Matthew 5, 1 to 16. The Sermon on the Mount. Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. 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. This is the word of the Lord. There's this interesting place in First Chronicles, in the Old Testament, where the tribes and the clans of Israel are getting ready to go to war. In the context, Samuel the prophet has already anointed David king. And the elders of Israel have already come, and the second time they've anointed him king. They've recognized you are the one that God has chosen to lead our people, our nation, so to speak. And there's just one problem, and that is that King Saul, the man who came right before David, is not willing to step aside. So he's living in rebellion to God and he's saying, I'm not abdicating the throne. I'm not willing to walk away. And so these mighty men of valor are coming together from each tribe and they're saying, okay, we're going to go together and we're going to confront King Saul and say, it's time to go. God has anointed David in your place. And so. You're reading through 1 Chronicles 12, and it's in the middle of these lists of these men of Judah are coming, and the Simeonites are coming, and the Benjaminites are coming, and the Ephraimites are coming, and all the rest. And then in verse 32, we read this, of Issachar, that's one of the 12 tribes, men who had understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do. And I think it's a very interesting phrase to insert a compliment kind of into the middle of just a list of tribes and numbers of people who are coming potentially to fight, to say men who had understanding of the times to know what the people of God were meant to do. There's a couple interesting words in here where what's translated had understanding is actually two different Hebrew words for knowledge that when you put it together, it means something like they recognized with great discernment. what they were to do, what God was calling them to do, and it says, because they understood the times. The times is a word for, they understood events, they understood circumstances, they understood a proper, suitable time or season for something. And I pause there and I think, you know, Lord, are we people that in our own age have this kind of knowledge, this kind of wisdom, this kind of discernment to look at what's going on in our times and to say, we know what God wants us to do, or we know the kinds of things that are pleasing to God because we're walking in wisdom. A lot of Christians just drift along with culture and kind of where the cultural trends are going, you often see believers just swept along either in pace or maybe even just a few months or years or trends behind the world, but just following in the path of the world. Many believers don't understand what time it is, so to speak. They don't have an awareness of here's what's going on. I think even believers in our culture, by and large, are discipled by a couple key sources. Most attend public school, so they're discipled by public school. They're discipled by mass media, and they're discipled by social media, especially through their peer groups that they follow. And outside of that, and maybe a few hours in church a week, there isn't a lot of intentional discipleship that pulls you or that trains you in a different worldview altogether than just what everyone believes. And part of my vision for this year is like, I want our family here as a church to be wise. I want us to be discerning. I want us as we're interacting with our peers for people to think that's someone's opinion that you should get because they are not just going with the flow and they're not just against the flow just to be against the flow, but they're truly wise. They're truly discerning. They understand what time it is. They understand how to respond to cultural trends and current events in a way that honors God and that reflects the heart and mind of Jesus. So I want to just pause and ask, what is our culture like? Because if we're thinking strategically about a Christian response to culture, it's important to know what is our culture like right now. And if I just asked you, what are some defining characteristics of our culture right now? And each of you could think of different things to say, our culture really values a few particular things right now. And I know we're stereotyping, we're painting with a broad brush, because you would say, I can find exceptions. I find people in groups that don't do that stuff. But again, I've done a chunk of reading from sociology, anthropology, and theology, and there are six things that keep popping up that I want to share. It's kind of six attributes of our culture, and this is just a point-in-time snapshot to say right now our culture is, number one, polarized and partisan. Okay, the idea of polarized, and you see this everywhere you go, or if you turn on the news, or if you even look at social media, how incredibly divided our country and our culture are. And it's not just any longer this, I look over at a different political party or I look at a different ideology and think they're not as right as I am or as we are. There's almost like a demonization of the other side now. Like to have a sitting president say, if you elect the other person, that is the end of democracy as we know it. Democracy will be done if you vote for the other party. And both parties are saying that