Sermon on Matthew 5:13-16, Salt and Light Evangelism

We have the most amazing relationship in the universe!  We know the One who created it all!  We get to see His hand in our lives every day!  He teaches us His wisdom for living and has gifted us with eternal life!  We know the truth that everyone needs to know, and we can’t seem to convince more than a small percentage of the people around us that it is worth their utmost investment.

Now I know that Jesus taught that there are few that find the narrow way (Mt. 7:14).  I also believe that there is a role God plays in the selection of those who come to Him.  But there is also a hindrance that we as Christians seem to be able to put in the way of unbelievers, that like a line in the sand dares them to cross over, and they’re saying, “Huh, uh, not gonna do it, I don’t want what you’re selling.”  We seem capable of erecting barriers to the faith that would put the Corps of Engineers to shame.  We actually seem skilled at turning people off to the greatest truth the world has ever known.  It’s as if we don’t give unbelievers a fighting chance to see the beauty of Jesus Christ.

Call me an idealist, but I believe there’s still a chance for us to repair our poor track record of outreach.  Instead of turning a fire hose on those who are investigating the faith, we can become a sweet aroma that draws them to the kitchen and invites them to take a taste of the best meal they’ve ever had.

First, we’re going to examine Jesus’ directions for us on being a draw to the faith.  Then we’re going to expose the things we do to get off the path Jesus directed us on.  Then we’re going to see what we can do to stay in line with Jesus’ directions.

So let’s get to first things first.  Jesus tells us something very important about ourselves that we seem either to have forgotten or have twisted into something ugly.  He tells us this in His sermon on the mount as recorded in Matthew 5:13-16.

Matthew 5:13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

 14 “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

 

I. You Are Salt in the Wound and Light in the Darkness

Do you see that?  Jesus doesn’t say that we should be salt and light in the world.  He says we are salt and light.  Whether you want to be or not, you are.  Whether you are a good witness or not, you are salt and light to this world.

Can I tell you a little about salt?  I’m holding up something that is very familiar – Morton’s Salt with iodine.  Salt was easily one of the most important discoveries humans ever made.  Early on, of course, people realized that salt was essential to human survival on a nutritional level.  In the 5th century A.D., Cassiodorous wrote: “It may be that some seek not gold, but there lives not a man that does not need salt.”  Our bodies crave salt because it is essential for certain of the functions of the body’s cells.

How many of you like food with your salt.  I always chuckle a bit when I see someone take a plate of food or a bowl of salad and before they even taste it they begin salting it heavily.  How many salt lovers do we have here today?

Because of this importance of salt in our diets, the production of salt became more important.  But beyond our dietary need for salt, what really made it economically crucial and valuable as a product was its ability to preserve meat from spoiling.  Before the mass production of salt, it was necessary to eat what meat was taken from an animal very quickly upon its death.  The discovery that rubbing salt on the meat prevented the meat from spoiling for long periods of time meant that meat could be taken and stored and saved for weeks to come, carried from place to place, sold to other groups of people, in short, meat could become an industry, a commodity in and of itself.  One of these meats was fish and since they were caught near a source of salt, brine water, the process of distilling the salt from the water and applying it to the fish birthed an industry in the ancient world that continues to this day.

So, when Jesus says that we, believers, are the salt of the earth, he means that we are one of the most precious commodities the earth could ever know.  We offer the world a way of surviving which it desperately needs.  But Jesus testimony about us comes with a warning:  salt can lose its saltiness.  And once salt loses its saltiness it is worthless.  It has no more properties that make it good for anything except throwing away.  That doesn’t mean that Jesus is going to throw us away if we don’t act salty like the salt we are.  What it does mean is that it is incumbent upon us to be salty, and Jesus will have to work on our lives until we are as salty as we’re supposed to be.  I’ve been reading a book on Christianity in China.  God has used decades of persecution to make Chinese believers among the “saltiest” in the world.  That may be what it takes for us, but I hope we can get there without that.

Jesus also says that we are the light of the world.  Do I need to talk about the importance of light?  Nothing can survive without light.  It is what sustains all the plant life on our world, which, of course, sustains us.  And we have grown pretty fond of light.  Without it our eyes have nothing with which to experience or register the outside world.

Light gives us something psychologically as well.  How many of you (be honest) still have this irrational fear that when you walk down a dark hallway someone’s going to grab you?  I still have this little feeling of fear when I go downstairs in the morning, and it is pitch black in the house.  What if there is someone waiting for me at the bottom of the steps?  They’ll get the drop on me.  We crave light.  And some people need it just to feel mentally normal.  SAD is Seasonal Affect Disorder.  Some people experience more depression in the fall and winter months because of the reduced sunshine.  It is literally devastating to their emotional health to not have enough light.  They have to resort to special lamps that simulate sunlight in order to make it.  We need light.  And Jesus is saying we are light to the world.  Again, we are absolutely crucial to the survival of the world.

