If you have your Bibles with you this morning,
and I hope that you do,
I wanna ask you to turn to Matthew chapter five.
Matthew chapter five.
So you can turn your Bible on or open it up,
whatever you do to get God's word in front of you.
I want you to turn to Matthew chapter five.
And as you're doing that,
last year I came across a term that I had to look up
because I wanted to make sure I had a good understanding
of what this was, okay?
And I wanna ask you this morning,
does anybody here know what a social media influencer is?
Raise your hand if you know
what a social media influencer is.
There's only a handful of hands up right now.
So either you are ashamed to let us all know
that you know what a social media influencer is,
or you're like me, you're just ignorant.
You don't know, you've never heard that term before.
That was me last year.
And so I looked it up.
I wanted to know what a social media influencer is.
How could it be so important?
That it would be an actual term, an actual thing.
A social media influencer is a user on social media
who has established credibility in a specific industry.
All right, so they're already losing me
calling social media an industry, okay?
But it says he or she has access to a large audience
and can persuade others by virtue
of his or her authenticity and reach.
Now, if you're like me and you go this afternoon
and you start investigating
who some of these social media influencers actually are,
you're gonna be thinking to yourself,
these people are flakes.
These people, I can't believe that anyone
would generate income that would support
this kind of behavior, this kind of so-called work,
this kind of activity.
But I want you to consider
some of the top social media influencers in our day
and what kind of money they bring down.
Number one is Dan TDM.
I don't know, maybe some of you kids out there,
teenagers, you might know who Dan TDM is.
I had never seen him before.
I Googled some pictures of him
just so I would have some kind of idea
of what he looked like.
But he brings in $16.5 million a year
and he is a gamer.
So he plays video games all day, every day
and he videos himself playing video games
and puts it online and people go and watch that
and the advertisers and the people that give
and all this kind of stuff
racks up $16.5 million a year.
A young lady by the name of Kayla,
it seems, is making $150,000 not per year
but per sponsored post.
So when she puts up a post on social media
and it gets sponsored by some business
or some brand or this kind of thing,
she gets $150,000 every time she puts that up there.
Selena Gomez, you may know as a celebrity,
she makes $550,000 every time she puts something up
on social media.
I would be more than happy
to start publishing on social media
multiple times a day
if somebody would agree to give me $550,000 a time for it.
I don't know about you
but that seems like easy money.
And you go read these things
and it's not really substantive stuff.
It's not anything that you can use.
It's just gossip.
It's just totally useless knowledge.
There's a fellow named Tyler Oakley.
He's an LGBTQ activist
and he makes $6 million a year
just on being social on social media.
The last one is a fellow named Ryan.
He has a page or an account called Ryan Toys Reviews.
And I don't know if any of you parents
have ever seen Ryan Toys Reviews
but I'm going to make you feel guilty about it
because Ryan Toys Reviews
makes $1 million per month
doing toy reviews for kids.
The kicker is Ryan is five years old.
Why have we wasted our lives?
Right?
You know, the rise of the social influencer
points us to our culture's desire
to improve the self
or at least to change the self in some way.
And we have this deep-seated desire
to change ourself in every aspect of life
from the video games that we play
to the health that we promote in our lives
all the way down to sexuality in our culture.
This also indicates how desperate people are to be led.
You know, we live in a culture
where people are saying,
I don't want to be led.
I don't want anybody telling me
how to do my life
or where to go
or what to think
or how to speak
or any of those things.
Yet our culture at its heart
is desperate to be led.
It wants to be led
and it's looking for anyone
or anything that will lead it.
Now, centuries before YouTube
began catapulting
these normal and boring people to stardom
and before Hollywood
ever captivated the world's attention
with a few larger-than-life personalities,
Jesus announced that its followers
would have an impact on the world.
In fact, he says
that they're going to influence
every culture on the planet.
