Dr. Evan Kane was the chief surgeon of Kane Summit Hospital in New York City. He had practiced his specialty for 37 years. Over the course of time he came to question the wisdom of using general anesthesia for every surgery. He believed people would recover quicker if they only had local anesthesia. However, no matter how convinced Dr. Kane was about his theory, he had one problem. Noone wanted to go under his knife while they were awake. Everyone he talked to had the same fear. They didn’t want to feel the pain of the scalpel while they were awake during the surgery.
After much searching, Kane finally found a willing subject. It helped that it was a relatively common procedure. According to Dr. Kane’s own records, during his practice he had performed around 4,000 appendectomies, so the procedure was almost second nature to him. The patient was prepped and brought into the operating room. The local anesthesia was carefully administered. As he had always done, he cut into the right side of the abdomen and entered the body cavity. He tied off the blood vessels, found the appendix, excised it, and finished by sewing the incision back up. To his own credit, he proved himself right. Throughout the surgery the patient felt very little discomfort. In fact, he was up and around the next afternoon, which was remarkable since this was back in 1921. Back then when people had appendectomies they were kept in the hospital from 6 to 8 days. It was a milestone in the world of medicine. However what made it particularly noteworthy was that the patient and the doctor were the same person. Dr. Kane operated on himself. (Charles Swindoll, Veritas, Vol 2, No. 1; January, 2002)
Believe it or not, that’s what I’m going to ask you to do today. If you’re squeamish at the sight of blood, don’t worry. We won’t even break the skin. What I want you to do is something like "spiritual exploratory surgery." I want you to root around a bit in your soul, take a hard and honest look at your spiritual health, and to see if your faith is as healthy as it should be.
Our text for this morning is Matthew 5:13-16. These are 4 verses near the beginning of Jesus’ most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. In this message, Jesus called his followers to the highest standards of conduct. He challenged us to "turn the other cheek" when we are struck on the right one. He commanded us to love our enemy, to forgive people who do us wrong, and to be sure we act with the purest motives. He said there were two roads, a wide road that leads to destruction and a narrow one that leads to life, and he said we ought to choose the narrow, hard to follow path. And here in these verses he calls those who follow Him to choose to be a godly influence on the society in which we live.
(Read Matthew 5:13-16)
Now I have to tell you, some of the tough teachings in the Sermon on the Mount have challenged me over the years. When I have heard Jesus say "Don’t worry about anything" and "Invest in the treasure of heaven instead of storing up stuff on earth" I have to admit it. I sometimes struggle with those things. When he said it is better to poke your eye out than look at a woman lustfully, I get a headache! Those are tough commands. But I always thought that these couple of verses were the easy part of the sermon. I thought being salt and light was pretty simple until I really started digging into the meaning of what Jesus was saying. As I studied this week, I came to realize what Jesus expects from us. We are to change the world we live in with our actions. He doesn’t just expect us to exist in the world. He expects the world to be transformed by our presence. The more I pondered the two images he used to describe how we are to affect the world, the more I recognized how tough these words are.
The first thing Jesus says we are like is salt. "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." Now at first blush this is a little difficult to understand. There’s no such thing as "unsalty salt." If you pour the granules out of your saltshaker and it’s not salty, somebody played a trick on you because salt doesn’t go bad. Sodium Chloride, table salt like Morton’s that you buy at the store is pure. But the Morton Salt Co. didn’t exist back in Jesus’ day. They got salt from evaporated sea water, and it was never completely pure. Occasionally what they gathered to use as seasoning or to preserve their meat was so impure that it wasn’t very salty at all. When that happened they would gather it up and cast it out in their fields to use as fertilizer. Sometimes they would throw it out the door to harden the pathway that led to their front porch. What Jesus says in these verses is that if His followers are going to change the world we live in, we have to be the real thing. Our lives can’t be a mixture of all kinds of impurity. We have to be uncompromised, pure, authentic. That’s the word I want you to remember with the challenge "You are the salt of the earth." Jesus is saying "Be authentic."
Now we have to admit it. One thing that has limited the influence Christians have on the world is that many who claim to follow Christ aren’t authentic. There are a whole lot of people who come to church on Sunday, but you’d never know it by the way they live on Tuesday or Saturday. If they have any influence on the world, it isn’t one that draws others to Christ. If anything, an inconsistent lifestyle repels people from the church. I can’t tell you how many times I talk to those who say they know someone who says they are a Christian, but their life is impure. It literally destroys the witness of Christ when believers don’t live out their faith. The world is looking for something authentic. People want the real deal, and if Christianity is just a show then they can get make-believe any night of the week on TV. Christ calls us to live out pure, uncompromised, authentic faith. If we do that, the world will be changed by it.
So, how authentic is your faith? Are the people around you drawn to faith by your life? If you are a Christian, do the people who cross your path recognize that there is a difference in the way you live? In Galatians 5 Paul said that when the Holy Spirit is active in your life you will be filled with love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. Can the people you work with, your family members, the people you go to school with, can they see those "fruit of the Spirit," growing in your life? Are you the real thing, or is there so much impurity mixed in with your faith that it isn’t good for anything?
Now let me make sure you understand what I am saying and what I’m not saying here. Jesus says that to influence your world toward godliness it takes the real thing, authentic faith. The key here is being real, not trying to appear perfect. Nobody likes a phony, and if you think you are fooling everybody, the only person you are probably fooling is yourself. The world can smell that stuff a mile away. If you want to make people think you never struggle, that sin is only a distant memory in your life, then you aren’t authentic. You are just wearing a mask.
