Well, I called this sermon Transforming the World. I probably could not think of much larger project than that. It's a big job. We have a world that is certainly in need of a lot of improvement, to put it mildly. I know when I sit in my office, I usually have, aside from a bunch of monitors around me where I'm working on my web stuff and all, I have my TV set on. I usually watch the news until sometimes I just plain have heard enough and turn it off. But we have this constant stream of really things that are discouraging and distasteful going on in the world. I mean, there are some good stories. We also see stories of crime and unprovoked violence, international tensions. We're concerned about terrorism in our world all the time, politicians who We don't know if they're telling the truth or not. They just want to get our votes sometimes. And we find out later what they said was not what they really meant. But that's the way it is in this crazy world. People with competing ideas get angry. They attack one another. Immorality is growing all around us. And it seems there's a contest to see how much people can get away with. while ignoring God's Word. But lately, too, I've seen quite an attack against Christians and Christianity and God's Word. It seems like they're trying to silence as much as they can, which might mean we're doing a good job. Because when you sometimes step on people's toes, that's when they yell. And I think that the Word of God is much more powerful than we give it credit for being. And one day, all of this mess will be changed. God will change it all when that final judgment comes. But we're not supposed to sit around waiting for that. In the meanwhile, we're here given the responsibility of extending Christ's kingdom, right here, right now. And each believer, every one of us who trusts in Christ, is to be influencing the world around us, the world that God brings us into every day. It's our job to explain the way of salvation and to promote God's ways. and for ourselves to honor the king of all kings and make his glory more visible. And the verse that I wanted to look at particularly this morning is in the Sermon on the Mount. And it's that verse in Matthew 5.13 where Jesus said, 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. Well, in biblical times, salt had two primary purposes. First of all, it was a preservative. They didn't have refrigerators or freezers back then. They didn't know how to can things and freeze-dry them and put them in those shrink-wrapped plastic things that we fight to get open all the time. So in order to preserve foods and to keep them from spoiling, they had to add chemicals to them, and salt was one of the very best. Because when you put salt in something, it tends to absorb the water that's in there. And it keeps the water from getting into the bacteria that spoils our food. And so for that reason, it holds back the spoilage. What's kind of interesting is God's law often used salt. Let me read a verse here from Leviticus 2.13. It says, and this is speaking now to the Jewish community in that time of Moses, looking forward to the coming of Christ, but He hadn't come yet. And they had to do offerings and sacrifices. In Leviticus 2.13 it said, You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering. With all your offerings, you shall offer salt. In fact, Numbers 8.19, says that the offerings are a covenant of salt forever before the Lord. Now, I've had people read that and you back off and say, okay, what does that mean, a covenant of salt? Why are they adding salt to the offerings? Well, the very purpose of salt, remember, is to preserve things. And these offerings represent the promises of God to us and our covenant that he makes with us. as our sovereign God, instead of destroying us, which he has every right to do, he said, no, by grace, I will come and die for my people and bring you into my family forever. And that's the covenant promise that we have. And that is sealed with salt in these offerings to show that it will never spoil. It will not become corrupted. God's promises are sure. And in fact, in ancient times, they actually did this with treaties between nations and tribes. They had their wars back then over land and whatever. Somebody insulted somebody, whatever it might have been. When they finally concluded, they would make a treaty with one another, agreeing not to kill each other, basically, and take each other's land. What they would do is they would add salt to the ceremony where they signed that covenant treaty. In fact, a copy of it was usually given to each person, and they had salt sprinkled around. There were different ways of doing it, but it symbolized that that treaty would be preserved. It would be endured. It would not wear out. No one would violate it. And so that's what the covenant of salt meant. And so the Israelites at that time understood perfectly what God through Moses was telling them about this covenant of salt. And Jesus said, you are the salt of the earth. We should do our part to hold back that moral and spiritual spoilage that's taking place all around us. We have a job to do. We're to be soft. We're to hold it back, to keep things from spoiling like that. It's our job. There's a good example in the Bible in the life of King Jehoash, 2 Kings 12, 2. It says, And Jehoash did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all his days, because Jehoiada the priest instructed him. So here's this king who's hoping to lead God's people And he had sin in him, just like any one of us would, but that sin was restrained in him through the ministry of this priest who taught him the Bible. And so we are to do that with our children, with our friends, with our work and our community. It's our job as salt of the earth to do what we can by God's power to hold back the spoilage, to keep that immorality and the unbelief and the false worship in check. We need to be a good influence, obedient Christians. And