9/20/26 - Matthew 5:13-16 - Salt and Light - Skyler Flowers

As you guys heard, we will be in Matthew chapter 5 again.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

It was great to be with you all.

Last week, as we started our series, looking at the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' longest recorded teaching in the Bible, and as you just heard, we'll be continuing today, just in that second section, right after the Beatitudes.

I'm going to read it again, and then we're going to dive in.

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?

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

You're the light of the world.

A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand and it gives light to all 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 who is in heaven.

It's the word of the Lord.

Now, according to Lifeway Research, 29% of the world's population identifies as Christians.

That comes out to about 2.3 to 2.4 billion Christians in the world.

I mean, just mathematically, you can probably guess that that comes out to be that Christianity is the largest religion in the world.

But as big as Christianity is today, it didn't start off that way.

Christianity was born in the backwater of the Roman Empire.

There were plenty of more interesting places, more important provinces than this little piece of land called Israel.

And the global spread of Christianity, it certainly didn't happen overnight.

Hundreds of years of hatred and intense persecution.

And yet the church survived.

And more than survived.

The church spread like wildfire.

But how?

What is it that made Christianity so compelling to a culture that it was so antithetical to?

How could this group of poor, uninfluential, and hated group grow to become this global movement that we see today?

30 years ago, Rodney Stark, a professor at Baylor, an expert on early Christianity, he wrote a book titled The Rise of Christianity, and that's the question he sought to answer.

And where he started as is he started by looking at the world of the Roman Empire, the world that Christianity would have arisen in.

And he highlighted its brutality.

Most people lived in poverty.

When natural disasters struck, it would take generations for whole civilizations to bounce back, if they ever bounced back.

Any sort of normalcy, pretty much lost.

For women, I mean, to lose your husband was to lose any bit of security you had.

Pandemic and illnesses regularly swept through the cities, just killing off masses, especially the poor.

Children born with various disabilities, or for simply being the wrong gender, were killed.

It was a brutal world.

This is the world that Christianity entered.

And this is what Stark writes.

To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope.

To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments.

To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family.

To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity.

Once Christianity appeared, its superior capacity for meeting these chronic problems soon became evident and played a major role in its ultimate triumph.

And this is what he says for what Christianity brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture.

To the impoverished Christianity, or Christians sacrificed from their own food.

When disaster struck, Christians opened their homes.

Widows and children were adopted into new families.

It's the brother of our Lord Jesus Christ, James, who says, religion that is pure and undefiled is the one that cares for the widow and orphan.

Christians risked their own lives when pandemic struck to care for others, and more than that, Christians carried a message that eternal life was offered to all.

Not by works, but by God's free grace.

Why did Christianity grow?

Here's why.

Christians, they were in the world.

They were living amongst people.

They experienced the realities that all the people around them experienced.

But they were not of the world.

Christians brought new values, they brought new ways of living, they brought a new culture, and Christians brought a new news.

God is restoring all things through Jesus Christ.

Now here's the reality: each one of us is scattered.

You know, you are in the world.

You already are.

You exist in this world in many, many places.

And in Matthew 5, verses 13 through 16, Jesus is telling us that wherever you are in this world, you are to live in a way that invites others into this restoration that Jesus offers.

Matthew 5:13–16

If you are a Christian, you are not merely meant to be in the world, but in it for a purpose.

And that's and to help us understand what that looks like, Jesus gives us two images.

And you're probably super familiar with them.

I'm sure you've heard it a million times, but they can be quite complex and so much depth hack into them.

Two images, Jesus says we are to be salt or to be light.

So that's what we're gonna look at today.

We're gonna look at salt and light.

And first, we are the salt in the world.

Now, few things in the world are as common as salt.

And you may not have realized it, but you have interacted with salt in the last couple of hours.

Salt is found in soap, in rubber, in clothes, in paper, in glass, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and more.

If you're holding if you have a leather-bound Bible just like this one that I have up here, you're interacting with salt.

We put it in our food, we use it to knock the ice off of roads, oceans are full with it.

You know, salt is literally everywhere.

This is just one of the basic realities of salt, one of the basic ideas that the image is offering us.

How far and wide salt is scattered.

And just like salt is scattered, Jesus points out that his people are likewise scattered in this world.