In ancient Greece they had great theatrical events, plays in large amphitheaters. They didn’t have microphones to make their voices heard, and they didn’t have cameras to magnify their images onto screens, so they invented their own system. They developed big masks. The masks made them look like the characters they portrayed. Built into the masks were megaphones to amplify their voices. The actors got on stage, got behind their masks and they became somebody else, someone different than they really were. The actors were called "hypocrites." That’s where the word came from. There are a lot of people whose life is a big act. Listen to what Jesus says to in Mt. 23:25-28:
Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
You see, God wants to change us, but not superficially. God doesn’t want to just change the way we look. He wants to change who we are. He wants to clean us up from the very core of our being. When we try to put on a mask we short-circuit His work because we try to appear changed. But it’s not real. Jesus calls us to influence the world toward godliness. To do it we have to be authentic, have faith in Him that changes us from the inside out. Anything less is useless to Him. (Read v. 13 again)
The second image Jesus uses to speak of our influence in our world, is no less challenging. Jesus compares us to light. (Read vv. 14-16) Now this image of light is a common one in the New Testament. John wrote about Jesus in John 1, "In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." In 1 John 1 we read, "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin." Consistently throughout the Bible, the thought is that where God is there is light. Where God is not, there is darkness.
Now what Jesus does here in these three verses is to expand the image to those who follow God. As believers in Christ we become the light of the world. It is not that we have any ability on our own to bring light to the darkness. He simply means that by being followers of Christ, we gain the ability to reflect His light. That’s why the result isn’t that we get glory, but that God gets the glory for the good deeds that we do.
However, the big point of what Jesus is saying comes in verses 14 and 15. Light exists for a purpose, to illuminate darkness. You can’t hide light and it be any good. You have to show it. It seems to me that Jesus is saying that as light, Christians need to be available. Being available is just as important as being authentic if we are going to influence our world for Christ. (Remember "This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!")
Jesus is challenging us to make a concerted effort to live in contact with people who need to know Him. We need to be involved with non-Christian people. In our context, it means we need to make the effort to cross paths with people who don’t know Jesus love and the hope He offers. When you are blessed enough to live in the light, make sure you don’t hide it. Be available enough to reflect it to others who are still living in the darkness. That’s the only way you will ever influence them.
Now how can you do that? It might be through volunteering. Go to the Library or the school. Get involved in coaching a kids athletic league. Find an organization that does good like the Lion’s club or the Historical Society and get involved. It could also mean that you live out your faith when you cross paths with others. Leave a decent tip at restaurants. Smile and be pleasant to the person who checks you out at the store. Help somebody who needs some assistance. Chances are better that you will be able to influence people for Christ if they can see that Christ has made a difference in your life. Joe Aldrich wrote, "Christians are to be good news before they share the good news."
Now this sounds all very well and good. To influence our world toward God, Jesus calls us to be authentic and to be available. Let Him transform us from the inside out, and then let others see that transformation by our good deeds. But when you bring all this together, it starts to get uncomfortable. If this spiritual surgery is going to hurt, it will be right here when we bring together authenticity and availability. So our tendency is to focus on one extreme or the other. You see, when you focus on living with an authentic faith, the tendency is to retreat from the world. Many do it by surrounding themselves with a bunch of Christians. They listen to Christian radio stations, read Christian books, develop deep friendships with other Christians. All of those are good things, but if we aren’t intentional about being available, the result is our authentic faith doesn’t influence the world because it’s out of their reach.
The other extreme is availability without authenticity. Some people who claim to follow Christ never struggle to be involved in the lives of people who don’t know Christ. But the problem is that their lives are indistinguishable from non-Christians. They have the same attitudes and the same actions. They enjoy the same entertainment and maintain the same lifestyle. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were pagans. Their faith doesn’t make any difference in their life. They’ve forgotten that Christians are called to be "in the world, but not of the world."
Do you see what I mean when I say that this call of Jesus to influence the world is tougher than it appears? My guess is that you have a pretty good idea about which tendency you have. The Holy Spirit is probably right now doing a little surgery, and He might be making you uncomfortable because he is working to cut out the compromise in your life. So, what is your tendency? Are you more likely to compromise on the authentic faith and become like the world, or to compromise on availability and withhold your influence from the world? Either way you have failed to be the salt and light that Jesus called you to be.
I recently heard about a business owner who became interested in Christianity, but he maintained a distance and just observed for a while. He employed many Christians in his company and he watched them like a hawk. He said, "You know, I was naturally drawn to God by observing Christian workers who were conscientious and kind and thorough and aggressive on the job. But I’ll tell you what really impressed me. One day a guy who I knew to be a fresh convert asked if he could see me after work. I agreed to meet with him, but later in the day I started to worry that this young religious zealot might be coming to try to convert me, too."
"I was surprised when he came in my office with his head hanging low and said to me, ’Sir, I’ll only take a few minutes, but I’m here to ask your forgiveness. Over the years I’ve worked for you I’ve done what a lot of other employees do, like borrowing a few company products here and there. And I’ve taken some extra supplies; I’ve abused telephone privileges; and I’ve cheated the time clock now and then."
He went on, "But I became a Christian a few months ago and it’s real-not the smoke and mirror stuff. In gratitude for what Christ has done for me and in obedience to Him, I want to make amends to you and the company for the wrongs I’ve done. So could we figure out a way to do that? If you have to fire me for what I’ve done, I’ll understand. I deserve it. Or, if you want to dock my pay, dock it whatever figure you think is appropriate. If you want to give me some extra work to do on my own time, that will be okay too. I just want to make things right with God and between us.’" In the end they worked it out. That business owner said that one conversation made a deeper spiritual impact on him than anything else ever had. ("Developing Contagious Christian Character," by Steven Chapman, SermonCentral.com)
That employee didn’t influence his boss because he had some clever presentation of the gospel. He did it because he was living out a faith that was both authentic and available. We can do that too. Jesus said we could. But to do it, we have to be willing to be the good news before we tell the good news.
