Matthew 5:13-16

Again, we are going to be in Matthew chapter 5, verses 13 through 16.

Matthew 5:13–16

To set the stage this morning, I just want to call to your mind the statement that was made about Jesus at the end of chapter 4.

At the end of chapter 4.

It was this the good news, the good news of the kingdom.

Jesus was traveling around a region.

I put up a map a few weeks ago.

Jesus was traveling around an area called Galilee.

That's a body of water in Israel.

And there's a bunch of like fishing villages and just common people towns all around that body of water.

And Jesus was teaching from synagogue to synagogue.

These were little Jewish kind of worship services or times for the community to gather together.

And Jesus was teaching this message, the good news of the kingdom.

And then, starting in chapter 5, we see that Jesus went up on a hillside.

And then we have in Matthew, all of chapter 5, all of chapter 6, and all of chapter 7, that's all the teaching of Jesus to his disciples.

But what we had said a couple weeks ago was that this is likely the material, the same material that Jesus was teaching as he moved around the Galilee.

We also see this material over in Luke 6.

Some of it's in other places in Luke as well.

But it's this message of the kingdom.

So a second ago, we sang a song where we want to crown him with many crowns.

And the idea that I want us to have as a church, as we're going through Matthew 5, 6, and 7, is that this is the King, Jesus.

King Jesus is giving instructions about his kingdom, what it looks like for us to be followers of him in his kingdom.

And there are some radical things that Jesus teaches in this text.

Now we're going to go back a little bit.

We're actually going to start in verse 11 and read up through verse 16.

And I'm going to borrow some of the context.

There's an overlap between what we studied two weeks ago and what we're going to look at today because verses 11 and 12 provide us with the context for verses 13, 14, 15, and 16.

It says this you are blessed when they insult you and persecute you, and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me.

Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven.

For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

You are the salt of the earth.

But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty?

It's no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.

You are the light of the world.

A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden.

No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the house.

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

Let's pray together.

That you it wouldn't just be me teaching, but there would be a moment that we have this moment or this morning with your spirit, and that your spirit would illuminate this text for us each personally.

Not that we would be here gaining facts and figures, but God, you would take and apply this into our setting, the normal life that we live out.

Be our teacher, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

There are three things that I want to draw your attention to in this text.

The first is this idea of an alternative kingdom.

An alternative kingdom.

In verses 12 and or 11 and 12, Jesus tells his disciples that they're blessed.

This is this declaration of congratulations.

You're in a great place when you're insulted and persecuted, and they say fault they say false things or falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me.

That is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

And then he also says this let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

I just want to meditate on these texts just for a second.

One of the things that we see here is that there are others that not everybody is a follower of Jesus.

Now that may seem simple, but one of the things that we're going to encounter as we're reading through the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus is communicating about a kingdom, an alternative kingdom that runs parallel and exists at the same time as the earthy kingdom that we live in.

Being a follower of Jesus means living with loyalty to a hidden kingdom while being the resident in an earthy kingdom.

One of the things that happens as you study the Sermon on the Mount is that a model for cultural engagement is formed.

Here's what I mean by that.

Maybe somebody, your parents or a friend or a neighbor or a coworker, tells you about Jesus and his death on the cross and his resurrection.

And to be a Christian means to respond to that, to repent and to turn to Jesus.

That's the beginning.

But then what do you do?

Once you are a Christian, what do you do?

And how, what kind of relationship do you have with the world that you live in?

When you decide to be a follower of Jesus, it isn't one of these like beam me up Scotty Star Trek moments.

Like you're not evacuated out of the world.

And it's not like that just missed Jesus' thinking, because in John 17, as Jesus is praying for the disciples, he says, I pray that you wouldn't take them out of the world, but that you would keep them.

And so because God could, like there's even accounts with Elijah and with Enoch where God could just take people out of the world if he wanted to, after they became his follower.

It's like you got it right, whoop, there, where he disappeared, you know.

But that's not how God, excuse me, that's not how life works.

Instead, we remain in our bodies, and we have this allegiance to an unseen God.

We are reading the Bible, but then we're in, we're all doing normal life.

And so there is a model that is formed, we're prompted to have a model formed around cultural engagement.

Again, culture is what's valuable, systems, financial systems, political systems, uh societal like uh stratosphere of who's important, who's not important, who has influence, who doesn't have influence, what is art, what's valuable art.

