Category: Christian Life

Being an Influence – Salt and Light part one

If your like me you have wondered just what Jesus was talking about when He called His disciples Salt and Light in Matthew 5:13-16

“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.”

I have read these verses many times and wondered just what being Salt and Light was.  I even tried to the best of my ability to be what I thought Jesus meant when He called us this.  Until recently I had never really understood what Jesus was talking  about.  I began to look at what Salt was used for in the lives of the people Jesus was talking to.  Because being salt didn’t mean we were to make life taste better for people.  In Jesus’ day salt wasn’t used for its taste.  It was used as a preservative.

Jesus was calling us to be a preservative in our society.  He was calling us to be a moral barometer in the world we live in.  Not so that we could judge the lives of those around us, but so that by our lifestyle they could see a better way.  Jesus was asking us to live our faith for the world to see, and be ready to give a reason for the hope that we have.  He was calling us to be an influence on the world around us.  Not by being preachy and telling everyone to believe what we believe, but to be an example that people could see follow.

But Jesus was also saying that we are able to preserve people as well.  In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God is going to judge the cities for their actions, and if you read any history of the cities they were not nice people, Abraham stands between them and God and after talking for awhile God says He will not destroy the cities if He can find 10 righteous people in them.  I never connected this story to Jesus’ comments about being Salt before, but this is what Abraham was doing.  We have all wondered at times why people get away with so much in our world.  I have heard the comment many times “If God is so just, why doesn’t He deal with these people?”  And I have come to learn what Abraham knew.  With God a little bit of righteousness goes a long long way.

God is not wanting anyone to perish.  2 Peter 3:9 “The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent.” When God looks at the world, He does see the wrongs being done in our society.  But the presence of those who know Him personally allow Him to withhold judgment.   God wants everyone to come to know Him and He sees the wicked people in our world, but He also sees the righteous.  We are able to make a difference in our world just by living out our faith for the world to see.  With God a little bit of righteousness, or Salt, goes a long long way.  And God knows that Salt always makes a difference.

We are important in God’s plan.  Each one of us is able to make a difference if we will accept the call of Jesus to be Salt in our society, to be an influence in the world around us.   God loves and values people very deeply.   We are not insignificant to God.  We are important and able to make a difference.  Remember that a little bit of salt goes a long long way, and Salt always makes a difference.

A faith worth believing

I have been confronted recently with the question What do I believe.

To be honest, I have had some difficulty putting into words what I believe.  I have never given it much thought before.  When in discussions with people, or listening to someone speak I could put what was being talked about into a framework of what I believed, and determine if what was being shared matched or not, but I have never sat down to think about what I actually believe.

I think this is common for most Christians.  We don’t know what we actually believe.  We say we believe the truth,  and at times are able to tell people what we don’t believe, but we have difficulty with knowing, and greater difficulty with sharing what we believe.  We cannot put it into a logical thought pattern to understand ourselves, let alone share it with anyone else.  This creates a rather large problem, because our main mandate is to go into the world and share with others what we believe.  It is kind of impossible when we don’t know.

I was reading a book and the author shared he was trying to share his faith with people, telling them they needed a relationship with God.  This was until a lady asked him “what is a relationship with God?”, and he couldn’t answer her.  This is what sent me on my quest to discover what I believed.  I wasn’t sure I could answer that question either, and I wanted to be sure.

As I thought long and hard about this, I realized I had another issue.  Not only do we not know what we really believe, we don’t know why we believe what we do believe.  We have accepted teachings and what people we have trusted have shared as truth, but we have never chased it on  our own.  We spout all kinds of messages because that is what others have shared, and we think it is the way it is done.  But when we get cornered by someone, like the lady asking what a relationship with God is, we get stumped and are unable to answer.  We really don’t know why we believe what we say we believe.

This leads us to the great tragedy in the churches we go to, where by statistics only about 5% of Christians in North America will ever lead anyone else to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.  We cannot continue to simply accept as truth what others tell us.  Christianity was never meant to be a blind faith.  Christianity is meant to be accepted by faith, and because God’s thoughts go so far beyond ours that we cannot ever hope to understand Him, we have to take some things simply because God said it was so.  But Christianity was meant to be a thinking mans faith.  Jesus said we need to “count the cost” before following Him.  We need to evaluate what we are willing to give up to be a disciple of Jesus.  We are supposed to think through our faith.