Even in a congregation like this, you guys are scattered in an unbelievable multitude of places.

You're scattered in neighborhoods all over the city.

You're scattered into families, some of which you were born into, some of which you were not.

You're scattered into various sports leagues that you feel like you spend all your time running your kids all over town to get to.

You're scattered in careers where you work with people like you, but you also work with people totally unlike you.

I mean, I'm sure some of you have a coworker that when you come home at the end of the day, you look at your spouse and say, You will not believe what this person said.

I mean, just like that person is just so different from you.

And in that same workplace, you have those relationships, and you have a multitude of other relationships.

And if I had to guess, you're probably on social media, you probably watch at least some TV, and you uh watch movies.

You're citizens of some country, you watch the news, when disaster hits, you feel it.

When there's you know uh celebrations and there's holidays, you experience them as well.

You are in this world and you are in it in a lot of places.

And the question Jesus has for us is where you are scattered, how are you salt in those places?

Now that now that's the difficult part of interpreting what Jesus means.

Uh you know, I think later we'll talk about light.

I think that idea is a little more common to us.

We can understand what sort of image Jesus means when he says, You are the light of the world.

Salt?

A little less obvious.

Uh all sorts of interpretations have existed.

One commentator identified 11 possible interpretations.

Uh we're not gonna do all 11 today.

We're not, but also don't want to limit ourselves to one idea of what Jesus might mean by be that we're the salt of the world here.

So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look at three possible ones.

I think all three of them are true.

I think all three of them are possibly even uh Jesus is meaning more than just one and meaning all three of them.

They would have been common ideas in his day and age.

So three things that Jesus means when he says we are the salt of the world.

So first one is salt as flavor.

You're a salty seasoning added to the places you're scattered.

I love to cook.

Cooking is it's my main hobby.

I probably cook three to four times a week and I have for years.

It's it's just what I love to do.

And when my wife and I first got married, she would eat my cooking, and almost every time she would say, Can you just stop putting salt in our food?

And that was it wasn't because the food was too salty.

I mean, there's definitely times that it probably was, but but it wasn't just that it was too salty, it's just that in her mind, salt is bad for you, therefore, can't we just cut it out?

That's just like one thing we can eliminate from the diet.

But what I would explain to her is you you can't just cut salt out of cooking, right?

If anyone, if you cook, you know this.

Salt isn't just an ingredient in the dish.

The reason salt is in everything you cook is because salt does not is not there to necessarily add flavor.

If you know, it's not meant to make it taste salty.

And if you if something tastes like salt, that means it's it's actually got too much in it.

But the reason why you add salt throughout the cooking process, even when you're baking sweets, is because salt amplifies the flavors already within the food.

It enhances the flavor, it reduces bitterness, it enhances the sweetness, it draws out the natural aromas.

In other words, it makes a carrot taste more like a carrot.

It makes the tomato sauce taste more like a tomato sauce.

It doesn't add the flavor, it lifts up the flavors in the food for the natural flavors within it to flourish.

All right, in other words, the salt you scatter in your food is meant to bring out the good within it.

You are the salt of the world.

You should be enhancing the good wherever you are scattered.

There's good in this world.

In Mississippi, in Jackson, in Madison.

There's all sorts of common grace goods that God has given us for our enjoyment.

And so we should enjoy them.

For Christians to be salt means that we don't need to be, we don't need to conceive of ourselves as killjoy world haters, but we can actually be those who show the world how to best enjoy the goods of this world.

We should be the type of people who draw out the best versions of other people.

You know, the culture of your workplaces should be better because you are in them.

There should be more, you the people around you should want to work harder, should be more inspired because they work next to you.

We should be the type of people that show up in our communities.

We don't withdraw we show up within our communities, and we look to actively contribute our gifts to the promotion of its good, whether it be a distinctly Christian good or not.

So look around your neighborhood.

Look where you are scattered.

Think about your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends, your community, and ask, where's the good?

Where can I amplify the good?

Where has God uniquely equipped me to be in this place for its good?

That's the first one.

Salt as flavor.

The second, salt as preservation.

Before the invention of a refrigerator, I mean, you needed some way to preserve meat, right?

You couldn't go to the deli counter, you couldn't go to the butcher and get something really fresh and then put it in your fridge and you know eat it a week later or something like that.

