Will you turn in the scriptures to St.
Matthew's Gospel in chapter 5, and we are
going to read the passage beginning with the
first verse and ending with verse 16.
As you are looking it up, may I
say how glad and pleased we are to
be with you on this lovely, looks like
a summer morning from this vantage point, not
quite summer outside, but it is good to
be in the Lord's house and to be
with you here.
Thank you for your prayers and your continued
interest in us.
Matthew chapter 5 and the familiar words beginning
with the first verse.
Now when he, that is Jesus, saw the
crowd, he went on to a mountain side
and he sat down.
His disciples came to him and he began
to teach them saying, blessed are the poor
in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will
be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit
the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be
shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they
will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be
called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness
sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute
you, and falsely say all kinds of evil
against you because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your
reward in heaven.
For in the same manner they persecuted the
prophets who were before you.
You are the salt of the earth.
That statement will occupy the main part of
our theme this morning, but I want to
read to the end of verse 16.
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.
You are the light of the world.
A city on a hill cannot be hidden.
Neither do people light a lamp and put
it under a bowl.
Instead they put it on its stand and
it gives light to everyone in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine
before men, that they may see your good
deeds and praise your father in heaven.
Thus reads the word of God, and we
look to him for an understanding of it
by the aid of his spirit.
Christian duty in the face of social degeneracy
is the subject given to us this morning
to consider, and that particularly with reference to
our Lord's statement to his disciples of old.
You are the salt of the earth.
I believe very firmly that if our Lord
were to make a broadcast of his very
latest thoughts concerning the duty of the Christian
church in our day, and we were to
hear his broadcast at midday today, they would
include what in principle we have here.
Never has the world been more in need
of men and women of saline properties, of
the capacity to stop the rot of sin
and evil of every kind in society and
in the church.
Never was there a greater need for men
who can stand in the breach so that
sin does not occupy their minds, pollute their
lives, and they in turn become carriers of
the evil thing and spread it along the
way.
And so there are two things that I
want us to examine here particularly.
First of all, and mainly really, our Lord's
perception of the underlying degeneracy of the society
he was then addressing.
He said you're the salt of the earth.
Why did he say that?
Well it's pretty evident from the primary usage
of salt in that ancient world, that is
the world before they had freezers or coolers
or refrigerators or what have we today.
If you went out into the market and
you bought a slab of meat and you
brought it home, you didn't want to cook
it today but you wanted it for a
meal tomorrow, well the only way to keep
it from turning bad, putrefying, was to rub
it with salt as soon as you could.
Salt was the only antiseptic, the only preservative
then known for meats and foodstuffs, and in
order to act in that capacity it needed
to be rubbed into the meat, rubbed into
the foodstuffs, and then unless the putrefaction had
already begun, it would keep it reasonably safe
for tomorrow or maybe the day after in
hot climate.
Jesus said to his people, you, he says,
you are the salt of the earth.
Now he did not mean by that that
by being salt we can bring a cure,
healing in and of ourselves to society.
Salt does not make the polluted whole again.
Salt only stops the rot from spreading.
But Jesus says you are the salt of
society and that leads me to say this,
it is necessary, very necessary, that we should
be seeing this statement of our Lord, you
are the salt of the earth, in conjunction
with the one that follows, you are the
light of the world.
Salt does not bring salvation.
Salt does not heal that which has gone
bad, but salt helps the rot from spreading.
It keeps it back.
What brings salvation that changes the circumstances is
this, you are the light of the world.
Jesus had said of himself, I am the
light of the world, bringing the knowledge of
God into the midst of a decadent community,
lost and undone.
And now he says, I have so wrought
by the Spirit upon you, you are the
light of the world.
My light is kindled in you.
The knowledge I have brought has laid hold
of you and you've laid hold of it
and it has transformed you.
You are light and you are capable by
my grace and what the grace of the
Father and the Spirit has made you, you
are capable of transforming the situation ultimately.
But in the meantime, as a preliminary action,
you need to be salt.
You are the salt of society.
You see my friends, unless we can prove
to society at large that our experience of
the Lord Jesus Christ, the subject of his
kingdom and of his rule, unless we can
prove that he has given us a new
life that is capable of standing against the
tide of evil from all quarters, as James
said, of keeping ourselves unspotted from the world,
as Paul says, holding forth the word of
life in the midst of a crooked and
perverse nation or generation, unless we can do
that, unless we can prove that, that is
by our saline property as salt.