of each other now. Not just that we disagree with our approach to public policy, but literally, if you elect the other party, democracy is dead. This 250 year experiment of the United States, it's over. That's very polarized. The idea of partisan, if you've heard this word and you don't know what it means, it's the idea of being strongly prejudiced. in favor of your own party, in favor of your own ideology, in favor of your own ideas. It's the idea of almost blindly accepting everything that's coming from your side, your perspective, so to speak. And you probably know this as well, that much of culture just lives in these echo chambers, where we surround ourselves with people who are saying the things that we already believe. By the way, do you know internet algorithms are written this way, where obviously the designers of the different platforms, they want you to stay on their platform so their advertisers make money, so that their advertisers spend money with them, so they feed you the kind of stuff that keeps you clicking on their site. And that stuff that keeps you clicking on their site, unfortunately, is usually very inflammatory stuff. We have an outrage culture that keeps you clicking. And then you go to do an internet search based on all the stuff that you have been looking at, and it's feeding you the kind of stuff that you already want to hear, and it's reinforcing. existing beliefs, existing priorities. There's a confirmation bias that's going on, and we get more and more polarized and more and more partisan as our news cycle reinforces two entirely different views of our world, or three or four or five entirely different views of our world. But most sociologists would look at this and agree that our culture right now is very polarized, very partisan. They would agree, number two, that our culture is increasingly anti-authority. Part of this is a neo-Marxism that's become very popular in the United States. The idea of neo-Marxism is we look at people with authority and we say, people with authority have power. People with power dominate and control and oppress. And domination and control and oppression are bad, so we're against that. So we're against authority. And you see more and more people and more and more groups just blatantly, openly rebelling against any authority simply because that's an authority. And they use what little agency they have to disrupt and to push back, to rebel against authority. You see that in schools, you see that in broader culture. A third key characteristic of our current culture is that it's sentimental. And I don't mean sentimental as in nostalgic, like I just want to watch the notebook and have a good cry. Sentimental here is the idea of placing a supreme value on feelings over thought and reason. We are a post-enlightenment culture, but the further we go, the more we shift from that enlightenment kind of thinking, the empirical kind of thinking, to a feelings-driven way of processing our world. This is where you'll often hear people today talk about, like, my truth, as if you have a truth that's different than the truth. But people will say, well, my subjective experience of my world is my truth. It's something called standpoint epistemology. I'd love to teach whole classes on some of this stuff. But the idea of standpoint epistemology is just like where I stand and the way I view my world, that's how I process truth according to my subjective thinking. Now, what I see, my lived experience, it becomes real to me. And you'll hear stuff like that. Well, it's real to me. even if it's not real. And in the realm of ethics, in the realm of morals, sometimes even in the realm of law, empathy, as it's so called, carries more weight than just saying what is good, what is right, what is true, what is just. And you'll have judges and lawmakers and juries and district attorneys who just look at something and they may say, I know the law, but I feel more empathy for this group and their experience. And so there's a shifting away from what is objectively true and right and good to, well, I just feel empathy and I feel more empathy or I feel more sympathy toward a particular side and we're doing justice on the basis of empathy instead of on the basis of law or what we think of as like an absolute truth that's outside of ourselves. You even see this sentimentality increasingly applied to the realm of science. where someone will say, you know, biology is an empirical thing. It's a thing you can study. It's a thing that's true or false. But someone's feeling like, I feel like a man trapped in a woman's body, or I feel like something other than the gender that I actually am. And people would say, well, What's important is how you feel about it. What's important is not that that is a living child in the womb. What's important is how you feel about it. So a lot of our world is being processed just through a subjective personal experience, a feeling, an emotion, an empathy, so-called, rather than through reason and through truth and through longstanding definitions of goodness. A fourth quality of our culture is therapeutic victimhood. And I want to begin this one by saying it should be clear there are actual victims in society and we should care deeply about them. When someone is the victim of a crime or the victim of an accident or circumstances or something, Christians should be quick to be the first to bring the justice and