Matthew 5: 13-16
“You yourselves are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, how can it become salty again? It is worth nothing anymore except to be thrown out and to be trampled upon by people. You yourselves are the light of the world. It is not possible for a city to be positioned on a hill to be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a measuring vessel; they put it upon a lamp stand, and it shines upon everyone in the house. Thus let your light shine before others so that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”
In the book Grand Essentials, Ben Patterson writes: “I have a theory about old age…I believe that when life has whittled us down, when joints have failed and skin is wrinkled…what is left of us will be what we were all along, in our essence.
He gives an example between a distant uncle and his wife’s grandmother. He says,
With my distant uncle all his life he did nothing but find new ways to make more money…He spent his senescence very comfortably, drooling and babbling constantly about the money he had made…When life whittled him down to his essence, all that was left was raw greed.
On the other hand he says, “My wife’s grandmother was a great example. When she was asked to pray before dinner she would reach out and hold the hands of those next to her, and with a broad, beautiful smile she would begin. Often her eyes would fill with tears and her chin would quiver as she looked up to heaven and poured out her love for Jesus. That was Edna in a nutshell. She loved Jesus and she loved people. She couldn’t remember our names, but she couldn’t keep her hands from patting us lovingly whenever we got near her. When life whittled her down to her essence, all there was left was love: love for God and love for people.”
If you have ever wondered what your life would be like if you could whittle away all the external filters that we often put on ourselves and get down to the core of it all then you are not alone. From Oprah to Dr. Phil to the recent popularity of life and training coaches to runaway best selling books like, Mike Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life”, we are encouraged to understand the physical, mental and spiritual hub of we are.
We are encouraged it seems because psychologists tell us that many of the dysfunctional problems that we experience in our emotional lives are composed and caused by a confusion of self. If the experts are correct, and it seems as thought they may be on to something as evidenced by the yearning of people whom are increasingly responding in incredible numbers to this quest, then honestly and diligently exploring this question suggests the potential for emotional and physical wholeness.
What is equally significant however, is if you thought that this was a new phenomenon for our culture and our time, you would be wrong. For when Jesus walked the roads around Galilee and Jerusalem He encountered much of the same yearning of the human spirit struggling with their minds and their bodies and ultimately their identities. Jesus understood more clearly than anyone else did the hunger and the longing for people to want to know the truth about the purpose and meaning of life.
So over the next several weeks we will be asking the question of what is at the core of discipleship or said another way, what is the essence of the spiritual life that Jesus taught about as it relates to being a follower of His. Further, how can we practice a system of Kingdom walking or faith living practically in a culture, which seems at best uninterested and at worst hostile?
There appears to be no better place to start then where the Lord preached His famous Sermon on the Mount outlined in the bulletin today. Here He begins to invade this side from the other side when he tells those who have gathered and received the Kingdom of God what the Good News is all about in the context of exactly where they were in life. Notice how Jesus begins…
He says, “Happy are those who are oppressed, happy are those who grieve, happy are those who have been humbled.
Many translations have translated this first verb as “blessed” but to really sense the gravity with which Jesus speaks about the condition mentioned the word “happy” seems to be more consistent with the attitude that Jesus is illuminating.
And I think that this is why when we think about these words and are completely honest with ourselves for many of us we will come to the conclusion that they do not make much sense especially when we put them into our context. For some that context may revolve around the “oppression” that one feels when a career path becomes less than fulfilling or a marriage has begun to lose its vibrancy and meaning. How can we be happy or even blessed for that matter when our world, my world is seemingly falling apart?
It is significant to understand that when Jesus talked about oppression and we compare His or their understanding with some of the modern problems and challenges that we experience, that Jesus was talking to a group of people who were under the tyrannical rule of a government in Rome. It was a government who was known for its ruthlessness in dealing with its subjects. Likewise when Jesus says, (“happy” are those who whenever people reproach you and speak all kinds of evil against you), we pause because we all have experienced the personal pain when we find out that people, friends, family, those whom we have trusted have in turn cut us with their words. Nonetheless, in all these areas of life that seem so hard to understand much less accept Jesus said: “If any person will come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
It is this idea and response, which seems to be the center and crossroad of our problems. Mostly because it is an understanding that fly’s directly in the face of our conventional response and wisdom in our own contemporary time. Let me give an example.
