Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey, everyone. Mark here. Welcome to the Mark Clark Podcast, brought to you by the Thrive Podcast Network, which is a whole network of podcasts that you should go check out. Today on part two of the Sermon on the Mount, we are diving into one of the most powerful teachings from Jesus on identity and purpose. Those are things that matter to all of us. Why are we here on this planet? What does it mean to be salt and light in a world that is often searching for meaning? I'll be sharing a lot of different stuff, thoughts from Tim Keller, lessons from, obviously, the Gospel of Matthew and what Jesus says in there. Even a story about Jimmy Fallon and his search for purpose. This episode is about understanding why you exist and how to live out the true calling of a meaningful, impactful life.
Mark Clark [00:00:41]:
Let's get to it. Sermon on the Mount, Part 2. Here we hit one of the great texts of this whole Book of Matthew and the whole Sermon on the Mount in regard to giving us all purpose and meaning, understanding our identity, which is one of the big kind of questions our culture is asking. Tim Keller, who planted a church in New York City in the late 80s, said that if he was planting a church again in that cultural hub called Manhattan, he would talk about identity very often because it's the main question of our generation. It's the main question people are asking, who am I? Right? Who am I? Even that song talked about, who am I to deny this? Or who am I? Who are you? What's your purpose? What's the meaning of your life? What are you here to do? I got a phone call last night that a friend of mine did, died yesterday morning suddenly. Just got sick and he went to bed sick, and in the morning, his wife tried to wake him up and couldn't wake up. Fellow pastor, and he's 40 years old, man. Like, this is real, right? When we come together and we worship God and we do offerings to fund ministry and we preach these sermons.
Mark Clark [00:01:54]:
And this isn't just like, so we have jobs. This isn't something we do. You don't come here to check a box. This is life and death, what we talk about here. This is. This is about eternity. This is, do you really have a soul? And if so, what happens to it when you die? Is there a God? What are you about? What is the. What's the reason you woke up this morning? Why does your heart beat? Not, like, physiologically, but why do you exist? I remember years ago, Jimmy Fallon, the talk show host, went to the hospital.
Mark Clark [00:02:32]:
He had this infection. While he was there, he read Viktor Frankl's book on the meaning of life. And Viktor Frankl is just this deep writer, gone through the Holocaust and so on, talked about the meaning of life in suffering. And Jimmy Fallon, as he sat there for eight or nine days in the hospital, read this book at kind of the end of himself, and he realized he was asking the question, why am I? Why does Jimmy Fallon exist on planet Earth? And he realized, man, I exist to make you laugh in the midst of a culture that constantly wants to steal your joy. But it took that moment of kind of pain and suffering for him to realize his why. Why does Jimmy Fallon's heart beat? What is he on planet Earth to do? And that's a question we're all asking. What is our purpose? And in very specific ways, Jesus tells us in this awesome passage what our role is, what the purpose and meaning of our life is. What is our identity? And he starts like this.
Mark Clark [00:03:24]:
You. He says, you, we're gonna talk about your identity. You're the salt of the earth. We'll come back to that. And if the salt loses its saltiness, how can he be made salty again? So the first thing Jesus does is he says that there's this. Our job is to bring saltiness to the world that we think. We think the world is salty, meaning that it's. It's fun.
Mark Clark [00:03:52]:
The world, the way it functions. It's cool, it's flashy. It's, you know, the way that they do money and the way that they look and the way that they do cars and houses and sexuality and work and all of that, that's really salty. That's cool. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's what I want to do. And so we strive after it. And we go on social media, and we're like, that's what salty means.
Mark Clark [00:04:15]:
That's what makes, you know. Cause this image of salty very interesting just kind of comes out of nowhere. We're like, why does Jesus all of a sudden say, you're the salt of the earth? We'll come back to that in a sec. But this idea of saltiness, what do you use salt for? It's to kind of bring the flavor out of something, make it tasty, make it tasty. How do you make life tasty? How do you make the world tasty? And we go, man, the way to make the world tasty is by doing all of these things, the way that the world defines them. And Jesus goes, no, I have far different ways for you to make the world tasty. When people live the way that they live. And, you know, a lot of surgeries maybe on their face to make themselves constantly look younger and younger and younger until it's like, bro, you know, you're 85 years old.