the mercy of God to victims. But the language and the ideology of victimhood is much more pervasive than simply seeing real victims. And you see this when no one is personally responsible for their own choices or their own sin or their own criminal activity anymore. It's always like, I have father wounds and so my parents are to blame, or my ex-spouse is to blame, or a former boss is to blame, or this group of people back here that did these things, like they're to blame. And the therapeutic part of this means that victim has become our model for processing through emotional, psychological, and even spiritual healing. The idea is you can go to psychology and as someone's helping you heal and grow and mature and work through very difficult circumstances, it's often processed through this lens of, well, how many layers of people hurt you? How many layers of victimhood status can you claim? And there's this giant master spreadsheet of grievances, and the more boxes you can check and the more layers of grievances you have, you get automatic street cred for being a multi-layered victim versus a single-layered victim. And again, there are very real victims, and actually one of the things that should be distressing to those who love truth and goodness is often we're passing over real victims that we should be investing in and caring for as a church because the victimhood language has become so pervasive it's hard to determine anymore who the real victims are. It's just pervasive. A couple more here, our society is often described fifthly as being secular. And you can see different all kinds of polls and surveys that have been done that fewer and fewer people identify, not only as Christian, but fewer and fewer people identify as really having any faith system at all. There is a distancing from God, from traditional ethics, morals, from an idea of eternity and eternal consequences, from organized religion. And I could make the argument that secularism is itself a religion, but that's not my point here. My point is that society increasingly lives lives disconnected from God. That's simply the idea of secular. God's character, God's law, God's promises are further and further culturally from what people discuss and build their lives around. And that's the idea of secularism. And then one more, our society is profane and sensual. And the idea of something being profane is simply that nothing's sacred anymore. Human life is not sacred to our culture. Marriage is not sacred to our culture. Gender isn't sacred to our culture. Sexuality isn't sacred to our culture. We are sensual. We are lascivious. We are a promiscuous culture. And ironically, the flesh is everything to our culture. And simultaneously, the flesh is nothing to our culture, rather than having a real view of like the beauty and the value even of the physical flesh that God has given and the covenant relationships that God has given. So some of you have heard these verses from 2 Timothy 3, but Paul writes this. He tells us about this. He says, understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty for people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power, avoid such people. And we can step back and be like, Paul kind of understood. He did this social analysis and he's like, things are headed this direction as people turn from God and turn from his holiness and his love and his beauty and his goodness and embrace something altogether different and define those things on their own terms, okay? Now, that's not everything that could be said about our culture. And I know those are very negative things, but those are some big influential things that non-Christian sociologists and anthropologists look at our culture and describe it the way I just described it and say, these are huge trends that are setting the pace for our culture. And you need to know what time it is. You need to understand that that is our culture. You are not swimming in a neutral stream. We're just like, it could be good or bad. You need to recognize like some of these things are really, really corrosive and believers, followers of Jesus need to do something about that. And that leads me to the third question, which is how should Christians react to and interact with culture? Let me start by giving you some very common reactions and interactions of believers, and then come back to our text that Edith read for us this morning. So, common reactions and interactions first. One of the common reactions is simply to hang on to traditionalism or conservatism. By the way, I want you to kind of recognize what your own instinct is. So the idea of hanging on to traditionalism is you can sit there and objectively say, wow, things are changing really fast. And the morals and ethics and mores of our culture are changing really fast. And I was doing something this past week just to remind myself. and looking up official policy positions of the left as recently as 8 and 12 years ago, and looking, the left is not where they were 8 or 12 years ago, they are way further over to the left, and the, kind of the more progressive branch of the right is where the left was 8 years ago. And I had to remind myself, like, oh yeah, like, the things that these people are saying now, these people were saying the same things just eight, 10, 12 years ago, but now they've shifted. And you can see people kind of in dismay and kind of wringing their hands and