Reflections on understanding the Church.
How do you sum up all the teaching that we have heard in the last seventeen weeks? How do you summarise a book of 14 chapters and 200 pages in one sermon? I could go through each chapter one by one picking out the main points, starting from the first sermon we heard on 6/5 about our business is growing; moving through to sermons like the one we had on 17/6/01 about the Church in good working order. Then finishing with a repeat of last week’s sermon about the bottom line. The only problems with doing this are that first it would get extremely boring; second, it would take a very long time – does anybody fancy sitting here for the next six hours hearing me talk? And most importantly, I would not be anything like as good as the people like John whom you have already heard preach about these subjects.
So how can you sum up all of this teaching? I cannot think of a better way than to see what Jesus said and says about us. It is also good that these words provide a link between the teaching about the Church that we have just finished looking at, and the teaching about the beatitudes that we are going to start looking at next week.
Have you ever thought how art affects the way that you see things? For years, as I have read Jesus’ teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, I have imagined him sat on that mount with a thousand or so people in front of him and there he is preaching to them all. One of the Bibles I read as a child – I think it was the Good News Colour Bible – had a picture of him doing exactly this. There was another picture on the wall of a Sunday school room showing the same thing. As I grew up, I carried that picture with me in my understanding of this sermon and it frightened me. I saw Jesus preaching to a large group of people who almost certainly did not realise yet who he was and he was telling them how they should be and I imagined that he was saying the same thing to me. I imagined Him saying: “Stephen Gladwell, this is how you are and this is how you should be; now change – and I knew that I could never change to be like this. I knew that when Jesus gave this he was not saying you must be poor in spirit or you must be meek or you must hunger and thirst for righteousness. He was saying that we must be all of these things, that each individual must be an illustration of them all. As I said, that is a scary thought, especially when you look at your own life and discover how you cannot even manage to be an illustration of one of them.
It is only fairly recently that God has shown me how wrong my understanding of this sermon has been. Listen to the first two verses in Matthew Chapter 5: “Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying:” Jesus wasn’t stood up there teaching a crowd of thousands who did not know him, he was stood there talking to twelve people that he had called out of the world to be his followers.
What difference does this make, apart from getting rid of those early pictures in my head? It means that it is almost certain that Jesus was not telling the disciples how they should be, but was stating how they are or were as his followers. He was not saying you must become poor in spirit, he was stating that in Him, we are this way. All we have to do is keep like this.
Now take this further and look at what Jesus says about the Church again:
“You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.”
Jesus is not saying to his disciples “Right, I have called you to follow me, now this is what you will become.” He is saying: “I have called you, this is what you are in me.”
Today, Jesus is not calling us to become salt and light, he is calling us to be the salt and light that he has made us into.
Salt itself has two functions, to preserve and to flavour. In other words, it is Canford Heath Baptist Church’s job to preserve or make good the people and place of Canford Heath. Have you ever heard somebody say “things were never like this in the old days”; “things were never as bad as this!” Well if these comments are true, then one of the main reasons for this is because the Church has not been acting like the salt of the earth and preserving and flavouring the world that God has placed it in.
When Jesus told his disciples that they were the salt of the earth, he was telling them that the world needed them. In those days it was impossible to preserve meat without salt and without meat, there would have been many people dying from hunger. The world needed Jesus’ disciples for it to survive, just as it needs us today. That is how important the Church is.
He was also telling them that the Church needed to be in the world. Salt, by itself, is completely useless. It only becomes useful when it is in contact with other things. It can only be a preservative or a flavouring when it is in touch with what it needs to preserve or flavour. This is why Jesus prayed just before he died: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” When you see a Church today that has little or no contact with the people and the situation around it, that Church is not acting as salt. It is only as we act and interact with our community that we begin to live as the Church that Jesus has enabled us to be. If we stay hiding behind these or any other walls, if the only contact this Church has with the world is through religious activities we are not being the salt of the earth that Jesus states we are.
If you take away anything from the teaching we have had over the last four months concerning the Church it should be this. That we need to act like the Church that Jesus has enabled us to be. This series on understanding the Church has shown us something of what the Church should be like, now we need to put that into practice. We need to let this salt have contact with the world and preserve and flavour it.
Jesus went on to say in this sermon: “You are light for all the world. A town that stands on a hill cannot be hidden. When a lamp is lit, it is not put under the meal-tub, but on the lamp-stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. Like the lamp, you must shed light among your fellows, so that, when they see the good you do, they may give praise to your Father in heaven.”