Mark Clark [00:05:05]:
We know, we know, man. It's starting to show. You know, it's like we're fighting. We're fighting this thing that's inevitable. What's under that? What's under that is an insecurity to deal with real life and what it's really about. And so, and so we fight it so that we look beautiful right into the end. But that's not saltiness. That's not flavor.
Mark Clark [00:05:29]:
That's not truly human life. Truly human life is the stuff we're doing as a church. Even next week, as we talked about the Accelerate initiative, where we're going to be doing these amazing things in regard to local mission and global mission and doing stuff bigger than ourself. That's saltiness, right? It's like a family like ours going, man, let's not just keep all of our money, let's adopt five or sponsor five kids out of Uganda so that my kids, when they can't get certain things and we go, well, we're sending our money over there, they realize that there's more important things in the universe than money. And when one of our pastors, I remember when I first met him, I didn't even. He has 13 kids, one of the pastors at our church, nine of them are adopted from two separate countries in Africa. That's salty. That's something.
Mark Clark [00:06:26]:
Versus the way that the world defines coolness and saltiness. Jesus goes, no, no, you guys, you're gonna bring a flavor to the world that is vastly different than the way that the world defines flavor, defines goodness. You, in fact, are the salt of the earth. And so our job is to infuse the world not with judgment, not with. Not with mopiness. Like salt, actually. It brings out the flavor in something. It makes stuff better, right? You get fries that don't taste good.
Mark Clark [00:07:01]:
What do you do? Give me the salt, man. And then you're like, oh, these fries are fantastic. It's salt. That's all it is. So how are we doing as Christians with saltiness? Because it seems like we're the mopiest, right? You're the mopeist. That's right. You are the mope of the world. Just mope around with your sad faces.
Mark Clark [00:07:26]:
Y'all look so sad and mopey and angry all the time and mean spirited and judgmental, screaming at the World, Yeah, that's gonna bring him in. That's gonna make everyone give me more of that on my fries. So he's going, we can be of a certain way that people are gonna want more of it on their fries, man. And that's what he wants you to be. A kind of loving, a kind of compassion, a kind of sacrifice where the world looks and goes, man, you are so different than everybody else. And then he says this thing. But if the salt loses its saltiness, like, have you ever thought about, what if you lost it? Like, what if you really had the identity and purpose in Christ that he wants you to have? And then you strayed. You strayed far enough where you never came back.
Mark Clark [00:08:22]:
Billy Graham was asked years ago, what is the one thing that you were terrified of? And he said, losing the anointing. Like, what if I lost it? And some of you, it's a warning. Some of you play. Play with it enough. And you poke at it enough. And you stray from Jesus enough. Or you stray from maybe the church communal life enough, or the things of God enough. And you think, maybe if I just push the edge, I'll get to the edge, and then when I just about.
Mark Clark [00:08:53]:
And then I'll come back. And he's like, be very careful with that, because you may never want to come back. It's like that, you know, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit teaching right in Mark, chapter three, that I remember as a young Christian. I'm, like, freaking out. It's like, Jesus, like, if you commit the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, you know, it's the unforgivable sin. I'm like, oh, my gosh, what is that? I remember a guy at my church, when he first started coming, and he grabbed ahold of that passage, and, you know, we were preaching through the Gospel of Mark. Of course, it took us a year and a half. You can see why we're only on.
Mark Clark [00:09:24]:
We're not even in the intro yet. And it's like, he's. And we got on this text about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. So all I got through was, you know, blasphemy. And he's like, what? And so he called me for, like, three weeks straight. I think I committed it. I think I committed. I think I committed.
Mark Clark [00:09:38]:
I think you need to pray for me. You need to pray for me. I think I committed the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. It's an unforgivable sin. And many of us, you know, we've been there, but the one thing I remember my New Testament professor getting up and saying is, he said, listen, the nature of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is that if you commit it, you're not gonna care. Because the Holy Spirit's the one that brings conviction in your life. And if you care and you're nervous you ever committed it, it probably means it's the Holy Spirit convicting you. So you're good.