being like, oh no, like culture's only headed one way and it's all progressive. And they're like, no, let's hang on to some of the traditional conservative values of the past. And I don't want to make that sound like that's all bad. A lot of the traditional things that some families, some individuals are getting back to now, like... Date someone of the opposite gender in a way that dignifies them and is holy and is pleasing to God. And if you can, get married and stay married and bear children and raise them up and teach them a work ethic and work hard and be honorable and be generous. I mean, some of these are traditional values and I'm not like, oh, that's crazy. I mean, they're good things. And there's a reason why many believers are trying to hang on to some of these things from the past or from kind of a traditional culture, because many of those things were healthy. Many of those things were good. And we needed the discernment to know biblically which things are good. Because the opposite side of that is many believers just adopt progressivism. And they think like the new institutions and the new values and the new customs are progress. They're new because they're better. They're better ideas and they're winning. And we recognize that they're winning because they're better ideas. And sometimes that's the case as well. Sometimes it is true that better ideas are coming along and we're improving things. And I'm not trying to throw all that out as if that's all wrong, but C.S. Lewis used the term chronological snobbery to refer to, you know, the ideas that we're having right now are probably the best ideas because why would we be having them if they weren't the best ideas? And we're just thinking like, what comes along that's new is replacement of something inferior. Sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not true. And again, we need biblical discernment to know which is which. By the way, you hear stuff like this all the time. Can you believe people used to think this way? Or have you heard this one? Make sure you don't end up on the wrong side of history. And they're saying, culture's going here. and you're gonna be scoffed at as a buffoon, as worse than just a traditionalist, but as a close-minded bigot if you continue to believe the things that you believe. That's this open, kind of thoughtless adoption of progressivism, when you just always say you're gonna be on the wrong side of history because culture's moving on. So many thoughtful people have this third response, which I'll just call winsomeness. The idea of winsomeness, which like some people I really look up to could be described this way, where it's like, you know, there's so much clash and there's so much anxiety and there's so much conflict going on in culture. We want to be known as gentle and gracious and thoughtful and reasonable. And when we open our mouths to speak, even the people that disagree with us and hate us are like, that was really reasonable. That was really well thought out. Like these people are processing things and there's a goodness to what they're saying, to what they're doing, even if I think they're completely wrong. There are cautions about winsomeness too. One of them simply being, who are you winsome toward? Because the moment that you're winsome to someone who is politically, ideologically way over here, and they think that you're being winsome, like gracious and kind and thoughtful, people over here are gonna be like, you're not being gracious or kind or thoughtful at all. You're just caving and giving them what they want to hear. So the reaction to that winsomeness then is a fourth position, which is combativeness. I've heard it more recently called, some people say, I just want to have a prophetic voice. You know, and they're thinking of like the Old Testament prophets who are very confrontational and like earnestly contending for the truth. And some people that are in that combative posture are like, look, so much of culture is so bad, we've got to take a stand and fight and fight everything. And I understand why people take that posture as well. But often it ends up coming across as just constantly angry, constantly argumentative, constantly sarcastic and caustic. And if you find yourself in that camp, you'll always see the good side of something to defend. If you don't find yourself in that camp, you're like, these are the people who are doing damage to the testimony of Christ in our culture, right? So this last one, which is, Again, these are not the only reactions, but these are five very popular ones. But this last one is like, the gospel is neither right nor left. Sometimes people critiquing it call it third way-ism. It's like, here's the way of the right, here's the way of the left, we're the third way. And we're kind of above the fray, we're above and outside the conflict, because we can We are the people who can properly evaluate both sides of every issue and then kind of choose this third way and kind of posture in the middle, you know, because we're libertarian or whatever. there's a wisdom to not just being that or that, but being able to identify the extremes, being able to identify, okay, that's good about that, and that's good about that, can we work together? What I've seen in practice is this has been probably two decades or more of this, the gospel isn't right or left, third way isn't, and by the way, the gospel is not right