Now that could give us the big head, right?  We could get all prideful about our bad selves.  We’re God’s gift to the world, literally.  But let me talk to you about some ways we can really mess things up.  Jesus hints at it when He says a light is useless when it is stuck under a bowl.

II. How You Can Ruin the Salt and Douse the Light That Christ Made You to Be

A. Live like your neighbors (lost ones, that is)

Unbelievers don’t know how to rescue the world because they aren’t the salt and light of the world.  When they look at us they expect that they’re going to see something different than what they are.  They want to know if we have something genuinely different and better than what they can come up with.  And we so often disappoint them.  God will save people despite that, but Jesus taught us that the world would know that we are His disciples if we loved one another.  And too often, we don’t.

Recently in one of our Sunday school classes, a man got up and gave testimony to how the Lord had brought him to faith and salvation.  Sitting in the room that day one of his fellow classmates felt compelled to stand up and give testimony, also.  But his testimony was that he had recently been with this fellow and had been behaving in a way that was not representative of Christ and His love.  He confessed this in front of the entire class and asked the first man for forgiveness.

Are there unbelievers around you who would say, “Oh, he’s a Christian?  Wow, go figure!  He acts just like me.”

B. Live like a hermit

You know, of course, that in different periods of the church’s history there have been monastic and hermetic movements.  Christians have sought to demonstrate their devotion by isolating themselves from the world.  But we’re more likely to be tempted to be hermit-like by never letting people know that we’re Christians and avoid the problem of embarrassing the gospel.  I remember for a long time how hesitant I was to put the Central Church license plate on my car for fear that people would be irritated with my driving.  But hiding that we’re Christians, being hermit-like, that is hiding our light under a bowl.  Jesus says that’s a no-no.  The answer is not to secrete ourselves away from the world, either physically or in other ways, so they can’t point to us and say, “If that’s a Christian, then I don’t want any part of it.”  I know I’ve wished some people wouldn’t identify themselves as believers, but that isn’t the answer.  The answer is to be the salt and light Jesus called us to be.

C. Judge people for the sin in their lives

Another way to put our lamp under a bowl is to be judgmental.  Perhaps one of the most uniform descriptions unbelievers give of Christians is that they are judgmental.  They act ‘holier-than-thou’ and critical.  They are always quick to give a negative assessment of something before a positive recommendation for changing it.  And you know what…many times they have been right.  For years we made the mistake of only standing in front of abortion clinics and yelling angrily at women going in for abortion counseling.  It took way too long to realize that didn’t represent Christ and that we needed to offer an alternative like Life Choices has been now for years.  For too long we have been quick to send angry emails to our senators and representatives, but never sending them positive encouragement for things they have done well, and even more rarely devising programs that can make a different.  We are notoriously guilty of getting easily whipped up into a frenzy over some perceived governmental sin, without ever really getting the facts for ourselves.  I don’t know how many times I have received the email about Madeline Murray O’Hare pushing a piece of legislation that will take mentions of Christianity off the air.  It does not exist, she is dead, and it was a false alarm from the beginning.

We are too quick to judge.  James warned us about this when he said, “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry” (James 1:19).  I loved it during our Walk Across the Room videos in our Connecting Point classes when Bill Hybels informed us that we don’t have to take responsibility for being the unbeliever’s conscience.  I believe he is absolutely right.  Our message shouldn’t be pointing out how bad unbelievers are but how forgiving Jesus is of how bad we were and are.  People will not be drawn to a Savior whose representatives are always treating them like pariahs.

D. Ignore people’s problems

Now there’s one subtler way we can fail to be salt and light, and that is to ignore people’s problems.  People don’t want to acknowledge that they need God.  Our sin as humans is that we try to do everything ourselves, so we won’t have to trust God.  But it is when all our solutions aren’t producing the results we long for that we are most open to God.  And believers have the best opportunity for communicating this when we acknowledge peoples’ problems and seek to help them.

This does two things: (1) It catches unbelievers at a time of vulnerability when they are most open to the gospel, and (2) it gives us a chance to play our most powerful card in evangelism – love.  When we are able to show an unbeliever love and compassion at the point of their greatest need, we are on the verge of leading them to Christ.  We are being the most valuable commodities in the world for them – salt and light.

We have received numerous calls from people who said that a friend at work from our church told them about our counseling and how it had helped them.  We have had numerous opportunities to lead people to Christ as the first step in helping them.  We have had people from our church provide help to people moving, or needing a job, or dealing with illness, or any number of problems, and in so doing have opened their hearts to Jesus Christ.  We have had people visiting people in jail.  This is where people might finally be open to the truth that God is worth trusting.