Mark Clark [00:10:06]:
It's when you stop caring that you might have lost the purpose and the saltiness and the vision and the identity that you're supposed to live out in this life, because you've strayed a little bit and you've decided not to be salt for the world for so long that you don't even know what that looks like, and you don't know what it feels like. And so it's a warning to us to be very careful. Okay, so back up here you are the salt of the earth. I love this phrase. There's a few things this means. In the first century, the Greco Roman world, salt was actually seen as an essential thing. So in our life. It's a weird image for Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:10:49]:
Now, let's just get our brains back to what's going on here. We're in the middle of. We're in the beginning kind of the Sermon on the Mount. All he's done so far are the Beatitudes. And we had done a couple weeks on that. Let me show you a picture. This is the mountain in Israel where they say that the Sermon on the Mount, it's called the Mount of Beatitudes, took place. There's a couple pictures.
Mark Clark [00:11:07]:
So picture Jesus on the side of these mountains near the water. And the water is kind of functioning almost as like a. Like it's a natural kind of acoustic thing. And he's down there and he's preaching this to them, and he's saying, you are the salt of the earth, man. Like, you look around at these mountains and these beautiful. That's not Napa. No, it kind of looks like a little bit. It's like, oh, there's Alpha Omega Winery.
Mark Clark [00:11:34]:
No, it's not. It's Jesus. And he's. And he's doing this revolutionary thing, and he says, you're the salt of the earth. And salt was something that they traded around. They called it theon, a lot of them, which was the Greek word for divine. Because you needed salt, they would use it as currency. They would use it to do three things that I think Jesus is talking about for us to do.
Mark Clark [00:11:59]:
But the first One, the first thing we gotta understand is the fact that he says that the earth needs us is interesting because what it says is very, it's offensive to the modern mind. The modern mind basically says we're fine, right? Naturalistic evolutionary theory says that the modern person is progressing and advancing away from our primitive past. We have technology, we have medicine, we have education, we're moving away. It's called the myth of progress. And we pitch it to generations for the last 200 years. Post enlightenment philosophy. We're getting better, we're getting better, we're getting better. And right here Jesus goes, you ain't getting better, you are actually saltless.
Mark Clark [00:12:47]:
And later he's going to say you're dark, because he's going to say that we're light if we ever get there. You are salt and you are light, which means by definition the world is dark. So if you're here and you're not a Christian yet, and you don't know Jesus yet, awesome. We're glad that you're here. What Jesus begins with is something that's super humbling for all of us to swallow, which is that you need salt in your life. You're actually not there yet. You're lacking something, you're sinful. The Bible would say you're out of touch with connection with God.
Mark Clark [00:13:21]:
You're not there yet. Progressively, we as a culture, we have all the education in the world and we're still, we're still cutting each other's heads off. We have cured diseases and we're still shooting up each other and flying planes into buildings. We are nowhere. We are still Cain killing abel. That's Genesis 4. We're still doing what we're doing in Genesis 4. We are in a place of much need that we don't even recognize sometimes.
Mark Clark [00:13:58]:
We aren't animals, but we aren't angels either. Our culture says you and I were. Okay, here's how to solve ourself. Better politics. How's that going? Have we solved all the problems of the world with politics, by the way? All we need is better education. All we need is more technology. All we need is more a tweak to morality. We've come up with every single solution under the planet, on the planet under the sun, and it hasn't moved us.
Mark Clark [00:14:30]:
And Jesus goes, I think the beginning of it is right back up to the first verse. You have to have poverty of spirit. You have to be humble enough to realize you need salt. You have to be humble enough to come to a place in your life. And this is we don't love this in our culture. This is like, remember a couple weeks ago we were doing Proverbs and Pastor Kurt talked about that Inside out movie. I always love the thesis of that movie where you have joy and sadness and fear and all these emotions, you know, and they're in control of this 13 year old girl's life. And the thesis is.
Mark Clark [00:14:59]:
And they actually draw a circle around sadness at one point and they stick her in there and they say, you're not allowed to leave there. And then they try to control the girl until the end of the movie when they realize they need sadness sometimes to take control. Because sadness is the thing that gets you to the place where you go, I need salt. You come to the end of yourself, you become broken enough where you cry out to God and some of us are just too proud. And so Jesus begins with this offensive default setting of, no, you actually have limitations. And you need. Now, what are the three things salt did? Really quick for your notes. Salt was a disinfectant.
Mark Clark [00:15:37]:
A disinfectant. It cleansed you out. Now I remember I went to Israel back in November and I went in the Dead Sea. Okay, so the Dead Sea is a sea 100 miles from where Jesus is preaching, which is very interesting that he has this as a background, a hunt. How many of you have been to Israel before? Right. Did you go to the Dead Sea? Right? Did you go in it? Yeah. And the beautiful thing about it is it's like it's a 99% salt. So nothing lives there.
