Matthew 5:13-16 - August 18, 2024

Mount Zion Community Church

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So after, after a short break, we obviously took a couple of weeks to talk about baptism.

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We're going to get back into Jesus teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. So this, this is just the

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Beatitudes for me personally to, to read and study through them was wonderful and it's going to just continue.

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It's good. Maybe it'll get better if, but if, if it's possible to get better, but it's just going to keep going and being great.

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So again, we finished the Beatitudes and those kind of served as an introduction to the

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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This is how, how redeemed, regenerate, excuse me, Christians are to live.

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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 consider 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.

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You'll recall that none of those things were possible under our own power.

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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.

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Those Beatitudes, those attributes, those lifestyles are only possible through the indwelling of the

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Holy Spirit, something we experience as part of our individual salvation. But even given that, we're not perfected yet and we're not always going to get it a hundred percent right, but what we should see when we look at the

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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.

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But even after all that, even after all those things, we're still just getting started because what

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I'll tell you now is that all those attributes, all the principles for your

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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

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Bible away and forget all about it, right? Because contained within the Sermon on the

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Mount is the presumption that these attributes are going to result in something happening in the world because of the presence of his disciples, because of you.

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And there's an expectation here. John MacArthur sums up that expectation in one word.

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He uses the word influence. And I'll explain that more in depth in just a little bit, but I want to read a long quote to you, just so you know, long quote is coming.

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It says this, as you know, there was never a period of which so much was expected.

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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.

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How sad to note that easy, confident optimism of theirs, the things they expected from this century, the golden era that was to come.

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It was all based upon the theory of evolution, not only in a biological sense, but still more in a philosophical sense.

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The controlling idea was that the whole of life was advancing, developing and going upwards.

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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.

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But still more was this advance emphasized in terms of the mind and the thought and the outlook of man.

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Wars were going to be abolished. Diseases were being cured. Suffering was going to be not only ameliorated, but finally eradicated.

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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.

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The masses through education would cease giving themselves to drink and immorality and vice.

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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.

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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.

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Now, how familiar does a sentiment like this sound to us? This could have been written at any point in recent memory.

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This could have been written just a year ago. This could have been written right before Y2K.

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But this particular summary was given by Martin Lloyd -Jones. He preached this sometime in between 1959 and 1960.

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And the time period that he was referring to was the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900.

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What was expected and where they were by the middle of that century.

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So he was referring to the great hope, the progress, the utopia that the 20th century was supposed to be.

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So this isn't even ancient history. I mean, I think it's old, but not everybody thinks it's old, right?

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I know that's a joke. I know you're not. 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.

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I mean, what we have now is just far beyond what anything their philosophers, poets, their teachers, their leaders could ever have dreamed of.

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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.

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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?

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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 going to happen.

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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.

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And they even get destroyed, you know, 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.

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And if we skip forward to the New Testament, Paul specifically tells us this. 2 Timothy 3 .13 says,

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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.

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We've all been corrupted by sin and that corruption came to us at our birth.

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It was not something that we had to go out and seek or something that we had to develop. It was in us.

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David writes this in Psalm 51 .5. We talk about our mind and our heart.

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Isaiah 1 .5 says, Where will you be stricken again as you continue in your rebellion?

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The whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint. And we should have a counter up on the wall.

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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 going to use it again today.

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Jeremiah 17 .9, The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. Who can know it?

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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.

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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.

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And I don't want to take a deep dive into this today. I mean, this is a topic that we could discuss endlessly.

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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.

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And like I said, we're not going to 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.

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So there's no redeeming value to pornography whatsoever. It's not beneficial to you.

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It's not beneficial to your current spouse or your future spouse or anybody else who is involved in your life.

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And in fact, I'll tell you this, too. Pornography used as adultery if you're married.

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It doesn't help. You might want to know why I'm saying stuff like this.

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It's because I've heard it said. It's not beneficial for your relationship if you're married.

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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.

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The technology that we've developed, again, pornography also, it's something that's existed forever, right?

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It's not a new thing. But what's new is just the access to it and the availability.

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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.

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And I'll tell you something that's worse that I learned when I'm listening to some information about this and 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.

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And what that ultimately winds up manifesting itself as is them acting out the things that they see on other children.

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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.

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It's really not the case. So, again, that's not our topic here today.

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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.

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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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And that's the last thing I'll say about that for right now. Other than the fact that I do want to let everybody know that despite what

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I've said about how awful it is and how sinful it is and how accusatory that sounds for 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.