A few years ago college president William Banowski interviewed Hugh Hefner about the shifting cultures and sociological change. He wrote of this encounter:
“I was made keenly aware of the universal appeal of Jesus during one of my conversations with Hugh Hefner in Chicago. As we talked, Mr. Hefner surprised me by saying, “If Christ were here today and had to choose between being on the staff of one of the joy-killing, pleasure –denying churches, he would, of course, immediately join us.” What most offended Jesus’ contemporaries, and what modern people find even harder to accept, is His insistence that to find life we must first lose it. Hugh Hefner writes: “We reject any philosophy which holds that a man must deny himself for others.” The playboy philosophy holds that every person especially men ought to love themselves preeminently and pursue his or her own pleasure constantly. Nowhere is the clash between popular playboyism and the ethical realism of Jesus any sharper than over how the good life is to be achieved. Hugh Hefner and a thousand other voices tell us to get all we can. Jesus tells us to give all we can. Because this clash is total, there is no way to gloss over it. It is a popular philosophy, which teaches that to get life you must grab it; Jesus taught that to win we must surrender. The conflict is absolute and irrevocable. 1
The essence of the Sermon on the Mount is exactly this: “That those who realize what really is important in this life have unlocked the keys to the Kingdom of God, therefore not only are they blessed, but they are truly happy! Jesus goes further however and says that once realized it must be lived. How does he say live it?
Beginning in the 13th verse Jesus tells the disciples that they are to be like salt and light. This is significant as well because in that day salt was a very important commodity. Just a little salt could preserve a lot of food and in the climate of Palestine and this was important. A bag of salt in that time was as valuable as a person’s life. Jesus here is saying essentially to the disciples that the knowledge that they now possess is equal to the value of life, their witness was to be shared with everyone. You don’t put the light under the lamp stand for it will only loose the illumination that it has rather, you put the lamp up high so that everyone can see it and benefit from it. In addition and in the same breath that Jesus tells them how important they are to His ultimate mission here on earth, he also warns them of how fragile their existence is. He does this when he shares the observance that salt can loose its saltiness and light can be hidden.
In William M. Thompson’s “The Land and the Book” there is an account of a merchant in Sidon who bought quantities of salt from the marshes of Cyprus, and hid them in houses on a remote mountain to avoid the payment of the tax. But the floor of the houses was the common earth and soon the salt by that contact lost its saltiness. It was then used to make the hard surface on the road. In like manner it seems true and real to the senses that the Christian of today either redeems the world or the world robs him or her of His or her faith.
Dwight L. Moody once wrote, “that this book (The Bible) will keep you from your sins, or your sins will keep you from this book. The warning for the disciples from Jesus is serious as well. If they do not stay focused on Christ then they might loose the ability to communicate the profound grace that they had received through the Son of Man and with that disability then they would be like salt that had lost its saltiness, not much good for anything.
The same is true today. In a recent gallop pole, it was noted that fewer than 10 percent of Americans are deeply committed Christians, says pollster George Gallup, who adds however that these people “are far, far happier than the rest of the population.”
Committed Christians, Gallup found, are more tolerant than the average American, more involved in charitable activities, and are “absolutely committed to prayer.” Committed Christians seem to be well on their way to purpose and meaning, health and wholeness.
Sadly, while many more Americans than this 10 percent profess to be Christians, adds Gallup, most actually know little or nothing of Christian beliefs, and act no differently than non-Christians.
Signs of the Times, November 1991, p. 6
The key given too for the disciple’s two thousand years ago unlocks the same doors today. We must unlock and understand and embrace the discipline, which comes and flows through faith. And if you have been a Christian for one day or one year you know that this profoundly hard to do. It is hard to do with the big things it seems even harder to do with the little ones.
This past week in my home visitations I was given the most beautiful specimens of homemade Chocolate Cookies that I had seen, or tasted, in a while. I received them graciously with the understanding that I would share them with my two grown children who are home for the summer from college and one who is a rising senior in high school. As you can imagine every time I looked at those tasty creations, knowing that I certainly did not need them, my salivary glands went into overtime and my ability to share them took on a great personal strain. There was a part of me that would be happy to oppress them for my own consumption. I mean all that we are talking about is cookies right? Right!
And yet part of discipleship is how we share ourselves and the things that we value with each other. Jesus says that we are blessed when we do so. In fact we are happy when we Kingdom Walk in a way that releases this attitude of knowing that everytime we give something up for Christ we are one step closer to the everlasting goal. I must admit that struggling with selfishness and greed over some delicious chocolate chip cookies seems insignificant at best when we think about all the larger issues that we are faced with on a daily basis and giving up for Christ. But, I believe the principle is the same. Jesus was ultimately saying to His first disciples and to us today that we must live large in our faith. The discipline and the commitment with which we apply to our own lives, especially the insignificant and small things, evidence this “Living Large”.
We are to stay honest with ourselves and with each other as we move together in the dance of His grace. His plan is for us to stay connected to God by any means necessary and then live our lives in such a way that people see the difference and are drawn to it. This is the beginning of Kingdom Walking in a X…treme world. This is the essence, this is the core, this is the center, of being the salt and light in world, which we were called to be.
By the way, does anybody want a cookie?
Amen.
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1 Illustrations Unlimited, James S. Hewett. (Tyndale Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois) pg.282