Mark Clark [00:16:09]:
It kills everything it touches. But no fish can survive in 99% salt. When you get in it, you just float on the top of it. It's very odd. You don't need to swim, like. So people who can't swim, you should go to Israel. Cause you feel like you can. It's like, ah, look at me, mama.
Mark Clark [00:16:25]:
Right? So. But here's what I realized when I started to float, I had cuts on my body I didn't know about. All right? The minute you touch that water, you're like, oh, gosh, I did not know that cut was there. Okay, I gotta clean that like that. So salt disinfects, it cleanses out. And think about that as Jesus gives this image that some of us, all of us at some level, need cleaning. We have sins and habits and practices in our life that we need God to actually get rid of. And we don't talk about this very often in church, but there are things in your life that's like, there were things when I Met Jesus, that I was doing that still.
Mark Clark [00:17:15]:
God is working on me. But there are things I've progressed over the last 25 years of being a Christian. It took me five years to stop smoking. These things don't happen overnight. And I would still totally smoke. It's just I'm a pastor and they won't let me. But it was like something I tried to get through. But there's things.
Mark Clark [00:17:39]:
There's ways I talked, there's ways I thought. There's things I did that over time, Jesus needed to cleanse out of me that I didn't even know at the time that I had. But when I touched him, it was like, okay. All of a sudden I was like, oh, my gosh. There's this thing. It was, like, heightened. This is a part of my life. And so Jesus starts to disinfect us, and he starts to make us in.
Mark Clark [00:18:03]:
If you've ever seen or read the Narnia books, in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the bullies in the story becomes a dragon. And at the end of it, the Aslan Lion Jesus character walks up and he needs to make him not a dragon anymore. And so he peels his skin off, and the kid talks about how painful it was to experience the kind of transformation that Aslan needed him to go through because his claws ripped through the dragon scales, like peeling an orange. And just left him sitting there in pain for a bit. But then he realized it was good for him. That's the kind of disinfectant Jesus does in your life. It hurts, though, right? But it's the thing that's best for you. Like, those of us who have kids.
Mark Clark [00:18:56]:
Like, I remember my middle kid, Hayden, which she. A bunch of years ago, you know, when the kids were small and their teeth are falling out and they can't wait for the tooth fairy to come. I don't know if you guys are in a tooth fairy. Like, that's a pagan thing. Okay? So sorry. So whatever. The Jesus fairy comes and gives them money, whatever your thing is. So my kids like.
Mark Clark [00:19:17]:
My kids like their teeth, they would get. So they didn't want to. Cause it hurt a bit. Right? Remember this when you were a kid even. And so it would just dangle and you would just get to the place where for, like, two weeks, I'd just be walking around like, I just want to flick it. I just wanna. Like, you know what? I. It's just like, dang.
Mark Clark [00:19:35]:
It's just like. It's one little vein holding it on, and it spins and you're just like, I just wanna. So I tried with my middle daughter to flick it out, and she wouldn't have it. And she's in the room. It's fine. It's fine. Finally, I'm reading in my room, and I hear my wife Mark. And I'm like, whoo.
Mark Clark [00:19:53]:
It's time. And I run into the bedroom and my wife's like, we're trying to corner Hayden. And she's like, no, I'm fine. I don't wanna. Don't touch me. If you do this, I'm gonna hate you for the rest of my life. I'm not gon visit you when you're old. Leave me alone.
Mark Clark [00:20:07]:
So I pin her down. It was my job to pin her down. And my wife just goes in. I got her arms down. My wife just goes in. And bam. Just. And of course it's.
Mark Clark [00:20:17]:
And then it's. Oh, that feels better. That feels better. Okay, that was good. And then, like, literally the next day, another one, young, dangling. I'm like, oh, gosh. They forget so quick. The pain for a second actually made it better, man.
Mark Clark [00:20:36]:
And that's what Jesus wants to do in your life. That habit that you've become, it's become a comfort to you. He wants to take it away, and it's best for you, but it's going to hurt for a bit. That's what it is. Anybody who goes into rehab and goes through detox knows what it's like, how difficult it is for those weeks. And you're puking in a room because you're detoxing your body from that thing that's been poisoning it. That's part of what salt does, and it's part of what Jesus does in your life. But of course, that's just the one level.