In order for meat to be preserved and last without decay, they would press salt into the meat.

Salt draws out the moisture, it dehydrates the meat, it creates an environment where bacteria cannot grow.

So meat will not rot if salt is actively working to draw out that which leads to its decay.

If properly salt cured, a meat can last months or even up to a year without refrigeration.

If you like travel in Europe and you go to like a like in Italy and you go to a really nice shop, you can see even just like salted meat hanging from the ceiling because it will last.

It will not decay while hanging there.

The image here is that we are sent in the world to stop its decay.

At this point in Matthew, the book has already shown us Jesus is coming to a world of violence.

Right?

The first image we get of Jesus is Herod killing children to stop Jesus.

In the chapter right before this one, the disease, the demon oppressed, the epileptic, the paralyzed, people who suffer from chronic, chronic pain are coming in to be healed.

Jesus has experienced firsthand the decay that exists in this world.

Rulers of this world given to decay, using their power for persecution.

But even just in our bodies, rebelling against us and the demons for us, decay exists.

But he knows the human heart as well.

Just before the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is tempted in the wilderness to reject God by Satan.

Jesus knows our temptations.

He knows the temptations that threaten to bend us and break us.

Jesus knows our ways, he knows our longings.

Jesus has seen the physical decay of this world, but he's also seen the spiritual and moral decay of this world.

God created all things good, but through Satan's first temptation, sin entered the world, and that decay began.

It grew in the human heart.

It caused all sorts of sins, hatred and jealousy, lust and lies.

Jesus will address these in the next section.

That's what we're gonna talk about in three weeks or so.

And from the human heart, it has infected every aspect of human life.

Our relationships, our communities, our families, our schools, our governments.

Look, you do not have to look long in this world to see its decay.

I know you guys see it and you feel it.

You don't have to look long, but you also don't have to look very far.

You can just look inside at your own heart and you'll see the decay.

How does Jesus react to decay?

Last year, uh you guys probably remember the ice storm that hit Oxford.

I'm sure you guys felt some of the effects down here as well.

Uh but in Oxford we lost electricity.

I mean, some people for weeks on end, we lost it for about a week.

And you know, while we were able to put some of our foodstuffs, you know, and our the frozen food outside because it was cold enough to maybe keep it frozen, even that's kind of risky because it's maintaining the right temperature over time.

And so you pretty much lose everything that you were keeping in your fridge.

It all spoils, it decays.

What do you do with it?

I mean, we could have guessed just stuck it back in the fridge and it'll just stunk really bad.

But no, you throw it all out.

That's what you do with decaying things.

But that's not what Jesus does.

Jesus sends healing.

Jesus sends his people as the salt of the earth press deeply into the world to draw out all that causes this decay.

Some of you have opportunities or will have opportunities to stop the decay of this world in major ways, in big ways.

Maybe you own a business and you're gonna make something, or you you provide a service for people that that helps them to live day to day.

And you have an opportunity as the proprietor of that or the landlord or whatever to serve them in a way that promotes their well-being and does not diminish it, that does not exploit other humans, but actually serves them for their good.

Maybe it'll be in law and government.

And you have the opportunity to shape laws and systems that to serve and help people.

You'll you're gonna fight injustice and you're gonna ensure the fair application of goods and services.

You know, whether it's media or medicine or education, there there's these big ways you might see, okay, this is where my faith, this is where Christianity leads me to change the world.

This is where my saltiness works to restore the decay that has happened in this world.

Some of you have jobs that you do this every single day.

If you're a doctor, if you're a pharmacist, you you see it right up front because you're caring for people with physical ailments.

You are actively fighting every day against the decay of this world.

And we thank you for it.

We should be thinking of our lives and our work and everything we do as how can the saltiness within me fight the decay in this world?

And when you may do it in big ways, but a lot of us may also hear changing the world, doing it in big ways, and think, I mean, I can't change the world.

Like, I have too many diapers to change.

I've got, again, you know, as I said before, too many sports practices.

I got too many tests to study for.

How am I supposed to do all of that and change the world?

How am I supposed to, you know, am I supposed to like add to my to-do list, change the world?

Look, for a lot of us, the the saltiness of our lives is just gonna look more like day-to-day, faithfully following Jesus wherever he's put you.

We looked at it last week.

But it's gonna look like living out the beatitudes wherever you are.

