There are various kinds of thanksgiving.
There is thanksgiving, in which we bring of
our gifts and we offer them to God.
There is also thanks living.
And I felt, therefore, justified in continuing with
the Sermon on the Mount this morning.
And I want to take as the basis
of our meditation, the 13th verse in chapter
5 of St. Matthew's Gospel.
Words that are very familiar to all of
us.
Where our Lord Jesus Christ says, You are
the salt of the earth.
But if the salt loses its saltiness, how
can it be made salty again?
It is no longer good for anything, except
to be thrown out and trampled by men.
We shall think particularly of that first positive
statement of our Lord.
You are the salt of the earth.
Christian believers are here described not simply as
subjects of heaven's rule, but also as the
salt of the earthly society.
Subjects of the commonwealth of the heavens, salt
of our earthly and human society.
The teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ can
never lose its value nor its authority, because
he spoke and he taught as God's only
begotten Son.
His word is and was God's word.
He was the very expression of the mind
of God, so that he could say, I
am the truth.
And therefore his word will never lose its
authority.
Nevertheless, there are times when the word of
God through his dear and co-equal Son
seems to be peculiarly appropriate and relevant to
our generation, to our day and age.
And I have a feeling that the word
before us today is a word that has
that peculiar relevance to this very morning, this
very day, this very period in our own
history and in the history of civilization.
You are the salt of the earth.
There is no salt in the earth unless
you act as salt.
I believe that if God were to broadcast
his very last thought and injunction for his
church, he would not have to change these
words.
This is his will for us.
There are other things, of course, included.
Indeed, the following verse and the following verses,
again, have something to say about our Christian
duty in the world.
But this is basic, and this is where
the Lord begins in the outworking of the
principles already enunciated in the Beatitudes.
You who have followed obediently the way of
the Beatitudes, now you, says Jesus, you are
the salt of the earth.
There are others who have concluded that the
Christian believer's proper place in society is to
be tucked away somewhere, away from the real
thrust of things, away from where the action
is.
Keep as far away from the dirt and
the grime and the sin as you possibly
can.
Now, in one sense that is true, of
course.
For we are to be holy, and we
are to be spiritually and morally distinct and
separate from the world.
But we are to be in the world,
if not of it.
And we are to be near enough for
the salt to touch the sore spots in
our society and to be robbed in by
our presence and our example.
And Jesus said that.
So, when we come to this particular aspect
of the teaching of the Sermon on the
Mount, we begin to see that the Beatitudes
appear in a particular context.
You see, so far we have more or
less tried to deal with the Beatitudes as
an entity all on their own.
That's understandable because they do form a specific
unit.
But that could be misleading.
When you come to the end of the
Beatitudes, there is no positive, no definite division
saying, now we start something altogether different.
Oh no, there is a bridge that moves
over and brings us over it into the
very rough and tumble of life as it
is.
And as we come there with our Lord,
acknowledging Him as the King of the Kingdom
and the Lord of our lives, He says,
you now are the salt of this society.
So you will see, if you care to
read on into the Sermon on the Mount,
how in a number of ways our Lord
Jesus will be repeating this over and over
again.
I don't need to go into the several
exhortations that are found in the course of
the Beatitudes now.
It would be interesting to do so as
we look ahead to what is coming, but
we shall pass by them and we shall
come and deal exclusively today with the first
of two general expressions of the divinely required
response from every member of the Kingdom of
Heaven.
The first is the one before us today,
you are the salt of the earth.
And the second general exhortation is, you are
the light of the world.
These are general statements applying to everybody.
There is not a believer here this morning
to whom these do not apply.
They apply wherever we are throughout the course
of time until the consummation.
You believing men and women are the salt
of society.
You believing men and women are the light
of the world.
Let's look at this.
What has this injunction, what has this word
of our Lord to say to us?
You are the salt of the earth.
Now the first thing I notice here is
that our Lord's words reflect a universal tendency
that is inherent in human society.
Our Lord's words reflect his own view and
his own understanding of the ills and the
ailments and the problems of the human race.
