious connections there, understanding. We can't hide either. We have to let our light shine. We have to let that, we have to be a force. We have to frame our life in a manner that is worthy of the gospel of the kingdom of God. Christ uses the metaphor of salt to show us the bitter pungency of life. There's a saltiness to that that is instructive. And there's a time and a way to be kind of an old salt. Kind of just a bit crusty in a right way with the gospel of the kingdom of God. As I said, we're not the honey of the earth, we're the salt of the earth. God uses imperfect earthen vessels to preserve the truth and ultimately preserve human life. Because there will be a group of people called the elect, life will not perish.

So to read these verses today probably seems just as foolish and preposterous and improbable as it did to that small group of people. When Jesus spoke those words, that small group of peasants on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee. People who had never been outside their own little region and would never get outside their own region. And Jesus said, you're the salt of the earth and the light of the world. When we look at that and try to figure that out today, it may sound foolish, it may sound improbable, but hopefully we understand it a little better. Because it is true today, just as it was true then. Because there is an elect, this world will not perish.