Matthew 5:13-16 - August 18, 2024

The Beatitudes as the Foundation for Christian Life

So after a short break, we obviously took a couple of weeks to talk about baptism. We're gonna get back into Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. So this is just, the Beatitudes, for me personally, to read and study through them was wonderful.

And it's going to just continue. It's gonna, maybe it'll get better, but if it's possible to get better. But it's just gonna keep going and being great. So again, we finished the Beatitudes, and those kind of served as an introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, but not the way we treat a typical book introduction, right?

Like when we look at an introduction of a book, we pretty much assume that this is something we can skip because it's not part of the main part of the book. It's just something that's keeping us from getting to the good stuff.

Well, just like a lot of book introductions actually do have some really good stuff in them, the Beatitudes, we have to pay attention to. They're foundational for us, and they're foundational for us to follow.

Because more specifically, what we said about the Beatitudes is that they are in fact a prescription for our Christian life. The Beatitudes are a list of ways that we are to be. This is how redeemed, to regenerate, excuse me, Christians are to live.

And if you go back to our discussions of these attributes, and just as a little refresher, those were poor in spirit, which we also considered as humility, mourning for your sin, lowliness or meekness, depending on your translation, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, being pure in heart, being peacemakers, and ultimately being persecuted for righteousness.

You'll recall that none of those things were possible under our own power. None of those things are things that we can truly do through our own effort. They're not things that come naturally to us as sinful people.

Those Beatitudes, those attributes, those lifestyles are only possible through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, something we experience as part of our individual selves. And we're not perfected yet, and we're not always gonna get it 100 right, but what we should see when we look at the Beatitudes and we look at ourselves is a difference in our lives, a difference in our desires, a difference in our choices, a difference in our behaviors, in our actions, and even our reactions to things that happen.

Human Progress, Sin, and the Corruption of Technology

But even after all of that, even after all those things, we're still just getting started because what I'll tell you now is that all those attributes, all the principles for your Christian life, they weren't just taught by Jesus.

They weren't just recorded in detail by Matthew for you to read, for you to feel good about the ones that you kind of think you did, and then just put the Bible away and forget all about it, right? Because contained within the Sermon on the Mount is the presumption that these attributes are gonna result in something happening in the world because of the presence of his disciples, because of you.

And there's an expectation here. John MacArthur sums up that expectation in one word. He uses the word influence. And I'll explain that more in depth in just a little bit, but I wanna read a long quote to you, just so you know, the long quote is coming.

It says this. As you know, there was never a period of which so much was expected. It is indeed pathetic to read the prognostications of the thinkers so-called, the philosophers and poets and leaders toward the end of the last century.

How sad to note that easy, confident optimism of theirs, the things they expected from this century, the golden era that was to come. It was all based upon the theory of evolution, not only in a biological sense, but still more in a philosophical sense.

The controlling idea was that the whole of life was advancing, developing, and going upwards. That was what we were told in a purely biological sense. Man had risen out of the animal and had arrived at a certain stage of development.

But still more was this advance emphasized in terms of the mind and the thought and the outlook of man. Wars were going to be abolished. Diseases were being cured. Suffering was going to be not only ameliorated, but finally eradicated.

It was going to be an amazing century. Most of the problems were going to be solved, for man had at last really begun to think. The masses, through education, would cease giving themselves to drink and immorality and vice.

And as all the nations were thus educated to think and to hold conferences instead of rushing to war, the whole world was very soon going to be paradise. That is not caricaturing the situation. It was believed confidently.

By acts of government and by international conferences, all problems would be solved now that at last man had begun to use his mind. Now, how familiar does a sentiment like this sound to us? This could have been written at any point in recent memory.

This could have been written just a year ago. This could have been written right before Y2K. But this particular summary was given by Martin Lloyd-Jones. He preached this sometime in between 1959 and 1960.

And the time period that he was referring to was the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900, what was expected and where they were by the middle of that century. So he was referring to the great hope, the progress, the utopia that the 20th century was supposed to be.