Then the gospel doesn't make sense when it
comes.
To preach of the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God doesn't make sense
to men and women unless they see that
that same gospel has transformed me, transformed you,
that we are able to overcome the sin
and the evil and the wickedness and the
perversity and the tendency to evil in this
world in which we live.
And there are thousands upon thousands of sermons
that will never make sense in any pulpit
or in any church or in any community
unless the believing community of that place are
salt along with the preacher so that when
they go out into society, the light of
the truth they declare is illumined by the
life that has saline properties that stops the
rot in the unbelieving world.
You are a salt of the earth.
Now what really gives edge to this statement
of our Lord, at least to me, what
really gives edge to it is this, that
he speaks these words not to voluptuous Grecians
or Greeks, not to idolatrous and proud Romans,
but the little congregation that he has before
him are a group of his disciples, probably
the twelve and maybe more, and then there
is a crowd coming, whether they're listening already,
I don't know, possibly they are, but they
were predominantly Jews.
Now there was there were certain things that
really set the Jewish community apart in this
day as in most generations, but especially at
this time they had been spiritually and morally
nurtured on the law and on the prophets.
They had a background.
God had revealed himself to Abraham and their
very history as a people spoke of what
God had done, and it was one of
the duties of a father to tell his
children how the Lord had brought the very
nation into existence, how God had later taken
them out of Egypt after 400 years in
bondage, how he had taken them into the
promised land, how he had given them his
law to indicate the kind of thing that
he expects of his redeemed people, of people
that have been saved from slavery, now made
free.
He gave them the law.
He erected or caused to be erected a
sanctuary for his worship and showed them how
every detail in that worship was ordered by
him, even to the very what we would
call today safety pins, holding the curtains had
to be of gold, indicative of the fact
he is God and he knows what he
must have from his people, and he's concerned
about every detail.
Now they had been brought up on that,
and they knew something about God.
I know they'd wondered, and as Jesus looked
at that very people, so honored, so honored,
so honored, now having God incarnate among them
to add to everything else, so honored, he
says, this generation, this nation too, is rotting
at the heart, and this generation needs salt
to stop the rot, and you my people,
you whom I've called to be subjects of
my kingdom, you whom I've called to live
under my rule, under my yoke, you are
the salt for this society.
Brothers and sisters, I wonder, I wonder what
terms Jesus would use today to describe the
rot in our society.
If this society was seething and rotten, what
on earth would the Son of God say
if he came to Toronto this morning?
I'm not going to give you a parade
of what I know.
You probably know much more than I do,
but I do want to tell you this,
that I have been absolutely overwhelmed recently in
being able to dip into the works of
some of the leading analysts of the society
in North America over recent years in order
to find out what's been going wrong.
I'm not going to quote them for you,
but I came across a book was laid
on my desk the other day written by
Chuck Colson, whom you know very well.
I've preached a few times from this pulpit
in our time here, and I think since.
Chuck Colson wrote a book about three years
ago entitled Against the Light, and there are
many virtues to this book, but one of
them is that he covers evidence from various
sources, and the sources he describes and he
gives are as important as the book itself,
and he presents his own understanding of it
all and the summary of it all, and
he tells us how desperate the situation is.
He traces, for example, the kind of thing
that's been going on in the realm of
education.
I remember when I came to, and my
wife and I came here in 1974, one
of the things that were raging in some
areas of Ontario at that time was the
great subject of values education, as it was
called, and there was a professor in a
certain college who had his roots here in
Knox who was involved in a very serious
discussion, an animated discussion on high level concerning
the propriety and the value and the meaning
and the significance of this particular policy in
education.
Well, values neutral education has proved to be
anything but neutral, and it has indoctrinated millions
of young people in North America to debunk
the very basis of the Western civilization over
the last 200 years and more.
And it has inculcated other ideas.
However, I mustn't go off at a tangent.
He speaks about the financial world and its
problems, and he goes into the political arena
and into the centers of higher learning in
our colleges and universities and into the Christian
church.
And what he says in effect is this,
that whilst we have been sleeping, the ethos,
the moral and spiritual ethos in our society
has been deoxygenized.
Christians can't breathe.
Men who believe in moral absolutes can't breathe
freely in this atmosphere in which we live
today.
They are suffocated.
You have men and women on a campus
in the United States going around crying, shouting
with all their wills, hey, hey, ho, ho,
Western culture's got to go.
Why?
