In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called His disciples to become both a strong preservative and an energetic force in living out the Christian life.
June 23, 2009
Makarios Living – Salt and Light
Welcome to Haven Today telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. I’m Charles Morris inviting you to stay with me for the next few minutes and a program called “Makarios Living – Salt and Light”.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus called his disciples to become both a strong spice and an energetic force – light – in living out the Christian life. We only do that if we’ve met Jesus and the full power of the Gospel has entered our minds and hearts. Only by the power of Christ living in us can we ever hope to be the salt and light that Jesus called us to live. Don’t go away. Yesterday we heard for the first time, music from the brand new album by Steve Ragsdale called “Simply Timeless: Classic hymns and songs of the church”. Steve, there is that theme in the scriptures where Jesus told us he is the Good Shepherd and it takes us all the way back to the psalms like Psalm 23 where David knew the Lord was his Shepherd. Hasn’t that impacted you in the new album that you’ve just completed with your wife Rachel?
SR: It’s true and you mentioned the psalms and I was just reading this morning Psalm 139 where David says, “Your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” And when I think of this particular cut, this medley it just drives that home even more that the Lord through my life and Rachel’s life as we’ve known him and walked with him has taken our hand and so many times he’s carried us too. And there’s a couple of metaphors there. He’s just been our Shepherd. He’s taken us through the challenging times of life. He’s been an amazing Shepherd.
Song:
Performed by: Steve Ragsdale
Steve Ragsdale from his brand new album “Simply Timeless” here on a Haven Today called “Makarios Living – Salt and Light”. If you want to hear sample tracks from Steve’s new album we have them there on our homepage haventoday.org. Christians are different and in the Matthew account of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus tells Christians that they have to be different. We are to live in the world but at the same time not be part of the world. Now, if you look around, especially if you live in one of the pockets of North America that’s called a “Bible Belt” you see even non-Christians adopt a deceptive veneer of Christian culture. I’m speaking of people who might even call themselves Christians but think that being a Christian is just about living a good life and doing good deeds and that’ll get them to heaven when they die. And that is certainly not what a Christian is according to God’s word but even some professing Christians seem indistinguishable from non-Christians and so deny their Christian name by their non-Christian behavior. Yet the essential difference remains. Jesus said that his people are different, as different as light from darkness, as different as salt is from disease. We serve neither God nor the world by attempting to minimize this difference. The Sermon on the Mount teaches that true Christians are different. Probably the greatest tragedy of the church has been this tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of being part of what should be a counter Christian culture. Chuck Smith, founder of the Calvary Chapel movement tells me that in the early days of the Jesus Movement it was his wife who taught him and urged him to be salt and light. He was just happy to do his job in a church. He was preaching. He was making pastoral visits during the week and it was only when his wife convinced him to just stop the car and give a lift to what were called “hippies” at the time, to reach beyond a traditional job description and befriend and minister all kinds of grace: the good news of salvation, food for the hungry, clothes for those who had none. Only then did his ministry grow. Chuck Smith was becoming the salt and the light that Jesus was talking about. To be a true Christian, you and I need to accept our responsibility to live as Christians, to be salt and light. Each affirmation begins in this Greek sentence of Matthew 5 starting in verse 13 with the emphatic pronoun “you”, as much as to say, “you and only you are the earth’s salt and the world’s light”. What Jesus is saying is this: You simply must not fail the world you’re called to serve. You must be what you are. You are salt and so you must retain your saltiness. I don’t even want to use the word “flavor” salt is more than that. It has a loving bite and so must you. You are light and so you must let your light shine and not conceal it in any way whether by sin or by compromise, by laziness or by fear. Bruce Marchiano, portraying Jesus in the 2 DVD set “Jesus the Christ” shares with us Matthew 5:13-16,
(Dramatic reading, Matthew 5:13-16)
Song: Salt and Light
Performed by:
From the classic youth worship album called “Songs from the Loft”, a great little song just called “Salt and Light” here on Haven Today, “Makarios Living – Salt and Light”. And before that from “Jesus the Christ”, the special 2 DVD set with Bruce Marchiano portraying Jesus we heard Matthew 5:13-16. Now we are living in a day when we Christians may feel powerless just as non-Christians may feel powerless. In fact, Karl Marx, the thinker behind Communism seized this word that you hear so much today. The word is alienation. What is our message for anyone who feels alienated or strangled by the system? Maybe they’re feeling the recession that we’re in and they’ve lost a house or they’ve lost a job. Maybe they are crushed by technology and they don’t have the training they need to work. What is our message to someone who is overwhelmed by political, social or economic forces which control them and over which they have no control? They may feel themselves victims of a situation in which they are powerless to change. What can they do? It is in the soil of this frustration that political and religious revolutionaries are being bread, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the system. You see this especially in the Muslim world but the good news is that from this very same soil Christ followers, Jesus’ revolutionaries can arise, more dedicated, more committed to spread the great story of Jesus that leads to love, joy, peace. This kind of peaceful, Gospel revolution is more radical than any program of violence. The Jesus Revolution changes people as well as changes structures. Have we lost our confidence in the power of the Gospel of Christ? Listen to Martin Luther. “With this single word I can be more defiant and boastful than they with all their power, swords and guns.” So we are not helpless and powerless after all. We have Jesus Christ. We have his Gospel, ideas and his power. And Jesus Christ is all the salt and light this dark and rough world needs. But, we must have salt in ourselves and