So this isn't even ancient history. I mean, I think it's old, but not everybody thinks it's old, right? I know that's a joke. I know, my mom is nodding her own head. But if Martin Lloyd-Jones was able to note how far off from the hopes of the turn of the 20th century was, if we fast forward about 70 years or wherever it is we are now, we've made advances that are far beyond anything that they could have predicted and far beyond anything that he could have predicted despite being a brilliant man himself.

I mean, what we have now is just far beyond what anything their philosophers, poets, their teachers, their leaders could ever have dreamed of. And at the same time, I would go so far as to say that humanity is in a worse place now than it was even when he was preaching a few decades ago.

And it's probably worse than they could have imagined. Who could have predicted that despite all these advances, these massive technological advances in virtually everything, every field available to us, that despite all those advances, in a lot of ways, the world would be worse?

Well, if you pay attention to your Bible, if you've read it starting from the beginning, and you'll see that God knew this and Scripture told us that this was gonna happen. I mean, from the very beginning, from Genesis, right after the fall, what we see is nothing but a downward trend in the morality of humanity as a whole, and they even get destroyed a couple of times and in a couple of different situations.

But so we see that, we see evil, we see debauchery of all kinds. And if we skip forward to the New Testament, Paul specifically tells us this. Second Timothy 3 .13 says, "'But evil men and imposters will proceed "'from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.'".

So it really, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone here, because we all know that there's no such thing as a person who is inherently good. We've all been corrupted by sin, and that corruption came to us at our birth.

It was not something that we had to go out and seek or something that we had to develop. It was in us. David writes this in Psalm 51 .5, "'Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, "'and in sin my mother conceived me.'".

We talk about our mind and our heart. Isaiah 1 .5 says, "'Where will you be stricken again "'as you continue in your rebellion? "'The whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint.'". And we should have a counter up on the wall.

It should be a Jeremiah 17 .9 counter. And every time I use Jeremiah 17 .9 in a sermon, it should go up by one, because we're gonna use it again today. Jeremiah 17 .9, "'The heart is more deceitful than all else "'and is desperately sick.

"'Who can know it?''. So this just tells us a little bit about who we are, about our sinful condition, about what happens when we live apart from God. So despite the optimism of these intellectuals, despite the optimism of the people who put their faith in man, it should come as no surprise that our abundance of technology has been put to no greater purpose than to increase the depths of our depravity that we have in society, just to make it easier and quicker to sin.

And I don't wanna take a deep dive into this today. I mean, this is a topic that we could discuss endlessly, but just as a snapshot of an example of the ways that technology can be corrupted by our sin, we'll use the example of pornography.

And like I said, we're not gonna dive deep into this today, obviously, but I'll just say this. Pornography in any capacity is absolutely, unequivocally terrible, and it's a sexual sin. So there's no redeeming value to pornography whatsoever.

It's not beneficial to you. It's not beneficial to your current spouse or your future spouse or anybody else who is involved in your life. And in fact, I'll tell you this too. Pornography used as adultery if you're married.

It doesn't help. You might wanna know like why I'm saying stuff like this. It's because I've heard it said. It's not beneficial for your relationship if you're married. It doesn't make you closer to your spouse to view it together.

And if you're using it alone in secret, then you already know that it's wrong. The technology that we've developed, again, pornography also, it's something that's existed forever, right? It's not a new thing.

But what's new is just the access to it and the availability. And it destroys the lives and it destroys the souls of everyone who's involved. The people that act in it, the people that produce it, and the people that consume it.

And I'll tell you something that's worse that I learned when I'm listening to some information about this in podcasts is that children get exposed to this at younger and younger and younger ages. And they get exposed to it before their brains know how to handle it.

And what that ultimately winds up manifesting itself as is them acting out the things that they see on other children. So to have the idea that pornography is something that, yes, it's bad, but it's just kind of over there and it's something that we don't need to worry about.

It's really not the case. So again, that's not our topic here today, but what I just wanted to do was talk about it a little bit because I think it's something that has to be discussed in our society.

And by the way, when I bring up the topic of a variety of sexual sins, and I even use a phrase like sexual sins over and over, the reason I do that is because these are things that we have to talk about in church.