All of those things are cultural pieces, entertainment, all of that is kind of the air that we breathe broadly.

And so we want to know how do we engage with culture?

Once you become a follower of Jesus, what kind of relationship do you have with financial systems, work, education, entertainment, political systems, relationships, and friendships?

Again, I'm talking about this because Jesus is alluding to an experience that his followers will have where they're doing life in Jesus' name and they're being persecuted or they're being spoken, they're being slandered.

And then there's other times where they're doing life in Jesus' name, and it's good, and it's causing the people who are observing to glorify their Father in heaven.

And so there's an engagement that Jesus is referring to with his followers.

He's saying, here's the symptoms, here's kind of the fallout of your engagement, and as we go through the Sermon on the Mount, we're going to see some ideas thrown at us about how do we have a relationship with culture.

What's that model?

How do you engage cultural systems?

How much are you influenced, and how much influence do you attempt to exert on those systems?

Okay, so I'm setting the stage because in a second here, I'm going to show you different ways that Christians have thought about cultural engagement, different models for cultural engagement that have existed over the last 2,000 years.

But I want this to be on your radar because as Jesus is teaching some things that are overt, there's also some subversive things or some presuppositions that come along with the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

There's a few different writers.

Richard Nieber wrote Christ in Culture.

James Davison Hunter wrote a book called To Change the World.

I highly recommend both of these books.

Are they your enemy?

Do you have something to gain from them?

Can you redeem the good things that they're doing?

Are you just trying to get away from them as fast as possible?

When you turn on your TV, what kind of relationship do you have with the things that you watch on TV?

When you're listening to music, there's all these different models that exist about how you, if you're a follower of Jesus, how do you engage with culture?

So the um the way that this chart works is on the left, you have, I know this is small print, so I'll read it for you.

Passive in influencing culture.

So everybody on the left is very passive, does not want to shape culture, doesn't want to influence how culture looks.

On the right, we have two quadrants that's active in trying to influence culture.

On the lower two quadrants, you have the idea of little common grace.

And on the top, you have the idea of full, full of common grace.

In other words, the world, I believe what he's saying is that the world is full of common grace that everywhere.

The people on the top are saying, everywhere you look, you see just like so much of God just subtly creeping through.

And then on the bottom, you have uh Christians who look at the culture and they go, man, this is so far, this is so alien from anything that we see in Genesis 1 and 2, anything from the garden.

Um, based off of those um four, those two axes and four quadrants, you have the two kingdom model, the relevance model, the transformationist model, and the counterculturist.

So down here we have the Amish, right?

The Amish, when they look at the world, or the Anabaptists or the Neo-Anabaptists and the new monastics, they're looking at culture and saying there's very little evidence of the presence of God in the world.

And they are not trying to change that, right?

They're like, we're gonna run away, we're gonna create our own commune, far away from, we're gonna get our own farm, and we're not gonna try to look like the world at all, right?

So that's the counterculturalist.

The two kingdoms model, this is Martin Luther, and it's kind of an enigma.

I'm gonna probably read about it here in just a second.

But the counterculture, it's a synthetic model that says, listen, we live in both a secular kingdom where God is sovereign and we see the sovereignty of God.

That's the idea full of common grace, but it's radically different from a spiritual kingdom of Jesus, and the two are just different places and we occupy both kingdoms.

That's the Lutherans and the Reformed Two Kingdoms people.

Then on the right, we have the relevance model.

You have liberation theology.

So if you come from more of a progressive, like black um church uh background, you may have been around like a liberal uh a liberation theology.

You also have mainline uh liberal churches, the emerging church, and then down on the bottom, a seeker-sensitive model.

Um and then so that's the relevance model.

Again, they're saying, look, when we look at culture, we see a lot of grace, and we want to influence even more.

We want to engage culture, and we believe that God's called us to impact culture and engage it fully and use the good pieces that we see in culture.

And then on the bottom right, you have the transformationist model, and that is that look, there's very little evidence of God's grace, but we want to change it.

So this is where this is pre um pre-Christian nationalism, but that's where Christian nationalism would go.

This is like, hey, we want to be um, we want to take our Christian um ethic and we want to advance it through politics and set up like a Christian nation.

So Christian nationalists, nationalists would be down in this right-hand corner.

So those are your four models.

Uh, there are good things and bad things in each.

I'm not saying one thing I appreciate.