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And, you know, 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.

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Jesus tells us in Mark 115, 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.

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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.

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You're already a sinner, so you may as well just give in to it. It doesn't matter what anybody is telling you. Scripture is the only thing that we care about.

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Scripture is our authority. And Scripture tells us that whoever calls upon the name of the

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Lord will be saved. And if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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All unrighteousness. So but let's get back on track here.

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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.

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A lot of people put their hope in these kind of advances. And it's morally neutral. It's not inherently bad.

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It's the way we take it and the way we use it that make it either good or evil.

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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.

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Our default is to tend toward the evil side of things. That's just the way we are as people.

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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.

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And I know that all that makes it seem hopeless because we're dealing with these problems.

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I mean, technology is certainly not going to slow down its advance. We're dealing with these things on a massive scale.

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But what I want to tell you today is that you can make a difference in any one of these areas.

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Your life can make a difference to somebody else here. How? Well, it goes back to the idea of influence that I mentioned earlier.

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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.

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So if you would turn in your Bibles, we're in Matthew chapter five. We're going to be looking at verses 13 through 16 today.

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I'll read all four of these and then we'll 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?

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It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

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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.

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Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your

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Father who is in heaven. So here's how we're going to break this down. We've already talked about the biggest problem that we face.

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We've talked about sin and the fact that the world is is a dark place, a decaying place.

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And apart from God, there is no hope. Apart from God, the world is completely corrupt.

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We're going to talk about what Jesus means, why he uses the metaphors of salt and light, and then we'll we'll consider some takeaways, some application.

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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.

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And that's that's the way these things are phrased. So what does Jesus say? He says, you are the salt of the earth.

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You are the light of the world. So I'll tell you this, you has two meanings here.

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You is individual, as in each person sitting here. And it's also plural, as in the church.

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So it's to you and it's to Christians all over the world. But second, he says, you are the salt of the earth.

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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.

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You are these things already. And the only question for you is, are you going to act like it?

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Are you going to live like it? Now, back to the idea of salt. So when we when we discuss the concept of salt,

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I read a lot of commentaries and we get ready. And there's just endless discussions of salt.

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And there's like six or eight different things that that scholars say that Jesus could possibly have meant.

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And salt was just more interesting than I ever realized. It shows up in scripture a lot, too.

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So here's just one little fact. So salt has always been valuable. It's always been a commodity. And there were times when

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Roman soldiers were paid in salt. And this is where we get our phrase, worth his salt.

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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, you know, all the implied and inferred meanings is that sometimes we can go way off the reservation.

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And I was really quickly brought back to the basics, the practical point of this by Martin Lloyd -Jones.

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So what we do, we stick to the basics of salt, right? We don't look for special meaning.

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Salt does a couple of different things in our world. The first thing that salt does is it seasons things.

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It gives it a good flavor, right? We put a little salt on our food to make the flavor better.

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We use it to improve things. And the application here for the Christians should be pretty obvious.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Jesus was talking about. Jesus is talking about a Christian being part of the world, just makes things better.

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And again, there's dozens of directions we could take with this analogy, but we'll keep it limited to that.

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Although we will say this, what happens if you put too much salt in something? Makes it bad, right?

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So if we're looking at this from a Christian perspective, you're called to be salt, but not salty, right?

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But how do you know where the line is? How do you know where you go with this?

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Well, that's easy. We direct you back to the Beatitudes. If you are living and bringing out your faith in accordance with what

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Jesus taught in the Beatitudes, you're not going to be salty. There's not going to be the too much salt, which, you know, maybe that looks like the

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Christian who just wants to beat down doors and tell people they're going to hell without actually talking to you.

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That kind of thing. The stereotypical idea of what society might think a

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Christian is. So, again, if you're truly out there living with humility, with meekness, making peace, it'll be hard to go wrong.

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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.

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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.

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And once again, the application for you, the application for the Christian becomes obvious.

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With this example, though, it's pretty interesting because the salt, the salt's not necessarily doing something active.

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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.

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It's slowing down the putrefaction process of this piece of meat.

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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.

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The world is continuing to devolve into sin. But you as a

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You have the gospel. You have the truth of who Jesus is. So as the salt of the earth, the

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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.

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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.

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And again, this is something else that as Christians, we just, we already are.

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You already are light. And it's another example of something that we're all familiar with.

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And I was struck as I read this by how we have these analogies. We have what salt does and what light does.

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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.

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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.

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Light shines into darkness and it makes things visible.