Because books from Pascal and others, I don't
need to mention them, are part of their
syllabus, representing some of the philosophies underlying Western
culture.
They say it's got to go, and go,
go it did.
The syllabus had to be changed.
That's just the kind of thing that has
been going on.
Brothers and sisters, we are living in a
desperate situation.
Let me give you one or two illustrations
of this, purely illustrated.
I could illustrate from many, many other sources,
but let me just read to you something.
I've referred to the realm of education.
Let me say this.
Let me read this.
A new barbarian, says Chuck Colson, who have
invaded American education, as they have the news
media and our legislatures, elevate tolerance as the
supreme virtue.
Alan Bloom, who wrote a remarkable book on
the closing of the American mind, Alan Bloom
calls this new tolerance, quote, the virtue, the
only virtue, which all primary education for more
than 50 years has dedicated itself to inculcating,
end of quote.
Chuck Colson goes on.
Teachers and school administrators encourage students to choose
from a smorgasbord of what they term morally
equivalent lifestyles.
Homosexuality, adultery, premarital promiscuity.
Gorge yourself on one or sample the whole.
And this smorgasbord morality, which is itself a
value system, tramples on the sensibilities of any
who hold to moral absolutes, Christians in particular.
A Californian sex education curriculum entitled Intelligent Choices
of Social Lifestyle, oh sorry, of Sexual Lifestyle,
advises seventh graders, parents, get that, advises seventh
graders, I've lost my place, here we are,
advises seventh graders to set, quote, a purely
personal standard of sexual behavior, unquote, for themselves.
A sex education curriculum for the elementary school
system in the same state specifies that children
will develop an understanding of homosexuality, will view
films, act out homosexual roles, and take a
test on what they have learned there.
So 10 year olds will get gold stars
if they do well in homosexual role play
in school.
Every area of education, Chuck Colson concludes, every
area of education has been infected by the
value neutral philosophy.
This is not only tragic, it is ironic,
since at one time the pursuit of virtue
was the specific goal of education.
Plato once wrote, if you ask what is
the good of education, the answer is easy.
The education makes men good, and good men
act nobly.
The nobility that has gone from our society
can oftentimes be traced in particular to this
root.
Now you may say to me that's very
far-fetched.
California anyway is a long way from here.
Let me read to you one other.
It's not from the schools, it's from another
area, and it is very telling.
Some studies in the AIDS crisis in the
United States identify French-Canadian flight steward Gaetan
Duga as patient zero, they call him, patient
zero, the initial carrier of the virus.
Before his death in 1984, Duga estimated that
he had sexual liaisons with 2,500 partners
in New York and California bathhouses, restrooms, bars,
hotels, and motels.
Even after doctors had warned Duga that he
had a fatal sexually transmitted disease, he continued
to infect dozens and dozens of partners, and
when he had coupled with them, he would
triumphantly announce, announced, I've got gay cancer, enjoying
the merging of sex and death.
No one knows how many victims of the
epidemic he unleashed finally reached.
Brothers and sisters, we are living in a
desperate day, and I fear that we as
churches are sleeping somewhere.
We need to be aroused.
There's trouble in the air, and to me,
summarizing all this, one of the tragedies is
this, not simply that our children in the
public schools are becoming more difficult to teach,
and the numbers of teachers having to abandon
teaching in our public schools at all because
they can't cope with it.
The lack of discipline and many other things
I don't need to go into, and I'm
not competent at any length to talk about,
it's not only that.
Not only are our children becoming unteachable, that
is not only caused by the schools.
Very often there is no discipline of a
godly sort in the home.
To add to that, our society is fast
becoming ungovernable.
You see, the one thing that our boys
and girls have been taught is this, that
they are self-made.
They've developed from a little bit of slime,
and they owe it all to themselves.
There is no god at all who has
been responsible for this.
No intelligence.
It has just happened.
It has just evolved, and here they are
now.
They've come a long way from where they
began, and really the only thing that matters,
do what you think best.
Think what you think best.
What do you think about this problem?
Well now, that's your thought.
That's your idea.
Think it out, and live it out.
And if you want anything, well just get
it.
We have produced the whole generation of me
-ites.
I want my thing.
This is what I want, and I must
get it, and I will shout, and some
of our adults have tantrums like spoiled children
when they don't get what they want.
We're living in that world, so that politicians
are in a scare.
Many of our politicians are the best people
in society.
We're forgetting that.
There are bad things that are going on
in the political field, but some of them,
brothers and sisters, are still the salt of
the earth and the light of the world.