When you get to the book of Acts,
the criticism is that
these people are literally
turning the world upside down
and it all starts
when Jesus begins to preach
in the Sermon on the Mount.
Matthew chapter 5,
listen to what he has to say
starting in verse 13.
He says,
You're the salt of the earth,
but if the salt has lost its taste,
how shall its saltiness be restored?
It's no longer good for anything
except to be thrown out
and trampled under people's feet.
You're 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.
Now, as I was thinking about these verses
in the most recent installment of my life,
I ran across a statement.
Tim Keller, a famous preacher
up in New York City,
he says that we shouldn't underestimate
what Jesus is doing
when he stands up to preach
before this group of people
on that mountain.
You see, we read about it
in the Sermon on the Mount.
We read about it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7,
and it just seems like a string of good advice,
a string of platitudes, if you will.
But Keller says, listen,
don't miss the importance
and the significance
of what's going on here.
Jesus is not just coaching people
on how to have a better life.
He took those people to the mountain,
and he began to teach them
because revolutions were started
in the mountains.
In Jesus' day,
when somebody had a bright idea,
when they wanted to see something change
in their culture,
when they wanted to gather a group of people
and start a movement in the culture,
they would take them out of the town.
They would gather them up.
They would kind of sell their idea
to people in the community.
And then they would take these people out,
if you will, on a retreat
into the mountains.
And that's where they would do their teaching
and they're indoctrinating.
And they would literally start revolutions
in the mountains.
And so Jesus takes these guys out there,
and when he stands up to speak,
he's not just trying to tell them
how to have peace and harmony at home
or how to pay their bills supernaturally
or any of that kind of stuff.
He's actually ushering in a brand new kingdom,
a brand new kingdom of people
who will be completely different
than any other kingdom on earth.
It doesn't matter how long this earth lasts.
There will never be another kingdom
like the one that he's ushering in
in these verses.
He's ushering in a kingdom of a people
who would ultimately influence
every culture on the planet.
It doesn't matter where we're from.
It doesn't matter where we go.
God's kingdom spreads out across all of it.
And so, as I mentioned earlier this morning,
the Romans had their day,
and the Greeks had their day.
And if the Lord lingers,
people will look back and say,
the Americans had their day.
But Jesus' kingdom will never end.
The sun will never set on his kingdom.
And so later in the Sermon on the Mount,
he will unpack what those differences look like.
He'll show you what your life,
how it looks different from everyone else
if you're part of his kingdom
versus being part of just your community
in which you live and this kind of thing.
And I would encourage you to look ahead
and read through that again.
I'm sure many of you have spent time
in the Sermon on the Mount,
but I would encourage you to take a look at it again
this afternoon, sometime this week,
and begin to see how God calls us out
to be a people separated for his glory
and for our good.
But just look at the headings, if you will,
in your Bible this morning.
Just in Matthew chapter 5 here,
the headings aren't inspired by the Holy Spirit,
but they are good summaries.
Jesus is going to go on to talk about anger
and lust and divorce and oaths and retaliation
and loving your enemies.
And that's way more than any of us
can handle all at one time today.
There's going to be a difference
in how his people act and how they live
and how they relate to their community.
And he'll unpack that.
But first he explains the impact
that they're supposed to have.
And I believe that if he came here
and stood before us today,
I think if he had the opportunity to stand here
and we had the opportunity to see him
and hear him like you're seeing
and hearing me right now,
I think that he would tell us,
he would take us to these verses
and he would say, this is who you are.
Church, this is what you're supposed to be doing.
This is who you are.
You may think that you're a carpenter
or a truck driver.
You may think that you're a school teacher
or a business owner.
You may think that you're a politician
or a community servant
or a public servant of some sort,
but he would say, no,
this is who you are.
And this is what you should be doing.
And he chooses two metaphors
to articulate how we as his followers
are supposed to relate to our culture,
how we're supposed to influence our culture.
The first one he mentions is salt.