It will look like being merciful.

Jesus said, blessed are the merciful.

It would look like being merciful to your good for nothing co-worker.

You know, you're helping them and serving them, refusing to slander them and gossip about them, uh, even though you feel so powerfully that they deserve it, that they don't deserve your mercy.

But you may be the only person in that person's life that hasn't given up on them.

You have an opportunity to be salt to them.

It'll look like pursuing purity.

I'm not saying you'll be perfect, but if you but if you will be the type of person who treats other men and women with respect, who does not, or at least actively fights against sexual temptation, who doesn't talk about people in a way that demeans their personhood, trust me, in a world like ours, in a culture like ours, if you do that, if you pursue purity, you will be salt.

You may be, it may be uncomfortable, but you will be salt.

If it looks like being meek, if you if you if blessed are the meek, if you are meek, if you're a person without pretensions, if you're a person of integrity, if you're honest, in a world where everybody seemingly is always performing, you'll be salt.

If you are a peaceful person, not pret, you know, not contentious, not always having to argue the next point, not always erupting into anger when someone disagrees with you, you will live like salt.

This is the type of being in the world that James Davidson Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, has termed faithful presence.

Faithful presence.

Christians don't halt the decay by seizing power.

You know, though we we hope that Christians are actively working within this world in positions of power to halt the decay, but it's not by seizing power, nor by withdrawing from the world to create little pockets of purity.

Christians live as scattered all over the place, even in surprising places, salt, and in those places we are faithful and looking to live like Jesus.

And if you do that in these big ways and in these small ways, look, the truth is you're gonna change the world.

That may sound crazy.

That may sound like a grand vision, but the truth is you will change the world.

Live as salt, and the world will be better, and it will be less decayed, and it will be more beautiful for your presence in it.

But even with that, our efforts, being faithfully present, will never be able to totally complete this.

The decay of the world is too strong.

How does God overcome evil totally?

This is the third image.

So we've said salt as flavor, we looked at salt as uh preservative.

Here we see three salt as covenant.

So throughout the Bible, we see God's relationship to people is structured in covenants, these covenant agreements.

God's binding himself to his people in loving commitment.

Covenant language is not as familiar to us, it's not used as much in the modern day as it used to be, but the idea of covenant was central to the ancient world and especially central to the way early Christians, and all throughout the Bible you see its language, thought about their relationship to God.

You know, probably the only modern example we actually do maintain is the marital covenant.

Two people take vows through sickness and health, through richer and poor until death do us part.

They bind themselves to one another in love.

That's a covenant.

This is how Tim Keller defines what a covenant is in the Bible.

He says it's a relationship much more intimate and loving than a mere legal contract could create, yet more enduring and binding than personal affection alone could make.

It is a bond of love made more intimate and solid because it is legal.

It is the very opposite of a consumer-vender relationship, in which the connection is maintained only if it serves both parties' self-interest.

A covenant, by contrast, contrast to the consumer-vender relationship, is by contrast the solemn, permanent, whole self-giving of two parties to each other.

Now, here's where the covenant idea comes, you know, interacts with salt, and what Jesus might mean by you are the salt of the earth.

Salt was often an ingredient in the covenants that God made with his people.

We see this in Leviticus 2 13.

You shall be, you shall season all your grain offerings with salt.

You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering.

With all your offerings, you shall offer salt.

Okay.

Numbers 18, 19, all the holy contributions that the people of Israel present to the Lord, I give to you and to your sons and daughters with you as a perpetual due.

It is a covenant of salt forever before the Lord for you and for your offspring after you.

So when Jesus, God in the flesh, says, We are the salt of the earth, he's drawing on, I believe, all these familiar images that we've talked about of what salt would mean and look like in the ancient world.

But I think he's also drawing on the deep well of scripture and how scripture is portraying salt as a covenant idea.

And this this helps us see two things.

First, by calling us salt in this covenantal way, Jesus is saying, You're in a covenant relationship with God.

Though your hearts have decayed unto death, God has come in the person of Jesus Christ to restore us, to enter into relationship with us.

Jesus makes a new Covenant with us.

The new covenant is a solemn, permanent, and whole self-giving of God to us and for us.

That's what the cross shows us.

That's what the cross is.

At the cross, Jesus secures our good.