But what do they find when they go
back to their writings and their constituencies?
They find people who want exactly and only
what suits them, and the sense of responsibility
for one another that was inculcated by the
Judeo-Christian philosophy and theology has gone, to
a large measure.
What we find on our streets is a
company of me-ites, me-me's, shouting, I
must get it.
We demand.
When our politicians go home to their writings,
this is what they hear.
Is it any wonder that our nation and
North America is as it is?
But over and above this, as far as
I am concerned, whilst our children are becoming
largely unteachable and our society ungovernable, the churches
have become unreformable.
You see, one of the characteristics of the
churches of North America today is this.
It is very difficult to reform churches according
to the teaching of the Bible.
Oh, we all stand for the truth, but
there creeps into our churches all the sins
of society, because we all go out into
a society and in some measure we are
infected.
But the difficulty is this.
Get a pastor, or get an eldership, or
whatever you call your leadership if you're not
a Presbyterian, to try and exercise discipline, and
you will find that it is downright impossible.
And if you get an eldership or its
equivalent to do so, you will find that
the body, the democratic body of the congregation,
will not stand it.
And when a church becomes unreformable, it is
a question whether that so-called church ever
was a true church of Jesus Christ.
Now, somebody very astute here this morning will
want to tell me immediately, now, now, now,
what about the churches of the New Testament?
Were they perfect?
No, my friend.
I'm, I blush sometimes when I read the
New Testament and the sins of some of
the Christians there.
For example, the church of Corinth.
There was gross immorality that came in there,
but I tell you one thing, I don't
stand for the kind of things that went
on in Corinth.
But listen, my friend, when a duly appointed
apostle of Jesus Christ addressed the issue to
the Corinthian church and sent them an epistle
in the power of the Holy Spirit, that
tragic church, that church that had accepted immoral
people into its midst, did something about it.
It was reformable.
When an apostle of Jesus Christ spoke, they
accepted the truth, and they humbled themselves, and
they apologized that they'd ever given their blessing
to certain things, and the culprit was given
time to repent and change, or leave that
society of disciples of Christ.
But the church has become unreformable, and I'll
tell you this much, you will hardly ever
hear of reformation in many of our courts.
Now it is to that society that Jesus
said in the first place, you are the
soul to the earth.
Why did he say it?
Well, he said it because he saw the
need of the society.
But I must leave you with this, he
had confidence that his people, subjects of his
kingdom, the men and women that he had
gathered around him as his very own, he
had confidence of this, they were all capable
of acting as salt and later as light.
Now he wasn't writing to the intellect, he
wasn't speaking to the intelligentsia.
He was speaking to the common people that
he had called to be among the twelve
and in the larger body of his discipleship.
And to all of them without exception, he
says, you are the salt of the earth.
You are the salt.
How could you say that?
How can you say that about an ordinary
Tom, Dick, Harry, whatever?
Well you see, it's because of the nature
of the true Christian life.
You see, there is a world of difference
between a genuine Christian and the man of
the world.
Now let's get that.
All some of us know it in our
heads, but brothers and sisters, we've got all
mushy and we don't remember it.
There's a world, there's an eternity of a
difference between a man who is in Christ
Jesus, a subject of his kingdom, under his
rule, and the best that the polluted world
can produce.
How's that, you say?
For this reason, that when a man comes
to the Christ of the gospel, a great
miracle takes place.
Becoming a Christian, you see, is not just
a sacramental occasion, as some people say.
And you come and have a few drops
of water on your forehead or go under
the oceans.
Sorry Baptists, you forgive me, I'm exaggerating.
Or even have it poured as they do
in some parts of the world.
Have water poured upon you.
It's not a sacramental occasion primarily.
There is a place for the sacraments, of
course.
But it is not that.
Becoming a Christian is a matter of becoming
a new creature.
Are you a new creature in Christ?
If any man be in Christ, there is,
says Saint Paul, a new creation.
Yes, but our Lord Jesus has said that
already.
He told Nicodemus, the very apex, at the
apex of religiosity among the Jews.
The teacher in Israel, the teacher in Israel,
as it is put.
And Jesus says to him, look here Nicodemus,
he says, you don't understand the things I'm
talking about.
Because you must be born anew.
You've got to be born from above.
You've got to have a new life that
you don't have now.
A new creation.
How come?
How do you, how do you, how do
you get a new creation?
Well it is by incorporation into Christ.
