Sermon on the Mount: You Are
Text: Matthew 5:13-16 ESV
“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.
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 5:13–16 ESV)
“Nothing is more useful than salt and sunshine.” Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 31.102
Let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a bag of popcorn covered in salt or even some potato chips. Even better if you are outside by some water basking in the sun!
We don’t think how often we need salt and light because they are so abundant to us. Amazingly, you can kill yourself with too much water because it makes your body low on salt—particularly the sodium—and your brain stops sending the right signals, so your hearts, kidney, and liver begin to fail. The solution is to add salt through a saline drip back into your body. Without light—particularly sunlight—your body stops producing serotonin and vitamin D isn’t absorbed. We can become depressed, be a higher risk for certain cancers, osteoporosis, and diabetes.
Salt has been used historically for agriculture, medicine, and food. Light is necessary for most of life—we can’t work well in the dark so we create artificial light and we can’t grow food without it.
I mention all of these because if you have heard many sermons on this passage — “You are the salt of the earth, you are the light in the world, the city on the hill” you have likely heard a myriad of imagery that pastors like to connect with this passage. They are all true about salt and light, but they are not all necessarily what Jesus is talking about.
You
This passage is connected to the section right before it, the beginning of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus is gathering his disciples (not just the 12, but the many) and is giving them a new set of commandments like Moses on Mount Sinai with Israel. That correlates to here as well. This section is specifically just about Jesus's disciples. Jesus starts out both sections today with the phrase:
“You are…”
This statement is emphatic. It is not just a generic you. This is very specifically his disciples. This is me and you.
Jesus begins his ministry by pointing his disciples to the state of their souls—the inner life that no one can see. He does that in the beatitudes. He says the “poor in spirit” are blessed. Those who mourn for their sin and the sin they see in the world are blessed. Those who know they have strength in Christ yet walk in humility are blessed. Those who are merciful like God was merciful to them in their sin are blessed. Those whose heart loves the Lord and is pure are blessed. Those who seek to make peace are blessed. And right in the middle he says that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—as those who are dying and need salvation, who are searching for the only hope they can ever have—and find Jesus, they will be truly satisfied in him!
Jesus strips away what most people are concerned about—how we look on the outside—and starts with the inner heart. And he makes it clear this is not some sort of work we do, it is the work he is doing in us. This is not what we do to please him to save us, it is what true sons and daughters of God live like. Jesus also reminds us in the beatitudes what the world will think of those who exhibit these characteristics—they will likely be reviled. Like Father, like Son, so too we will experience levels of persecution.
Now, this may seem obvious, but I think we forget we cannot expect the world to live out these beatitudes nor to exhibit the characteristics we are going to talk about today. We cannot expect those that do not yet have the truth of the Gospel of Jesus alive in them to live the truths of the Gospel of Jesus. Only his disciples can do that. We should not be surprised nor baffled when the world has no desire to do these things. They cannot exhibit true life and true love for God because they do not have life in Jesus nor do they love God.
At the end of the beatitudes Jesus gave us hope that knowing God, seeing him, and being with him forever is better than any problems we could face here. That is the background to our passage this morning. Jesus first speaks in his sermon about our blessedness in him and the work he is doing in us through his Holy Spirit. In our passage this morning, he then turns to our responsibility. He is telling us here what these changes in us will produce. We don’t just have a future hope in heaven, we have a job and a purpose in this new life now on earth.
Saltiness
Jesus defines this purpose with an analogy. “You are…” salt and light. Salt and light don’t just speak to the influence Christians can have on our world, our earth, our society, or friends and family, they speak to the influence we must have if we are truly God’s.
The first analogy that defines who we are and the role we are to play is salt.