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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

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Isaiah 9, 2, which says this. The people who walk in darkness will see a great light.

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Those who live in the land of the shadow of death, the light will shine on them.

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Or in John 1, verses 4 through 5, this is written about Jesus.

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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.

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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.

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And John tells us that Jesus is the light that shines on that darkness. How do we know that?

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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

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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.

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We see this in the life of Jesus. We see in living color the process of light shining into darkness.

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This is exactly what he did with the Pharisees. Simply by virtue of the way he lived his life, they hated him.

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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.

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It shined light on their hypocrisy and the fact that they were simply practicing a religion.

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They were acting out things that weren't true in their heart. And this is why they had him killed.

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And this is an example of the way your life as a Christian should also be a beacon of light to the world.

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I mean, your presence should be noticeable, and it should probably even change the people around you.

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It should be obvious that there's something different about you. Even more specifically, how does this look in practice?

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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.

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It shines a light on the sin, and it reveals the true blackness, the true darkness that is that sin.

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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.

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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.

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Because I want to move on to what the cost of failure is.

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Again, we already said that we are these things, but what if we're not acting like these things?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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So understand the implications of this. If someone who claims to be a

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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,

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Jesus says they're useless. Tasteless salt is no longer good for anything, but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

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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.

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Salt doesn't lose its flavor. Salt lasts for a long time. Now, one thing people refer to is areas of the

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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.

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That salt has been mixed with something in the water, in the world, and it's no longer salt, so it's contaminated. And the light example is intended to be equally absurd.

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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?

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That's stupid. I'll give you an example that combines both of our metaphors.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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So what do you think we did with it? We threw it away. There was no point in it.

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It did not do what it was designed and intended to do.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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I'll tell you how this looks in practice. And this is also kind of a silly example, but it completely fits.

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So as a chaplain in the military, everybody looks at you a little different unless you give them a reason not to.

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But what happens is that soldiers will literally apologize for cursing in front of you.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You don't wanna give them a reason to think that you're no different than any other officer in the army or the

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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.

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This is how your life should look if you're salt and light. You can't compromise on what

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Christ says in order to get along better with people who don't follow him.

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You can't change the beatitude lifestyle in order to have people like you.

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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.

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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.

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They're afraid to plainly preach the full counsel of God's word because it might offend somebody.

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It might hurt somebody's feelings, especially if their sin gets named. Because none of us like that.

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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

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Jesus, and then everything will be cool, and they'll still like the pastor, and the pastor will still be popular.

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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

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Holy Spirit. Can that happen? You're darn right it can. God can convert anybody that he wants to convert.

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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.

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It was a Presbyterian church in New York City called Redeemer, who was pastored by somebody that a lot of people know very well.

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And he had somebody who was a news anchor attend his church. She became a

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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

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Bible said about things like homosexuality, or what the Bible said about things like women being pastors, or even what the

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Bible says in reality about the dynamics of the home and of marriage.

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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.

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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.

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So now, where has she left? She didn't hear these plain principles preached to her.

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She got a version of Christianity that was designed to be palatable to a large number of people that contained what

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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.

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So this is what happens in our churches. So as a result, even our churches aren't different.

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So that's number one. Your life must be different. Number two is related.

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And I love this phrase, so I'm gonna use it again. Your video must match your audio. And what

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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.

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You can't mix just a little bit of your favorite sin in, nobody will find out, it'll be okay.

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Going back to what we talked about earlier, you can't watch pornography and lecture people about purity.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 dragged me to church on, 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.

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And sometimes, I won't say that about everybody, but sometimes it's because they were going to church because it was the expectation, but at home, church wasn't part of their world.

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So we're professing something and not living that way. And as a result, again, children resent parents.

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Spouses resent their spouses. And I would say that contradicting your testimony before the people that are closest to you, especially children, is dangerous.

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I mean, you risk, unless you really don't care, you risk leading your children away from God. And that's probably worse than some kind of public fall is to live in such a way that your children don't think that God is real because of what you did.

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And, you know, and for me to stand up here and say this, you know what that means.

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That means my family gets to hold me accountable, right? So, yes, your video must match your audio.

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And I'll go ahead and head off some of the criticism and say, of course, I'm not perfect, right?

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But Amy and I do our best in the household for this kind of thing. So that's number two, your video must match your audio.

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Your life has to match your testimony. Number three, and this is one of my favorite ones to talk about lately, is you can't be a secret

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Christian. And this goes back to what I said was just the utter absurdity of the idea of lighting a lamp and then immediately covering it with a basket.

