Follow Christ. We're continuing our series on basic Christianity and looking at the sermon on the Mount from Matthew five, six, and seven that Jesus preached and taught to his followers. Last week, we looked at the end of it where he said, there's two paths you can follow. There's one that's really wide and it's packed full of people. There's another path that goes in a similar direction.

Is it? It seems like we're walking down the same life, and yet he says, there's one path that's a lot narrower. There's a gate on it that's real narrow and tight. It's like, almost like the farther you go, the harder it gets. But don't give up, because walking down that path and going through that gate is the pathway to life.

Not just eternal life, like heaven thereafter after our earthly death, but it's the pathway that as we walk down it, we find that this is the life we were meant for. And so what Jesus is doing is he's showing these people that there are things in this world that people will go after, but that they're not for his followers to be part of. He's saying, live this way, not that way. Now, as we looked at in the Beatitude series, there's always these little, like, off ramps or these little places we're tempted to kind of give up. These places were tempted to say, well, maybe that part isn't for me, or maybe this life isn't for me because I can't do that.

Don't give up. You see, God is working through these things in your life to say, I have a plan for you. I have good things in store for you. That doesn't mean you'll never encounter difficulties or bad things, but it does mean that all the way through that, that God is working to make something good out of you. And so go through those times in life and trust God and say, God, I don't know what the end of this is, but I know I'm trusting you to get me through this and to show me how it is that I can live this christian life.

And so today we're going to be looking in Matthew, chapter five, verses 13 through 17, this is what most of us know as passage on the salt and light. And Jesus, speaking to his followers, says these, you are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled on by people. You are the light of the world, a city located on a hill cannot be hidden.

People do not light a lamp and put it under a basket or anything like that, but they put it on a lampstand and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before people so that they can see your good deeds and give honor to your father in heaven. Let's pray. God, we just thank you this day for the words of Christ. Father, we thank you that we can know that this life is for us, that we can know that Jesus is giving us words to live by so that we can have this as a guide, so that we can have this as a pattern, so we can set this as the foundation of our lives.

It's not in our power that we live this way, but it's in the power of Christ living in us and through us that we can live out these words in this life that he has called us to. God, may we be changed from the inside out. And, Lord, I pray that if there's anybody here who doesn't know you as their personal lord and their savior, that they would take this day to start saying, God, how is it that I can live for you? Forgive me of my sins. I want to walk with you.

I want to walk in this new life, create a new life in them. Lord, I know that that's your will. You said you're not willing that any should perish, but that all would come to everlasting life. And so, Lord, I pray for that today. God, I pray for those who have received you.

Maybe they've been walking in salvation for a number of years or even decades, and yet they need to know where it is you've called them to serve in this world, who you've called them to reach out to, to be that shining light in front of them. And so, God, I just pray that you would show us each one, how to live for you today. In light of this word, we pray in Christ's name, amen.

Interestingly, salt is the only rock that humans eat, as far as I know. Like, maybe somebody's tried something else, but I don't think they've been too successful. You can probably pass some small pebbles, but they're not going to do anything for your body. I've heard people used to be really poor and they would make stone soup. I think that was just to put a big rock in the bottom of the pot and make it look like it was more full so people weren't depressed.

I really don't know about that. I didn't live in those days. But salt is the only rock that humans consume. Salt is interesting. And if you don't think so right now, if you're like, no, I just eat a lot of it when I go to McDonald's, you know, because if you didn't know that, if you go to McDonald's, you just already, it's like they hit it with you with a little blaster at the drive thru.

I don't know if you know that. It's just shooting salt at you so you're conditioned for it because they put more salt on their food than anybody ever should consume. I had a friend who was in, my old mentor would add a packet of salt to a big Mac, and I'm like, I think you're dying right now. Like, you're just. It's over for you, sir.

But salt, really, here's the problem. We use salt as a seasoning. And if you've been using salt to season your food, I gotta be honest, you're doing it wrong. Salt is not a seasoning agent. Salt, what it does is it actually pulls out the flavoring that's in the other flavors of your food.