“You are the salt of the earth,” (Matthew 5:13 ESV)
This saltiness in our lives is not just for ourselves, it is not just something we demonstrate to a few close friends, it is something everyone in every sphere of life we come in contact with should notice. The implication that we are the salt means the world does not have this type of characteristic. Yet, what does he mean by saltiness? If we read a little further, we can see the analogy Jesus is making:
“but if salt has lost its taste how will its saltiness be restored?” (Matthew 5:13 ESV)
Ahh. We are talking about salt’s taste—its use in food. Its usefulness and ability to preserve meat, its role as the enemy of decay, its ability to season and flavor dishes. It is the day-to-day cooking interaction that many of us are aware of. Jesus seems to be thinking about saltiness as having something it brings that is good and unique—its flavor—and its role in stopping something bad—decay. These both would be included in the use of salt with food.
On the positive side salt brings a specific flavor. We can often tell when salt is in something. And salt brings out other good flavors. I was amazed when I first started cooking how if I wanted to bring out a specific ingredient or flavor in a dish—to pull out the pepper flavor, to compliment the curry, to even make me more aware of the sweetness of dish—so often just adding salt would often bring out each of those flavors.
On the side of stopping something negative we can think about salt stopping rot and decay. Settlers wouldn’t have made it to Idaho from the Midwest if they didn’t have barrels of salt packed with meat. Beef jerky stays in my cupboard for weeks on end without molding because of the salt in the meat that has cured it.
Our saltiness is meant to be about our presence adding a God-focused flavor to this world and staving off the sin-induced decay that is rampant all around us.
Light
Before we talk about how exactly that might look, let’s look at the other analogy: light.
“You are the light of the world.” (Matthew 5:14 ESV)
Again, this is meant to be a part of who you are as God’s sons and daughters, and it is meant to be seen in every interaction you have with the whole world. The implication is that the world is in darkness—as much as they think they are enlightened, they are not. They need light, and you and I can provide it. And again, we need to look ahead to see exactly what aspect of light Jesus is talking about:
“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.” (Matthew 5:14-15 ESV)
We’re talking about the illumination aspect of light, how it shines forth and helps us to see and identify things. From the moment we wake up in the morning, no matter how begrudgingly, this is one of the first functions we notice about light. On the positive side it helps us find the things we are looking for and it also helps prevent us from the negative—grabbing, running into, or going somewhere we wouldn’t go if we had seen clearly.
Light illuminates the good things we need to see. It lets us turn off the alarm clock, comb our hair in a way that looks nice, and find our way to work. Light helps us recognize our surroundings and make sound judgements—we can determine where we are and how to best act next. It helps us see the beauty and joy of what God has made in all of his creation—mountains, birds, leaves.
On preventing the negative, light lets us notice the bad and avoid it. We can avoid stubbing our toes on the dresser if we can see it. We will likely choose to not touch the pot that is glowing red if we see it. Lights help us see the straggling deer bounding across the road as we weave through the mountains at night.
Our being light is about illuminating the good things that God loves while also identifying the negative things that are not God honoring so we and others can avoid them.
Sons and Daughters: Image Bearers and Priests — Salt & Light
This pairing may seem odd to us:
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Be salt—let our presence add a God-focused flavor to this world and help stave off the sin-induced decay that is rampant all around us; and
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Be light—illuminating the good things that God loves while also identifying the negative things that are not God honoring so we and others can avoid them.
Yet these two analogies parallel the two largest images throughout all Scripture that define me and you. Jesus is calling his disciples back into the purposes that God gave them originally and is using everyday images to help them understand.
To be salt and light is the call that God originally gave his sons and daughters to be his image bearers and his priests.
When God made Adam and Eve he said they were to be “[made] in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26–27). They were to image God in all his ways to the world. Similarly, Israel was called God’s son, his very image in a people group. They too were to image God to the entire world. To image God is to demonstrate the nature and character of his rule and kingdom in everything we do
Where Adam and Eve (Genesis 5:1) and Israel (Exodus 4:22–23) failed to image God rightly, Jesus succeeded as the Son of God and very image of God himself (Colossians 1:15). He has now given his Holy Spirit to us and called us his sons and daughters, those who are to be conformed to his image and to display his image to all the nations for his glory. As God’s redeemed image bearers, we are to be his sons and daughters, to rule in accordance with how God rules, and to display the character and likeness of the Son and Father in heaven in everything that we do!
