Matthew 5:13-16 NIV 13 You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. 14 You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:13-16 MSG. Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage. “Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.”
Observation
I love the Sermon on the Mount! We are told so many times throughout the Bible in broad and general terms to love, serve, honor, and obey God. In these 3 chapters of Matthew, Jesus lays out clearly some real, practical, difficult, often seemingly impossible instructions on how to love, serve, honor, and obey God in our day-to-day living! (See also a similar passage from Romans 12 below.). Not surprisingly, we are challenged by this teaching to exchange our human perspective for Jesus’ point of view:
* responding according to the heart of God to life’s challenges, events, experiences, relationship ups and downs,
* submitting our lives, our status, our social acceptance, our resources and even our futures in a way that fulfills God’s will and purposes rather than our own,
* becoming the lantern through which His light shines clearly and the salt that enhances His flavor in all our actions and words.
We are asked to “simply” exchange our earthly culture for a heavenly one – offering up our substance, our pride, our accomplishments, our status, our rights, our very lives to fulfill God’s will and purpose through worshipping Him and serving others (both lovable and unlovable). This is not so simple or easy for us – trusting God enough to be willing to trade all temporal, real, tangible, experiential rewards for the invisible eternal rewards promised by God. It is especially challenging for us as Americans raised in a culture that values and praises personal achievement, visible productivity, recognizable individual accomplishment, and personal rights and freedoms. We also cherish and don’t easily lay down those rights and freedoms we feel we have earned, deserved or received as a privilege of being born here.
This teaching of Jesus will ask us to exchange:
- judgment with mercy,
- bravado and pride with humility,
- selfishness with selflessness,
- storing up with sacrificial giving,
- traditions of compromise with simple pure worship and service, and
- surrendering my plan for my life in order to submit to His plan for me.
In making these choices, we will allow the Holy Spirit to clean off the glass of the lantern of me through which Jesus shines. It will also allow Him to make us into the seasoning that brings out the flavor of God without us judging which conclave of darkness deserves the light and who gets to sit at the table to eat.
We all are simply asked to embrace the redemptive, loving, gracious heart of God toward “whosoever will come” by demonstrating our love and trust in Him and His plan for each of us through our investment of time, talent and resources (and setting aside our rights) in loving, serving and following Him by selflessly serving others – both friend and foe. He is asking us to exchange the natural for the supernatural, the temporal for the eternal, the imperfect life here for the perfect life in Christ.
Impact on Me
I characterize myself as a recovering over-achieving perfectionist who relapses more often than I like to admit. While I find so many of the instructions in the Sermon on the Mount to be hard to embrace, this sermon is in red letters in my Bible and, therefore, Jesus speaking to me. It should be so simple to just be the lantern, to just keep the glass clean and clear so Jesus can shine through to pierce the darkness and redeem and rescue whomever will respond, but like so many other humans now and in all history, I find myself complicating matters sometimes by hankering after a more visible, productive, important or prestigious role in the Light-bearing or by judging which person deserves to be invited to sit at the table and taste to see that the Lord is good.
Another complication arises when I allow the glass of my lantern to become obscured with filth – sin, judgment, pride, a desire for recognition, the decoration of religious traditions, or the praise of men. Or I neglect to clean my own glass because I am criticizing the glass cleaning of others around me (that removing a splinter from another’s eye when I have a telephone pole in my own). In all of this, I dim or distort the Light which is Jesus because I am forgetting what a privilege it is for me to be included in the Light-bearing process at all!
If I were lost in the darkness, I would not care about whether the light was a lighthouse, flashlight, a lantern, a candle. I would see the light alone as my way out of the darkness. As salt, I need to be a mere sprinkle so as not to overwhelm the flavor of the true spirit and soul food that is Christ. So, my challenge is:
- to keep it simple,
- to keep the glass of my lantern so clean, clear and unobstructed that I am invisible as He shines through me,
- to be a pinch of salt so that my life enhances the taste of God it provides,
- to remember that my role is designed by God and the perfect way for me to fulfill His will and purpose in my life and the lives around me.
So, it appears my choice is either, “Yes, Lord, help me to submit to Your teaching, allow You to change me, so I will see with Your eyes, love with Your heart, obey Your instruction and become more like You,” or “No thanks. Too hard. Not interested. Can’t trust that You are faithful and able to come through. I’ve got my own plans, rights and freedoms that I am not willing to give up. I’ll go with what seems reasonable, acceptable, doable – what seems right in my own eyes.” When I lay it out this way, there is only one choice, a choice that is only possible because God has the grace to forgive me when I fail and sustain, strengthen, renew, refresh, change, teach me through the power and presence of His Holy Spirit working in and through me.
Prayer
Lord God, Gracious and Merciful Father, may I be quick to repent when I fail, stay pliable in Your hands and be merely the best vessel and perfect pinch of seasoning so that Your perfect will and purpose can be achieved in and through me. I pray this all in Jesus’ name. Make it so.
Pressing On In His Footsteps 