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But I can never say it better than Martin Lloyd -Jones. He said this, there is nothing in God's universe that is so utterly useless as a merely formal

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Christian. I mean by that, one that has the name, but not the quality of a

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Christian. So if you're a Christian, but nobody knows it, are you really a

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Christian? And if you wonder how churches like what

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I just talked about survive and frankly even thrive,

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I mean, they're massive, much bigger than this. How do they survive and thrive?

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Well, it's because the chairs wind up filling with people like this.

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Not everybody, again, what I don't want is to be misunderstood as making blanket statements about every single person who sits in every single church and every single pastor with a big church, but this is very common.

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But they sit around and they are just priding themselves on how understanding and how nonjudgmental and how loving they are.

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Hearing teaching that is safe and non -controversial and then making no difference in the world other than maybe congratulating each other on how

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Christian they are. Speaking of self -congratulation, that brings us to point number four.

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And that is never seek your own glory. And this brings us to verse 16.

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Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your

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Father who is in heaven. And this one's hard.

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Like how do you go out and do public good deeds and then give all the credit to God without sounding disingenuous?

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We talked about this in the men's group. They're doing a lot of good stuff to help people in the community, to help one person specifically in the community.

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They truly are being the light of the world and the salt of the earth. But it's for the glory of God.

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We're doing this to spread the gospel, not to make ourselves feel better about something that we've done for someone else.

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So again, this is hard. How do we do it? And I'll give you the best answer

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I have in just a minute. But the bottom line is this. The world is a dark place.

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It's a depressing place. That's something else that was discussed this morning. We talked,

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Sam talked about fear. Tommy talked about how we give into that fear in the political realm and the way society is going.

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So the world looks bad and it doesn't really seem to be getting better. And despite the idea that we could fix all of mankind's problems with just a little bit more knowledge, if we just knew a little bit more, if we just discovered or invented this one last thing, despite how we feel about that, all it really gets us is better and faster at doing bad stuff.

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And so I think it's safe to say the quest for knowledge has been a failure. And again, that's not to say that there haven't been benefits.

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Of course there have been benefits, but not a single one of those benefits has any eternal value or any eternal significance while we're still in darkness here.

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There was a period of time from roughly 1685 to 1815, you remember what that was called?

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It was called the Enlightenment while we're still in darkness. But even the

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Enlightenment was not completely novel. I was shocked to read this quote when I was reading about the

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Sermon on the Mount. The quote goes like this, "'Let us never forget that Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and the rest had given their full teaching several centuries before these words were uttered.'"

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So people that we learn from, people that our philosophers study taught before Jesus ever taught the

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Sermon on the Mount. Yet the world was still in darkness. And the point that I'm getting to here is that every problem, every issue, every conflict that we have, from conflict within ourselves to the individual level, all the way up to the scale of world war comes down to one thing.

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It comes down to sin. Martin Lloyd -Jones again, every difficulty in the world today can be traced back in the last analysis to sin, selfishness, and self -seeking.

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So what is the solution? What do we do about this? The first and foremost is something that I talked about a little bit earlier.

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But I wanna direct you briefly into the Gospel of John, to chapter 17.

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And I'm gonna look just at verse 12. It says this, while I was with them,

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I was keeping them in your name, which you have given me. And I guarded them. And not one of them perished, but the son of perdition, so that the scripture would be fulfilled.

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I guarded them, and not one of them perished. So what you have to picture here is

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Jesus in the garden, on his knees, praying.

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And this is just one verse of this prayer. This is just one small part of what is an absolutely phenomenal prayer.

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And you can only imagine the things that he's feeling as he's there, because he knows what's about to happen.

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Because what happens after he finishes this prayer? He leaves the garden, and that's when he gets arrested.

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And then ultimately, that leads to the crucifixion, which mercifully, by the grace of God and God's design, leads to Jesus' resurrection three days later.

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And that resurrection was obviously a miracle in itself. But the real miracle, or one of the real miracles, the real gifts, is that Jesus' death and Jesus' resurrection was exactly what it was that allowed

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Jesus to pay the penalty for the sins of the world. God knew about all this darkness, and he sent his son to die, so that God, in his perfect righteousness and perfect justice, could forgive all of us, could forgive you, could forgive me of those sins of what we've done in the world, as long as we repent and believe in the work that Jesus did on the cross.