He sees the human race, he sees human
society in need of salt.
And that is only another way of saying
he sees the moral condition of the race
as requiring the use of an antiseptic to
stop a rot that is already rampant in
the body of the race.
And he says to his people, you are
just that.
As Jesus bade his disciples to play the
role of salt in their society, he unmistakably
discloses his own understanding of the moral condition
of that ancient community.
He saw it in danger of disintegrating and
of becoming a polluted thing.
Now you will notice that apparently there was
no need for our Lord Jesus to say
any more about what he meant when he
said, you are the salt of the earth.
If you delve back into the history of
the times, you will see that salt was
used for many things, many purposes.
If you ever boiled an egg, I don't
know whether they did boil eggs in those
days, but if they did, well I guess
they would have a pinch of salt to
bring out the taste, as you bring out
the taste by means of a pinch of
salt in many areas of culinary.
And there were many other uses.
But there was one use for salt which
was universal in that region, in that part
of the world.
And that was, it was used as a
preservative.
Whereas its uses were many, its primary task
was, on all hands, to be used as
a preservative of meats and of foodstuffs.
In days before, coolers and freezers and refrigerators
had appeared on the scene.
And in a climate which was pretty treacherous
for meatstuffs, the only reliable preservative was salt.
Salt itself is aseptic, free from putrefaction.
And it was thus widely used as an
antiseptic, countering putrefaction from setting in.
And it was the only means available.
And this is how our Lord chose to
speak of his disciples.
Of those, that is, who are members of
his kingdom, subjects of the rule of heaven,
though they live upon earth.
And the point I want to stress now
is that our Lord Jesus saw his society
in general, then, to be in a state
of moral disintegration, of moral putrefaction, of moral
decay.
So much so that it required some means
or other, some extraordinary means, in order to
stop the rot from spreading and bringing disaster
upon the rest.
So then, our Lord saw evident putrefaction at
work in society.
And this is very significant because, whereas it
might have been very evident in certain other
parts of the world of our Lord's time,
he is addressing, at this moment, he is
addressing, in the first place, some of the
godliest and the most righteous people of that
day and generation.
He's not speaking to pagan Greece with all
its licentiousness and all its perverse wickedness and
ignorance of the true God.
Neither is he addressing the Romans.
He is addressing the children of Abraham.
He is speaking to men and women who
have been brought up and nurtured on the
Old Testament scriptures, on the law and the
prophets.
Heirs to the most wonderful tradition of all
times, and they've been saturated in it, they've
been fed upon it.
But he sees, he sees, and don't forget
he used the same metaphor or a similar
metaphor, I should say, in other places to
describe the same kind of thing going on
as when he told the leaders of the
Jews that they were like a grave of
bones and carcasses of dead bodies.
Substantial death.
He says that he sees that society, that
society, in need of some saline properties to
stop this awful process from proceeding so that
ultimately it strangles the race.
Now if that was our Lord's diagnosis of
such a highly privileged community, we shudder to
think of the language he might use today
if he were to speak directly to us
in our Western world in order to describe
the condition of things among us.
Here in Toronto, for example, the symptoms of
evil found in that ancient Palestinian society were
all like benign pimples when compared with the
gross indecencies and indignities that have become part
and parcel of our contemporary way of life
in the 20th century.
The bloodstream of our society has become so
heavily poisoned that it defies description.
The disease has spread and taken firm hold
of the patient, strangulating all moral expression.
It's very dangerous today to live the moral
life.
He will be ostracized.
Someone in pastoral work told me this last
ten days ago, that in process of her
business profession, she had had to point out
to two clients that they were suggesting something
which was ethically altogether improper.
And I would not like to tell you
what happened.
But she was courageous enough to do it.
She was the salt of society.
This is what we're all called upon to
be and to do.
You see, my friends, we cannot continue to
share in the optimism of the late 19th
century, the end of the last century and
the beginning of this, how optimistic people were
about human life.