as obedient Christians, we become a benefit to all those around us. We really are there to help them. And that brings us into the second use of salt. It wasn't only used to preserve food and keep them from spoiling, it was also a flavor enhancer. Things taste a whole lot better with salt on them. And in fact, there's actually a verse in the Bible about that. In Job 6, 6, it says, can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt? So they understood back in those days, salt is a very helpful thing. And so it has a positive use as a seasoning agent. And in the same way, we're here to be a seasoning agent in God's world. We're to enhance the flavor of it all. We're to make it a better place. where God is appreciated, where his word is practiced and his benefits are taken in. And so we need to influence as much as we can this world around us and promote the enjoyment of God's blessings, his promises, and his gifts. And so, what are the examples of godly behavior? Colossians 4, 6, Paul wrote and said, let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. So that flavoring of even the words we speak should be so that we're enhancing what's around us. We're making it better. We're making it taste better because we're preserving and introducing God's ways around us. Paul put that in a little different figure of speech when he wrote to the Corinthians. In 2 Corinthians 2, beginning at verse 14, he said, But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of Him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one, a fragrance of death to death. And to the other, a fragrance of life to life. Okay, so we're like air freshener, a little dish of potpourri in the world. We're supposed to make things better. were here to enhance the world around us. But it mentions here that to some, they won't like that. It's a smell of death. It exposes evil for what it is and they don't like it. You know when salt can preserve food and make it taste better, but if you cut yourself and you get salt on it, it stings, it hurts. That's because again, that exposed tissue When the salt gets on it, it wants to bind up the water molecules there. And that hurts because we need those water molecules in our cells. And so, pain starts up and it hurts us. And that's what happens when God's truth exposes our sins sometimes. We don't like the feel of it. It hurts. Sometimes we read God's Word and we almost tremble at the things it exposes. It hurts. It exposes things inside us we'd rather not admit. We say confessions of faith here when we worship. And sometimes we really think about it. We're exposing ourselves to the wrath of God, if it were not through the very work of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who stood in between and took that penalty on himself in our place. So we need to understand that salt not only hurts those who are dead in sin, but it can be uncomfortable for us too. But you see, when it comes to us in whom God's grace is at work, that pain can be a blessing. It reminds us, hey, we need to rest in Christ. I'm not so good. We see our sins and we want to get rid of it. It's like a father who loves his kids so much that sometimes he takes away their privileges. Well, he doesn't make it hurt because he wants to make them suffer. It's because He wants to make them better. And that's why our Lord Jesus sometimes exposes our sin and we begin to see how horrible it is. And we grow because we recognize how much we need Him and how little we can trust in ourselves. But you know, what's interesting is Jesus didn't say, go out there and be salt. He said, you are salt. That's what we are. That's our job. It's what He saved us to be. It's not like some of us might choose to be salt. No, you are the salt. That's what God put you here for and redeemed you to be. We're to be an influence out there in the world. There's a lot of pessimism today. And it even affects the church sometimes. When we withhold our influence, salt of the earth, God's kingship and His grace become invisible. We are the salt of the earth and it's our job to appreciate the wonders of God around us and to pass it on. That's our assignment. That's our job. And no matter where you are and what you're doing, you need to be encouraging those around you, enhancing the wonders of God, holding back the flood of sin and evil as much as you can, And that means you do that when you're involved in your hobbies or when you're at school or when you're at work or when you're driving in your car on the road. And sometimes that's a very hard time to be encouraging when you're fighting traffic and all that. But we need to do our very best wherever we are all the time to be the salt of the earth. And so we need to plan carefully. You don't say, okay, I'm salt. We need to know what that means. And so we have these principles that are given in scripture so that we might be so salt of the earth effectively. First of all, we need to study God's word. You need to know what God has actually revealed and said so you can know what a transformed world looks like. If we're supposed to be holding back evil and making things better, we better know what that better is. Because if you get 10 people in a room, you have 10 different opinions about what's best in life. unless we understand that what's best is when we glorify and honor our God. But we have all kinds of opinions as to what good is. You hear people on television. I'm not encouraging you to listen to all these talk interviews and everything, but people have got all kinds of ideas about what's good and what's right. They have all kinds of ideas about what Jesus taught. Most of them are wrong. But you see, we need to read our Bible so that we know and we can give an answer. So that we can show the world what the right way is. And we can bring the promises of God to our friends. We know where to find them in the Bible. And that we become familiar with it ourselves. So that we recognize the hand