He says in verse 13, he says,
you're the salt of the earth.
Now there are a lot of uses
in the ancient world for salt
and all those uses kind of spill over in today.
We could have a Sunday school lesson
on any one of these uses of salt
and we could find meaning in our life.
Uses like seasoning or healing or destruction
or making of covenants
and this kind of thing.
And all those things can be applied
in some way in our lives.
But I believe that Jesus is really talking here
about this idea of preservation.
Salt is used in preserving things
that would spoil otherwise.
And so like salt would be rubbed
into the meat of his day
so that it wouldn't turn foul,
I believe that Jesus would say
that Christians are rubbed
into the fabric of our culture
to be a preserving agent
in the lives of those around us
and the cultures in which we live.
And this is what it looks like.
It looks like Christians
being rubbed into the schools,
administrators, teachers, and students.
They're being rubbed into the fabric
of that school system,
that education system
for the glory of God
and for the good of all who participate.
And I want you to know,
some of you that have been to Sedona,
you know that we work in the schools
a great deal.
We spend a lot of time
just loving on the schools.
We'll go and do landscaping for them
and I don't want you to be
under any false notions, okay?
When you go do landscaping in the desert,
you're not trimming hedges.
You're digging up cactus, all right?
It is a major effort of love
to go and to serve these people this way.
But we spend a lot of time
working in the schools
and when we arrived in Sedona in 2014,
the first principal that I met
was a very skeptical Jewish woman
who didn't want to hear anything
I had to say about Jesus
and really was a little uncertain
as to whether she should let us
even be nice to her, okay?
Over time, we won her over
and the next principal was a friend of mine.
And what I want to share with you today
is that this past school year,
at the beginning of this past school year,
we were given a new superintendent.
They hired a new superintendent.
The elementary school received a new principal
and in the next school year,
our high school is going to have another principal
and all three of those administrators
are going to be numbered among the people of God.
They're all going to be believers.
Now, they're not going to run a Christian school
as we would know a Christian school,
but they're going to be the salt
that's being rubbed into the fabric
of that school system
so that it begins to look different
and sound different and smell different.
Christians are rubbed into businesses
as CEOs and managers
and laborers.
Like I said,
you think you have a job to make money,
but God has given you a job
to give you a context
to act as a preservative of the culture.
And so one of the things I love to tell,
and he's not here today,
so I get to tell it,
my dad was a truck driver
for I don't even know how many years.
From the time I was in kindergarten
until February a year ago,
I think is when he retired.
He was a truck driver.
For most of my growing up years,
he drove on a team.
He and a partner would leave on Sunday night at midnight
and they'd get home on Friday afternoon.
I want you to know that as I was growing up,
my dad's never preached a sermon.
He's led a few prayers and worship
and this kind of thing,
but at least two, if not three,
of the riding partners that he had
over the course of those years
became Christians
because he was being rubbed into the fabric
of the trucking industry.
And so whatever you do,
you're being rubbed into the fabric.
Christians are rubbed into the communities
that we live in as neighbors
and public servants,
as little league coaches,
and the list could go on and on and on,
but don't miss the fact that Jesus says here,
you are the salt of the earth.
So whatever you do and wherever you go,
you are the salt of the earth.
Not you're gonna be the salt of the earth
or you have the potential
to be the salt of the earth,
but you are the salt of the earth.
This is what you are.
And notice here,
he's speaking to all the people
that are following him that day.
This is not something
that he pulled the 12 aside
to just give them a little private devotion
and try to kind of encourage them
to be better disciples.
This is not,
this is certainly not something
that he's just given
to the religious leaders of his day.
This is something that he is sharing
with all the people
that are following him on that day.
And so I want you to know that today,
I'm not preaching this sermon to Fred Stone.
I'm not preaching it to your staff.
I'm not preaching it to your Sunday school teachers
or your deacons
or your small group leaders
or your youth chaperones.