And he destroys the stronghold of sin in our lives.

He restores our heart from its decay.

He makes us children of God.

And as the last line of this section tells us, He's your Father in heaven.

That's the first thing.

By drawing on this covenant idea, he's highlighting if you're God's people, you're in a covenant with him.

He's made a permanent binding commitment to you.

But second, by calling us all to the earth, he means that Christians, you also take that new covenant into the world.

We invite others into this covenant with him.

We speak and we proclaim the good news of Christ's love for the world.

We don't merely live as salt, we speak a salty message.

We speak of his commitment to this world's restoration.

We tell the world that our God has not given up on the world because it has decayed.

He's not given up on them.

When we see the injustices of the world, we can say, I too see them, and I also believe in their restoration.

Not merely out of human effort, that we should be involved in human effort and working for to correct the injustices in the world and the decay of the world, but because we believe in a God who will himself, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his second coming, restore all things in him.

Our work to preserve the good, to fight against the decay, and carry this covenant.

It's an extension of Christ's work and Christ's love for this world.

And it will be completed.

You can have confidence.

The decay won't get the final word.

Jesus will when he returns.

You are the salt of the world.

What a calling it is to participate in the resurrected work of Christ today.

But there's a warning that also comes with this image.

You must maintain the distinct properties of being salt.

This is what he says: if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?

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

I mean, if salt is mixed with their dirt, it can't flavor, it can't preserve, it can't even be offered in the covenants that God has mentioned.

Mix dirt in with your salt.

You know, try to remove it before you sprinkle it on your food.

Good luck.

You know, mix dirt in with your s with your salt and then press it into your meat and enjoy your food poisoning later.

Live like the world.

Look like the world.

And try to offer the world the good news of Jesus.

And you're gonna find yourself ineffective.

You've lost your saltiness.

Your life and your message will ring hollow.

What good is this Christianity?

You you're living a life just like me.

You're not gonna actually, you're not gonna combat the decay of this world.

You're gonna contribute to the decay of this world.

This is why people often critique Christians for being hypocrites.

Because you say you're the salty person, and yet I look at your life and I do not see any distinct properties of being salt.

There's a warning here.

If the scattering that comes with living in this world, you might become like the world.

And it it it'll happen to it, it'll happen to us.

It'll happen to us at different times.

And when we do, we're no longer good as salt.

Faithful presence, you know, being worth your salt, means being in the world, but not of the world.

Loving the world, but loving it as God loves it.

To live as salt and thus be faithful carers of God's love into the world.

We have to always be pressing salt into our own lives, pressing salt into the lives of your brothers and sisters in Christ.

That's what the church is for.

And trying to halt the decay, to fall back on the forgiveness that Christ offers, even when our salt has lost its saltiness, to commit ourselves again to God.

And if we do that, we will be salty people.

We'll be the salty people that Jesus envisions.

But also we will shine bright in a world of darkness.

And that's the second image Jesus gives us.

We are light in this world.

Now, again, you know, the salt imagery can be a little, you know, feel a little obscure.

The light imagery is one that we're so much more familiar with.

All you have to do is stumble around in your house in the middle of the night with the lights off and see how dangerous it is for you to know how dangerous it is to move in a world of darkness.

Like, especially in my house where there's like, you know, a dog bone and kid toys all over the ground, stumble through my house at night, you will feel the danger.

But the depth of the imagery, even though we may understand that, the depth of the injury can still be lost on us because we we live in a world of lights.

You know, every house has lights for the most part.

I mean, go to a football game.

Like I, you know, I was at the Olmis game last night.

Just unbelievable the lights.

Like they have like drones flying in the air to shine lights and make images in the sky.

Streets, even in rural areas, at least in America, have lights illuminating the path.

When I took astronomy, uh, when I took astronomy 101 when I was at Ole Miss, you know, there's this one night you're supposed to go look through a telescope out at the stars.

You'd have to drive an hour outside of town just because the light pollution, even in a place as small as Oxford, was so great.

That is very different from the world Jesus' listeners would have lived in.

And I only have one experience in my life where I think I could kind of understand the depth of the darkness of the world they would have lived in.

Uh when I was 18, I was able to go on a mission trip with my church to Kenya.

So I know Miss Joanne and your ministry, y'all will be going there.