You and I, if we are up to
date in our understanding and our knowledge of
things, cannot anymore bury our heads in the
sands and say, pack up your troubles in
your own kit bag and smile.
Everything will come out all right in the
end.
We just can't do that.
You remember how it was at the end
of the last century?
Dr. Lloyd-Jones makes a lot of this
in his commentary, and rightly so.
And I was reminded of this as I
was reading him during the course of this
last week, how he points out that the
thinkers and the philosophers, not only the politicians,
but thinkers generally and poets too, at the
end of the last century, were all so
very optimistic.
We are moving into a new era, into
a new century, into a new age, and
all our troubles are about to go.
We shall be passing them by.
They will all be behind us.
It was all because, you see, Darwin had
come on the scene.
And the theory of evolution, not just that
man had come from the beast, but the
doctrine of evolution had introduced a philosophy.
And the philosophy was this, that man is
essentially getting better and better.
He's always leaping forward.
He's always moving forward, morally as well as
physically, or biologically.
And there is this inevitability of progress.
And with the advance of knowledge and of
schools in every segment of society in those
days, in every part of society in Europe
and elsewhere, you had schools for children.
Now with education coming, we've got the answer
to everything.
People are not going to fight anymore.
People are not going to indulge in sex
and evil in an illegitimate way anymore, outside
of marriage.
People are not going to do the stupid,
craziest things they have been doing anymore.
People are going to be taught.
They're going to be educated.
And with education, we're going to leap ahead.
There will be no more war.
Their swords will be beaten into plowshares.
We shall have conferences where wise people will
come together and talk things through.
This was the late last century and the
first decade of this.
Do you know, my friends, there are some
people who are still living back there.
They're still in the dreamland of those days.
And they're forgetting the explosion of 1914 and
of 1939.
But thinking men and women have realized that
those two massive explosions have blown the bubble
to that figment of the human imagination.
You cannot depend upon the inevitability of progress,
either morally or otherwise.
Why?
Because there is poison at the heart of
the race.
There is evil in the mainstream of society.
Listen, my friend, it's more poignantly personal than
that.
In your heart and mind, there is sin.
Out of the heart of men, says Jesus,
there proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, lasciviousness, an evil
eye, and a whole host of other things.
I don't want to go after them now.
Where do they come from, including wars and
battlings between men and men?
They all come from the human heart.
There's something wrong with the human heart.
Now listen, to me this is the remarkable
thing.
And I still believe that the church has
yet to wake up to this.
The church of Jesus Christ, the true church
of Jesus Christ, was meant to be the
salt of that kind of society.
Men and women, if you were born of
the Spirit of God and washed in His
blood, you were meant to be, I was
meant to be, the salt of society to
stop the rot from spreading.
Now I have to bring a caveat in
here.
This is not all the truth of the
New Testament.
And you mustn't deal with this as if
it were the only thing that Jesus ever
said.
If he said we only need salt to
stop the rot, well, of course, it would
be an emasculating of his own gospel.
But in the next word he will say
you are the light of the world.
And he has much more to say after
that.
We do not only need salt to stop
the rot from spreading, we need to bring
light into the situation, to explain to men
and women what's happening, and to show the
way out.
But in the meantime, the world, the earth,
society, needs salt.
Your office, your home, the place where you
work, the place where you live, the people
you company with, they need salt.
And you, brother and sister, you are the
salt of the earth.
Because, you see, this is threatening to progress
and to move ahead and to strangle the
whole of creation.
And unfortunately, as I indicated previously, we are
living in a day and age when the
church has either forgotten or deliberately chosen not
to take this seriously.
In order to be salt, you see, we
have to be different from the society.
You cannot act as a preservative unless you
are yourself an aseptic and can act as
an antiseptic.
You must have in you a quality of
life that can stand against the rot.
And having stood against it, can move into
it and change things by the grace of
God.
And the consequences of the church's negligence, of
course, is very tragic.
I have no time to deal with that
at all this morning.
The only thing I want to say is
that whereas in former ages, when immorality has
been rampant, in former ages, God's faithful people
have had one royal standard to raise against
the incoming tide of the contemporary barbarians.