So let me move this into the positive realm now.

III. How You Can Be Savory Salt and Illuminating Light

A. Do Good Deeds

The first thing Jesus tells us to do is good deeds.  Now this might seem a little strange to you.  Shouldn’t the first thing we do be to share the gospel with the unbeliever?  Well, in some cases that might be.  But in most cases the very best thing we can do is a good deed.  How will they know we love them enough and therefore they can trust us enough to listen to our presentation of the gospel?  Only by the way we demonstrate love for them in tangible, hands-on ways.

A lady in our counseling offices recently was asking about the Mormons and if what they taught was true.  What had piqued her curiosity was the fact that, as a single mom she was having problems with babysitting, house repair, lawn care and other needs, and a friend of hers who was a Mormon involved her Mormon fellowship in helping this woman on numerous occasions.  They didn’t do it because she promised to convert, but, from all appearances, because they loved her.  Make no mistake about it, the Mormons do not have the true gospel.  But they have one truth down – love.  Love convinces the hardest heart that what you have to offer is valuable.  Shouldn’t Christians, of all people, be doing that kind of convincing?

Look for opportunities to step in and help someone in times of trouble.  I know that you will initially feel overwhelmed with the need and incapable of providing enough help.  That is where I hope that you will be able to call on the body of Christ here at Central.  Ernie is going to be doing a series starting next week on finding our place of service.  What if we had a way to muster the strength of our entire congregation to help our own people who are struggling on the edge of survival day to day?  What if we created a loving system of help on all levels, manned by caring believers?  What kind of testimony would that be to the world and how could it be used to reach out to unbelievers in need?  I wonder if we’ve gotten evangelism all backwards, trying to tell people first how to be saved without showing them by our deeds.

B. Do Your Kind of Good Deeds

The second thing Jesus tells us to do is to do our kind of good deeds.  He says, “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds.”  You have a peculiar shape for doing good deeds.  You have spiritual gifts, passions, and abilities, and a personality and experiences that make you uniquely able to minister to people’s needs, especially those in the body of Christ, but for those outside the body as well.

You should be in the process of discovering what your good deeds are.  One of the best ways is to get involved in the lives of people, ministering to them.  You will quickly find what you’re good at, passionate about, and love doing. Ask God to show you where there is a need He wants you to help meet and see what He shows you.  Then be obedient to what He shows you and get involved.

C. Give God the Credit

The last thing Jesus tells us about doing good deeds is to give God the credit.  He says, “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”  Now, do you know what that means?  That means it isn’t enough to do good deeds.  You have to open your mouth and identify yourself as a Christian and when they ask how you are able to have hope in the midst of life’s storms, you have to give a verbal reason for the hope that lies within you.

Do you know how to present the gospel?  Do you have a couple of simple ways of sharing the truths that transformed your life? Learn how to share the gospel clearly and persuasively.

Praise of our Father in heaven is the goal of all that we are doing as salt and light.  It is really God who is the salt and light of the world and we, by extension, and by virtue of our connection to Him, are become salt and light, also.

Conclusion

Chris Wright is the international director of John Stott Ministries. It was founded to equip and train pastors and leaders.  Wright has a front-row seat looking at the extraordinary changes taking place in global Christianity. In his most recent book, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, he says this:

It is vital that we see the Cross as central to every aspect of holistic, biblical mission… Because in all forms of Christian mission, we are confronting the powers of evil and the kingdom of Satan—with all their dismal effects on human life and the wider creation. If we are to proclaim and demonstrate the reality of the kingdom of God and his justice, then we will be in direct conflict with the usurped reign of the evil one. In all such work, social or evangelistic, we confront the reality of sin and Satan. In all such work, we challenge the darkness of the world with the light and Good News of Jesus Christ and the reign of God through him.

What this tells me is that good deeds are not just acts of love that open people to the gospel.  They are direct attacks on the kingdom of Satan, the kingdom of darkness in which all unbelievers reside.  We are making a raid on his domain whenever we let our lights shine so that people can glorify our Father in heaven.  Are you enlisted in this battle?  You are the salt and light of the world.  You are the most precious commodity the world needs.

Christianity Today, in an editorial posted 1/25/2007 says “…we must be careful to live out our faith—with demonstrable neighbor love—rather than coasting along in a civil religion that blesses consumer culture and sings praises to the God of materialism. After all, the greatest apologia is love lived out.”

What problems are stirring your soul to action?  Where is God speaking to you about enlisting in this great battle?  What would God have you do as a first step this week?  Because if you aren’t acting as salt and light you are not fulfilling your calling.  You are, in fact, hindering the effectiveness of the kingdom of God.  Let’s be who God made us to be.  Ask Him today to use you as salt and light, and when He shows us how, let’s obey.