Jesus said, ye are the light of the
world, ye are the salt of the earth.
During these Sunday mornings of the month of
January, it has been our privilege to engage
in a series of studies on the subject
of the Church and the world.
I said when we began that we would
undoubtedly find these to be most important discussions.
And it's very evident from the comments and
from the correspondence that has come to me
that you have indeed been finding them so.
You and I live in this world.
We are part of the economy of this
world.
We are subject continually to the pressures of
this world.
And yet, as Christians, our true home is
not here.
We belong to another country.
Our habitation is in God, and heaven is
our only true home.
We are called to be in the world,
and yet not off the world.
And this is one of the supreme tests
that every Christian disciple must face.
The dilemma is continually before him.
How can he influence the world without going
into the world?
And yet, how can one go into the
world and not become tainted with its spirit
and affected by its culture?
Our whole way of life, as well as
our thought processes, are conditioned by social and
cultural patterns which are definitely not in origin,
nor in spirit.
And you and I have to make up
our mind, because we dare not go along
with the tide.
We must, by the grace of God, face
the facts and settle it within our hearts
what way we are going to go.
We must decide who is going to win
within us, God or the world.
And we must therefore search the scriptures for
the truest guidance that we can find, and
also cry to the Lord our strength and
our life for grace to choose the way
that the scriptures of truth do show.
Now that's what we've been trying to do
in recent Sundays.
It has been under very great constraint that
I've been led to these subjects this month,
and yet I've known continually that the Lord
was sending his word to us at this
time, and that for some very particular purpose,
and that as he has been leading us
to consider the implications of our discipleship in
the world, it has been towards this specific
end that the church, the church that God
has so signally blessed, this church of not,
throughout the years, might emerge into a fuller
ministry and with a deeper level of dedication
than it has ever known before in the
service of her Lord and of her King.
My constant prayer through these days has been
that no word would come to us but
only the word of the Holy Ghost, and
that all that the Holy Ghost is saying
to us we may have found grace to
receive and to obey.
This is the last Sunday on this present
series of study.
Let's take just a moment to recap.
We have studied our Lord's ministry and teaching.
We have noted that he has stressed there
is an irreconcilable hostility between his church and
the world, and that this hostility would not
in any sense be eased or ceased by
the conversion of the world to the Christian
faith.
On the contrary, one of the great perils
the church would face would be of assimilating
the spirit of the world to herself.
And when the Son of Man shall come,
will he find faith on the earth?
And then we studied the Apostles' teaching.
Be not conformed to this world.
Be not conformed to the wisdom of this
world, to the course of this world, to
the cares of this world, to the spirit
of this world.
And then we moved into that inner sanctum,
that holy of holies of the New Testament,
in the 17th chapter of St. John's Gospel,
the great high priestly prayer.
And we heard our Savior meditating upon the
mystery of the gift of his church to
himself.
We heard him interceding for the purity of
the life of the church amongst men.
We heard him outlining the authority of the
mission that has been committed to the church.
And we heard him expecting the unity of
the fellowship of his church.
And then last Sunday we moved on to
another grand facet of the grand debate, moved
on to consider the power behind the world,
the prince of this world, of whom our
Savior spoke so much.
And last Sunday morning we noted some very
pregnant and altogether important things.
We noted that behind the pull and the
pressure of the world is the God of
this world.
We noted that to love the world is
to become in bondage to the God of
this world.
We reminded ourselves that Christ has overcome the
world.
And then we noted as we closed that
in that victory we may share, because this
is the victory that overcometh the world, even
our faith.
Now today we move forward to our final
study.
Move forward to ask, what is the specific
mission of the church in the world?
Why are we here?
Why is it that God does not immediately
translate a soul to heaven as soon as
that soul is born into his family?
Why does God leave us here?
And to answer that, I have chosen two
of the most staggering statements that our Lord
ever made.
Indeed, if it were not Christ who made
these statements, if they rested on apostolic authority
alone, we might almost dare to question them.
But it's our Lord who says it.
It's Christ alone who declares them, and who
says this.
Ye, to his church he is speaking.
Ye are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world.
By any standard these are daring and daunting
and amazing and almost incredible words.
You are the light of the world.
For who are these men?
Look at them just for a moment.
They are the disciples, and none of them
are men of the schools.
Gifted men certainly, but none of them possessed
of the qualities and gifts that the world
counts noteworthy.