The law of God.
And our fathers did that.
You go back into the 16th and the
17th century and the 18th century, this was
fundamentally what they did.
They appealed to the nations, they went back
to the law, they went back to the
Ten Commandments, they went back to the preaching
of the prophets, they went back to the
same kind of teaching in the New Testament,
and they declared God's law.
But you see, we don't have God's law
anymore, we don't believe there is a law.
We have been poisoned intellectually, we do not
believe there is such a thing as really
right and wrong, heaven and hell.
We don't believe that anymore.
And we don't believe that there is a
law of God that is infallible, by which
we shall be judged.
We don't believe that anymore.
We have abandoned the revelation of God, and
so we have no law to stand on
and to declare.
We've sold the past.
You know what has been happening in Europe,
don't you?
What has been happening in the countries of
Europe over the last 25 years is this.
That leaders, political leaders, and it doesn't matter
what flavor they have been, generally speaking, I
could quote to you country after country, where
they have legalized what God has condemned.
Not only homosexuality and soliciting and these kind
of things, but other things too.
They've legalized, they've made it legal, and they've
given certain things the aura of respectability, and
they've baptized it with this aura of respectability,
that from there on it becomes accepted as
part of society.
The government has to look after it.
That's what's happening.
Thus our world has been turned upside down
and inconsistent with itself.
There is no more inconsistent society than ours.
In an age when cleanliness and hygiene is
generally the order of the day, in every
other realm of life, morally, we are moving
into an era of legalized bilge.
Physically, our children are examined the moment they're
born, and intermittently thereafter until they die.
And they have their regular check-ups, as
most of you do, not as children, but
as grown-ups.
Physically, that is.
Intellectually, our children are tested to see if
there is any drawback.
Are they able to imbibe what is being
taught them in the schools?
Is there any evidence of being somewhat slow
in pace, taking things in?
If there is, you must make special provision
for them.
You see, the intellectual is so important, and
we've got to make special provision if there's
anything lacking or anything wrong.
And yet, simultaneously, those same children are being
immersed, even bombarded by moral sewage.
Hygiene on the one hand, care for the
body, care for the mind, sewage on the
other.
How do you explain that?
There's a madness about the rest.
We've become altogether inconsistent.
We see nothing wrong in it, you see.
We've been conditioned, and we've been duped, and
we just don't know where we're going, nor
what's happening to us.
On the physical plane, we are rightly concerned
that our world should enjoy the benefits of
sanitation, hygiene and cleanliness, of course.
Whilst at the same time, we go on
to desanitize the moral climate, and to take
the moral oxygen out of the atmosphere.
And men and women are perishing morally, and
have no moral concept.
And we have to say about our age,
what Jeremiah said about some people in his
day, they don't know how to blush.
Now, in that society, you are the salt
of the earth.
Jesus saw this real difference between his people,
members of his kingdom, and those of all
the other counter kingdoms of the earth.
The church is altogether different, a new creation.
And a new creation with an entirely different
life, with a quality of antiseptic that can
stop the whole thing from spreading, and by
the grace of God, enable to turn the
tide a little, and bring in the light
with it, in order to bring a new,
more new creations into existence, in this awesome
world.
You see, we need to see this, we
need to realize this, we need to take
it in afresh.
If you are a Christian, my friend, God
has been at work in you, and is
at work in you.
I sometimes go on the road, and people
say, you know the signs on the road,
beware, men working.
As if to say, take your hats off.
Well, I do take my hat off, metaphorically,
when I see men working anyway.
But I tell you, what I see in
so many places where I go, is God
at work.
And I'm learning, and looking into the faces
of God's people to remember this.
There is not a man, there is not
a woman of God, but the God has
been and is at work there.
That's how you're a saint, that's how you're
a believer, if you're a believer.
God has been at work in you, it
is God who's done it.
The Christian is a new creation, he is
morally different from the world around him.
He is morally saline in his nature, he
is salt.