or left. So if you're hearing that, the gospel is not like, Jesus loves conservatives. And it's not Jesus loves liberals. So there's a truth to the gospel isn't catering to this. The gospel isn't catering to this. The gospel is the good news of Jesus. It's life unto salvation to anyone who believes him, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile, to the conservative and to the liberal. So there is a truth that the gospel is not that or that. Unfortunately, in a couple of decades of this practice, There's a very popular term now, punch right, coddle left. And what that looks like is many of these people in this third wayism find it very easy to lampoon and attack what's on their right, like those evangelicals or those fundamentalists over there, while kind of cuddling up to what's to the left of them. And this is very, very prominent Christian leaders have been accused of this because this is what they're doing. They find it, it's very easy to kind of attack your own party when they're to the right of you while saying like, we're not like them. But it's not going both ways. It's asymmetrical in our culture right now. Okay. I'm not pushing us into that either. Now, what I want to do is say, what if Jesus already gave us the model for how to react to culture and to interact with culture? And what if we can't actually improve upon what Jesus said? And that's why I go back to the first 16 verses of the Sermon on the Mount. And I think it's so important that that first verse begins, that Jesus is coming to his disciples. And we've just gone through a series of discipleship, so you know what a disciple is. It's someone who says, like, my faith is in Jesus, and I'm walking in the footsteps of rabbi, of master Jesus. and I'm apprenticing my life to his, I want my life to look like his. I want the dust of that rabbi to be all over me, where when people listen to me and they talk with me and they watch my life, what they see is a lot of Jesus. Okay? And notice that's who Jesus is talking to in this sermon. He's not saying, if you want to become a Christian, you should be a really good person in these ways. He's saying, okay, your followers, your believers, now let me describe the character of these disciples who are embodying my kingdom values, not the values of the world. And by the way, if you step back to Jesus' world, In the first century, with Roman occupation of Jewish people, you would find people who are very, very traditional and conservative, people who are very, very liberal. You would find the combative zealot types who are like, let's kill everyone and overthrow the whole thing and blow it up and be sarcastic about everything. And then you had like the Sadducee crowd that's like, well, no, let's be winsome because We have power in this society, and we want to be well thought of, and we want people to think that we're intelligent, we're processing things reasonably. So you had all these same parties and sects back when Jesus walked this earth. And he didn't say, be like them or be like them. He said, blessed are, and he names categories of people. And the first thing I want to say about a range of biblical reactions and interactions is, number one, Our reactions to our culture are and must be character dependent. Character dependent. Jesus isn't just throwing away verses 1 through 11. He's saying, as I look at my kingdom of people, they should be poor in spirit. They should be those who mourn. They should be the meek. They should be hungering and thirsting for righteousness. They should be merciful. They should be pure in heart. They should be peacemakers. They should be willing to be persecuted for righteousness' sake. which means they're doing right by God's standard even when it's very painful and difficult and there are consequences for standing with God in the midst of a culture that is not. Notice Jesus is not saying blessed are the abrasive, blessed are the sarcastic, blessed are the compromisers, blessed are the clever wordsmiths. He says blessed are these categories of people which is not like you go through and try to work on one of those. The idea is as you're connected to Christ, organically connected to Christ by faith, this is the kind of character that he's reproducing in you. Now imagine before we do anything, imagine we're just the kind of people that Jesus describes in verses one through 11. And as you go out to interact with your culture, again, you're not necessarily thinking of practicing something specific, you simply are poor in spirit and meek and hungering and thirsting after righteousness. You simply are a peacemaker by character. That's what I mean when I say our influence is character dependent. That's really reinforced when Jesus goes on to talk about salt and light and a city set on a hill. Because you think of salt, you're like, what does salt do? And I'll get into that in just a second. But it's not like, salt is not sitting there thinking like, I need to do certain things. It's just salt. And when salt is salt, it has certain impacts. And the light is not like, I need to go be light-like. It's like, no, just by virtue of the fact that it is light. So our emphasis is on being overdoing. We need to be the people that Jesus has transformed and renewed our identity to make us people who are salt and light in a city set on a hill. and we need to be authentic to our God-given identity. And the biggest and a huge