This is from Tim Keller's Center Church book.

There are good aspects in each, and he writes a big section out of the middle of his book and goes through these sections each in depth, and he explains why these different camps um believe what they believe, and he does a great job of commending them and saying, here's the dangers that are involved in having that position.

Um, he got this material from reading um Richard Niebuber and kind of summarizing it in his own way.

Niebuhr gives five, kind five positions: Christ against culture, a withdrawal model of removing oneself from the culture into the community of the church.

That's kind of like the Amish idea.

Um, Christ of culture, an accommodationist model that recognizes God at work in culture and looks for ways to affirm it.

That's remember that more upper right hand quadrant.

Christ above culture, the synthetic model, this is the two kingdoms, upper left-hand quadrant.

Christ and culture in paradox, also another take on the two kingdoms model, and then Christ transforming culture, a conversionist model that seeks to transform every part of the culture.

This is lower right-hand corner, um, Christian nationalism, neo-Calvinism, and the like.

All that to say, you can't just take for granted that you follow Jesus, and then you just know here's how, here's the relationship that I should have with culture.

You've got to make a decision.

Are you called to disengage, engage?

Do you have this high optimism that as you engage your workplace, right?

Let's say that you're there as a Christian and you're like, I can bring Jesus into the workplace, not just so that people get saved, but that Jesus is gonna give me wisdom on how to do my job, and the kingdom is gonna just burst out in the in the workplace because um common grace is so readily available.

That's kind of more the camp that I I fall into.

But I appreciate like there's the aspect of the the uh neo um uh monastics, like Shane Claiborne, who's decided to live in Philadelphia amongst the poor and to take guns and turn them into jewelry, and you know, and it's this idea of like we're just gonna live as this community of peace amongst the poor.

You can see how somebody may read the teachings of Jesus and come to that conclusion of like, this is what it looks like to live out his faith.

That's a radical way of interpreting Jesus, but I appreciate his sincerity in that.

And then there's other things, other models that exist that I think you can definitely learn from those groups, even if that's not your model per se.

In fact, when Tim Keller goes through this section in his book, his entire book is called Center Church.

This idea of, hey, let's find the center of these models and pull out what is good.

All that to say, being a follower of Jesus means living with loyalty to a hidden kingdom while being a resident in an earthy kingdom.

And as we're going through the Sermon on the Mount, we're gonna see that Jesus expects for us to live in a very like hands-on way with the world.

Sometimes it means you're persecuted, sometimes it means you're doing good, and it's leading other people to go, wow, God is awesome.

How do we make this work?

That's our question.

We go into this next section salt and light.

Salt and light.

He says in our text that we're looking at, you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.

There is a temptation when you read this to fill in a gap.

Do you know what gap is missing?

Where he's obviously using a metaphor here saying your salt and your light, but the question is, what does it mean to be salty?

What does it mean to be luminescent, to be full of light?

Now, in verse 16, he does talk about letting people see and observe your good works.

But before he gets to that, and when he's talking about salt, he really doesn't say, here's what it means to be salty.

So when you go and you read the commentaries on this, there's all kinds of different ideas, depending on what your model is, of what it means to be a salty Christian, right?

What that looks like.

And it's funny to see how many people fill in the gaps with their kind of preconceived idea.

And I would just say, let's hold back from that a little bit, other than verse 16, in where it talks about good works, because Jesus doesn't fill the gap.

He just says, your salt, your light.

Jesus doesn't offer a specific definition of what it means to be salty.

He makes it as, he takes it as a given.

He says, You are the salt of the earth.

You are the light of the world.

The emphasis then is not on becoming something you are not.

Again, it's not an emphasis on trying to be more salty, but on fully embodying what you already are in Christ.

The principle is that Jesus expects his followers to be distinct and efficacious in the world, to have an effect in the world.

And If anything that we can take from this text, whether we know exactly what it means to be salty or full of light or not, this is one thing we do know.

Jesus is definitely saying that his followers need to stand out.

Okay?

Because some of us, like me, are like, we would love to blend in.

We would love to blend in.

I went to a thank you.

We went to I went to a meetup networking thing on Friday that I was invited to.

And it was not my normal crowd.

In fact, I was invited and I was early before the guy that invited me.

If you've ever been in that setting, it's like the most awkward social environment, unless you're a gifted salesperson and you just love to meet people randomly and just walk into the middle of like a group of people, which is not me.

