A New Way of Serving
What purpose do you serve?
How many of you love popcorn? I love popcorn.
For a long time, we just bought microwave popcorn, and anytime we wanted some, we would just put a bag in the microwave, and 3 minutes later, it’s ready! But that’s not how I grew up.
My dad loved to make popcorn, and we had one of the popcorn makers where you put the popcorn kernels and the oil in the bottom, turn it on, the plate at the bottom would heat up, and there was a piece that would turn at the bottom to stir the kernels and the oil. While that’s working, we’re melting the butter to put on top.
When it’s all done, we put that in a big bowl like this, and then it’s time for what?
That’s right — it’s time for SALT!
Who loves salt?
I love salt. I love regular table salt, pink Himalayan salt, black Hawaiian salt, really… any kind of salt!
Salt serves a purpose!
Without salt, I’m not sure how much I would enjoy popcorn. But with salt, I can’t get enough!
Salt & Saltiness
Fun fact, did you know that pure salt can’t lose its saltiness?
Pure salt, sodium chloride, can’t lose its flavor. It’s stable. It doesn’t break down. But, if salt is mixed with other things, if it becomes impure, it can easily lose its saltiness. It can quickly become tasteless, dull, and useless. And it all depends on the purity of the salt.
Can we be honest for a moment? Purity isn’t something that’s valued in our culture anymore. At least, not when it comes to moral purity.
Everyone wants clean and pure drinking water. We’ll pay $5 for a bottle of brand-name triple-filtered high-quality drinking water from the store. We’ll install water filters that cost thousands of dollars in our homes. A lot of us grew up drinking water out of a garden hose, and that was just fine. Not anymore! Nowadays, we take seriously the purity of our water, but for some reason, we don’t take seriously the purity of our lives.
We’ll go to great lengths to purify the water coming into our home, but we do little to nothing to purify the content coming onto our screens. We’ll spend countless dollars to make sure what we drink and take into our bodies is good for us, but what we allow to enter our eyes, our ears, our hearts, our minds, our souls is contaminated, and we know it, and we allow it, and we often go looking for it.
Pure salt can’t lose its saltiness, but if it’s impure in any way, it can quickly become tasteless, dull, and useless.
And this is one of the ways Jesus talks to his first disciples about what it means to be a part of His Kingdom.
Again, I want to invite you to imagine this moment.
Just imagine you’re there, some 2000 years ago, sitting on a hillside with a bunch of other people listening to Jesus talk. He’s just arrived on the scene. He’s been saying some things no one has ever heard before, and He’s been doing some things that no one has ever done before. He’s talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, He’s calling people to repent of their sins, and He’s been healing people who are sick.
You’re curious. That’s why you’re here today. You’re sitting on this hillside with Jesus, and you hear Him say this…
“You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless. – Matthew 5.13
You Are the Salt!
Jesus calls you the “salt of the earth.” But what does that mean?
In the ancient world, salt was rarely pure. Salt was gathered from different places and would be mixed with other minerals, sand, and other impurities.
One of the places near where Jesus was speaking that day, where you could find a lot of salt, was the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea is the saltiest body of water on Earth. It’s 9 times saltier than the ocean. It’s so salty that nothing can live in it, which is why they call it the Dead Sea! The Jordan River and other smaller streams flow into the Dead Sea, but nothing flows out of it. It’s also the lowest point on earth, some 14,000 feet below sea level.
Maybe you have been there. My wife and I got a chance to go there a few years ago on a trip to Israel. When you go to the Dead Sea, you don’t need a float. The salt concentration is so high you’ll float all by yourself. It’s impossible to sink!
The heat in that area causes evaporation from the Dead Sea, leaving behind salt. But that salt is impure. In the days of Jesus, the salt that was harvested from places like the Dead Sea was stored in blocks or heaps. But when humidity or rain came and hit that mixture of salt, sand, and minerals, the actual salt would dissolve away, leaving behind a white, powdery mineral residue. It was no longer salty. It was tasteless, dull, and useless. And if that happened, the only thing you could do is throw it out. It was worthless.
Salt doesn’t lose its flavor unless… unless it becomes mixed with other impure things, unless it becomes diluted. And Jesus, looking at this group of would be disciples, reminds them that salt serves a purpose, but it can only serve that purpose if it remains pure!
Hang on to that thought, and listen to what Jesus says next. He shifts analogies and says this:
“You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. – Matthew 5.14-15
You Are the Light
Jesus makes a move from talking about salt to talking about light. Different object lesson, but it’s the same point. He says to these disciples – You are the light of the world!
Which is interesting, because there’s another place in Scripture where Jesus says about Himself, “I AM the light of the world.”
You may be wondering, well… Which is it, Jesus? Are You the light of the world, or are we the light of the world? Some people have tried to make sense of this by saying that Jesus is the light of the world and we are called to reflect His light, like the moon reflects the light of the sun; we’re called to reflect the Light of Christ. And that’s good. I like that. There’s truth there. But that’s NOT what Jesus says here.
Jesus doesn’t say here that you are called to reflect His light. Jesus says, and I quote, “You are the light of the world!”
And you may wonder, how can that be?! One of the great mysteries of the Christian life is that if you are a Christian, if you are a follower of Jesus, Christ lives in you.
Galatians 2:20 says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me…”
Colossians 1:27, reminds us, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
2 Corinthians 13:5 asks, “Do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you…?”
Jesus Himself said in John 15:4–5, “Abide in me, and I in you…”
If Christ is in you, you aren’t reflecting His light. You are radiating His light! You embody His light. You are the light because you have the Light dwelling within you. Abiding within you as you abide in the Light!