They looked at them, we are told subsequently
in the book of Acts, and they perceived
that they were ignorant and unlearned men.
They weren't men with the scholar's gown.
They weren't the kind who were naturally world
leaders.
All unknown men.
Subsequently they were to become pioneers in the
spread of the glad tidings of the gospel.
But as of now, as at this particular
moment, when our Savior has gone up into
the mountain and has begun to teach them,
they are really an unknown band, and seemingly
so small a company of insignificant men.
And yet our Lord says to them, you
are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world.
Just what did he mean?
We must of course recall that in the
immediately preceding verses we have the Beatitudes, and
we have studied these in the past.
And the Beatitudes give to us the portrait
of the Christian man.
Here is the blessed man.
Here is the truly Christian man.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness.
Here is the true church.
Here is the true disciple.
And our Lord has been outlining this category
of man.
And he's been showing so clearly to his
disciples that they are going to fit into
this category.
That this is the kind of man he's
going to make them.
And then he says, you, being such men,
are going to be the light of the
world.
He recognizes in them, even now, though no
doubt in a very limited degree, the qualities
and the distinguishing characteristics of which he has
been speaking.
And he says, you, men like you, are
going to be the salt of the earth.
You are going to be the light of
the world.
And in saying that, he declares the great
charter truths of the gospel of redeeming grace.
Because it's the very heart of our Savior's
teaching that it is his church alone, within
his church alone, that is and is to
be found the light of life.
The development of our Savior's teaching in the
Sermon on the Mount is very emphatic and
very clear.
The good life is delineated.
Our Lord states what a Christian really is.
He makes it his first business to define
Christian character.
And then he begins to apply this description.
Having shown what the Christian man really is,
he proceeds to show what the Christian man
really does.
Or to put it in another way, having
demonstrated the character of the Christian, he now
proceeds to define the conduct of the Christian.
And he says to his church, you are
going to be the light of the world.
You are going to be the salt of
the earth.
And any series of studies on the church
and the world would be absolutely incomplete, unless
we face the implications of this kind of
statement, as we are trying to do this
morning.
I want you to note first of all
the assumption that is basic in these statements.
And then we'll examine the mission that's involved
in them.
And then as we close, we'll study the
gospel invitation that's implied.
You are the light of the world.
You are the salt of the earth.
Let's think about the assumption that is basic
to these sayings of our Lord.
And it's a twofold assumption.
The first concerns the world, and the second
concerns God in his relation to the world.
Let's think for a moment about the world,
and the assumption that is basic in such
a statement of our Lord.
When our Lord says, you are the salt
of the earth, and you are the light
of the world, there is a very definite
assumption.
And it is this, that the world in
we live as a world in darkness.
Because if he is sending his church out
to be the salt of the earth, if
he is sending his church out to be
the light of the world, obviously there is
corruptness, and there is darkness on every side.
Now that of course is not popular theology.
That is not the kind of popular teaching.
This isn't the kind of thing that modern
man expects to hear from the church.
However much he may study the march of
history, and however much the march of history
may remind him that he is not the
wanted and boasted being that he would like
to consider himself to be, yet man goes
on thinking he is.
Man goes on believing in what he calls
the natural enlightenment of the human spirit.
Man goes on continuing to believe that within
himself there is the light that he requires
upon everything, even upon God.
Man continues to believe in human reliability, and
human resourcefulness to tackle the ultimate issues.
But against that our Lord says that this
world is a corrupt world, and that this
world is a world in darkness.
Now when our Lord says that, he is
repeating obviously what all the Bible has been
declaring from the beginning.
And that is what you would expect, because
he is the word and all the scriptures
give testimony to him.
We therefore expect uniformity of testimony from the
written word and from the living word.
And the testimony of all the Bible is
this, the testimony of our Lord concerning man
is this, that there is rottenness in the
earth, that this world in which you and
I live is a fallen world, that the
world in which you and I live is
a sinful world, that this world in which
you and I live is a bad world,
that the tendency of this world in which
we live is always to evil, that the
tendencies of the human heart are always to
wars and to strife and to violence and
to death, that there are corrosive and degenerative
and putrefying elements built into the very constitution
of society for which man has found no
cure.
And this is the world, this is the
kind of world in which you and I
are called to live.
There is a fatal bias which denies our
best intentions.
At the heart of our lives there are
foul and vile and rotten and hideous things.