So I'm like off on the side pretending to look at my phone and I'm thinking about this sermon.

And I'm thinking about this idea that Jesus, who I am naturally in my personality, and then what Jesus is teaching his followers.

That there is, there is just this aspect of if you're a follower of Jesus, there's a taste about you, and there is a luminescence about you.

And so one of the ways that we engage that principle is that if you're like me, that's where being a follower of Jesus becomes real because you've got to say, Lord, I don't really want to be having the taste.

I don't want to stand out in a crowd.

I'd really like to just kind of go through life and not be noticed at all, and just kind of be camouflaged and blend in and not be noticed.

And yet, here, as Jesus is teaching his disciples, he's saying, No, no, I expect for my followers in the world to be salty and to not lose their taste.

I expect for them to be full of light or to be the light of the world and to not be hidden in that sense.

And so, what does it mean?

I think I love the vagueness of it, because when you become a follower of Jesus, what's promised is that God puts his spirit in you.

Are you a follower of Jesus this morning?

If you're a follower of him, God's spirit is in you, and what that means is that he is now designing your life.

If you're cooperating with him, he is leading you and guiding you, and the influence of God's Spirit is in line with what Jesus is teaching, right?

Because of the Trinity.

The Spirit of God is the Spirit of Jesus that's in you, and really all we need to say is, okay, God, I give you permission to make me tasty in the world, to make my life a light.

I give you permission to author that, design it, to make it whatever it's, but I'm done resisting your spirit.

I'm not going to resist you anymore.

Just show me, right?

Don't go out and try to make it up.

Let the Spirit of God lead you into this idea of being salty.

But then Jesus does lay out, this is the third simple principle that's in our text, the loss of a primary function, the cautionary tale that's in this text.

You'll notice that it says here, but if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty?

It's no longer good for anything.

And then you go down a little bit further, and it says, A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden.

No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket.

There is a sense of tragic waste, tragic waste in these examples, a loss of potential, a failure to be what they were designed to be.

We live in a cultural moment where there is a bankruptcy around purpose, and there's an emptiness that cultural participants express around I do not feel fulfilled in my job.

I do not feel fulfilled in this relationship.

I do not feel fulfilled or that I'm living out a purposeful life for X, Y, and Z.

What Jesus here is saying is that your life has this purpose and there is this possibility of tragic waste, a loss of potential, a failure to be what you're designed to be.

Again, if you're a follower of Jesus, the Spirit of God comes in and makes you a custom, a custom disciple, not a cookie-cutter disciple.

Not like, you know, we're gonna stamp them out, but no, the Spirit of God is taking your personality and your backstory and your moment that you live in and the resources that you have, and the Spirit of God is authoring for you a purposeful life where you're gonna be salt and you're gonna be light.

We've already encountered this idea in uh at an earlier point in the in the book of Matthew.

In Matthew chapter 3, verse 10, John the Baptist is teaching in this context by the Jordan, he's doing these baptisms, and the Pharisees come to him, and John says of these Pharisees, listen, the axe is already at the root of the trees.

Matthew 3:10

Therefore, every tree that look, do you see what it says there?

Every tree that doesn't produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

A tree has the potential to bear fruit.

And John is looking at these Pharisees as walking trees with the potential for fruit, and he says, listen, the way that God's kingdom works is that the people that are not bearing fruit, there's something that's happening where they're just set off to the side.

Here he's talking about an axe cutting them down in John 15.

The branches that are not bearing fruit are thrown into the fire and they're burned.

This is there's a continuity of this concept throughout the teaching of Jesus.

So when you look at yourself in the mirror every day, you're looking at a vessel that God has redeemed.

He's purchased you by the work on the cross, and now he wants to author in your life fruitfulness.

And listen, listen, saints, he's been talking about this from the beginning because when God made people, he put Adam and Eve there into the garden, and what did he say?

Listen, he said, listen, Adam and Eve, I want you to be fruitful and multiply, right?

I want you to rule, subdue in the garden here.

I want you to take responsibility for this place.

Name the animals, right?

Steward over the ground.

There was nothing growing up.

It says in chapter 2, there was nothing growing out of the ground yet because one, God hadn't made it rain, and two, man hadn't tilled the ground yet.

It's a fascinating little phrase there.

It hadn't been tilled yet by man.