You should be using other spices in most food, unless it's a steak, it's just salt and pepper, then, okay, you can just do salt and pepper and grill it or cook it on a pan, I don't care. But if you're not just using salt and pepper, you probably just bought a bad steak. You know, you need to buy better meat, and then you'll realize, I don't need to add anything more than salt and pepper. But that's just my opinion. So here's the thing.

Salt, what it's doing is, in cooking now, it can do many different things as far as changing how the food actually cooks. But what salt is doing is it's enhancing the other flavors in the food. It's enhancing the seasoning that's there or the natural flavors that are in the food. I actually learned this week as I was researching about salt, and you're going to find why all this is so interesting and important. I was watching this, this woman that's a chef, and she has a book and a series on Netflix called salt, acid, fat, and heat, or some order of that.

And she says, if you can master those four components, you can cook or bake just about anything. Heat, salt, acid, and fat. Everything's based off of those. There's might be some other things, but that's what you have to learn those things, and then you can build on top of it. She cooked two pans of the same vegetables, the same method, but with one, she added salt at the beginning, and with one, she added it at the end, and it changed the way the vegetables cooked, because one of them, it actually pulled the moisture out of them, and they just got mushy and nasty.

And I realized that's what I do wrong when I'm cooking, like zucchini or squash or something like that. In the pan is I'm adding salt at the beginning, but the other ones were nice and crispy and browned a little bit. And she just seasoned them with salt at the end to pull some of the flavors out of them. And they were beautiful and wonderful. And so it depends on what you want to do with those techniques, but what salt is doing is it's enhancing the flavor of the food and the other spices and seasonings that you might add to it.

Salt also is necessary in our bodies. Now, how many people have been to a doctor that told you your salt intake was too high, too much sodium in your diet? Anybody? They're like, hey, you got to cut back on that. I think it's one of their favorite things to do.

But I also found some doctors online that were saying that a lot of that is incorrect. Your body will tell you when you need more salt. I think your body will tell you when it's deficient on many things, like when you get that dry throat and you need a water, you know, you're already dehydrated. Probably you should have been drinking it hours ago, but. Or maybe, like, stop drinking so much, like coffee or tea and incorporate a little water.

So, anyway, I just thought of that. So, so, you know, your body will tell you these things, and they're saying sometimes you can actually, you know, we might actually need more salt than what we're consuming, because what salt does in a body is it helps with muscular control. Those of you who have maybe exerted yourself too much outdoors at some point on a hot day and you sweated a lot, you start having muscle cramps and things not working right, and you go to pick something up and you drop it, because you just don't have that muscular control. That's why we have sports drinks and things that help to not only replenish electrolytes, but the salts in our body, because the salt helps maintain the proper fluid balance in our body. Of course, your blood actually has salts in it.

You've been to a doctor, perhaps, and needed fluids, and you get an iv drip that has a solution of salt and water, a sodium drip, because your body needs those fluids. Salts are also useful in neurotransmission. In other words, if you've really been worn out and sweated too much, and you say, my brain just isn't working, there's a reason why I. You're probably deficient in salts from sweating it out so much, and the neurotransmission is not happening in your mind. So these are very interesting things that we see about that.

You also know, probably, that salt draws or attracts moisture. If you've been to a lot of restaurants that have maybe subpar air conditioning settings, they always end up adding rice to their salt so that it doesn't cake up and get moisture in the little salt shaker. The salt draws moisture, it attracts moisture. It'll kill a slug that way. My daughter wanted to add salt to a slug because she'd heard about that, and I said, well, that's probably one of the meanest things you can do to a slug, because how would you like it if the 70% of your body that's made up of water was just sucked out of you?

You wouldn't like that too much? She says, oh, no, I don't want to do that. I said, okay, cool. Smash it with a brick. You know, like, that's how you kill slugs.

I did that the other day. I was laying down some little paver bricks at my parents house, and there was a slug on. I was like, oh. And I smashed it, and it squirted me. So that was bad.

That was really gross. Don't do that. But if you put salt down on the ground, for instance, it will, you know, it'll kill what's growing there. It'll kill the grass, this. Because what the salt does is as it attracts moisture, the plants are supposed to be able to attract moisture into their roots and draw them up into the plant.

