Grace For Your Day December 27

According to the Chamber of Commerce’s website, the most popular New Year’s resolutions from last year are to eat healthy, get more exercise, and save money. The same website also said that 84 percent of the people who made those resolutions will abandon them by January 19. In other words, they will lose interest in them after only a few weeks of establishing them which is tragic because the New Year is a good time to evaluate your priorities. It provides you with a unique opportunity to reflect on your life and change things that need adjustment.  

Most people do this in the physical realm but Christians should do it spiritually as well. The church should use a time like this in order to remind itself of what is truly important in life. With that in mind, Matthew 5:13-16 says:
This passage is a good reminder of what it means to be a Christian because Jesus says that, if you follow Him, you are the “salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” In other words,  it is not your job to escape the world but to enlighten it. It is not your calling to run away from the culture but to put salt in it. 

In fact, the picture of salt here is a very good one because salt was one of the most precious commodities in the ancient world. It was used in order to provide:

• taste for your diet
• preservation for your food
• antiseptic for your wounds
• herbicide for a field that was overgrown with weeds

Jesus said that His followers would have a similar impact on society because they would influence it for good. They would remind a lost and dying world that God is real. 

I mention this because some Christians get this backwards today. They believe that they should abandon the world because it is so bad. They think that Jesus wants them to flee from it in order to go somewhere that is safe. However, that is not what Jesus told us to do in this passage. As He was preaching to a group of Jews who lived in the wicked Roman Empire, He reminded them that God was calling them to let their light shine among the darkness of the culture so they could help change it which is what we are going to talk about this week at Grace Fellowship Church.

This Sunday, I am going to give our church a New Year’s Resolution and that is to remember that you are the salt of the earth. You are not becoming the salt. You already are the salt. You are not striving to be the light. Jesus has already made you the light. You just need to let others see it. You need to take the Gospel with you to work or school or the grocery store so that they can observe the difference in you.

Please join us as we talk about that this weekend at Grace. The service will begin at 9:30 and it will be live-streamed on our You Tube Channel for all those who cannot make it in person.

- Jeremy Cagle