Love Jesus 13

Excerpt from David Shaw’s “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” If we the Church are not the Salt & Light – who else is there?”

“You are 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.”  Matthew 5:14-16

The Beatitudes are not to be lived in isolation or only among fellow believers, but everywhere we go, in all aspects of our lives. God’s only witnesses are believers, and the world has no other way of knowing of Him except through the testimony of who we are in Christ.

“Evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Tim. 3:13). The world cannot do anything but get worse, because it has no inherent goodness to build on, no inherent spiritual and moral life in which it can grow. Year after year the system of evil accumulates a deeper darkness. We can look around at the culture and the world we live in and see the moral entropy that sin has brought upon us…

The world is full of lost souls who cannot see their way out of the quagmire they find themselves in. Addictions, depression, broken families, greed, avarice, violence and all the other proceeds of living in a sinful world, a lost world, cannot be addressed unless God’s people answer Christ’s clarion call. How will the lost find their way to the Father’s house unless the Father’s house, acting as salt and light, reach out to them? Our work is not only as individual grains of salt or as individual rays of light but it is as the whole church of Jesus Christ.

As individuals we are called on to reflect Christ’s love as a testament to who we are and who He is. People should see Christ in us to the extent that they desire what we have. The joy that we have in Christ is such that we should long that others would also have that very same joy. Salt and light represent what we as Christians are. The only question, as Jesus goes on to say, is whether or not we are tasteful salt and effective light. The very fact that we belong to Jesus Christ makes us His salt and light in the world.

One aspect of Church life that has often distressed me is when a Church sits back and waits for the world to come to them. No meaningful outreach to a dying world. A Church that sits in the proverbial holy huddle is not salt and light. No matter how rich the intra-Church family life is that Church is not obeying Christ’s teaching in Matthew 5:13-16.

Our witness to this culture is commanded not suggested. Our witness as individuals and as a Church are to be a reflection of Christ Himself. We are not to reflect badly on Him. Remember that our salt should not lose it saltiness, our light should not be hidden to the world. We must understand fully that our salt and light is to bring glory to our Father in Heaven and our Lord Jesus Christ. Our lives are to bring glory to the creator of the universe, the author of our salvation, the Alpha and Omega, the Ancient of days, the Beginning and the End, the Blessed Hope, the Desire of all Nations, and the Eternal Father.

Letting our light shine before men allows them to see our good works, the beauty the Lord has worked in us. To see good works by us is to see Christ in us. That is why Jesus says, let your light shine. It is not something we create or make up, but something we allow the Lord to do through us. It is God’s light; our choice is whether to hide it or let it shine.