Paul said in Acts 17:11 “And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth.” They didn’t take what Paul said solely because Paul said it.  They searched the scriptures in depth to see if what was being shared actually was in the bible.   To much of what we have accepted as truth is simply been hearsay and has been blindly accepted.  And as a result it cannot stand any of the storms in life.

If we as Christians are to actually stand tall and strong we need to know what it is we believe and why.  Otherwise we are just simply spreading around hearsay and conjecture without really evaluating what has been said.  And as a result we have built our lives on a foundation that cannot hold us up.  We end up building on sand instead of solid rock.  Only when we begin to evaluate what we believe, and then find out why we believe it and own it for ourselves can we truly stand as God intends for us to stand and be the light that we are called to be.

I welcome you to join me on the journey of discovering what we believe and why.  We cannot become who we were meant to be unless we are willing to.

Why do we struggle so hard for God’s approval?

Have you ever tried to live up to the expectations of the church?  Ever tried to live out the life that people said you had to live to be a Christian?  Many of us have and most of us have failed.  We have tried and tried and tried to live a life that we thought was pleasing to God.  Only to be left feeling disappointed and ashamed.

I know I have felt this way at times.  It is not a new problem.  For centuries people have had this struggle.  We try and try to be  who we think God wants us to be and become, and most times simply get defeated and for many completely give up trying.  This is what I did when I was in my teens.  It didn’t make any sense that we would have to fight so hard and seemingly get so little.

And to make it worse the “leaders” who promoted this lifestyle weren’t able to live up to it either.  We have seen many many church leaders displayed on national news having thrown their lives and ministries away for some pleasure.  And all the while they were preaching against some of the very behaviors that they themselves were committing.  And I would look at these types of leader and it would reinforce my need to do away with God and the church.  “Who needs it” was my thought.

But this was not the church or the Christian life Jesus intended at all.  Jesus said of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:4 “They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden.” And many of us have felt the weight of unbearable religious demands upon our shoulders.  Now whether we have put them there ourselves or have had them placed there by someone else is for us to evaluate.  Because we have tried to hold ourselves to a standard that God didn’t create for us.  Paul said it best when he said in Galatians 3:2-4 “Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it?”

We have all tried to follow after God in our own way and have often resorted to rules to allow us to feel like we were measuring up.  But this is not at all what God intended for us.  Jesus said in Matthew 11:28 “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

Brennan Manning says something similar in his book “The Ragamuffin Gospel”

Let’s suppose you advanced me $1,000,000 for my personal needs. A year later, you request that I begin making monthly interest-free payments of $10,000 on the debt. On the first day of each month I sit down to write the check just as the morning mail arrives. You have just sent me a $10,000 check to cover my payment. You continue this practice until the full amount of my debt is repaid. I’m bewildered and protest, “But this is totally lopsided.”
God is enamored with His people and so intent upon a response that He even provides the grace to respond.

Now let me say that Christianity was not meant to be a cake walk.  Nor was it meant to solve all of your problems magically.  The church has often promised the unrealistic when we promised a bed of roses.  Christianity wasn’t supposed to be easy.  Now I know this sounds like a contradiction.  If Jesus promised an easy and light burden then how can Christianity be heavy?  It sounds like a contradiction but it isn’t.  Jesus said that this was a hard path to walk on, and there would be few who would.  The thing that makes it different is that Jesus walks it with us.  God will not lay anything upon us that He doesn’t equip us to bear.

Christianity is not about following rules.  It is about a relationship with the One who calls us personally by name, and then picks us up and allows us to walk with Him.  God gives us the grace we need to follow Him.  Now what does that mean you ask?  Well biblically grace literally means “The transforming power of God doing in us what we cannot do for ourselves.” It  means that all of the power of heaven is focused on you and I enabling us to walk out the life God designed us for.  It only gets hard when we try to do it ourselves.  That is what the rules are doing for us.  Allowing us to become who we think we need to be by our own effort.  It doesn’t mean that what we are trying to do is bad.  It is simply by whose power are we doing it?

So let me ask the question, Whose power are you trying to live by?