Mark Clark [00:21:09]:
He's actually talking about us for the earth. Now it becomes more difficult because now you and I have to be a disinfectant for the world. What could that mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means we gotta do the stuff none of us wanna do, which is this, Men. When you know that your buddy is mistreating his wife or cheating on her, as I've seen many times, I've seen guys who know that that's going on, and they sit around the poker table and say nothing because they're losers and they're weak and they're cowards. They forget that part of the job of being in the church, which is who Jesus is talking to, is you don't get to live a private life. Anymore where you just get to live unto yourself like the suburbs preaches at you. You know, you drive, your car in, your garage goes up, you go into it, your garage goes down, and you don't come back out until the morning when you gotta go to work.
Mark Clark [00:22:14]:
Because what you're doing when you get home is you're watching Netflix. And then after that's over, you got the game on. And then you got this. And then you just move in this very isolated kind of life and you forget that. When you live in something called the church, you have this responsibility toward one another where you gotta start calling each other out for stuff. You gotta disinfect, not just yourself under Jesus, but now you gotta start disinfecting people, helping them, challenging them. Ladies, when your girlfriends are slamming their husbands too much, when life just becomes a perpetual negative audio cycle, do you ever go, you know, ladies, maybe. Let's stop for a sec.
Mark Clark [00:23:04]:
Why don't we pray for this guy? Because he sounds like a disaster. If Sally's husband. Sorry, Sally, I saw you sitting there. I really don't mean Scott at all. He's a great guy. I looked over, I said, sally, if Margaret's husband is really like that, we should probably pray for him instead of just sitting around talking about him. If materialism is running through your community, do you ever call it out and go, I just don't know whether you need that tomorrow. I don't know if you need.
Mark Clark [00:23:39]:
See, this is where this becomes hard, because now you gotta help the church. I'm not talking about the world here. Remember that. It's very important. I'll just say this now in case I forget. When we talk about the salt of the earth and the light of the world later. John Stott makes a point in his commentary. We spend half our time screaming at California and America for being so corrupt.
Mark Clark [00:23:58]:
The point of an image of salt and light, second image is seasoning, but the third image is preserve. Part of the job is not to look at the world and go, I can't see salt. Preserved meat. Back then, there were no fridges. So for two or three days you'd put salt on meat and it would preserve it. Light, of course, would cut in through darkness. John Stott makes a point. Meat goes bad naturally without salt.
Mark Clark [00:24:23]:
So you don't blame the meat for being meat. When it goes bad and starts to teach certain things or believe certain things or act a certain way, you don't go, bad meat. Can't believe you're being all meaty. Meat's just doing what Meat does, man. Without salt, you don't walk into a dark room and go, my gosh, darky, darkness. What's up with the darkness in here? Can't believe it's so dark. Bad dark. What do you ask? Where's the what? The light, man.
Mark Clark [00:25:10]:
So the question isn't, the church gets to posture itself toward the world and try to disinfect the world. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about each other, the people of God, the ones who say, I follow Jesus. Now it's time to go, hey, bro, you gotta. You gotta live this. So a disinfectant, secondly, it's a seasoning. It makes stuff taste better. So the question is, how is my life making the world better, brighter? We're gonna talk about in the initiative, the Accelerate initiative, starting next week, we're gonna talk about our heart.
Mark Clark [00:25:51]:
To plant 100 churches in the next 10 years, that's like. That's an image of seasoning the world, making it better. We're gonna make the world. You know, church planting is the number one form of evangelism under heaven. So I started talking to one of our pastors in Vancouver, said, we want to support you. You're gonna plant a church in Vancouver? We want to support you. Guy in Romania, guy in Ireland, couples all. We're gonna start getting involved in church planning, really, funding, helping train up.
Mark Clark [00:26:19]:
That's making the world. That's seasoning the world. That's putting salt on it, making things taste better. That's the image of what Jesus is saying. Marriage, ministry, kids, camps, all of these things are what we do to make things better. Now, when you're doing this disinfectant thing and you're doing this seasoning thing, what's sometimes hard is we go, yeah, but we want to be loving. We want to make sure that we're loving. We don't want to seem judgmental to people.