God created humans not to just work so that they can make money, but to fulfill his purpose on the earth.

And he's over and over again using metaphors and imagery that talks about potential.

The implication for the listener is to examine whether we are truly living out our own God-given design and purpose.

Our own God-given design and purpose.

The um this whole text that we're going through of the Sermon on the Mount is gonna jar you, it's gonna push on you.

Just like think of how a potter is like working a piece of clay.

There's gonna be things in here where it's like, man, I don't feel comfortable with that.

Or, or even more so, like, I don't know how that works itself out in my life.

I've got those things in the from the Sermon on the Mount where it's just like, I see that this is how the kingdom works.

Like, I don't know how obedience fully works in that way.

But I just want to warn you, I just want to just say, um, when you look at when you're looking at this sermon, take in the whole thing, take in the whole thing.

I had this interact uh interaction um I think two weeks ago.

Um, and some of you saw that I posted this on my on my Facebook page.

I had shared a picture of us doing the compassion center feeding, and this guy who had been a friend of mine on Facebook, I really had never met him in real life, but he left me this really nice comment of Matthew 6.1, which Matthew 6.1 says, Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.

So he's taking this text from the Sermon on the Mount, trying to rebuke me for sharing pictures about us feeding people at the Compassion Center.

Now, the funny thing is in the same sermon that Jesus preaches is verse 16, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

Listen, I don't know Joshua or what his deal is or why he tried to write why he decided it was his moment to troll me.

But um I do know, having lived in the Christian bubble long enough, that it is um it is easy to take pieces of a very challenging text and be like, well, you know, Jesus said this one thing, like you gotta hide your good works.

Well, but he said something different earlier.

We got to take it all in.

We gotta take it all in and let it shape us.

In verse 16, he says this, let your light shine, right?

Let your light shine.

And then he says, so that they may see your good works.

One of the people sitting, listening to Jesus teach this, was a man named Peter.

Peter was a fisherman, and he goes on to become this great apostle, one of the early apostles and leaders of the church.

And Peter was deeply impacted by this teaching of Jesus.

Again, I think that Jesus taught this material more than once, but it seems to have deeply impacted Peter's life.

This whole idea just generally of just do good comes up as he's writing his own letter years later in um uh two Jews spread out around uh the area of Turkey.

He says this to the to those uh Jewish followers of Jesus conduct yourselves honorably amongst the Gentiles, so that when they slander you as evildoers, they may observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits.

Do you see how similar that statement is from what Jesus is teaching in the Sermon on the Mount?

That they may see your good works.

For Peter, he took a hold of Jesus' teaching and his cultural model when we studied this as a church together was take the position of weakness, do good from a position of disadvantage.

In other words, consider yourself perpetually the underdog in culture and do radical acts of good.

Turn the other cheek, be radically generous, submit to the authority, do these things that are good, and then let God be the invisible third party in the room, and let God just convict and transform non-believers' lives, people that are still yet far from God, let the Spirit of God work on them through your good works and bring about his kingdom in their life.

I just I want to put that in front of you because as a church about a year ago we were looking at that material, and I just love, I love thinking about Peter there on the side of the mountain, listening to Jesus teach um teach these specific things.

So, I don't have a cultural model for you, but we're gonna read together the teachings of Jesus over the coming months from the Sermon on the Mount, and what I want you to be thinking about is how do you engage culture?

When you look at the world around you, do you see a total absence of the grace of God in general, like that the world is bankrupt?

Or do you see God working powerfully through non-Christians in amazing ways?

That's that's one of two questions.

That's one question you need to ask.

What what side or where do you kind of land on that axis?

And then do you believe that you're called to transform culture, or do you believe that you're called to run away and isolate yourself from culture?

Think through those things as we are going through the Sermon on the Mount.

Let's pray together.

Lord, we thank you for this text, and we want to surrender to the work of your spirit in our life.

Thank you for choosing us, for redeeming us, for giving us the down payment, the seal of the Holy Spirit in our life, the promise that you will lead us into what is true and good and right.

We pray that you would find in us obedience uh to the things that are written here, wisdom that you would teach us, Lord, how to occupy this moment uh in time.

And so, Lord, we give ourselves to you afresh.

This morning, we're here uh as worshipers of you, students, followers, but also worshipers of you.

We declare that you are our King and we are the subjects of your kingdom, and we want to follow you.

Bless us this week, we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.