That's the verdict of the Son of God.
This new creation takes its birth from the
gift of our new nature, of our rebirth,
of our new spirit, the Spirit of God.
Peter goes so far as to say that
we are made partakers of the divine nature,
having escaped the corruption that is in the
world through lust.
There it is.
The teaching of our Lord, reiterated to the
people of the next generation.
The remaking of a man as to be
thus different from the world around him is
an intricate divine action consisting of many parts.
There must be a cleansing, a way of
sin.
This is a major operation.
You cannot make a man or a woman
to have this kind of character without a
cleansing, a cathartic process.
This divine catharsis, this is salvation.
Have you been cleansed from your sin, my
friend?
Have the chambers of your imaginations and your
thoughts and your desires, have they been innerly
cleansed?
This is salvation, you see.
I have no time this morning to go
into the details of this.
Let me quote to you three scriptures only
and offer no comment.
But I quote these scriptures because they refer
to three factors that are involved in this
cleansing.
The blood of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and
the Word of God.
Jesus Christ gave himself for us, says Paul
in Titus, to redeem us from all wickedness
and to purify for himself a people.
How?
Christ died.
He gave himself up for us to do
that, to purify us, to cleanse us.
In Titus 3, 5, he says this, God
saved us through the washing of rebirth and
the renewal of the Holy Spirit.
There is no renewal, there is no change
of our hearts apart from the Holy Spirit.
Jesus said to his disciples, Now you are
clean because of the word that I have
spoken to you.
And in many of our churches the blood
of Christ is not mentioned and the Holy
Spirit is nothing but an impersonal entity and
the Word of God is diluted.
Brothers and sisters, there is no cleansing, there
is no purging of the hearts of men
and women apart from the Word of God
and the blood of his Son and the
Spirit of the Holy One at work.
Has he been visiting you?
Are you clean?
Men are not fully remade even by such
cleansing.
There must be a renewal.
I know I can't go after that this
morning either but just let us remind ourselves
of that statement.
Renewal, renewal in the Holy Spirit, Titus 3,
5.
The Spirit does not only take part in
our cleansing but also in the renewal of
our natures, giving us the divine seed, the
divine same end so that we are new
creatures if we are born of God.
Such a divine work brings to focus, you
see, the real difference between the Christian and
the society around him.
Now to such people Jesus says, You are
the light, you are the salt of the
earth.
This is the Christian's ministry, this is part
of our major part of our ministry here.
See, many of us and many believe, sometimes
elderly Christians in their homes will say to
the pastor when he visits them, I feel
so helpless.
I can't come to the services as I
used to and I can't go out and
I can't offer tracts to people and I
can't go and evangelize and I can't join
the visitation evangelism team.
Oh, brothers and sisters, listen to this.
You don't need to move from where you
are to perform a basic Christian ministry by
just being what you are in Christ.
You are the salt of the earth and
someone comes into your house, someone comes into
your hospital ward if you were there.
None of you this morning are there of
course.
Someone comes to you and if you are
what you are, if you be what you
are, if you just be yourself in Christ,
you are exercising by His grace a ministry.
Now, I'm not saying it's not necessary to
go to the further most parts of the
earth.
It is necessary.
But I do want to encourage some of
us who are not as mobile as others
and who cannot move in and out as
other people do.
Listen my friend, just be what you are
by the grace of God.
Learn to be the salt.
Learn to be a believer.
Learn to be a saint.
This is one reason why it grieves me
so very, very much that in our modern
day and age there is so little emphasis,
generally speaking, upon the doctrine of holiness.
And I have met supposedly good Christian people
who almost talk as if really your daily
prayer and Bible reading and devotion and being
apart and alone with God as if it's
unnecessary.
You know, it's a lie of Satan.
It is absolutely indispensable.
You say, why?
Because this is how we maintain our saline
properties.
It's by fellowship with God.
It's by communion with our Holy Heavenly Father.
It is in being alone with Him and
by His Word and His Spirit and the
blood of Christ continuing their ministry upon us.