part of how we make an impact on our world that looks like Jesus is simply we go into our world being true and authentic to the identity that he called us to live. I want you to know, secondly, our interactions are not only character dependent, they are collective. So as you're looking at verses one through 11 again, notice how many times he says, they and theirs. So he's not talking about an individual and saying, you go and individually pursue these values or these attributes. He's saying, collectively, we are these things in Christ. And you think about, again, those three metaphors of salt and light and a city. You know, salt is not a grain. Like, salt works by having lots of salt. It's a collective. And light is not like one photon, it is lots of photons bundled together, shining this light. And a city is not one citizen, it is many citizens doing life together, showing our city, we are a different kind of city. And the way that we're doing relationships with one another and with outsiders is a different kind of citizenship. than the citizenship of the world. So I don't want you to just think of like, how do I go out on my own this week and have this impact on my society? But we're thinking, how do we as a community of faith, as a collective, bearing the image of Christ, have certain kinds of positive influences on our culture together? Thirdly, I want you to note positively from this Sermon on the Mount that our interactions with the world, with our culture, are anti-corrosive. Anti-corrosive. I mean, why did he pick salt and light? Because they're two of the most anti-corrosive things in the ancient world. And you think of salt today, and you probably think of the salt shaker or maybe a salt grinder or something, and you think of seasoning your food. Like, put a little bit of salt on, and it brings out the other flavors that are there, right? Well, back then, they're not thinking like, we should just barely season our food with salt. They're thinking we should rub copious amounts of salt on things that we want to preserve, like raw meat. Because before the days of refrigeration, how did they keep things from spoiling? Salt was a preservative. And that's really what Jesus is saying, is not like, put a little bit of salt on culture and then it really pops, right? No, he's like, rub the culture of Jesus on culture because culture is headed a certain direction. And it's not just left, it's headed to sins of the right. It's headed to sins of neutrality when you should not be neutral. And Jesus is saying, you, as you embody my character, you are stemming the tide of that corruption and that corrosion and that putrefaction and profanity of everything. Light, you think of the anti-corrosive properties of light. You know, the sun gets rid of all kinds of like literal germs, corrosion, corruption. And when light shines on things and exposes things, that corruption has to go somewhere else. And you just look at your life that if we are in lockstep with our culture, whatever that subculture is that we wanna be in lockstep with, how are we stemming the tide of the corrosion of culture if we're just like culture? And that's what Jesus is saying here when he says, if salt has lost its saltiness, how is it going to be effective? In other words, if you don't embody a distinct character as you go in, How are you making the difference that salt is intended to make? You might as well just throw it out and trample it underfoot because it's worthless. It doesn't stem the tide of corruption. It doesn't preserve goodness and truth and beauty. Fourthly, and this final sub point here under this point is our interactions are corrective. Okay, light first exposes what's in the darkness and then it corrects it. And by the way, I don't want us to think of only exposing what's evil. We do this thing with our children where You know, the parental thing of like, we always catch you doing something wrong and then there's discipline and there's correction. Well, we try to do the other thing. Like when the light shines in and it's like, oh, you were practicing piano or this past week, like one of our boys was being really kind and selfless to the other one. And Marty's like, hey, you know what? I saw that. I heard that from the other room. that you are putting someone else's needs ahead of your own. So the idea of like light just shines and it sees whatever it sees, and we should be both exposing the darkness to be a corrective, but also exposing what's good and saying, more people need to know about this. More people should hear about this kind of thing and see what is truly good and truly beautiful. So think about how much evil flourishes simply because there's no light. being shined on it to say, look at that and see it for how disgusting it is. I mean, an example of this that our church did right here in the neighborhood is when human trafficking and open air drug markets moved into the neighborhood, we shined the light on them and said, they have to leave. We are against these things. We are unashamedly opposed to the abuse of the image of God in whatever form it takes. So we are going to move these things out. We are gonna act as a corrective culturally to something going on in our area. And the idea is instead of participating in the unfruitful works of darkness, the Bible literally says expose them, but expose them as a corrective. And so I made a list, like if darkness is