Image Bearer = Be Salty
This is the same as saltiness. To image God is to bring the distinct flavor of his character into the world. By being his representatives, we are a preservative against the sin that was in this world. Jesus does this as the image bearer, the salty-one. We see and know God perfectly through him and we see sin in retreat throughout his life and ministry—people are healed, death is reversed, the blind see. We are all meant to be examples of this type of God revealers with our very life and sin preservation in our presence within this world.
Second, we are God’s royal priesthood. Adam and Eve were called as priests to “work” and “watch over” the garden (Genesis 2:15). All of Israel was called to be a kingdom of priests (Exodus 19:6) and God gave a lineage of priests through Aaron to specifically image this priestly duty. Both were to help keep the holy places holy, declare in line with God’s will what is clean and unclean, guard the gates of the community, and offer up sacrifices of praise to God. Yet both failed. Jesus came as our perfect high priest, the Passover Lamb who paid the price for our sins once and for all in his own sacrifice. The church now is the royal priesthood that Adam and Eve and Israel were supposed to be. We are the ones who declare clean from unclean and are in-ourselves his holy temple where God dwells.
Priesthood = Light
This is the same as being a light. To declare, work, watch over what God has given us by declaring and illuminating what is good and what is not. Because we know Jesus, we can act as God’s priests and declare with God what pleases him and what does not.
To be salt and light is nothing less than to take our place as God’s sons and daughters and truly image him to a watching world by having a distinct flavor, be a presence against the decay and rot through sin in our world, and declare good and bad illuminating God’s will and what is not his will.
Application
We see that Jesus is calling them back into their God-designed purpose by using a common, everyday image to encourage his disciples. To even begin to unpack all the ways we are to image God—to be salt—and rightly declare right and wrong as priests—to be light—is a huge task. On the one hand, it is everything in Scripture to understand how to rightly be these people. But if we are to consider this morning how to be salt and how to be light, it might be helpful to filter it through three categories that Scripture speaks to often: our Time, our Treasure, and out Tongue.
Time
“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5:15–16 ESV)
Treasure
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19–21 ESV)
Tongue
“How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” (James 3:5–10 ESV)
Our time, our tongue, and our treasure reveal the wisdom we have and know, they speak to our hearts desire, and they direct our entire body. So, they are a good filter to examine our “salt” and “light” characteristics.
Time
Is your use of time a distinct flavor, does it preserve against sin, and does it illuminate what God loves?
If you were to catalog how you used your day, breaking it down by hours and minutes, what would you see? Does it include things that a non-Christian would never have? Like the recipe for cookies versus the recipe chicken-pot-pie, we should be able to see ingredients that demonstrate a distinctness between the two. This is your distinct flavor, the uniqueness of your imaging God. Your time is a great way you can illuminate what is important to God and what is important to you.
An easy example is, “Did I spend some time today with God?” That is a great place to start. You and I have access to the God of this universe because of our relationship with him through Jesus Christ. Do we even care? Do we do anything different because of that? Being a part of a Life Group, being purposeful to be with our believing friends, getting up and attending church on Sunday morning are all ways that our time can display a distinct flavor or illuminate something that God loves. These are also grace and ways we can use our time to prevent sin in our lives and others’. These are all things that friends and family and even our culture may notice and see the distinction between you and others.
Would your work colleagues or school mates notice at work or school that your time use is different? Do you honor your teachers and your bosses with your time? This can both point to our love of God and it can be that preservative that encourages others to use their time well.