If we don't use those terms and we don't discuss, not in a lewd way, but if we don't discuss the issues that are related to this, if the church doesn't talk about it, I promise you the schools won't talk about it.

Politicians really won't talk about it and the world won't talk about it. And then it becomes something that we can't talk about because you can't even bring it up in church and you can't even talk about it with the people who should care about you the most.

So, pornography is just one example of how technology, how the worship of the mind and the advance of man ultimately winds up being corrupted in our world. And that's the last thing I'll say about that for right now other than the fact that I do wanna let everybody know that despite what I've said about how awful it is and how sinful it is and how accusatory that sounds to you, the blood of Christ is more than sufficient to redeem absolutely anyone of any kind of involvement in this or anything else for that matter.

And as I've just been lecturing you on it, you would say, well, how's that possible? You wouldn't say that, but some people would. Jesus tells us in Mark 1 15, he says, repent and believe the gospel. That's how it's possible to be redeemed from any one of these sins, to repent and to believe the gospel.

And it doesn't matter what anyone else tells you. It doesn't matter what the devil is sort of whispering in your ear that, well, you've already done it, so you may as well keep going at it. You're already a sinner, so you may as well just give into it.

It doesn't matter what anybody is telling you. Scripture is the only thing that we care about. Scripture is our authority. And Scripture tells us that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

And if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. All unrighteousness. So, but let's get back on track here. So suffice it to say, it's in our nature to take things that are good and corrupt them.

In fact, much of what people put their hope in, a lot of people put their hope in technology. A lot of people put their hope in these kind of advances. And it's morally neutral. It's not inherently bad.

It's the way we take it and the way we use it that make it either good or evil. But as the result of the fall, as the result of what happened in Genesis, we actually talked about that at the men's breakfast this morning, our default is to tend toward the evil side of things.

That's just the way we are as people. Because when we put our faith in anything other than God, and when we try to use man-made solutions to solve what are ultimately spiritual problems, problems internal to us, then it fails.

The Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World

And I know that all that makes it seem hopeless because we're dealing with these problems. I mean, technology is certainly not gonna slow down its advance. We're dealing with these things on a massive scale.

But what I wanna tell you today is that you can make a difference in any one of these areas. Your life can make a difference to somebody else here. How? Well, it goes back to the idea of influence that I mentioned earlier.

So the Beatitudes taught us how to live. And our passage today gives us kind of a brief overview of what the results or what the effects of living that way are. So if you would, turn in your Bibles. We're in Matthew chapter five.

We're gonna be looking at verses 13 through 16 today. I'll read all four of these and then we'll jump into it. You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how will it be made salty again?

It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot 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. So here's how we're gonna break this down. We've already talked about the biggest problem that we face.

We've talked about sin and the fact that the world is a dark place, a decaying place, and apart from God, there is no hope. Apart from God, the world is completely corrupt. We're gonna talk about what Jesus means, why he uses the metaphors of salt and light, and then we'll consider some takeaways, some application.

So let's look at salt first. That's the first thing that we see. And before we even get there, there's something important that we have to focus on as we begin this discussion, and that's the way these things are phrased.

So what does Jesus say? He says, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. So I'll tell you this. You has two meanings here. You is individual, as in each person sitting here, and it's also plural, as in the church.

So it's to you, and it's to Christians all over the world. But second is he says, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. And the implication here is that this state, what he's talking about, is the present reality of a disciple of Christ.

And it's your present reality as a redeemed believer. You are these things already. And the only question for you is, are you going to act like it? Are you going to live like it? Now, back to the idea of salt.

So when we discuss the concept of salt, I read a lot of commentaries when we get ready, and there's just endless discussions of salt. And there's like six or eight different things that scholars say that Jesus could possibly have meant.

And salt was just more interesting than I ever realized. It shows up in scripture a lot too. So here's just one little fact. So salt has always been valuable. It's always been a commodity. And there were times when Roman soldiers were paid in salt, and this is where we get our phrase, worth his salt.