Well you say that's a mouthful that we
can't take in.
What does it mean?
It means this.
There is a relationship with Jesus Christ which
is akin to the relationship of the branch
to the vine.
Or the relationship between my limb, my hand,
my arm, and my corpus.
A relationship in which this hand of mine
shares in the body of this body of
mine, is subject to this mind of mine,
and this will of mine, is part of
me.
To become a Christian, my friend, is a
supernatural act of God the Holy Spirit, whereby
he takes a man of the world, incorporates
him into Christ, so that the life of
Christ, the head, penetrates and percolates that body
and that new limb, and he is born
anew.
And he is a new creature.
Old things are passed away.
Everything has become new.
You see we were all in that depraved
society at one time.
God let's be proud.
I was there.
You were there.
By nature we were all, says Paul, the
children of wrath.
We walked according to the prince of this
world, the power that is still working among
the children of disobedience.
That's where we were brothers and sisters.
Well what changed it for those of us
who are in the kingdom of God?
Well just this.
God by his word and his spirit and
the blood of Christ, brought us to a
point where he drew us to himself, and
the life of Christ began to flow into
us.
Now you can see.
And you see this is why, this is
why our Lord could tell men and women,
ordinary men and women, of many failures, you
are the salt of the earth.
Because this new life has already come into
you, and the one who began the good
work in you will continue it until until
he's finished with it.
My friend I want to tell you exactly
the same this morning.
I don't know whether this is a very
challenging or a comforting word, but I have
to say it.
I want to tell you my friend, however
weak you feel in this dreadfully immoral society,
the grace of God, the fullness of Christ,
the power of the spirit, the meaning and
the message of the word of God, if
you can only read it and meditate upon
it and believe it, is such that it
will transform you day by day more and
more into the image of the Christ who
withstood all things, tempted in all times like
as we are, yet without sin.
Take a red hot poker out of the
fire on a day like this.
Have a fire outside.
Put a poker in it.
Don't know what you'll be doing, but anyway
put a poker in it and it gets
red hot.
On a cold frosty morning you take that
poker out and it's red and it's hot.
Put it on the ground.
Two processes will begin simultaneously.
One, the poker will get colder and colder
and colder.
Two, the heat from the poker will penetrate
the cold earth beneath little by little.
There comes a point where the temperature of
the poker and of the earth that is
immediately under it are equal, is equal, but
then something happens.
The poker gets colder and colder and colder
and the earth doesn't get warmer anymore.
It too goes back to what it was
until the poker has lost everything that it
had and is just like a slab of
frozen earth.
Men and women, are you influencing the world
around you as much as the world around
you is influencing you?
Or is it not true that like the
poker you too have been so influenced by
the world that you've lost your zeal?
You've lost your passion?
You've lost your concern for society and for
individuals, for your children, for your grandchildren, for
everybody?
And though believing in the old doctrines of
grace, but passion has gone out of life,
the Son of God comes to you this
morning and broadcasts a message that has not
been changed.
You believer, or you feel ever so weak,
you believer, wherever you are, you, if you're
a subject of my kingdom, your first duty
is not to do anything but to be
what you are.
Be what you've been made.
Now we need people to go up, to
be active and to go out into society
and to do many many things.
That comes, that comes.
But before you start that, the Bible says
there is the service of being what God
has called us to be.
That is the meaning of worship really.
Fundamentally, to re-selenize our characters with a
sense of God and his holiness and his
sovereignty and his will and his grace and
his mercy and his purposes.
And being thus re-selenized to go back
into the world and be and as God
leads us to do.
God bless you.
I feel a great warmth in my heart
for this congregation.
It couldn't be otherwise.
Oh, I'd love to hear that the man
God sends you, as he will, to be
your senior pastor, will be a man of
salt and will lead you, dear people, to
be such a salty people in a society
that is smelling sick.
That you can declare the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God and shine
that light out of a full experience of
his presence.
Better than you've ever done before.
May the future be so much better than
anything you've ever seen or read about in
the past history of this great old church.
Let us pray.
Oh Lord our God, we humbly bow before
you.
There is no other stance that we can
honestly take but the one that acknowledges that
we are unworthy and wayward sinners at best.
And apart from your grace without any hope,
but by your transforming grace and power, you
are still able to change the citizens of
a lost, of a Corinthian society, of a
Canadian society, of a Californian society, into men
and women of salt.
Oh God, revive your work in the midst
of the earth in Jesus.