The New Testament uses this image of light in three different ways in a believer’s life. John 8:12 gives Jesus’ words “I am the light of the world” so to remind us of that, I will light this big candle. When we come to believe in Christ as our Lord and Saviour, the Bible tells us that we all become lights. Paul wrote to the Ephesians that they should “walk as children of the light”. And in Philippians 2:15 he commended the Christians in Philippi for “shining like stars in a crooked and depraved generation. In other words, Christ’s light should be in each of us. To illustrate this, I will light these nightlights from the big candle that represents Jesus. The third way that the image of light is used is in our reading today from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus tells his twelve disciples “you are the light of the world,” he does not say, “You are the lights of the world, but the light of the world. In other words, twelve disciples – one light. Sadly, this is the image that is often forgotten in our Churches today. They are full or at least partly full of individual Christians each shining their own lights. This is not how it should be; the Church should be one light shining out in the darkness.
“You are the light of the world”. This is not an option that Jesus gives us for ourselves or for our Church, or for the world. When we become a part of His Church, we are the light of the world. The Church in Canford Heath is the only light source available in this area – do you realise that. People might come to know God simply by picking their Bibles up and reading them but that is not likely to happen to many of them. We are the people whom God has chosen to let our lights shine around here. Again, this is what we have heard several times in the last few weeks, ‘Our business is growing’; ‘Motives and Methods in Evangelism’ these have both been titles of sermons from this series. It is no good having a light and keeping it in a bowl. That is what Jesus said, yet if we are honest, we will admit that that is what we have been doing for a lot of the time. We have been letting the light shine but mainly to each other in things like prayer groups, Bible study groups and worship. It is time for God’s Church throughout this country to go back up on the hill and let their light shine before all mankind. The whole purpose of light is for it to shine out in the darkness, not for it to be hidden away. Remember Paul’s words to the Church in Ephesus saying that we are to “walk as children of the light.” That is not something you do by keeping your light in a Church. And as I have mentioned, to the Church in Philippi, Paul said “Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life.”
It is time for us to go back out and let our light shine in our communities, by witnessing, by serving, by comforting the grieving in our neighbourhood, by befriending the lonely and by healing the sick whether they are Christian or not. “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” It is not evangelism alone that will bring people to the light who gives us light; it isn’t deeds alone. It is both together.
But before this can happen properly, I think we all need to look in a mirror at our own lives as individuals and as the Church. We need to see what kind of light we are revealing to the world. Have you ever noticed that when you first light an oil lamp the light that it gives out is small and has many colours in it? This is because of the impurities that have gathered on the wick and oil. Do we have any impurities in our lives that cause our light to do this? And if the light has been burning for a long time, have you noticed how the light does not shine as strongly because of the ash and charcoal stuff on the wick? Are our lives like this? Has our light been burning for so long without being tended and trimmed that we are not giving out light as we should? I think that God gives us a choice if our own lives or the life of our Church gets into this stage. We can allow Him to do the trimming necessary for the light to burn brightly again, or we can ignore the fact that it needs doing. If we allow that to happen than God has no choice but to allow testing times, difficulties and problems to come upon the Church so that the wick can be trimmed through these.
The final thing I want to say returns to the illustration with the candles I gave earlier but I still believe it is necessary to say it. Every believer in Christ is a light themselves; as well as being a part of the one light that is Christ’s body on earth. When all of these believers in a Church let their own lights shine the Church they are in will be a force in their community and will have a great impact on their neighbourhood. I would like to ask whether this is happening in God’s Church at Canford Heath and Longfleet at present though. With all the members that this Church has, it was impossible to get enough deacons to help run the Church. When John asked for people willing to help with an Alpha course in the area, two people responded in the first two weeks. Are we letting our lights shine as Jesus wants us too when things like this happen?
You are the salt of the earth. But if that salt looses 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.
We are now going to sing a song about light that I am sure everybody knows. “Lord, the light of your love is shining, in the midst of the darkness shining.” But this time, as we sing it remember that we, as individuals and as God’s Church are the light that is shining. As we sing the words, “fill this land with your Father’s glory,” remember that we are the light that God has called to reveal that glory to the world. As we sing, make it your prayer and plea before God that we allow ourselves to be the light of the world that God through His son Jesus has enabled us to be.