Mark Clark [00:26:47]:
I call my buddy out boy. That just doesn't seem nice, like, but he's cheating on his wife. Yeah, I know, but it's just so awkward. I just like to, you know, get along. Tom. It's easier on the golf course if I don't, you know, go, hey, bud. You should probably not cheat on your wife, Tom. Anyways, and then we use the phrase loving to justify our silence and cowardice.
Mark Clark [00:27:18]:
And here's what Tim Keller says. Love without truth is sentimentality. It supports and affirms us, but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness. It gives us information. But in Such a way that we cannot really hear it. So if you are trying to love someone, but you never give them truth, all you're doing is sentimentality with them. I love them, but you're not calling them out on their stuff.
Mark Clark [00:27:52]:
Well, I know. Well, that's just sentimental. But if you try to be truth person all the time, I got to get you the truth, he told me. I got to get you the truth. But you never love and walk with anyone, then all you're doing is bombarding them. And so he says. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent.
Mark Clark [00:28:23]:
So the third image about salt is that it preserves. It preserves the world. It helps because humankind naturally is disintegrating. It's not getting better. The world just doesn't get better by itself. Like the myth of progress tells us, think about your own physicality as you get older. How's that going? Right? Are things getting better? Right. Things are slowing down, man.
Mark Clark [00:28:58]:
Is your body getting better as you get older? Right. It's a disaster. Is your eyesight getting Sharper? Right. I'm 42 years old. My brain. I start to tell a story. I can't even remember why I was telling it, literally. This is starting to happen to me now.
Mark Clark [00:29:22]:
I don't know if this is a side effect from COVID or what this is. I know you didn't have that down here, but in Canada, we had Covid and Ms. Placer County. It was amazing. But we had this. I'm like. I'm sitting there talking to people. I'm like, halfway through, I can't remember why I was telling this story.
Mark Clark [00:29:39]:
It's crazy. 42 years old. My grandfather drove till he was 95 years old, right? He died a couple months ago at 100. I was telling you guys. But 95 years old, he finally gave up his license because we were all like, bro, this man would just drive through red lights. It's just like, you know what? You know what? I'm too old. I don't have time for this. The world could figure it out.
Mark Clark [00:30:06]:
We wouldn't drive with him anywhere. We're just like, we'll meet you there, pops. We'll just. Yeah, we'll just. We'll meet you there, bro. This is what happens when you get old. And so the world disintegrates. Second law of thermodynamics.
Mark Clark [00:30:19]:
Things. Things are winding down. The earth is going to. The sun is going to burn out one day. Energy is winding down. Crime, racism, war, divorce levels happening more and more socially. There's suicide levels, hopelessness, more pills, identity loss. In the Western culture, relationally, we've never been more disconnected.
Mark Clark [00:30:43]:
Sexually, we've never been more promiscuous. Shootings, anxiety, fear, loneliness. The humanism and the technology of the solutions that we've brought have led us nowhere. We got more drugs, more porn, more alcohol to soothe our loneliness and our pain and our inner demons more than we ever have. The world is messed up. And Jesus says the answer is move to a state where they play Christian music in the mall. Jesus says, I want you to help preserve the earth. Don't run from it and create your own subcultures of everywhere where you feel comfortable because everyone talks like you and votes like you and thinks like you, dresses like you, believes the same things as you.
Mark Clark [00:31:45]:
I need you to be salt man. I want you to into the meat. Into the meat, like into it. Like how many of you count in your mind, your non Christian friends? We baptized over 200 people last weekend at Easter. 200 people. I want to ask a follow up question. How many of them got baptized because of you? You run away from the earth, you're never going to be. You're going to be salt.
Mark Clark [00:32:26]:
You're just going to be two pieces of salt bumping up against each other. Hey, we're salt, you're salt. Where's the meat? I don't know. That doesn't work. You disappear to a safe world. Jesus says, I need you to be part of this world. The image of preserving something. Here's what I love about that image.
Mark Clark [00:32:47]:
You know what it means. I know it sounds like I've been really down on the earth, the world, but I'm actually not. Because here's what Christians sometimes forget. You know what the image of preserving is? It's that there's some good that you're supposed to bring out. That's what the preserving is. There's good, right? There's beauty, man. Like just because a person doesn't know Jesus, you don't posture yourself as their enemy. You go, they're made in the image of God.