of God at work around us. And so it reminds us of his promises and presence. But just knowing God's word is not just a science or a study assignment. We also need to pray. That's the second thing. We need to pray very effectively so that God will use our efforts for His kingdom, so that His power and blessing work through us. Otherwise, if we think we can go ahead and accomplish this without relying upon God through prayer, we become part of the confusion out there. Third, we need to work together as a church. We need to unite ourselves. and really work as a family to transform the world around us. But first, we need to have a strong spiritual bond as a church family. That's more important than most people realize. I think a lot of people in our world today think that church is a place you go to be entertained or to get pumped up. No, it's a place we come to worship and to encourage each other as a family, to really stand with one another, to be concerned about everybody sitting around us. And it's a place where I see we've got some empty seats here. Well, you could fill them up by bringing somebody, inviting people, telling them, come and worship with us and be part of a family that really wants to change this world. You complain about it? Well, let's do something about it. Let's come together and worship. Let's encourage each other, be a real family. Let's learn what God promises and then we'll go out of here and put it into practice. because we've taken time to honor and glorify God for what He is. And therefore, we also need to be careful when we come into worship together that we are really paying attention to what's going on. We want to be sure that we and our children who are learning, a lot to learn. We're still learning stuff. We need to be sure we understand every part of the worship service and that we're consciously taking part in it. Not just kind of reading words because they're written there, but we're thinking what those words mean. We're really applying them to our lives. We're thinking, Lord, do I really feel this way? Do I really believe this? And if not, Lord, forgive me and work on my heart that I might be stronger. And that's what we need to be working on together. And so we encourage each other. And that's the fourth thing. We need to actively be plotting to stir one another up. I'm not just saying that. Let me read what it says in Hebrews 10.34. It says, let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works. The old King James says we should provoke one another to love and good works. That's what we need to be doing. Not just waiting for other people to do good, but finding a way, plodding around, considering it says. How can I help this other person to actually be good? Probably the answer isn't going to be to go up and yell at them or to humiliate them. What we need to do rather is to find ways we can work together to be growing and be stronger to love and good works for the glory and honor of Christ. We sit down and we talk, we have coffee together or whatever and we pray together and we say, what can we be doing? What really can we do today? What can we do tomorrow? What can we plan together? So that we're all engaging in doing good works for the glory of Christ and the spread of the gospel. And that's the fifth thing we need to do. We said read God's word, you need to pray, you need to work together as a church and worship. We need to encourage each other and we need to tell the good news to people who don't yet know it. We need to be ready to share God's word. We hear people all the time sharing their opinions out there in the world. Sometimes we wish they wouldn't say what they do. There's an awful lot of evangelical effort to spread bad behaviors in our world today. People are really diligent to try to get society to change, to accept its ways. And those ways are often ones condemned in scripture. Well, why can't we spread the word of Christ? Why can't we just interject into the conversation the truth? And help people to understand there's hope and there's real truth here. It's not that we have to all get along by being the same mind, we're going to be different. And you're already saying that you disagree with me. Well, okay, I disagree with you. Let's get on with it and talk about these differences. But what does God say about it in His Word? And you know the amazing thing? What if somebody doesn't believe God's Word? They say, well, the Bible isn't God's Word anyway. So what? It's not your job to convince them. It's your job to tell them what's there. It's the Holy Spirit's job to convince them. And you know what? When you tell people the Bible and God intends to redeem them, the Spirit will make them believe it. It's not your job to go out there and try to convince people with reason and so forth. People say, I can't do that because people say they don't believe the Bible and they don't know what to do. Tell them what it says, that's all. I get people come in our website sometimes They like to pop in the chat channel once in a while and say, oh, I don't believe the Bible. Okay, you don't believe the Bible? Well, I didn't one time either. But right now what I want you to do is discuss the topic we're dealing with right here and be polite and kind and we welcome you to stay. You don't have to believe the Bible to stay and listen with us. And it's amazing, some people leave right away then and others, Get engaged. I've seen over the years some very interesting conversations. They say, well, I didn't know that that's what the Bible said. And so rather than trying to start a fight over it, just challenge people to work with you and learn what the Bible actually has to say about who God is and who we are and how we're made right with God since we are alienated from him. So we need to be proactive agents out there for good. But there's another part of this verse. You have to be careful. Salt can become spoiled and made useless. That's what it says. Now, I