Sermon on the Mount

This Little Salt of Mine

/ pastorpete51 / Leave a comment

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. Matthew 5:14 ESV

Being the salt of the earth gets a lot less attention than being the light of the world. After all when was the last time you heard anyone singing, “This little salt of mine!”? When people think about the salt of the earth they vaguely picture plain and ordinary folks. On the other hand, when my mother used to say that sailors were using “salty language”; she meant something quite different. Then what exactly is there about salt that Jesus is urging us to understand?

It may help to remember that salt comes up from mines deep in the earth. Its uniqueness is that it is totally different from the soil around it. In the same way, when we became Christians God dug us up by His grace and brought to the surface for a special purpose. His grace has transformed us and so He asks us to let that grace flow through us to transform our own little part of the world. Every day He gives us the opportunity to demonstrate the difference that grace has made in our lives; not to try to fit in and become like everyone else. When Jesus prayed that we would be in the world, but not of it He was asking that His grace would flavor everything and everyone around us. We are on earth for such a short time, so why don’t we start singing, “This little salt of mine; I’m going to shake it out!”

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What ever Happened to Sin?

/ pastorpete51 / Leave a comment

With all the debate about highly paid kneeling athletes one might be led to believe that racism is something new and shocking. In a way it is good and healthy to be able to talk about right versus wrong but that conversation apparently begins and ends with only one or two subjects. Any conversation about sin in the church seems to run into a dead-end. We don’t want to judge or worse be thought of as hypocritical because of our personal failures. Yet while here on earth, Jesus minced few words when it came to pointing out sin. He regularly pointed out that the Pharisees were adulterers, covetous and in danger of hell for their hard-hearts and attitudes.

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The preaching of God’s grace was never meant to end up as an accommodation of sin. Yes we are all weak and we are all in need of a great Savior to forgive us. But sin remains sin. Adultery has grown to be so much the norm that we forget that it still destroys families. Gambling which is simply the marriage of stealing and covetousness continues to march through our nation with new and bigger casinos in every state. The idea of honoring the Sabbath has been so completely abandoned that even a brief Sunday morning feel-good meeting is too inconvenient to sacrifice the chance for overtime pay. Jesus’ sermon on the Mount has lost its message as a revolutionary overthrow of sin and is  today looked at as some kind of nice collection of sweet ideas.

 

This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. 1 Timothy 1:15

Maybe those kneeling athletes who have at least started a debate about racism have stumbled onto a starting concept that we as Christians ought to consider following. What would happen if we began to take a stand no matter the price for the things that Jesus taught us to do? What if like the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, people actually knew that we would do without conveniences in order to live for Jesus Christ? What if this year instead of a trip to a theme park we spent a week volunteering in a homeless shelter. What if we turned off the Super Bowl and went to church to pray? Just standing for the national anthem will not move us one inch closer to God while our children grow up without a father or mother in the home because of the failure of yet another marriage. We need to do more than smile and just talk about grace. It is time for the mighty power of that grace to be allowed to radically change our lives and we will discover that there is nothing more joyful, more peaceful and more liberating than being cleansed from real sins by a real God who really sent His Son into the world to save sinners: of whom I am chief!