So there you go. There's something fun that you learned today. But one of the problems that we have when we start looking into commentaries and we start digging into all the implied and inferred meanings is that sometimes we can go way off the reservation.

And I was really quickly brought back to the basics, the practical point of this by Martin Lloyd-Jones. So what we do, we stick to the basics of salt, right? We don't look for special meaning. Salt does a couple of different things in our world.

The first thing that salt does is it seasons things. It gives it a good flavor, right? We put a little salt on our food to make the flavor better. We use it to improve things. And the application here for the Christians should be pretty obvious.

Like this is one of those ones that just sort of jumps out and smacks you in the face. You should be improving the state of the world with your influence. This is what it means to be the salt of the earth.

Salt of the earth is one of those phrases that we've kind of taken. And I won't say we've corrupted it because it still has a good meaning. It's still a good meaning to say that someone is the salt of the earth, but it's not what Jesus was talking about.

Jesus is talking about a Christian being part of the world, just makes things better. And again, there's dozens of directions we could take with this analogy, but we'll keep it limited to that. Although we will say this, what happens if you put too much salt in something?

Makes it bad, right? So if we're looking at this from a Christian perspective, you're called to be salt, but not salty, right? But how do you know where the line is? How do you know where you go with this?

Well, that's easy. We direct you back to the Beatitudes. If you are living and bringing out your faith in accordance with what Jesus taught in the Beatitudes, you're not gonna be salty. There's not gonna be the too much salt, which maybe that looks like the Christian who just wants to beat down doors and tell people they're going to hell without actually talking to you, that kind of thing.

The stereotypical idea of what society might think a Christian is. So again, if you're truly out there living with humility, with meekness, making peace, it'll be hard to go wrong. You will be providing that salt.

So in addition to flavor, salt has another primary purpose that it's used for, and that's as a preservative, particularly with meat. So a little bit of salt rubbed into meat can stop it from rotting, or at least slow down the process of decay that naturally occurs.

And once again, the application for you, the application for the Christian becomes obvious. With this example, though, it's pretty interesting because the salt's not necessarily doing something active.

Just the fact that it's present there is causing something to happen. Just the fact that the salt is present is preventing the decay of the meat. It's slowing down the putrefaction process of this piece of meat.

And so it is with the Christian in the world. We've already established, or at least mentioned, that the world is kind of a rotting and decaying place. The world is continuing to devolve into sin. But you as a Christian, and you as the church at large, because again, you is referring to both in this case, you have the ability to slow down, to slow down that decay in your areas of influence, just by living as Christians.

But more important, by living as Christians who share the gospel with the people that are around them. One of the principles that we've talked about before is it's not simply enough to go out there and live as a good person, because atheists live as good people.

People who have no belief or love for God live as good people. The thing that differentiates you, which again, we'll talk about in a little bit, is the fact that you have something that they need. You have the gospel.

You have the truth of who Jesus is. So as the salt of the earth, the Christian has the opportunity to use their influence to make a positive contribution to the world, whether as a flavoring, a seasoning, or as a preservative.

But the other significant role, so now we'll move on to light. The other significant role Jesus calls out for the disciples is this. And again, this is something else that, as Christians, we just, we already are.

You already are light. And it's another example of something that we're all familiar with. And I was struck as I read this by how we have these analogies. We have what salt does and what light does. And these would have been clear to Jesus a couple thousand years ago, yet they're equally clear to us now.

If you really think about it, they make as much sense to us today as they did then because light and salt have not changed. But light operates in a little bit of a different way than salt. There's more action to light because what it does is light actually shines onto something or into something.

Light shines into darkness and it makes things visible. And when we think back to what we saw in Matthew 4, 16, when we went over those verses a while back, that one referenced Isaiah 9, 2, which says this, the people who walk in darkness will see a great light.

Those who live in the land of the shadow of death, the light will shine on them. Or in John 1, verses four through five, this is written about Jesus. In him was life and the life was the light of men and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overtake it.

So this goes back to part of our premise about the natural state of the world here and that is that the natural state of the world is darkness. And John tells us that Jesus is the light that shines on that darkness.