Probably one of the harder questions regarding time is if you are “redeeming,” “making the most” of the time as Ephesians said? I won’t mention all the ways that we can waste time and be decayed through our time, but things that I have done to waste time include Netflix or Hulu binging, endless video game days, evenings lost on Facebook and Craigslist, and even just being lazy in general. Sometimes those things are good ways to rest and relax and can be a salty example to others, but sometimes they are not and are simply allowing the rot to set in on our lives. Does even our culture know that we won’t spend our time on raunchy movies, gambling, or other vices because we won’t spend time there?
Our time is a major indicator of the flavor we have and it illuminates the good we love in God and the bad we know we shouldn’t pursue.
Treasure
Is your use of money a distinct flavor, does it preserve against sin, and does it illuminate what God loves?
A clear way to tell is: would your budget look distinct from an unbeliever in any way? In the positive sense, would someone looking at how you spend money have any idea that you love God? This obviously includes your direct giving to the church. Do you tithe cheerfully, regularly, and generously? It also includes the ways you spend money outside of yourself caring for others, investing as Jesus says not in the things of this earth but also in heavenly pursuits that can’t easily be quantified. How much money should we be willing to throw at missionary and evangelistic endeavors that someone might be saved? Hundreds, thousands, millions?
Our money often accompanies our time—what we spend time on we spend money on. While there is nothing wrong with skiing, mountain biking, or kayaking, does our money show that we love these sports and outings more than God and his passions—caring for the poor, the widow, the orphan as James says (James 1:27)? It is fine to have a house, a car, a computer, a phone. But a sign that a tool has become an idol is often that it is gilded with gold. Have the things you are meant to use for a tool in this life to serve you and God become your treasure and your joy, the things you pile money into above all else?
To protect ourselves from money, are you good at not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing? We will talk more about that in Matthew 6, but we want to make sure we protect ourselves from the corrupting nature of money itself, and be sure to use it in ways that illuminates and flavors what God loves in this world. Can you say that is your relationship with money? Would others say that is your relationship money? Do your friends marvel both at your thrift and your generosity towards others?
Tongue
Is your use of your tongue a distinct flavor, does it preserve against sin, and does it illuminate what God loves?
The most dangerous indicator in this list is our tongue. As James says it is a fire! It can ignite a passion for God one minute and it can tear down a person the next. Does your tongue bring healing, comfort, clarity, encouragement, or is it unnecessarily cutting, hurting, destroying? Does your tongue focus most on others than yourself in pointing out faults, and does it focus on yourself more than others when pointing out positives?
Most importantly, are you willing to simply speak the truth? Will you say what pleases and honors the Lord and what doesn’t?
Warnings
It is interesting that Jesus doesn’t spend the most time on the positive statements to be salt and light. It is really our need to understand our purpose and to see the connection between image bearers with salt and priests with light that takes time. Jesus actually spends more time warning us and illuminating concerns about our saltiness and light character.
Concern #1
“...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 5:13 ESV)
This is a strange idea for us because salt really doesn’t lose its flavor. NaCl is a very stable compound and will always taste “salty” to us. Yet for much of history people used salt marshes and salt that was found in the earth. This salt has many other minerals in it and the salt, because it dissolves in water so easily, often leached out of the mixture and what people were left with was other minerals that had no salty taste whatsoever. It was only good for throwing out and as dirt to walk on.
The concern here seems to be that we will, over time, stop being salty. We will no longer bring that distinct flavor and preservation quality—we will not image Christ clearly. I think we all know this is a real concern. The more we are around and in relationship with people who are not salt, we tend to morph into a similar way of living. We spend our time just like the world. We spend our money just like the world. We speak just like the world. Sadly, we even begin to sin just like the world. They want to get up early and ski but have no desire to think about God, so we set him aside as well. The very thing we were meant to be—a distinct flavor for God and a preservation against sin—is no longer what we do.
This points to a very real tension we all experience—we are called to be close enough to the world to be in it, but not so close that we become it (John 17:16). In what ways has this become true for you? In what ways have you slipped in this tension and have been pulled headlong into a life that no longer has much salty quality, where you are no longer imaging the God who has saved you?