But if the concentration of salt or salinity in the soil is too high, the plant won't be able to draw it up into itself, because it's like, salt is like a water magnet, and it's pulling the water to the soil, and the plant can't pull it up into the plant. Fertilizers will have salts in them as part of what helps balance the fertilizer out, and also because the plants need that salt content from the fertilizer to help the plant have a higher salt content than the soil and draw the moisture into the plant. I used to do a lot of plant health stuff in a former job. I'm sorry. I promised you I wouldn't nerd out too much on that.

But the point is, if you apply too much fertilizer, you're going to kill the plants. It's not good. I also found that out the hard way when I tipped over my fertilizer spreader one time, and I tried to clean up 80 pounds of fertilizer. But there was a big dead spot in that customer's yard for a long time. And I'm pretty sure we gave them free lawn care for the rest of the season on that modern day, our salt.

We use salt for a lot of different things, industrial type purposes. You've probably been in a pool at some point that had salt water in it instead of chlorine. Chlorinated water, it helps with that. It's used to melt ice on roads and snow, because what it does is it lowers the freezing point of water. So in other words, water freezes at 32 fahrenheit, but instead, salt gets it down to about five degrees fahrenheit.

And so the ice will melt then, because it lowers the freezing point of water. Salt is used on things like cleaning the filters. In a water softening system, you don't have a salt water in your house. You have a water softener, and then the salt is used to rinse out the filters and keep it clear. Chlorine is made from an electrolysis system that creates chlorine out of salt.

Tom, sitting there in the back taking notes, uses that, like, probably every day. He's just a chlorine junkie, man. He's the king of chlorine, as it turns out. He has a business doing cleaning and pressure washing. But a lot of times, you don't need pressure, you need chlorine because it's going to actually kill the bacteria that it's on.

And so all these things are made from salt. They put chlorine in our water pipes to help keep them clean and clear and kill the bacteria that might want to otherwise grow in our pipes. And so between all these things and the sports drinks or the iv bags, we use a saline or a salt solution for a lot of different things in our lives. It's not just that little girl with the umbrella on the Morton shaker that we use salt for seasoning our food. I'm not even going to get into sea salt versus, like, the nacl sodium that we, that we have in the Morton's thing on your salt shakers versus, like, mined salt from in the ground.

We're not going to get into all that stuff. I'm not going to go too crazy. But salt did have its ancient uses in times of antiquity. Salt was the refrigerator. I mean, we put meats and things like that in our refrigerator in order to preserve them and keep them for a while.

They didn't have that. So what they would do is they would heavily salt everything that they wanted to keep for a long period of time. And if you were somebody that lived in a place where they weren't raising farm animals for slaughter and for food, or you weren't near a body of water and you wanted fish, your fish was probably a salted fish. Or that meat was salted in order to transport it at pretty much an ox cart pace, you know, a few miles an hour over land to get to your particular village or city where you lived. And so you were eating salted meats and fish, most likely.

In fact, they use salt for mummification so that the corpse of, you know, Egyptians and other people that might have practiced that would last a long time just be really dried out. Because what the salt does is it pulls the moisture out of that body or the meat itself, and it keeps bacteria from growing on it and breaking it down. And that's why we would salt our foods. I learned that when I moved to Tennessee quite a few years back now, and I saw these little roadside stands, and they would have these things hanging, and it said, country hamst. And I finally asked somebody, I said, what's a country ham?

And they said, well, it's salt cured meat. I was like, okay, and why isn't it in a refrigerator? And the guy just kind of chuckled like, you don't know what you're talking about, do you? And I said, no, that's why I'm asking you. You know, like, I don't know what I'm talking about.

And so it's didn't need refrigeration. It was a salt cured ham that could just hang out there until you're ready to hack some of it off and eat it. I guess if you've ever gone to cracker barrel and you're getting one of those sampler breakfasts, and they say, if you want country ham or city ham, I don't know why it's gotta be called city Ham. It's just not salty ham. You know, like, I don't want to die from over intake of sodium today.