That's what our Lord says.
You cannot read the Bible without recognizing that,
that this is the biblical diagnosis of the
human situation.
And as it happens there are many allies
upon whom we can call today to support
this biblical diagnosis, history of which we have
already mentioned is eloquent.
During the past three thousand years there have
been barely three hundred of them that have
been free from war.
But in the great era of enlightenment in
the days when the whole theory of evolution,
scientific evolution, had permeated into the realm of
philosophy and man's thinking, and it had got
into the whole bloodstream of man's thought concerning
his future and the development and course of
history and of man, there were many who
thought that the world was going to go
on getting better and better.
It was just a case of enlightenment.
It was a case of education.
It was a case of more and more
social amelioration and the like.
And soon would come the utopia for which
man so long had dreamed.
And that went on for nearly fifty years.
And then suddenly out of a blue, blue
sky there came the thunderbolt of 1914 and
the dreadful holocaust of 1914 to 1980, which
so many of you still remember, the first
great world war.
But even then the kind of thinking was
this, that this is the war to end
war.
There will be nothing more after this.
We'll all have learned our lesson.
1919 came, and all the struggles of the
twenties.
And then in 1933 there was a certain
putsch in Germany.
In 1936, 1937, 1938 the Munich crisis, and
1939 the world again was plunged into war.
And for these five or six awful years
we lived, right within the heart and vortex
of the volcanoes, was what resulted.
Surely this is indicative of the heart of
man.
Surely this is the story of the human
heart.
Surely history itself in its total concept is
just a presentation of that which is basic
within each individual breath.
It's just a projection in its fullest possible
extent of that which is here within ourselves.
Has the world improved since 1945?
We've had 16 years, well nine now, of
the cold war.
And we're being told on many sides that
the forces that are hand to Christ are
winning better in the cold war than in
the so-called hot war.
Story of history, I suggest to you is
eloquent reminder of the assumption that our savior
here is making.
There are corrosive, degenerative, biased, pardeeble tendencies in
every heart.
But not only history, think of modern psychology
and psychiatry.
Think of the great teachers in this school.
Think of the way in which, during the
past hundred years, there has been such careful
examination given to the ego of man.
And in the end of the day, this
has to be recorded, that those who have
gone down deepest into the study of the
essential ego have come up with a declaration
of the hideous nature of the spirit that
they have found, that underneath the subconscious and
deep down in these hidden realms that we
ourselves scarcely know, there are influences, there are
powers, there are forces that are absolutely and
unutterably violent.
Why is it that you and I would
hesitate ever to have our dreams projected on
a screen?
Why is it that we would hesitate to
have the thoughts of our imagination made public?
Why?
Because they are evil.
And the Lord looked out upon men and
saw that the imaginations of their hearts were
only evil.
There's not only history and psychiatry to cite
as allies in support of the biblical diagnosis,
there is the whole field of society around
us.
And as we look out onto society, see
these foul and rotten sores that fester on
the body polity, on which we will not
and need not particularize this morning, though we
well could, because we are not blind to
what is going on.
And some of us who try to keep
abreast in the frontiers of the thinking and
of the action of our modern generation know
so well what is happening.
And some of the kind of things that
we could begin to tell you about that
are happening even in this city, I say
corrosive and degenerative and putrefied, we would need
to begin and coin new language to try
and describe the unutterable degeneration of the human
heart, decaying and deathly and diseased conditions in
society.
And that is the unregenerate world.
And men and women, let's face the fact
again.
Let's try and face the biblical analysis and
diagnosis of the situation, because it's only as
we see the light in the of God
that we will be able to go and
work the light.
This is a darkened world.
In spite of the so-called enlightenment of
human culture and philosophy, the Bible declares that
there is only darkness.
Indeed, it calls it gross darkness.
Do you fellows and girls in your work,
in your studies, you meet with some of
the most delightful people?
Don't be misled.
Don't forget our Lord's diagnosis.
Apart from him there is only darkness.
This is a world blessed with every facility
to create a paradise, a millennium on earth
within twenty years.
There's nothing lacking.
Even with this explosion of population throughout all
the world, there's plenty, there's abundance and more
and still more to feed everyone and to
make everyone know fullness and plenty and blessedness.
But instead, over our head, the shadows of
racial suicide become darker with every decade.
Sometimes we begin for a little just to
feel that that kind of thing has been
pushed into a corner and we may forget.