How do we know that? We know that because that darkness was the natural state of us. It was the natural state of our lives and our heart before the Holy Spirit changed us. We read this in 1 Peter 2, 9, but you are a chosen family, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

We see this in the life of Jesus. We see in living color the process of light shining into darkness. This is exactly what he did with the Pharisees. Simply by virtue of the way he lived his life, they hated him.

They hated him before he said a word to them because his life and the things he was teaching shined light on the darkness that they were bringing into the world. It shined light on their hypocrisy and the fact that they were simply practicing a religion.

They were acting out things that weren't true in their heart. And this is why they had him killed. And this is an example of the way your life as a Christian should also be a beacon of light to the world.

I mean, your presence should be noticeable and it should probably even change the people around you. It should be obvious that there's something different about you. Even more specifically, how does this look in practice?

I would say that people shouldn't be comfortable sinning around you because just the nature of your life, in this case, you don't even have to say a word. It shines a light on the sin and it reveals the true blackness, the true darkness that is that sin.

And you would have to think that if people are comfortable sinning around you, whether it's through words, cursing, language that's used, or whether it's through actions, if people are okay doing that around you because there's nothing different about you than them, that's something that we have to think about.

That's something that we have to really reflect on in our own lives. And hopefully the meaning of those two statements, what it is to be salt of the earth and light of the world are so obvious that we don't have to spend too much more time talking specifically about that.

Because I wanna move on to what the cost of failure is. Again, we already said that we are these things, but what if we're not acting like these things? Because I already said the assumption here is that the disciples are salt and light and that it's not possible for them to not affect their surroundings.

And that's what he goes into when we read the next part of that. But if the salt has become tasteless, how will it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out, to be trampled underfoot by men.

And then about light, 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 for all who are in the house. So understand the implications of this.

If someone who claims to be a Christian is neither salt nor light in their life, as in there's no discernible difference or they make no discernible difference in the world, Jesus says they're useless.

Tasteless salt is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. And the idea of tasteless salt, just so you know, the reason he uses it here is because it's just an absurd concept on the face of it.

Salt doesn't lose its flavor. Salt lasts for a long time. Now, one thing people refer to as areas of the Dead Sea where salt is kind of mixed with other minerals so it loses its saltiness, it doesn't have the same kind of flavor but that just goes to prove the point further because that salt has been polluted by something else.

That salt has been mixed with something in the world and is no longer salt so it's contaminated. And the light example is intended to be equally absurd. I mean, why else would you light a lamp and then immediately cover it up with something?

And we could talk about the metaphorical ideas of what the basket represents, but really there's no point because if you need light, why would you cover it up? That's stupid. I'll give you an example that combines both of our metaphors.

We had this light in our laundry room. We got it from Lowe's a few years ago and it was one of those LED fixtures. It's got just a whole bunch of those little bitty LEDs inside of it, right? So there's no light bulbs and one day it just stopped working.

We turned the light on and nothing happened. And I called the electrician who installed it and he was like, well, it's probably either a bad switch or the light fixture has just gone bad. So the light fixture indeed had gone bad.

It wouldn't light up our laundry room anymore so we couldn't see the clothes that were in the washer or the dryer or anything else that was in there. So what do you think we did with it? We threw it away.

There was no point in it. It did not do what it was designed and intended to do. It no longer had an influence in our laundry room. So at this point, we've looked at most of those verses, but I wanna provide some application.

And I know that we haven't directly discussed verse 16 yet, but I'm gonna get to that in just a minute. So if we consider some of our takeaways here, what are they? I'll say the first one is this. Your life must be different.

If you are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world, as a disciple of Christ, you are to live differently and you are to live in a way that's so different that it's obvious that you have something that other people don't have.

I'll tell you how this looks in practice. And this is also kind of a silly example, but it completely fits. So as a chaplain in the military, everybody looks at you a little different, unless you give them a reason not to.

But what happens is that soldiers will literally apologize for cursing in front of you. They'll be like using the foulest language you can imagine, because that's what soldiers do and they do it all day, every day.