If you just travel a couple hours south, you guys will experience this.

Uh at the end of the week, we went to a safari uh just south of Nairobi and slept in tents.

And it was an experience like nothing I'll ever forget.

Because I remember at night, you know, we're sitting by a campfire, so there's still a little bit of light, but we're 150 miles from the nearest city.

There's nothing, there's no sound.

There's it, I just remember feeling as as awe-inspiring as it was, also how terrifying it was.

The darkness was so totalizing, so consuming, that it's like it filled up all of your senses.

Like you felt like you could hear the darkness, like it was the darkness was surrounding you.

And that's not even considering the things that might be lurking in the dark, right?

Surrounding your camp.

It's that sort of darkness that Jesus' listeners would have been familiar with.

So you see in that kind of setting, how hopeful a light would be.

That's what Jesus says you are like.

You are a beacon of hope for the world.

And your light does a lot of things, but at least at least two things.

Your light exposes.

This is verse 15.

Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

When you turn on the lights, you see what's there, you see the dog bone, you see the kids' toys, you see the corners of the couch that you stub your toes on.

You don't have to worry about it anymore.

We are to people, we are to the world, a people who the light of the gospel exposes the dangers hidden in the dark.

I think at least again, two dangers in particular.

We expose the lies of this world.

The lies.

The world lies to us.

The world tells us, look, you don't have to be so salty all the time.

You can you can be salt, you can be a Christian, you can have a little bit of world in your life, you can have just a little bit of sexual immorality, just a little bit of drunkenness, just a little lie.

Just a little.

The world lies to us in small ways, but the world lies to us in big ways.

The world rewrites the goodness of God's vision for humanity and calls it wicked.

The world looks at the plan that God has for you and says, wicked.

And there's all sorts of cultural narratives you can see this in.

The world tells us happiness can only be found by seeking your own pleasure.

Our experience is our success.

The world tells us, you know, that freedom can only be found from liberating ourselves from religion and our responsibility.

Your true self is waiting to be found and made.

But these are lies.

Look at you, hold up the light of the gospel to them and they will unravel.

You'll see them for lies.

This is God's world.

God does want your flourishing.

God does want your freedom.

God does want you to find your pleasure and happiness within him.

God loves you, he wants you to follow him to eternal life.

And there you find your happiness, your identity, your freedom.

Holding up the light of the gospel means at times we have to expose the lies of the world.

But look, that requires it requires care and it requires preparation.

We should be students of God's word.

You gotta know God's word well enough to expose lies.

And we gotta be students of God's world.

You know, don't avoid the narrative the world tells you, but but seek to really get to the bottom of it, to really understand how God's word offers a better life for humanity.

Engage those around you, working to get to their heart, to understand what is it that really drives them?

What is it that really disturbs them?

What is it that animates the center of their life?

What are the things that they are committed to?

You should be curious.

Being light, I think, in other people's life would be if you were just the most curious person in your workplace, with the with your neighbors, with the people around you, not in like a nosy way or like in an awkward way, but but being in a way of saying, no, I really truly want to hear what is it that drives you, what animates you, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, what are you worried about, what are you scared about?

Where do you think ultimately life's biggest questions are answered?

We should be a curious people.

And when you do that, when we are, you'll you'll hear both.

You'll hear the good in these people's life, you'll hear the things that they affirm, that the Bible affirms, you'll hear the things that are good that you want to amplify within their lives, but you will also hear the world's lies.

You'll hear where the world twists the good, and you'll see where you can offer light, where you can offer life to them.

You'll you'll see how this falls apart.

You'll see, you'll you'll be looking at their lives, you'll say, look at how this falls apart.

Look at how unsatisfying this is.

Is that if you really believe this, look where it actually leads.

You'll expose its lies, but but the other thing you'll expose, you'll expose lives, lies and lives.

This is John 3.20.

Jesus tells us about when light enters someone's life, uh, this is what John 3.20 says.

For everyone who does wicked things hates the light, does not and does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light lest his work should be exposed.

Our sinful natures resist the light.

Like we do not want to be exposed.

We don't want to see the ugliness of sin in our lives.

Sin finds strongholds.

You know, it's a parasite that attaches itself to the good things in our lives.

And it turns them into idols that enslave us.

They become little gods that we can't let go of.