evil, then the church's light is goodness. We're not just saying, look at the bad stuff. We're against the bad stuff. No, bring the goodness to replace it. Don't just expose it and call it out and be critical and be complaining and be frustrated all the time. Bring the goodness to replace it. Bring the light to replace it. If darkness is error, then the church's light is boldly proclaiming the truth and saying truth is truth. Like we are not going to be ashamed or timid about the truth. Our culture needs to hear the truth. If darkness is just a pervasive negativity and anxiety, then the church's light can be joy and contentment and trust. If the darkness of culture is just this hostility and this divisiveness and this partisanship, then the church's light can be shalom, like holistic peace that God is intending to bring to individual souls and to relationships. If the darkness is injustice, and there's a lot of injustice, then the church is not saying bad injustice. We are bringing justice. We are doing justice on behalf of other people, particularly the marginalized who can't seek it for themselves. I mean, just going out, if the darkness is hostility, it's peace. If the darkness is arrogance, there needs to be a light of humility. If darkness is hatred and contempt for other people, then the light is bringing the love of Jesus and the compassion of Jesus into our relationships and into our neighborhoods. And if darkness is death, and there's a lot of death out there right now, then could not light be a holistic pursuit of life in Jesus' name? I don't just mean eternal life, but I mean abundant here and now life for people to get to know Jesus and to see Him as He really is and to love Him. And I hope that you're seeing as I go through this and just saying, like, let's be people who embody the character of Jesus, verses one through 11, and who go out collectively as salt and light in a city set on a hill that cannot be hidden. Hopefully you're understanding, we don't just have one default response to culture, okay? I have friends that it's like, they're just a hammer. Everything they see is a nail. Bam, bam, bam, I'm a hammer. That's just what I do, I just hammer things. It's like, well, you're not a hammer. And I know other people that are like, I'm an electric blanket and I just wanna cuddle everyone and everything. It's like, but you're not an electric blanket either. You are salt and you are light and you're a city on a hill. And sometimes salt and light irritate. Like this morning at five when my alarm goes off to get miles to hockey and light is an irritant and I don't want it. But then you realize the goodness of light. You realize the healing properties of light. You realize the exposition of light showing there's evil. We've got to oppose that. We've got to do right in its place. That's why in the words of Andy Crouch, the church needs fewer postures and more gestures. In other words, if you're just settling on one response to everything in culture and just saying, well, that's just the way I am, there need to be more gestures in Christ likeness and read through the gospels this spring early on and see the diversity of responses of Jesus. How one moment this incredible sensitivity and empathy and compassion and a moment later calling out the people like, why did you do nothing about this? Because all you care about is your own power. And he stands up, and he's bold, and he's courageous, and he turns over tables and said, this isn't what my father's house is for. And I think when we live the life of Jesus, and we are who he has created us and recreated us to be, that's when we start to see these really wonderful paradoxes of conviction and compassion. of justice and mercy, of people who take their faith very, very seriously, but don't take themselves that seriously, or people who are really, really bold and courageous, but simultaneously meek and humble like Jesus. And we're used to seeing people who are bold and courageous and brash, and we're used to seeing people who are pipsqueaks and don't say anything. But when you put those together and someone knows how to be humble, but how to take a courageous stand, not for their own ideas, but for Jesus and for the gospel and for the truth of his word, that's when you start seeing some really beautiful things that the world can't just put in a box. So here in closing, what are we doing this year? And a lot of this has to do with what I've just referenced, but one thing and a main thing is just continuing in apprenticeship to Jesus. Because those eight or nine or 10 attributes that show up in verses one through 11, I would love for every single one of us in this family to better understand what does it look like to be poor in spirit? What does it look like to be meek? What does it look like to have a hunger and a thirst for righteousness? So that as Jesus is reproducing his, not just teaching, but his character in me, and I step out into my world as that kind of person, There's a transformation and a renewal that's coming through my life and your life and our lives and our influence collectively. So we're gonna very deliberately continue in this practicing apprenticeship to Jesus, not just setting it aside, but continuing to bring it up, continuing to disciple our way through it. Because I not only want us to look like the people in verses 1 through 11, or really 1 through 16, but I want you to