was a chemistry teacher for a while, and I know that salt is sodium chloride. For you chemistry buffs, that's N-A-C-L. It's a chemical. That's all it is, a molecule. Two atoms stuck together, and because of the type of bond they have, it works the way it's supposed to work. That's salt. It doesn't change into something else. If you put salt on your table in a salt shaker, it's not going to turn into something else, and if it's pure salt, it's going to stay pure salt. So then, how can salt become tasteless and useless if sodium chloride is always sodium chloride? Well, there's really two ways that salt can be spoiled. First of all, where did it come from? When we get salt, it usually has some kinds of impurities in it. I remember visiting the Bahamas down there with some missionaries, and the Morton Salt Company had this one island, where they would flood huge areas of land with the seawater, and when the water all evaporated, they'd go around and get the salt that was left behind, and they didn't use that for your table salt, that's what they sent up here to the states to use, and we put on the roads up north when it gets icy and so forth, more industrial type salt, but sodium chloride is, is mixed in other things and it has minerals in it. Now, biblical times, that's the only way they had of getting water. They'd evaporate some seawater and the only way they had of getting salt. And they said there were different kinds of salt, different qualities, depending on where you got it from. A good quality salt came from the Mediterranean Sea, I'm told. But there was a bad salt that came from the Dead Sea or the Sea of Salt. I mean, Dead Sea, what can you expect out of the Dead Sea, right? But they said that the problem was that it had an alkaline taste after a while. It had gypsum in it. So if you take salt and you put it in a dish on your bowl and it's got other minerals mixed in with it, with time, as water gets in the air and atmosphere gets absorbed, it can change the consistency of what you've got there. Chemical reactions take place and things deteriorate and it no longer tastes good. You have to throw it out. Similarly, when you come to Christ, You've got impurities in you. We have all kinds of bad habits. And one of the things we have to do is to get rid of those bad habits by the power of Christ working in us. We need to overcome them. And so if we want to be the salt of the earth out there effectively, we need to search out those little things that remain and we need to pray for the Lord to help us to get rid of them. Again, it might hurt the wounds. It might be painful for you to get rid of some of those dear sins that you've held on to for a long time. But without that, you become ineffective for the work of Christ. But there's another way salt can become ruined. It can get contaminated after it's been collected. Sometimes, you know, salt gets something spilled in it or gets mixed in with poisons or whatever it may be. Well, there's very little you can do to clear that out, you basically have to throw it out. And as it says here, throw it down, it gets trampled under feet, they just throw the salt out, it's no good anymore, it got polluted. And so we need to be careful that we avoid entangling ourselves with all the stuff that's going on out there that's wrong. We're influenced so much by things around us. And I think in our world today where we have so much communication going on, we've got Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all kinds of stuff, that's just going into people's minds all day long. And we need to be careful what we're filling our brains with, what kind of things we're exchanging with other people, what we're putting up on our Facebook pages, what we're Googling, what we're reading in books that we might get or magazines, what shows we watch on television, what movies we go to, what games we dare spend hours playing on Playstations or whatever it may be. What are we really centering our lives around? We need to be careful that we don't become contaminated with the attitudes and values of the world around us such that we become ineffective for Christ's kingdom. In 1 John 2, verse 15 and following, John warned this way. He said, Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride and possessions, is not from the Father, but is of the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires. But whoever does the will of God abides forever." And when Paul wrote to the Philippians, chapter 2, he said, that you may be blameless and innocent children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation among whom you shine as light in the world. Well, it's been said we are in the world, but we're not to be of the world. In other words, you're here to be an influence on it, not just to become a part of it. We are a part of it, but we are also salt. In order to go out there and to be salt, and to be that aroma and fragrance of godliness, we are to be the light that shines in the dark places, and trust that our God will enable us to bring Him glory as we do that. But of course, there are temptations that come along that want to get us off doing the wrong things. The temptations are things that look good. I mean, if you fish, I remember I used to fish, we used to actually put worms on hooks and drop them in Lake Honey I in New York. Catch little sunfish and things. Well, there's this fish swimming around and suddenly there's this nice delicious worm hanging in the water in front of him. He bites the worm and what is it? It's a hook and he ends up being the dinner instead of getting dinner. That's the way our temptations are. There's not going to be something out there that says, hey, let's go do something evil today. No. It's going to try to lure you into something that looks tempting and delicious. Something people are going to say, hey, this is OK. You'll feel good. It's a good experience. We end up getting ourselves all tangled up in things that offend