And then the chaplain comes in the room and they go, oh, oh, oh man, I'm sorry, chaplain, I didn't know you were there. They'll turn off the profane music where they're working. They'll behave different when a chaplain is in the room.

And the reason they do this, even if they don't know you, and even if they don't believe a single bit of what you believe, they see you as a man of God. They see you as different. And it influences their behavior.

So there's a fine line to walk there where you still need to be able to interact with them, but you don't wanna lose that. You don't wanna give them a reason to think that you're no different than any other officer in the army or the Navy, the Air Force or the Marines or wherever.

And that can be uncomfortable because you're being identified as different and you're being treated as different. But this is how our lives should look if we're salt and light. This is how your life should look if you're salt and light.

You can't compromise on what Christ says in order to get along better with people who don't follow him. You can't change the beatitude lifestyle in order to have people like you. And I think that at least part of the reason that a lot of our evangelical churches today are so utterly pathetic is for exactly this reason.

Because we have men who are presumably called by God to be pastors, but they're afraid to plainly preach what the word of God says. They're afraid to plainly preach the full counsel of God's word because it might offend somebody.

It might hurt somebody's feelings, especially if their sin gets named. Because none of us like that. None of us like to be convicted of this stuff, even though we all have it. And they think that if they're laid back, if they're cool, if they're nonjudgmental, then what will happen is that they'll attract sinners into their church, they'll feel welcome, and then somehow they'll magically become convicted of the sin that's never discussed, and they'll come to know Jesus, and then everything will be cool, and they'll still like the pastor, and the pastor will still be popular.

Now, I say this, when I make statements like that, I say this all the time. Far be it for me to ever underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit. Can that happen? You're darn right it can. God can convert anybody that he wants to convert.

But here's what often happens in practice. Here's an example. This is a high-profile example of a high-profile church, and even a high-profile believer. It was a Presbyterian church in New York City called Redeemer, who was pastored by somebody that a lot of people know very well.

And he had somebody who was a news anchor attend his church. She became a Christian at this church, or she considered herself to be a Christian at this church. But what she found out as she dove farther into Scripture, as she started to learn more, she started to learn what the Bible said about things like homosexuality, or what the Bible said about things like women being pastors, or even what the Bible says in reality about the dynamics of the home and of marriage.

And she didn't care for them. And she said, if I had known that this was part of Christianity, I wouldn't have gotten involved because this goes against a lot of the stuff that I believe in in my life.

This convicts people that are friends of mine. But I never heard it preached from the pulpit, so I didn't know that it was part of it until later. So now, where has she left? She didn't hear these plain principles preached to her.

She got a version of Christianity that was designed to be palatable to a large number of people that contained what I can guarantee you was a significant amount of truth, but not all of it. Not the part that people don't like to hear.

So this is what happens in our churches. So as a result, even our churches aren't different. So that's number one. Your life must be different. Number two is related. And I love this phrase, so I'm gonna use it again.

Your video must match your audio. And what I mean here is that your life has to match your spoken testimony. But to put an even finer point on this, it means that you can't mix a little bit of sin in with your lifestyle and still be a credible disciple.

You can't mix just a little bit of your favorite sin in, nobody will find out, it'll be okay. You know, going back to what we talked about earlier, you can't watch pornography and lecture people about purity.

You can't cheat on your spouse and teach about biblical marriage. You can't rule your children with fear and talk about what the Bible says about parenting because eventually it's gonna blow up and you'll be revealed as what you are, which is probably a false disciple.

I mean, we all have heard stories about pastors, for example, pastors who lost everything because they thought they could hide some kind of sin, whether it was sexual sin or some kind of substance abuse or even abuse of power and authority, until it got found out.

But those are just the high-profile things. We also know people who are now resented by their children, for example, or resented by their spouses because what they did was they put on a godly facade at church or when they're out in public, but at home, they're different people.

Privately, they're different people. I mean, how many times, especially a lot of you, not to stereotype your generation, but you or your children, how many people do you know who say, oh yeah, my parents drag me to church twice on Sunday and on Wednesday, and every time the doors of the church were open, we went, and they don't go to church now?