But don't let's forget, men and women, that
the stockpile grows bigger every month.
The stockpile of the hydrogen bombs and everything
beyond are becoming multiple.
Think of the situation in personal and social
relationships, in industrial problems, in economic issues.
Look at the tragic breakdown in personal behavior.
Look at the broken homes of our enlightened
century.
I say that the man is simply pulling
bandages across his eyes who refuses to face
the facts that this world is in darkness.
But that is not all.
Because, you see, along with this assumption, the
assumption that is implicit in our Savior's statement
is this other assumption, which is that God
has done something about it.
That God has provided an antiseptic for the
corruption.
That God has provided the light of life
for those that sit in the darkness of
death.
And that this is the glory of the
gospel.
So much for the assumption.
We've spent all our time for this morning,
I'm afraid, on that.
This message has become completely unbalanced, homiletically wrong.
Let's just take a moment to speak of
the church's mission.
The church's mission is defined here as salt
and light.
The ministerial office is this office of carrying
the light into the darkness and of carrying
the salt into that which will otherwise become
completely corrupt.
The Christian is meant to be the salt
of society.
And our Lord sends his own out to
live in workshops and in homes and in
offices.
And he sends them out there to radiate
the spirit of pure thinking and clean love
and sincere goodness.
Sends them out there in the midst of
men to be, as it were, a little
colony of heaven.
In the midst of all that corruption, to
be a spot of absolute purity.
In the midst of all the darkness, to
be a pinpoint of light.
In the midst of all these corrosive and
degenerative factors, to be a factor of uplift
and a pointer and a signal to God.
That is what the church is sent to
be.
That is what she is called to do.
And by doing that, she acts as salt
does in the physical realm.
And as light does in the darkness.
For who else has the light?
Men and women, Christians and friends, let me
remind you again that our greatest thinkers today
are completely baffled.
The greatest thinkers of this generation simply do
not understand their generation.
Our greatest thinkers today are good at laying
out the facts and showing the factors that
operate within the problem.
But when you ask them what they propose
to do about it, they have nothing to
say.
But this morning, as we come to the
close of this series of studies, I want
again to remind you that the Bible has
the answer.
And that there is the mission that has
been committed to the church.
And that the church has been sent out
to proclaim that there is a way of
life.
A way of life that is free from
corruption.
A way of life that is free from
adulteration.
A way of life that is free from
darkness.
And that this life is in God the
Son sent out to be the salt of
the earth and the light of the world.
In other words, the church is sent out
to be the savior of society.
Sent out to be that focal point that
will magnetize men God-worse.
Sent out to be a living communion, a
living fellowship that will become a magnetic field
into which men will irresistibly be drawn to
the light.
And to the light which is purity.
So our Savior says to his church, let
your light so shine before men that they
may see your good works.
And they will too begin to glorify your
Father in heaven as they bow the knee
to him.
As they come and cast themselves at his
feet and name him the God of their
heart.
What a tremendous mission is ours.
We should remind ourselves as we are sent
out into this mission, that the surest way
in which we will keep ourselves unspotted from
the world is by committing ourselves to this
quality of mission.
By giving ourselves without restraint, without any constraint,
but by giving ourselves in total and glad
surrender to become the light and the salt
as our Savior himself has said.
One final word.
There is an invitation here, and that is
to come to the light, and to come
to him who is the Savior.
I wonder if I've been speaking to some
of you this morning, and for you this
hasn't yet happened.
You're not really yet within the church.
You've been coming regularly, you know, and you
love to come and to sing these hymns,
but you're not yet in Christ.
Ah, this morning you may enter in, and
he may enter into your life, and as
he enters he will bring the light, and
he will cleanse and purify your heart and
your life forever.
Do you know what else he will do?
If you will only let the Lord come
into your heart in his fullness, you know
what he will do?
He will wean your heart forever from all
love of the world, and when he does
that, he will make you truly to be
the light of the world, and the salt
of prayer.
Lord, bless this word we pray thee.
Help us to go out.
Help us to go forth trusting in thee.
Oh, make us to know our mission.
Help us to haste to fulfill our mission.
Help us to spread the light, to take
it into the darkness where thousands are lying,
bound in the dark some prison house of
sin.
Help us to proclaim to every people, tongue,
and nation that God in whom they live
and move is love.
Oh, help us.
Grant us thy blessing for thy great love's
sake.