God. And it turns out it was all a lie. It didn't make us feel better after all. We just wanted more and more and more because we're dissatisfied. And the more you get involved, the less satisfied we are. Moral compromise can just plain diminish our effectiveness for the glory of Christ. Back years ago, there was a way in which they used to pay soldiers with salt. Sometimes the soldiers would work real hard and they would actually give them a little container of salt for their paycheck. Well, they could use that at home, put it on their food, preserve their meats and so forth, that they could take it to the marketplace and you could trade salt to buy things. It was a valuable commodity. But you know, if the soldier didn't serve as a good soldier, people would often say, he's not worth his salt. That's where that expression came from, by the way, back in ancient Rome. We still say that today, he's not worth his salt. We often don't know what that means, we say it anyway. Now you know what it means. Salt, when it's pure and clean, is valuable. And we are valuable to the world around us. We are precious in the eyes of our God when we're serving Him and honoring Him and when we're glorifying Him. That word of warning in 2 Timothy kind of brings a soldier into it. It says, no soldier entangles or gets entangled in civilian pursuits since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. If we're here in the world, we can enjoy it, but remember why you're here. You are not here to enjoy it. Although you can enjoy it, you are here to bring glory to God. That's why he made you. That's why he redeemed you. That's why he made all things, so that they would declare his glory. And we see this world around us, and we wonder how in the world can it be changed? This is how it can be changed. Individuals being out there effectively as salt. This is a commentary by Martin Lloyd-Jones, a Reformed preacher, and he was illustrating this point from English history. I just want to read what he wrote. He said, what undoubtedly saved England from a revolution such as that experienced in France at the end of the 18th century was nothing but the evangelical revival. This is not because anything was done directly, but because masses of individuals had become Christians and were living this better life and had this higher outlook. The whole political situation was affected. And the great acts of Parliament which were passed in the last century were mostly due to the fact that there were such large numbers of individual Christians found in the land. Sometimes we lose our voice because we just want to blend in. We don't want to rock the boat. We want to attract a whole bunch of people, so we'll be anything that people want to be attracted by. We become the bait. But we're not drawing people to the Christ or the Bible. We're merely giving people hope that somehow we all can just be together, you know, why can't we all just Get along. We hear all these philosophies of the world, you know, we all just need to love each other and all these platitudes. As long as you're not a Christian, that is, they may get after you if you're that. It's a bit hypocritical, this tolerance the world promotes. And we don't want to make our church a place where all we're doing is putting up these little bumper sticker type truths. We want to promote the truth of God's Gospel, all of it, faithfully, joyfully, and humbly, because we know that we all have failed many, many times. Have we all done these things? Do we have that weekly plan that we put into place where we're studying God's Word, where we're praying faithfully, where we're preparing for worship to be ready on the Lord's Day, to come out and spend the whole Lord's Day honoring Him? encouraging other believers, telling others about the gospel, promoting God's promises and principles wherever we go. Now, we haven't done these things to the best of our ability, any one of us. We always have room for improvement. And that's where we need to be building one another up as a body of Christ. We need to be in prayer for one another, encouraging one another, making plans to provoke one another if we can, to love and good works. And so instead of letting that temporary bait of temptation keep us from the work of Christ, let's look at what really is going to make your life valuable, what's going to really make it count, not the passing things that maybe one day you'll regret. We have no right to grumble when we watch the news that the world's becoming a terrible place if we haven't done our part. And if we as individuals speak up, we vote, We talk with others, we encourage each other, we dare to help one another and strengthen one another when we stumble and fall. We don't give up on our friends no matter what they do. Then we're being a good influence, you see. And we can see society change. People say, well, it's probably hopeless now. No, it's never hopeless. Our Lord took a world in the dark grip of Romanism and by a monk nailing 95 debate theses on the door of his church, transformed the entire Western world. And here we are today in this continent that wasn't even known to those people back then. And we're worshiping that God who is sovereign and loves all of us through Christ whom he has known from eternity past. That's how long he's known you. Is he going to know what you're going to do when you get home today? He knows what you're going to do. He knows what you're going to do tomorrow. And some of the things probably won't be good. But in Christ, He loved you anyway. That's called grace. We think about that, it just touches my heart to think of how much our God loved us. But He gave Himself that we might be the salt of the earth and make a difference. I'll close with the words of King David here from Psalm 139. He said, Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. Before we celebrate the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, let me lead us in a word of prayer.