It's for every single one of you.
You are the salt of the earth.
And at some point in your life,
when you chose to follow Christ,
you by definition are the salt of the earth.
Unfortunately,
that does not necessarily mean
that you will be a good preservative
because Jesus tells us here
that sometimes the salt loses its saltiness.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, it doesn't mean that it stops being salt.
It just means that it loses its effectiveness
because it has become contaminated.
And what Jesus tells us here
is that when the salt became contaminated,
people would just toss it out into the street.
And it would get packed down
as people walked over and treaded on it.
It would just get packed down
and become part of the ground.
Before long, you can't tell the salt from the dirt.
This salt that was so important
and used in so many homes
is now just part of the ground,
part of the dirt that people are walking on
day in and day out
is no longer useful as salt.
So in the summer of 1995,
I was 19 years old.
That's been a long time ago.
But at 19 years old,
I was on the camp staff at McCall up the road,
up 178.
And I sat at the same table in the dining hall
every single meal.
My table happened to be on the porch
and it was an open air building at that time.
And so every morning I would come in,
I'd pick up these little disposable salt shakers
that they had put on the table
and I'd try to take some salt out
on my eggs and my grits, right?
What do you think happened?
Nothing.
I'm gonna tell you,
nobody spoke up, by the way.
Nothing came out.
Those salt shakers would sit there overnight
and the moisture and the air would get in there
and it would just clog them up
and it would make it to where the salt
would not come out.
And so for about a week that summer,
as the summer kicked off,
for about a week, every morning,
I would walk around about half of breakfast time
looking for a salt shaker that worked
because everybody needs salt on their grits, okay?
Nobody has an amen to that.
Yeah, I know who you are.
So finally one morning,
I got up, I go to breakfast,
I get my eggs and grits and sausage,
I got it all on the plate,
I'm ready to go and I hit the salt.
No salt comes out.
I set it down and said, forget it.
I have not picked up a salt shaker since.
And it's not because I'm health conscious,
I'm worried about my heart,
or because I'm holy,
or any of those kinds of things.
It was because the salt had become contaminated,
it was useless,
and it wasn't worth my effort.
Right?
And I want you to think about that
in terms of how insignificant the contamination seems.
That salt shaker was contaminated
by the moisture in the air.
It wasn't dropped in a puddle of water.
Nobody spilt anything on it.
It was simply the moisture that came out of the air
that made that salt useless.
Jesus makes you salty.
But you have to avoid contamination
if you're going to be a preservative for him in this world.
And here's where it gets a little personal for us, okay?
Because it's real popular these days
for us to be transparent and honest
and open about our struggles
and the sin that is in our life
and this kind of thing.
And I'm all for transparency,
and I think that's a good thing for the most part.
I probably feel like that most of the church
is hiding far too much
that they could be released from
if people were willing to share
and accept some accountability
and ask for some help.
The truth of the matter is
is that the sin in your life
that you struggle with
can be an encouragement to others
who struggle with that same kind of sin.
If they see you walking with Christ,
they can have hope for themselves.
It can become a powerful part of your testimony.
However, if you continue in your rebellion against Christ,
that may or may not endear you to other people,
but it will certainly hinder them from coming to Christ.
All right?
And I want you to think about this in two ways.
If you continue in your rebellion today
in the sins of commission in your life,
the things that you do that you know displease God
and keep you separated from Him,
it may or may not make other people think,
oh, yeah, he's just a regular old Joe,
and he's a lot of fun to be around,
and if there's hope for him,
there's hope for me,
and that kind of thing.
But it could hinder them from coming to Christ
if they don't see a difference in your life.
If they see you acting like they do
and living like they do
and just being here on Sunday morning,
it could be a hindrance to them actually embracing the gospel
and giving their life
and trusting Christ for their salvation.
But it's not just the things that we do
that we don't want anybody else to know about.