BUT… if you put that light under a basket, if your light becomes hidden, shaded, obstructed in any way, it becomes useless.
Flashlights
Some of you remember back in the good old days, before your cell phone had a flashlight built into it, you needed an actual flashlight from time to time. Whenever you needed a flashlight, maybe the power went off at the house or something like that, there was nothing more frustrating than finding out in that moment, when you needed the light the most, that the batteries in your flashlight were dead.
A flashlight that can’t produce light is useless.
Jesus says, You are the light of the world. That’s who you were created to be. You are useful. You serve a purpose. Your light serves a purpose. Don’t hide it. Don’t obstruct it. Be a city on a hill.
One of the things I love about living in a place like Houston is the city lights at night.
You can even see the city of Houston lit up at night from outer space. Here is an image taken by the crew of the International Space Station (Expedition 22) on February 28 2010.
Jesus says, be like that! Shine that bright. So bright that people driving through the city at night marvel at the beauty of the lights. So bright that people in outer space can see you lit up and shining bright for the world to see!
Salt serves a purpose. Light serves a purpose. The question for us is simply, how do we be salty? How do we be light?
How?
The Good News is that Jesus tells us! In the very next verse, Jesus tells in plain terms what it looks like to be salt and light in this dark world.
In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father. – Matthew 5.16
Martin Luther King, JR once famously said,
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”
— From “Strength to Love,” 1963
How do we be salt and light? By our GOOD DEEDS.
In the Gospel of Matthew, we see this connection again. We’ve talked about it before, this connection between what we believe and what we do. It’s one thing to believe the Gospel. It’s something else to live the Gospel. Jesus makes this connection for us right here: what we believe is connected to what we do. One of the ways Jesus makes all things new, one of the ways we live as members of His Kingdom, is through serving those around us in love.
When Jesus says, You are the salt of the earth and You are the light of the world, what is He talking about? How are we salt, how are we light?
We are salt and light by the way we live and by the way we serve those around us in love. What shines are our good deeds. And we don’t do good things to say look at us, look at what we did, look at how much we gave, look at what we accomplished, look at all the people we helped. No! We do what we do to point people to the goodness of God!
Salt serves a purpose. Light serves a purpose.
What purpose do you serve?
A few months ago a group from our church served one of our widows and needs. We call this our Hearts and Hammers ministry.
This story didn’t make the headlines in any newspapers. It didn’t go viral on social media. Some of you might not have even known this was happening. But if you’re wondering what salt looks like, what light looks like, it looks like this.
Not long after that, there were people in need in our community, people who were hungry and needed a little help. Our friends at Second Mile Mission asked our church to help provide protein, specifically canned meat, to refill their pantry and help real people in need. Our church showed up and helped out in a big way. If you’re wondering what salt looks like, what light looks like, it looks like this.
Whenever you do these kinds of things, people always stop to ask why.
It doesn’t matter if you’re painting a house down the street, buying extra food to refill a food pantry, or maybe leaving a little more than usual to tip the waiter at the restaurant because you found out they were going through a hard time, or that time you stoped to check on a stranger in the parking lot or the check out line because it looked like they needed a hand, or whenever you serve those around you in love, you become salt. You become light.
And that’s what you’re called to do. That’s who you’re called to be.
The problem is that you live in a world that wants you to compromise your saltiness. The way the world does that is through threatening your purity. Pure salt can’t lose its saltiness. But impurity can corrupt the best of us and make us tasteless, dull, and useless.
Can I call you today to a higher standard? To prioritize the purity of your life like you prioritize the purity of your drinking water? Can I call you today to be salty?
You can ask my kids, whenever we’re watching a movie and eating popcorn, I always say the same thing. No matter how much salt we put on our popcorn, at some point, I’ll look at them and say, “It needs more salt!
The world we’re living in, it needs more salt.
Stay Salty! Shine Brightly!
The world we’re living in is dark. I don’t have to tell you that. Watch 5 minutes of TV, and you’ll see it. Check the headlines, and you’ll see it. This world wants to hide your light. Better yet, it wants to drain your battery and kill your light. A dead flashlight is useless. And if you allow it, this world will corrupt your light, corrode your batteries, and kill your ability to shine. Don’t let it.
Stay salty. Shine brightly! Serve those around you in love!
How?
The only way to stay salty is to fight for your purity. And the way you do that is by staying close to the source of the salt. The salt in our house stays salty, it stays pure, because it stays in the salt shaker! We’ve got 2-3 of these in our house. As long as the salt stays in the salt shaker, it remains pure, uncorrupted, good, and useful! In the same way, remain in God! Abide in Him as He abides in you! Remain in His Word! Remain faithful in prayer. Remain in Him, and you will remain salty. And Good Works will flow from your life!
But the salt wasn’t meant to remain in the salt shaker forever. It’s meant to be used. In the same way, be useful! Do good!
The only way to shine brightly is for you to stay fully charged and to clear away anything that would hide or corrupt or cancel your light. The way you do that is by staying close to the Source of the Light. To Jesus who said, I AM the Light of the World. Light stays pure and bright when it’s fully charged, when there’s nothing hiding the light or detracting from the light that is shining. In the same way, get into the Light of God, the light of the presence of Jesus. Remain in that light, and you shine brightly. And Good Works will flow from your life!
Salt serves a purpose. Light serves a purpose. YOU serve a purpose. Your purpose is to produce Good Deeds that point people to Jesus and glorify our great God!
Stay salty. Keep shining. Remain faithful! May our good deeds point people to our good and gracious God and King!
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