Ham that's too big for the menu. So city ham or country ham? And I feel like in the south, they're testing you, and they say that you're like, country ham. You know, like, you don't want to admit that you want the city ham. Cause it's a little healthier in the south.

They don't really care if their food's gonna kill you, you're gonna have a good time getting there. You know, they said, well, you know, I eat that ham, and I'm like, good heavens. Like, that's just. It felt like my mouth was dry. It pulled all the moisture right out.

That's a lot of salt in that. But they would use this in ancient times for things such as this. They also incorporated salt into manure piles, just like we put it in our fertilizers, because it would help preserve some of the nutrients the soil needed from that manure as it was composting. And so they would add salt to their manure piles. If you were reading in one of the other gospels, such as Luke, it includes a couple additional words of Jesus where he says, if the salt loses its saltiness, it's not even good to throw on the manure pile.

A pastor and author, Francis Chan had a pretty funny thing about this. He said, if you want a visual, it's like when Jesus says, you're the salt of the world, but if you've lost your saltiness, you're not even good enough to stand on top of a manure pile. Like, you climb on top of it, and a farmer's like, hey, you're ruining my manure pile. Get off of that. You know?

And it's just. It's like, wow, I never thought of it like that. But that's what Jesus is kind of saying. The impact on salt has been quite widespread throughout history. I mean, there are trade routes that have been built.

Like, Venice built a trading empire just based on their salt trade that they had. India fought for british independence because of a tax on salt. And that was actually not just tea that the Americans were a little bit mad about. There was. They were a little upset, too, about attacks on salt that we had from the british empire.

And so we just told them we had enough. And for some reason, we still seem to care about their monarch family, the royal family. And I'm like, I haven't had to care since 1776, to be honest. You know, I don't know why some of you guys are so enthralled with them. That's a good joke.

Come on, guys. Anyway, words such as sausage, salad, and salary all come from the same root word as salt. Yeah, they used to dip greens in salt water to preserve them, too. And now we just eat salads without all that extra sodium added. But that was a way for them to preserve greens because they didn't necessarily have the canning techniques and things that we do.

So, yes, salad even comes from the same root word as salt. Bet you didn't know that salt was originally harvested from salts in seawater and things like that. So if you don't live near a coast, you're probably going to need somebody trading salt or carrying salt in transit to you to where you live. So the big question is, with all that stuff about salt, why did Jesus tell his followers that they were the salt of the earth? Like, I didn't have to say all that stuff to get to that question.

I just wanted to get you thinking about that and then drop that on you and say this. Why in the world would Jesus say, you are the salt of the earth? And on top of that, have you ever. Have you ever gotten a shake or salt and said, ah, this salt's really turned bad sitting up here in the cabinet? No, you've never gotten salt that went old.

Now, I have had some spices in my cabinet that I promise you I've had for over a decade. I just didn't use them that much. And I'll go to use some of them and I'll say, I don't ever remember buying this ever. You know, I wonder if it's still good. Like, is it the least bit potent?

And probably not at all. There are some people that say, oh, I use fresh spices. I'm like, well, I don't have a spice dealer, so, you know, I don't know where to get them, but I go to the grocery store and I get them from there. Actually, our groceries, we buy them from Kroger with an app on our phone, and they deliver them to our front door. So that's pretty cool.

And we save a lot of money and get fuel rewards points at shell. That's just a free plug for Kroger. I'm just telling you, we really happy with. It has nothing to do with the message. But salt.

Salt was used. You got to think, if Jesus said this to his followers, why they heard it differently than we probably do. Like, we've got all of our industrial and commercial uses and cooking uses for salt today. They had their uses for it back then, but they must have had a different viewpoint of it than we do. Because if you try to look up commentaries and preachers and, man, we say a lot of dumb stuff sometimes.

And I try to look at some of it, and I'm like, you guys missed the point, I think. But I'm still trying to figure out what the point is. So I'm studying all this stuff, and I'm like, there has to be something else. The people that Jesus was talking to, they heard something different than we do when he talked about salt. You see, in the Old Testament, salt was used in sacrifices.