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So I'll tell you this too, this is what this means. No matter how dark we say the world is, no matter how bad all these problems are, and no matter what lengths people will go to to indulge their sin, there is nothing that is too dark and there is no place that is too far away to be beyond the reach of the cross and to be beyond the reach of what

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Jesus did on the cross. And what Scripture tells us is that it's truly a gift that we can't earn for all who call upon the name of the

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Lord. Now, why is this the solution? Because if you believe that you are outside the grace of God today, if you believe that you're lost, if you're one of those people that says,

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I know you're here in church today, but if you're one of those people that says, oh, I can't step foot inside a church, you don't know what I did, lightning would strike me down, all the things that people say to excuse themselves from not going to church, or if you simply feel like you've done things that are too bad for God to forgive,

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I'll tell you that it's not true. And if you wanna talk more about that, I would love to talk to you.

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I would love for you to come and ask me, how is that possible? So that's the truth for you, but there's one more thing.

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And that's for all of you here, brothers and sisters, no amount of secular knowledge is ever gonna overcome our sin problem.

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You cannot learn enough, you cannot innovate enough to overcome that problem.

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So that means something important for you who consider yourselves to have experienced the saving grace of God through the work of Jesus and the power of the

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Holy Spirit. And that's this, you as a Christian, you're the only one who has the solution to the pain and the darkness of these people in the world.

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Government doesn't have it, school doesn't have it, no kind of technology has it.

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You are the only one who has the true solution. And it doesn't matter your age, it doesn't matter your income, it doesn't matter your job, it doesn't matter your education.

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You have something better to offer than any of the smartest people, any of the richest people, any of the most famous people on the planet, and you have the gospel to give to people.

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Because what does it say? It says, faith comes by hearing. But how will they call on him who they have not believed, and how will they believe in him who they have not heard?

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So I beg you not to keep it a secret. But again, how do we do this for the glory of God?

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How do we go out and share the gospel? How do we go out and serve people? How do we go out and change lives for the better without making it about us?

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Well, that's the question that's related to verse 16. And the best answer that I have to that is that you live your life according to what

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Jesus taught in the Beatitudes. That's how we got right here where we are, is we came out of the Beatitudes to this.

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The poor in spirit humility, the recognition of who you are, where you came from, and what was done for you should be more than enough to cure you of any kind of superior attitude that you have towards other people.

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Again, but for the grace of God, you would be that wretched sinner that you are secretly judging in your mind.

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And it also cures you of the idea that you're responsible for any of those things that have happened to you.

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It's purely the work of the Holy Spirit, again, through the grace of God. And then if you look, meekness, peacemaking, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, those are the things that keep your light shining.

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If you live that way, you will look different. That's what allows you to truly be the salt of the earth.

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That's why all of that led to these verses. So this is the suggestion that I have for you to close.

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And I know I don't do a lot of these practical things, but today I'm going to read and meditate on the

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Beatitudes. Do it every day. It's just a few verses. And I don't mean read it, because you can read it in probably 15 seconds, but you have to really reflect on not only what it means, and we've gone through all of them, so you should all know what they mean.

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And if you don't, the sermons are online, and I will answer your questions. But reflect on that, and then on how your life shows that.

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Make the Beatitudes a part of who you are. Again, the world is a dark, dirty place, and Christians are the salt and the light of that world, if you live the way

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Jesus taught us to live. Now, I'll close with this quote from J .C.

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Ryle. He says this, salt and light evidently imply peculiarity of both heart and life, of faith and practice.

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We must dare to be singular and unlike the world if we are to be saved.

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Let's pray. Heavenly Father, once again, we thank you for your teaching.

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God, as we dive into your word, we see the glory that's revealed there, and we see the promises that you have for us, and we see the answers to our questions about how it is that we should live.

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God, we see that we are called to be different.

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We are called to be separate, but while we're called to be separate from the world, we're not called out of the world.

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You have very intentionally put us here to be an influence. You have very intentionally put us here in the time, in the location that you've put us to be salt and light to certain people in certain situations.

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When we reflect on what was done for us by Jesus on the cross, when we reflect on what we were saved from, the eternal hell and the eternal torment that was surely to come to us for our sins, but for the work of Jesus on the cross,

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God, it's all we can do not to just fall down and thank you and praise you, but to get back up and live as salt and light in the world.

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God, I pray that each person here, if they don't know you, that the Holy Spirit would move through your word to reveal to them who you are.

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And for those of us who have experienced the gift of salvation, that we would be what you called us to be and what you made us to be.

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And that simply by being there and sharing the gospel, we would have the world be a better place.

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God, once again, we thank you for all that you've done for us. We thank you that we can gather here together.