It's the things that we should do
that everybody assumes we're doing,
but we're not doing.
It's sharing our faith.
It's proclaiming the gospel
when we're given opportunity.
We spend our lives building rapport with people
and investing in relationships
and building relational capital
and this kind of thing,
and then we never spend it on the gospel.
And if you continue in your rebellion,
and when I say rebellion,
I mean refusing to share the gospel
with your neighbor or your family member
or your coworker
or the person at the ball field
or whoever it may be,
then that may endear them to you.
They may not think you're a religious fanatic
or anything like that,
but it could very well
cause them to stumble over the kingdom
and miss it altogether.
As I always want to ask you,
are you sharing the gospel
with those in your circle of influence?
The people there around you
that God has put you in their lives
and he's rubbing you
into the fabric of their existence.
Are you using that for his glory
by sharing the gospel with them?
The second metaphor that he uses here is light.
And he says that you are the light of the world.
And whether we're talking about oil lamps
in Jesus' day
or the flick of a switch
or the push of a button on our phone
in our own day,
the lights come on
and the lights come on
for one purpose
and that is illumination,
revelation.
And again,
Jesus says to his people,
you are the light of the world.
This is not something
you need to go to a class for.
This is something you are.
By your nature,
as a believer in Jesus,
you are the light of the world.
And this is so significant
because in John 8, verse 12,
Jesus says,
I am the light of the world.
And can,
you know,
if Jesus walked in today
and he said,
I'm the light of the world,
we'd be like,
hallelujah,
praise the Lord.
Everybody look to the light.
Thank you for showing us the way.
But then he turns around and says,
you are the light of the world.
And so I wonder
what you're shining on today.
I wonder what people see
because you're the light
of the world today.
He goes on to say
that a city set on a hill
cannot be hidden.
Some of you have been
to Sedona before
and I don't know
if you've made the trip
to Cottonwood,
to Walmart,
in the dark or not,
but we don't have
a Walmart in Sedona
because we're too good for that.
People like me,
we still drive over
to Cottonwood
so that we can get
to Walmart, okay?
But if you go
to Cottonwood at night,
there's this mountain range
behind Cottonwood
and over to the right
as you're driving
toward Cottonwood,
you can see these lights
on the hill.
It's just dark
all the way across
and then there's
this little section
of flickering lamps,
lights.
That little town
is Jerome.
Now, Jerome
only has 400
and something residents,
okay?
It's a tiny little
used up
copper mining town
is what it is.
And nobody would know
Jerome is there
probably
except when you go
to Cottonwood at night,
there's no mistaking
that there's people
over there
on that mountain.
And I would venture
to say even
at only 400 strong,
they'd never get
enough people
to turn their lights off
to hide themselves.
Jesus says
a city set on a hill
cannot be hidden.
And like all the
little individual lights
that make that town
visible to those of us
driving to Cottonwood
at night,
so all of us
who belong to Jesus
are little lights
that are peppered
across our culture
for the purpose
of shining on Jesus
for our community.
Specifically,
so people will see Jesus.
not so they'll see
how to manage
their retirement better,
not so they'll figure out
how to have more harmony.
All those things
are fine and good
and wonderful,
but people don't need
the gospel for that.
People don't need
to come here
and hear God's word
for that.
But so people
will see Jesus
and so the question
will come,
what are we illuminating?
What are we shining?
What do people see?
Because we are shining.
Well, you will expose
sin and evil
in the world around you.
Some of you
who go to work
and you're not willing
to cut the corners
or you're not willing
to fudge the deals
and this kind of thing,
your life,
your light
will reveal
faulty and dishonest
business practices
in your industry.
And some people
are not going to like you
for it,
but the Lord's honored
by it.
And others
will be compelled
to listen to what
you have to say
about Christ
because he's made
this difference
in your life.