Yeah, I hadn't known that. And I've read it, I've talked about it. We've taught it through a class that we had on Wednesdays for quite a long time. We talked about all the old Testament laws, and I forgot this. They were supposed to add salt to their grain offerings.

They were supposed to add salt to their meat offerings that they gave to God in Leviticus 213. I know you're so excited to look that up. Later. In Leviticus 213, God told them that all grain offerings should be salted. Later on in Ezekiel, he had said, hey, you were supposed to be throwing salt on the meat that you bring before me.

He sold them in numbers 1819 to add salt to their offerings as well. And there he called it an everlasting covenant of salt. What? Now I feel, and I'm studying this. I'm getting deeper and deeper into stuff that I don't understand, and I don't know if I need to really care this much.

And you're thinking the same thing right now. You're like, Pastor Nick, where are we going with this? I'm glad you're thinking that. You need to be thinking that. It's important, though.

Jesus said this as he's closed out his beatitudes and opens up the next part of his message, and he's trying to tell you that you need to be salt, not that you need to be. You are salt. And when he talks about this everlasting covenant of salt, he also talks about it with King David and his sons. He says that there will be, they will always have one of the sons of David on the throne in Judah. And that is an everlasting covenant of salt that I have with them.

Start thinking about it, start praying about it. I started looking about it. I started looking it up, and I'm like, what in the world does a covenant of salt mean? Because it doesn't say God doesn't tell us in those scriptures. Hey, and by the way, for you people later that don't really trade in salt or is pretty cheap, to go just to the store and pick up some salt, you know, or you use it for industrial purposes, you're not really going to be thinking about this.

But you see, salt in its natural form doesn't go away. It doesn't become unsalty. And that's the point when Jesus says, if the salt loses its saltiness, it's no longer useful for anything. You can't put it on manure. You can't sprinkle it on a path.

If you wanted to kill the grass there, because before roundup and all this stuff that we spray that's giving us cancer, they could just use natural things like salt to put out there. And Liz is saying, yeah, I've been telling you that for years, like dish soap and salt and ammonia will put it down and it'll take care of it, you know, and so it's like they would do these natural things. But Jesus is talking to us, and he wants us to understand what they knew, what they understood. Salt doesn't just go bad. There never becomes a time where salt is unuseful, even in a manure pile or on a trail to kill the grass.

The point is, it doesn't go bad. Salt doesn't stop being salty. And so what he's telling us is when he says, if the salt loses its saltiness, they would have been like, but it doesn't. Can you believe that after all this study, I was trying to find the answer to that question, and it slapped me upside the face. None of those other things matter.

The thing is, I'm trying to find the answer is, how does salt go unsalty? The point is, it doesn't. Jesus is saying, if you're one of my followers, you can't just turn it off sometimes. You can't just sometime become unsalty and then resalt yourself up again. You can't just, at one point, go to a store and get upset with the person, or you can't just answer the door and be upset.

I almost slipped up earlier this week. I was sitting there. I was actually working on the sermon. I was sitting at the little counter on a stool right by the door, and I'd had the front door open. It was just the glass storm door closed, and.

And somebody knocked on the door, and I went up to it, and I opened it, and he's wearing a shirt. He was a salesman. And I just said, no, we're good. Like, I didn't say, hey, how are you? Or, oh, man, it looks like, sorry, you're sweating.

Because I didn't have, like, bottles of water in the fridge or anything to give him something nice cold to drink. But I didn't say anything nice and pleasant. I just said, no, we're good, thanks. He's like, you don't even know what I'm here for. I was like, well, I saw your shirt.

I can pretty much guess you're trying to sell me a service. We're good. And then actually, he talked to me for a minute, and I kind of softened up, and it turns out I might actually want to buy his services. You know, like, oh, okay, you can save us a lot of money on our Internet, it sounds like. But you can't just be salt 1 minute and then worldly the next.

You can't. You can't get salty with people and then be the salt of the earth. Does that help? Okay, we'll work on that. So Jesus talks about this, and he expects that we should understand that if we are salt, we're always going to be salt.