we must let our light shine. That’s what Jesus is talking about, talking to you and me today in the Sermon on the Mount. Salt and light have one thing in common. They give and they expend themselves. They are the opposite of any and every kind of self-centered religion. But salt and light are different as well as complimenting each other. Salt is largely negative. It prevents decay. Light on the other hand, is positive. It shines away the darkness so Jesus calls his disciples to have a double influence on this world in which we live. We’re to be a negative influence by arresting the decay and a positive influence by bringing light into the darkness. It’s one thing to stop the spread of evil and it’s another to promote the spread of truth. Look at this a little more closely with me. Jesus says first we are to be salt. God wants us first to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business staying in some salt shaker. Our place is to be rubbed into the secular world just like salt is rubbed into meat to stop it from going bad. And when society does go bad – and we know it does – we Christians sometimes tend to throw up our hands. Maybe we need to look a little more closely at ourselves and not just how bad the world is. Unsalted meat is always going to go bad. It can’t do anything else. The real question each of us needs to ask ourselves is this: where is the salt and am I being the salt that Jesus has called me to be? Jesus was preaching on the north side of the Sea of Galilee overlooking that body of water. Less than 100 miles to the south the River Jordan flows into another sea, the Salt Sea, so salty that it’s dead and on its western side there lived at the same time as Christ a Dead Sea community whose library of scrolls caused an archeological stir when they were discovered by a shepherd boy several decades ago. Maybe if you’ve been to modern day Israel you visited what remains of this monastic community of Asseans who had withdrawn from what they saw as a wicked world. They called themselves the Sons of Light but they took no steps to let their light shine and in their compound their salt was as useless as the deposits on the shores of the nearby Dead Sea. Is it possible that Jesus was thinking of them when he preached this message up in the Galilee region? What does it mean to be the salt of the earth? We have to speak up! Not for any old issue that comes along but for the Gospel, for the truth that comes from scripture. Martin Luther said, “Salting has to bite.” And I think he was right. The real salt is the unwrapping of the scripture which denounces the whole world and lets nothing stand but the simple faith in Christ. One theologian said, “We’ve lost that biting quality of true Christian witness.” He said, “To look at most Christians one would think that their ambition is to be the honey pot of the world. They sweeten and sugar the bitterness of life with an all-too-easy conception of a loving God but Jesus did not say, “You are the honey of the world.” No, he said, “You are the salt of the earth,” salt bites. And the message of the judgment as well as the grace of God has always been a biting thing. And besides our being salt Jesus said we are the light of this world, his light of this world and we are not to hide his light living in us. The light must shine and it shines through us. How many times have we thought we were salt but there was no light? How many times have we thought we were light but there was no salt in us? The two go together as Jesus was teaching and preaching righteousness that only comes by his grace living in us.
Three things, first, this is the way we ourselves will be blessed. The Beatitudes identify those whom God declares to be blessed, those who please him and who themselves find fulfillment. True blessedness is found in goodness and nowhere else. Second, this is the way the world will best be served. Jesus offers his followers the immense privilege of being the world’s salt and the world’s light if only we will live by the Beatitudes with God’s Spirit living through us. Third, this is the way God will be glorified. Here at the beginning of his ministry Jesus tells his disciples that if they let their light shine so that their good words are seen, their Father in Heaven will be glorified. At the end of his ministry, in the upper room, he expresses the same truth in similar words, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.” If I could sum up what Jesus is teaching us today in these few verses of the Sermon on the Mount what would that teaching be? Here it is: Christ followers, you and me, are to be salt and light. We are to bring blessing to ourselves, salvation to others and ultimately give glory to God.
Song: Go Light Your World
Performed by: Chris Rice
The music of Chris Rice and the light that we’re to be, salt and light in Jesus Christ here on a Haven Today called “Makarios Living: Salt and Light”. Well we just got to hear from Steve Ragsdale again today from his brand new album called “Simply Timeless: Classic hymns and songs of the church.” It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Steve and I’m so happy he could join us on this program today. If you would like to hear audio samples from his brand new album, “Simply Timeless” we have them posted on our homepage, haventoday.org. There you’ll see the link and you can listen to any of his great music that honors and glorifies our Lord Jesus Christ who calls us to be salt and light in this world in which we live. We also have his new CD as a thank you for your gift to this listener supported ministry. Just go to our homepage, h.a.v.e.n.t.o.d.a.y, haventoday.org and there you’ll see the album under the “Specials” section called “Simply Timeless: Classic hymns and songs of the church”. You’ll also see on our homepage, haventoday.org that 2 DVD set with Bruce Marchiano portraying the life of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s called “Jesus the Christ”. And we also have the brand new book by Warren Weirsbe, “50 People Every Christian Should Know”. We’ve had a number of people that have been ordering multiple copies of Warren Weirsbe’s new book. I assume one for themselves and others to give away. You can call us also if you like on our toll free number in North America, it’s 1-800-654-2386. Please let us know the station you’re listening to when you get in touch. That toll free number, one more time, is 1-800-654-2836. And if you’d like to allow somebody else to hear this program as well, that’s easily done. Go to our homepage, haventoday.org, type in your friend’s email address, a little note from yourself and the program is on its way. I’m Charles Morris and I want to thank you for being with me and invite you to come back again tomorrow for another program on Makarios living, blessed living, from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. And join me then as together we share the great story that’s all about Jesus on Haven Today.