By these means we continue to have our
saline pungency if we are to have it
at all.
And there are many of us that will
never be what we ought to be because
we spend so little time with God.
No one else will make you holy.
There is a word here in the text
that I can't go after this morning, but
I must mention it.
If the salt has lost its savor, then
what can salt it again?
What can give it its saline properties back?
And Jesus doesn't answer the question.
There is an answer to the question by
the grace of God.
There is an answer to the question.
The King of our kingdom who invites us
at the beginning of the Beatitudes shows us
the way.
And if you have lost your saline properties
this morning, the thing for you to do
is to go back at the beginning of
the Beatitudes and start all over again.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
And so forth.
Go through it.
Press on.
Get lower and lower at the feet of
the Savior and let Him have more and
more of you.
And let Him rule and reign and transform
and direct.
And He will give you back the properties
you've lost.
But you see, the Christian is meant to
be overcoming the world.
Everyone born of God, says John, has overcome
the world.
We have this potency which God has given
us, which we should guard and cultivate by
His grace.
I must conclude with this.
Which process is going on in your life
this morning?
Possibly the two.
Is the world influencing you?
Or are you influencing the world?
You know, it really is a question worth
considering.
You see, if you take a red hot
bar, a red hot poker, we would say
in England, out of the fire, and there
it is imbued with fire, red hot, and
you take it out of the fire and
you put it on a cold hearth, two
processes will begin to take place.
One, the poker will get cooler and cooler
and colder and colder.
Two, the hearth will get warmer and warmer
until there comes a point where the poker
and the hearth are about the same temperature.
Now we come to a strategic moment.
Unless the poker can get more heat into
it and get its heat restored and renewed,
then the poker is going to be more
influenced by its environment than the environment is
going to be influenced by the poker.
I don't know whether that's a good illustration.
I hadn't thought about it.
But something like that, my friends, may be
going on in all our lives this morning.
We've come out from the presence of God
and we find that the world is taking
the steam out of us, is taking the
energy out of us, taking the zeal out
of us, taking the love for God and
His people out of us.
The world is creeping into us and we
are losing our coldness.
And the world may be a little bit
influenced by us, but there comes a point
when, unless we can get back to the
original source of heat and purging and be
impregnated with a divine fire and the divine
life that makes us saline, we cannot perform
our ministry.
Oh, please, do not think that the preacher
in the pulpit this morning is insensitive to
the problems of this day.
I salute some of you young people who
are facing temptations the kind of which I
never faced in my day and I thought
that the temptations I faced were overwhelming.
I know, I know.
But my friends, as long as I open
the word of God, I discover that the
children of God have the kind and quality
of life that should overcome this world.
And I have to deny my faith and
my Lord before I can go back from
there.
And therefore I dare to believe that the
life of Christ perfected in you and in
me can still make us salt of this
awful society in which we live.
Brothers and sisters, let's take it more seriously.
I confess to you my sins, my weaknesses,
my frailties in this respect.
All that one had fought more, all that
one had oftentimes been more outspoken against evil.
We say that's negative.
But you have to do it in certain
circumstances.
And I believe that God is calling upon
us in this day and age to try
to recapture the old apostolic tongue and the
fear of God in our heart.
You are the salt of the earth.
Let us pray.
Father in heaven, we have to acknowledge before
you that whereas we were always unworthy of
this epithet and description of us, we have
fallen so far short as to feel that
we have little right to be called by
your name at all.
And we are somewhat disheartened as we come
to a passage like this and see how
far short we fall of the standard you
have set and of the call that you
have addressed to us.
Oh God, enable us to see your view
of your people even as we see here
your view of society.
You think we can.
You think that it is possible for us
to overcome the moral temptations and trials and
climate of our day and age.
And just because you believe that we can,
help us to believe it also.
And in obedience to your word to discover
what you have to do within us and
for us and to give to us in
order to make us increasingly fit into this
part of our job description.
Spirit of God, come afresh upon us to
this end.
In the blessed name of your glorious Son,
Jesus Christ.
Amen.