For you teenagers
and kids
that go to school
day in and day out,
if you're living
for Christ
and you're shining
as the light
of the world
and what you're
going to be revealing
is gossip
and careless talk.
I want you to know
that when I went
to Spartanburg
to pastor at Philadelphia
within the first
six months,
I got a call
on a Sunday night
and it was from
a lady in our church
but she was calling
on behalf of her neighbor
who was frantic
and couldn't talk
about anything
at the moment
and what had happened
is this lady's
little girl
who was in the sixth grade
had just hung herself
and they wanted somebody
to come talk
to this family.
And I can think
of a hundred
other people I know
that would have been
better at that than me
but God called me
to that place
and what I found out
as I talked
to the family
and as we listened
and unraveled
the knots
and the cords
of all this tragedy,
what we found out
was this little girl
in sixth grade
was being shamed
and gossiped about
and kind of ill-treated
at school
and this kind of thing.
And I don't see bullies
behind every bush
but something made
this little girl
so sad
and so down on herself
that in the sixth grade
she hung herself.
And I wonder
when you go to school
guys,
are you shining light
on that stuff
to where it's exposed
and squelched
or do you actually
pour fire
on those,
pour gas
on those fires?
Are you actually
part of the problem
with that?
You know,
it could be that
you being the light
of the world
shines light
on immoral living
but whatever it is
you will have
the answer
for escaping
that slavish behavior.
People know
that they're enslaved.
They may not want
to admit it
but they know
that they're enslaved.
They're looking
for somebody
to lead them
out of it
and it could be
that you're here
this morning
and you realize
that these things
are true of you.
You do pour gas
on the gossip.
You are tied up
in immoral living.
You are guilty
of improper
and scandalous
and dishonest
business practices
and it comes
to your attention
today that
you are these things
because you've never
been redeemed.
You've never been
let out of it.
You've never been
bought out
of that sin
and that's the message
of the gospel
this morning
is that if you will
turn from that sin
and if you will
turn to Christ
and cry out to him
for the forgiveness
of your sin
then he will
buy you out.
And he will
rescue you
and give you
hope for eternity.
You'll help others
grow in their faith.
I just want to
ask you a question.
You take a mental
inventory right now.
Do the people
in your home,
do the people
in this church,
do the people
in your workplace
or your school,
are they growing
in their understanding
and faith in Christ
because they're
being around you?
If not,
it might be
that you're not
really shining
light on Jesus
at all.
You're shining
Jesus on
how to encourage
other people
to live better
and that might
make them feel
better for a day
or for a season
but it won't
last them for
eternity.
And then finally
you'll see that
people begin
to follow Jesus
because of your
testimony,
because of the
light that you're
willing to shine,
because being rubbed
into the fabric
is a salty
preservative of
this culture.
And I want you
to know that
there is no
greater experience
in life than
to lead somebody
to Jesus.
I hope every
single one of you
have had the
opportunity to lead
somebody to Christ.
But if you
haven't, I want
you to know that
the day you got
married, the day
you retired from
your job,
the day your
child was born,
all those things
pale in comparison.
And those are
significant things.
I've gone through
every one of those
except for the
retirement.
I've been through
every one of those
things.
They're significant
things but all those
things pale in
comparison to seeing
a sinner cry out
to Christ and
receive new life
in Jesus and hope
for eternity.
There is just
nothing in the
world like it.
And this should be
the natural result
of us living our
lives around those
who are close to
us.
Jesus says it would
have been terribly
wasteful to light
the lamp and to
cover it up with a
basket.
People didn't do
that.
People had sense
back then.
People in my house
leave lights on all
the time.
They don't have any
sense.
In Jesus' day they had
sense.
When they lit the
lamp they put it on
the stand so that
everybody in the
house could see.
And Jesus says this
is the way that we
should function in
our culture.
Verse 16 says 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.
Our very lives should
function as a light
that leads others to
Jesus.
