Salt and Light: Matthew 5:13-16
Thoughts about serving others
This link includes a list of posts about Serving the Least, the Lost, and the Lonely.
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Let the Word evoke words. May your life encourage lives.
Take a moment and read these few verses while imagining you are in the crowd that heard about Jesus, that you walked from Capernaum to this mountainside venue and saw with your own eyes, heard with your own ears, this preacher say the words:
You.
Let that sink in for a moment. Jesus, God-incarnate, the one who was and who is, spoke to the crowd and through the Gospels, he speaks to you and me, and he points directly to us to say we are the salt and light of the world. We’ve been called to be more than just carpenters, engineers, moms and dads, we have a responsibility to tell the world through our lives, our limited time on earth, about Jesus.
Not for your own glory, but for the glory of the kingdom. We are his ambassadors, entrusted to disseminate the amazingly good news–even to those who don’t think they need to hear.
The other day my wife shared with me a profound thought, something that we need to remember as we preach the gospel with our words and deeds. To those in ancient times, knowledge that the world what spherical, that planets orbited the sun, that the earth was not the center of the universe, was completely irrelevant. They imagined the concept of the disc-world, a flat earth, and it didn’t matter if they were right or not because they were not going to leave the earth and fly around on a jet; they were simply going to tend to their sheep or farm their land all the days of their life. Knowledge about the universe simply didn’t matter. It’s not that they were offended by those who proposed the idea of a round earth or sun being the center of our solar system, they simply didn’t care, it made no difference to their daily lives.
It takes a very different approach to preach to such people and I think the same is true today. People now think they are so wise because they can Google anything and form an opinion one way or the other in a matter of seconds. We are quickly convinced of our own ignorance because we have access to the words of those who are far more intelligent and who have studied one particular subject for decades (or we can think we’re smarter than the experts, but that’s a whole different discussion). We’ve become so informed, yet it seems we may have missed some fundamental truths: We are the salt and light of this world and, perhaps this is the point, the world NEEDS salt and light. Have you ever tried to share the gospel or even begin a spiritual conversation with someone who really didn’t care? It’s impossible to get someone’s attention that simply doesn’t see the problem. The current generation in this country is raised without prayer, without a hope in Christ, with a demand bent toward cultural relativism, it’s no wonder they don’t see the problem!
We are the salt and light and all of us are eternal beings. Everyone we meet has a destiny that’s either amazingly good or horrifically bad. Jesus speaks to the crowd and says simply: “You are the salt of the earth.” Lord help me to appreciate this statement more and more each day, to understand that being thrown out and trampled is not an option, to hide your light under a bowl just doesn’t make sense! Lord use my life to add salt to the world, to shine into dark places–even to those who don’t know that darkness really exists.