experience the blessing that comes to those people. Notice how Jesus says, joy and blessing come to these kinds of people, and I believe that. We want to engage with and love our neighbors with a thoughtfulness, like a scriptural intensity and intentionality that defies these stereotypes of the right and left. I genuinely want people to be confused. You're pro-life, so that makes you conservatives, but you're doing all these things for the marginalized and the homeless, so that makes you liberal. Who are you people? And Jesus very often did that, where people were just like, we can't figure you out. Because you're doing things that these people would do, but you're also doing things that these people would do. Then you're doing things that nobody's doing. Yeah, because we want an intentionality to saying, may the life of Jesus be reproduced in us to go out and engage with this neighborhood and your neighbors, wherever they are, to just, it looks like Jesus. It doesn't look right or left all the time. And by breaking those stereotypes, people have to have actual conversations. of like who are you, what drives you, what motivates you? We're motivated by the love of Christ. We want to present people complete in Christ. We don't wanna present people just traditional or more progressive or anything in between. We want to present people to Christ. Thirdly, and this is not new, but we wanna continue to pursue younger and more diverse generations. If you look around, this neighborhood is not getting older and it's not getting more white. We already have a diverse church and a fairly young church by God's grace. This is nothing against older people, but I'm one of the oldest people in the church. The future of the church is younger generations who are owning their own faith and not just saying, that's your church and maybe one day I'll kind of inherit it and my generation will take over. We wanna say, no, there are opportunities now for younger and younger people and in a more diverse crowd of people to come and take ownership of the church together. So we want to invest in that. Fourthly, we want to staff for this. Again, I've shared this before, but we would love to hire a pastor of formation. The idea of someone that all the discipleship stuff we just did, there's a pastor who is helping walk people through that all the time, disciple them, create new online materials that are helping to disciple more people, all that faith and work stuff we've done, because we believe that at your core, when you're going out into the workplace, you are replicating Christ in your work, or you have the opportunity to. So we would love to staff in multiple ways, just how are we growing in a practical street-level faith, and we think it's so important we're actually hiring people to help us do this in following Jesus. I've mentioned this one as well, but building programs and technology for this. So adding different capability to our website that isn't currently there, kind of updating it. I'd love for you to have an app on your phone that not only tells you like here are the events coming up and here's who's in the church, but discipleship materials that you can find from us that are fed to you through an app driven kind of thing. Videos and online courses, serious stuff and fun stuff. but that are being processed through the way that younger generations and diverse generations are all able to access, not just information, but able to access community together. One of the things I've been thinking the last several weeks, and I'll explain this just very briefly, but I was thinking, who's afraid of the church? Who's afraid of the church? And if you're like, well, why would you want people to be afraid of the church? That's not that I want people to be afraid of the church. But we've done a lot with darkness and light through the Advent season. And I would love for the powers of darkness to tremble because of the embodiment of Christ's church in a given neighborhood. I would love for them to feel and to be talking amongst themselves of like, we have to oppose that because they are so outspoken against the stuff that we are for, and they're joyful about it, and they're humble about it, but they are bold, and they are not going anywhere, and they have the spirit of God against us in this place, in their lives. And those that like literally want to be on the block just doing literal evil and debasing the image of God, I want them to tremble and say, we can't do that here. We have to do it somewhere else because these people are onto us and they don't care for what we're doing. And they're lifting up the broken and they're binding up wounded bodies and emotions and souls and helping people find Jesus. And that's what we wanna be about. We want the church to grow, not because we're bringing in people from other good churches and just getting them to swap over, but we wanna see broken lives being healed. We wanna see people come to Denver and be like, man, if you wanna be discipled, if you wanna be apprentices to Jesus, that's where you go, because look at what they're doing together to just put on the image of Jesus together. So again, that's a lot, where culture is, where culture is headed. But would you reread Matthew 5, one through 16, and would you pray with me, Lord, you're saying this is what your disciples look like. I want to look like that. Would you be working that in me this year?