Furthermore when they
witness our lives when
they see our good
works they shouldn't
be saying attaboy
patting Josh on the
back.
That's not what they
should be doing.
Jesus says they need
to see your good works
and they need to see
your life so that they
will be compelled to
give glory not to me
not to us not to you
but to God who is in
heaven.
So as we close this
morning Keller has
another thought that I
like for us to think
about as we close.
He says Christians are
attractive to and
attracted to people who
are not like them.
And I wonder if you are
attractive to and
attracted to people who
are not like you.
Let's just unpack that
for one second here.
Are you attracted to
people who are not like
you?
Do you long to be rubbed
into the lives of those
around you so that they
can see Jesus and embrace
him as their Lord and
Savior?
You know when I first
moved to Sedona I
realized these people
aren't like me.
They don't talk like me.
They don't think like me.
They don't eat like me.
I really just don't even
enjoy being around these
people.
You know they don't want
to eat meat and they you
know it's just tough some
days right.
But then the Lord just kind
of broke my heart over and
he said I didn't bring you
here because all these
people are like you.
I brought you here because
they're not like you.
And I brought you here so
that I could rub you and
your family into the fabric of
this culture so that they
might see me and come to
me for salvation.
Are you attractive to
others because you shine
brightly for Jesus?
Not just because you're nice
and easy going not because
you like to have fun or tell
funny jokes and this kind of
thing but because you're
committed to Jesus and
reflecting him to those
people.
You see my fear is is that
the people in Pickens that
are not sitting in this
building today are not
sitting in a building like
this today.
They're not sitting in a
building like this today
because they're not
attracted to it.
And believe me I'm not
saying that you need to
bring in the smoke and the
lights and all that garbage
to get people come in.
I'm talking about how you
live your life on a daily
basis before these people.
Do they look at you and
scratch their head and say
what in the world is
different about that guy?
Why is that gal so happy all
the time?
Are you attractive to
others or have you or have
you put them off because all
you do is demean other
people around you that
aren't like you?
Here's the truth.
What you have to offer a
hungry lost and dying world
is infinitely more valuable
than anything that all the
social media influencers are
peddling all put together.
People in our culture are
longing to see change in their
lives.
They're desperate to be led to
something that is better than
this present.
They deeply want to be led
and I wonder this morning and
this is what I'm asking you to
do.
Will you commit to be a
cultural influencer for the
glory of Jesus Christ by being
the salt and light that he has
made you and called you to be?
Let's pray.
Father God, we're thankful that
you did not leave us in our
sinful state, Lord, that when we
didn't want to be pursued, when
we weren't even concerned about
being saved, Father, when we
didn't even realize we were
lost, you were coming after us.
We're thankful that you saved
us by the blood of your son,
Jesus Christ.
And Lord, this morning,
hopefully we've been reminded of
just how significant that is and
just how urgent it is for those
around us in our culture.
Lord, in our school, in our
workplace, in our community, our
neighborhoods, our ball fields,
Lord, there are people that are
desperately longing to be led and
they're going to be led somewhere.
The question is whether or not
we're going to be ready to lead
them to the gospel.
And so, Father, we ask you this
morning to do your work in our
hearts that we might realize where
we are failing to be attracted to
people that aren't like us.
Father, would you help us to tear
down those barriers and would you
help us to have a longing in our
heart to be rubbed into the fabric
of their life that they might know
Christ and have hope for eternity?
And Lord, if there's anything in our
life outside of the gospel of Jesus
Christ and his glory that is pushing
people away, Father, would you help us
have the boldness and the courage to
identify it and be honest about it?
Would you help us to have the strength
to turn from it that we might be used
mightily in these people's lives to
draw them to Jesus?
Father, only you can do this work in
our lives.
Only you can make us salty and use us
as light.
And we're asking you to do that.
We're going to be faithful to be
obedient in Jesus' name.
Amen.
I'm going to ask Fred to come up and
lead us as we go.