Like, we're going to be the thing that naturally pulls out the goodness of what God has placed in this earth. See, this creation that he has made is good. The world we live in is good. So many of the people in this world are evil. And our job, our purpose, our role as the salt of this earth is to pull out the good things that are here, to show the goodness that God has built into it, and to say, God loves you.

Look at everything good about this place. That is the job of salt, is to create the proper balance, to help make sure that things are functioning right in the creation of God. And so then we look at what Jesus continues to say, because he says that you are a light on a hill, you're a light on a hill. And if there's a city that's up on a hill and everybody lights their lamps because they didn't just turn on light switches, but if they turn on all the lights, they light all the lamps at night, everyone can see that city. In wartimes, like in world War two, they would have laws where nobody could turn on the lights.

Or if you had lights on, you had to have blackout window shades. You couldn't allow any lights in the city because it becomes a target for the invading enemy to drop bombs from their airplanes. You see, a light on a hill cannot be hidden. There's nothing that is unseen about a city built on a hill. It's visible from all around.

And the rest of the sermon, Jesus, what he's doing is he's talking about this idea of what the people of God, his followers, are supposed to live as the people of light. Interestingly enough, we've been talking about salt covenants and salt being an everlasting thing that doesn't ever spoil and what he had said was, I'm setting a covenant with my people, the chosen people of Israel, to be my servants. And he gave them a job to do. And he says, I'm setting up a salt covenant. I want you to use salt on your sacrifices, not because they need salt, but because that'll be a reminder that as you are giving your offerings to me, that I am calling you to live out my covenant in perpetuity forever.

But when Jesus came to this earth, it was partially because the children of Israel, the chosen people of God, had failed to live out their bargain, their side of the covenant. They had failed to do the things God had called them to do, namely, to be his priests throughout the whole world. In other words, to be the light in the world. They were supposed to be the ones that showed the nature and love of God to all people. And they had failed to do this.

They weren't even good at keeping the first commandment about God, saying, I am the Lord your God. Don't bring any other gods before me. They couldn't even get that one right, much less show the world who God is. And so Jesus, when he comes, what he's doing is he's saying, I am teaching you the way of life. For my followers.

We might call them christians or followers of Jesus, whatever you want to call them. He is showing them the way to live. And he's saying, you're like a city that's on a hill that can't be closed out, that can't be done away with. And there's no way that a light can get blocked out except by covering over it. In other words, you can't just cover up your light and just kind of navigate through the world and act like you don't know Jesus denying him like Peter did.

Your light is visible at all times, and the light shines in the darkness. Darkness can't stop light. Only covering it with a basket or a bowl of some kind will do that. The point is, if salt had such an impact on the world, shouldn't we as well? If salt impacted trade routes and built economies and nations and caused nations to want to fight, fight for their independence because of the taxation on salt, if roman soldiers, allegedly, depending on who you get your sources from, were paid in salt at times for their salary, which is where salary, the word comes from.

If that's true, if salt had that big of an importance, shouldn't we, shouldn't we have that much of an impact on our world? Just as light is unstoppable, just as darkness can't stop light. Shouldn't the followers of Jesus be an unstoppable force to show the good of God's reign and rule in this earth? You see, we see darkness all around us. But where there is darkness, we're supposed to be the light that's shining.

And like a city on a hill, people need to see that as a beacon of hope. When they look at the church, they need to not just think, well, that's an old place that's out of touch and doesn't understand me. Or a place that judges me. They need to see it as a beacon of hope to know that in that place they can connect with the hope of life, Jesus Christ. So we need to be the cleansing salt and the bright light that this world needs.

And now, before Pastor Kendall comes up, there's just a little poem that my daughter. I recorded her saying that I think she learned in school. Cause I didn't teach it, but she memorized it. I had no idea she'd done this. And she's gonna talk a little bit about light.

Here's my poem. The sun is like a golden lamp that sign so bright and tall no one can turn it off and on or blow it out at all high in the sky it keeps me warm and as strange as this may be a thousand sunshine vitamins slip right inside of me but God set forth a brighter light that blinded eyes might see he sent his son to my dark heart oh, may he shine through me.