And when it when we when we attach ourselves to them, we're enslaved by them, it becomes nearly impossible for us to see how destructive and miserable they actually are.

They may be offered just enough of what we were hoping for to keep us blinded to them.

But the light of the gospel exposes these idols, it shines a light on them.

And then what happens is sin?

Sin will squirm, it's gonna hide to get out of the light.

But the gospel is a searching spotlight in your life.

It searches out, and the goal is again revealing sin's ugliness.

When you hold up the light, the voice of the gospel, look, you should expect resistance, you should expect desperation as the sin tries to get out of the light.

Sin doesn't want to be found out, but when we hold up that light, we're saying, Don't you see what this is doing to you?

I mean, don't you see what this is keeping you from?

The exposing nature of light, it's not meant to shame or humiliate.

And that's crucial.

If you're just like going around and you're trying to be like a spotlight in people's life, like, ha, got you.

There it is, you sinner.

I don't think you're gonna be shining very much light, or maybe not the light that you think you're shining.

You may be shining more of a light on yourself and the ugliness within yourself.

The light of the gospel exposes so that it'll call them back.

Right?

The light exposes, but the second thing light does is light attracts.

This isn't an attraction like a bug to a light, you know.

We've exposed your life.

Now, zap, we got you.

It's more about a city on a it's that city on a hill that Jesus talks about.

Picture that darkness that I experienced in the the safari in Africa.

Now imagine you had to travel from where I was to another town, you know, hours away by foot.

I mean, as the sun is going down, you're starting to get really panicked, like, oh no, I'm not gonna make it in time.

I'm gonna be stuck out here in this extremely dark road.

I can't even see the light, and who might be waiting for me there?

This is this this is the parable of the Good Samaritan, right?

He's walking along the street and the man is attacked.

This is the world that they would have known.

So do you see the hope that a city on a hill would have?

You're walking along this path, the sun's going down, oh no, you round the corner as the sun goes down, it's pitch black dark, and there's a city.

You see the light and you see your path, and you know, oh my gosh, I'm gonna make it.

Hope and safety.

We hold up the light and it attracts broken, lost sinners to God, to the God who loves them.

We're lights, but we don't draw people to us.

But through our lives and through our message, we draw people to God.

This light imagery, it's Jesus is drawing again on the Old Testament, Isaiah 42, 6 through 7.

The Lord is speaking of the future servant he is going to send.

And this is what he says: I am the Lord, I've called you in righteousness, I'll take you by the hand and keep you, I'll give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisons, prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison, those who sit in darkness.

Jesus is the light.

It isn't our light.

It's his light shining through us.

We are a reflection of his light in this world.

We're not like the sun.

You know, we don't have some core power within us that makes us shine bright.

We're like the moon.

It has no light within itself, but it gives off no light.

The sun, or the moon is illuminated by the sun.

The sun so illuminates the moon that even when the sun is hidden from our view, we can still enjoy the sun's light reflected by the moon.

Jesus is the covenant that God has made with his people.

He opens the eyes and he brings the light to the nations.

Jesus is the light of the world, and though he is no longer on earth physically, though he is hidden from our view, his light remains.

His light shines across the world through Christians scattered in every nation.

Hold up your light.

Don't hide your light.

It's the hope of the world.

You don't have to feel the pressure to attract people, but you know, by your eloquence or by your ability.

It's not your light.

Let the light of Jesus shine through you.

And if you do, if you live like salt and let your light shine, people will come.

They'll come longing to know more of this covenant God has made through Jesus.

And as verse 16 says, they will see you and they will hear you and they will give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Father, we praise you that you have sent your son, that you've called him in righteousness, that he lives a perfectly righteous life, that you have guided him by the power of your will to live as a living covenant with his people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes of the blind.

We thank you that he has given his life on the cross for us, that we might not despair of the decay we see in the world, that we might be confident in the world's restoration, that at the cross we see not your hatred of the world, not your wrath towards the world, but we see your wrath poured out on behalf of the world.

That we see your love for the world and for all who are in it.

So Lord, we pray that just as we find our own hope in that world in that light, we find our own hope in that cross, that we would take that hope unto the world, that we would not be ashamed of it, that we wouldn't want to hide our lights, but that we would live openly and loudly and in every place that we are as carriers of this loving covenant that you have made.

We ask all this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.