Concern #2
“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…” ((Matthew 5:14-16 ESV)
It is literally impossible to hide a city that is built on a hill. What are you going to do, plant really large trees? This is why castles on hills always had a wall around them—they needed a way to defend themselves since they were easy to find. Similarly, the function of a lamp is to not be hidden. We turn on a light expecting it will do its job. It would be so counterintuitive to turn on a light and then cover it with a box. Why do that?
The concern here is not so much a tension, but rather our temptation to outright sin. The temptation to not say what we ought to say when we ought to say it. I know what it is like to be in line at the coffee shop and have someone ask you what you are doing tonight or this morning, and realize that that it will be the third time I tell them I’m heading in to church this week, and won’t they think that is weird. I know how gut wrenching it can be when someone brings up a topic that Scripture speaks clearly to—our sexuality, our gender, our life’s purpose—and know they will likely look to you to contribute to the conversation and you are sure it won’t go well.
This temptation is to deny our illuminating mandate and simply hide. To not declare what God loves and what he hates. Sometimes we are scared because we just don’t have enough love, enough tact, enough care in how we share so we know the problem is us. We need to own those sins in those moments and let others know that our lack of ability does not change the truth. We also need to practice, to work at it, and to make caring in love a goal. Do not hide your responsibility and job to illuminate to the world what is good and Godly and what is sin.
Concern #3
“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 5:16 ESV)
This one may not seem like a concern, but it is there. When we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we can now see things we never saw before, our hearts are sensitive to things they could never feel, and our ears hear his word and can respond to his call. Yet we are still sinners, and we can often misuse our ability to know the Lord. This speaks to another tension we live in.
From our perspective, everything we talked about today will take work. To change how we use our time, how we use our money, and how we speak (for certain how we speak) will feel like a lot of purposeful steps and many times of repenting to the Lord and to one another. We will have to change habits in many areas if we want to better display and season our life with Godly ambitions and pursuits. We will have to carefully attenuate our language if we want to illuminate Godly works in a way that comes across loving. We will work hard.
Yet, we have to admit that anything good we do is because God was first at work in us. It is only by the power of his Holy Spirit that we are growing. In this tension we find that we have to point others to the fact that we are “light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8) and are to then shine as “lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15). Our life is not meant to be a parade of virtue, and it is not an attempt to win praise to ourselves, rather, we are to “Give glory to our father in heaven” as Jesus says.
Conclusions
Kingdom norms produce kingdom witness.
We should walk away today realizing that as God works out our faith in us and as we work out our own faith in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), this new heart makes us someone specific—we are salt and light, we are image bearers of God and priests who work to keep and protect the very words and commands of God that he might be glorified! The beatitudes are being worked in us and they produce a witness to the glory of God in everything we do—our time, our treasure, our tongue—and in every sphere of life—the entire world. It may not seem like much when we look at ourselves critically and feel like we have little to offer in way of flavor or illumination, but it can be the difference for a world that is completely lost.
There is a poet, Olav Hauge from Norway who wrote this:
“Don’t bring me the ocean if I feel thirsty, nor heaven if I ask for a light; but bring a hint, some dew, a particle, as birds carry only drops away from water, and the wind a grain of salt.”
You may be exactly what someone needs as their first glimpse of the light of heaven in you, coming from sinners like us. You may offer the small grain of salt that someone will find an explosive awareness of a God they have never even considered.
The awareness we need to have is this isn’t an option. It is our identity in Jesus now. We are his image bearers and his priests or we are not. We are salt and light or we are not. We are his sons and daughters—beloved in Jesus and changed by the Holy Spirit. There is not a middle ground. Dietrich Bonhoffer said it this way:
“Flight into the invisible is a denial of the call. A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow him.” (Bonhoeffer, 106)
The very purpose of a disciple is to be salty and flavor with Godly desire and preserve against sin, while also illuminating others with the light of Christ and what he loves and hates.