Mark Clark [00:33:19]:
Let's pull out the goodness. There's such a thing as beauty and art and wonder and joy here. Remember that scene in so they just released the Lord of the Rings in theaters. So I brought my kids. I mean, we've seen it, I've forced them to watch it a hundred times. But we just went back to the movie theater this week to watch the Return of the King. But in the Two Towers, there's that beautiful scene where, you know, they're totally hopeless. There's been all this bad and awfulness in the world.
Mark Clark [00:33:49]:
And Samwise gets up and gives that speech, you know, and he looks to Frodo and he says, you know, folks in those stories had every chance of turning back, only they didn't. They were holding onto something. He says, what were they holding onto, Sam? And he has this line, I always love it. He says that there is some good in this world and it's worth fighting for. Amen. That's the line, man, that in the midst of all the orcs and the evil and the awfulness that have happened in their journey, where they're like, man, at this point in the story, we just want to turn back, we want to give up. He goes, no, no, no. Let's keep.
Mark Clark [00:34:34]:
Folks in those stories, realize that there was something holding up. Well, what's. There's some good in this world that's worth fighting for. I remember when my. When I was in high school, I'd just become a Christian, and I was telling everybody about Jesus, and my friend looked at me one time and she goes, I don't believe any of this stuff, but when I look at you, I do wonder whether it's true. That's what we're talking about. Are you a preserver? Good. Do you bring out the good? That's the idea.
Mark Clark [00:35:04]:
And then, of course, the next image, because I have to get to it contractually, is that you are the light of the world. And again, darkness, we are meant to be salt. We are preserved. But we also penetrate the darkness, and we show the darkness a different way, a beautiful way. And again, we gotta be part of this world in order to do that. We can't disconnect. I remember my buddy called me up a little bit ago, and he's like, hey, man, I want to go golfing with this guy. I'm like, okay, cool.
Mark Clark [00:35:42]:
I'll see you there Tuesday morning. He's like, well, well, hold on. He's not a Christian. O okay, so I'm a pastor, so usually I need to, you know, get someone to sign off before I go hang out with them that they believe all the same stuff as me. No, no. I'm just saying his language is gonna be colorful. Like, I just don't want you to be surprised. I'm like, well, more colorful than mine on the golf course.
Mark Clark [00:36:07]:
I mean, okay, remember Rap Tourette So he's like, well, I'm just saying, man. Like, I'm just nervous about it, okay? I'm like, well, what are you. So sure enough, I get there and meet this guy. Oh fuck. He just starts to blah, blah, blah. I'm like, hey, how you doing, bro? And we're chatting. I'm like, what's. Oh man, I don't know.
Mark Clark [00:36:26]:
I'm dating this girl, we just had our first baby, man. Oh, dude, congratulations. Congratulations. I was thinking about getting abortion, but my girlfriend didn't want to do it anyways. Yeah, bro, yeah. And by the ninth hole it was like, so what do you do? I'm like, I don't know, I'm the lead singer of a band. I don't know, what do you do, bro? I'm like, I'm a pastor. He's like, no.
Mark Clark [00:36:53]:
And I'm like, yeah, shoot, bro. But we had some real good conversations. This is. If your world is so echo chambered out that you're not actually connecting, here's what I love. I'm doing Daniel, reading through Daniel in my, in my devos. And this week the Babylonian king wants to kill all the magicians and dream interpreters that can't interpret his dreams. And he's ready to kill them all. And Daniel shows up, he goes, okay, listen, I'll do it.
Mark Clark [00:37:27]:
And he goes, but I'll do it, but I don't want you to kill all of them. And I just saw in that, like this, this guy's fighting to protect the pagans. We're all like, yeah, get them pagans out of here. We got a Christian society to build. Get them pagans. And Daniel goes, no, no, no, keep them, keep them. I'm actually here to protect them. I want them to live.
Mark Clark [00:37:51]:
And there's a very interesting thing about we gotta be in the world, but not of the world. That's the call. Now. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. I love this. It cannot be hidden. We are a town, guys. We're a town built or a city on a hill.
Mark Clark [00:38:07]:
Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. How are you doing with that? You're a light. If you're a follower of Jesus, you are a light. Some of you are dimmer than others, but you're light. It's okay. But the main thing is he doesn't want you to hide it and put it under a bowl and act like it's not true. So whether you're a student in high school or college or a co worker or whatever. Don't put a bowl over it, shine.
Mark Clark [00:38:30]:
Instead, they put it on a stand and it gives light to everyone in the house. It's good for everyone, by the way, everything you're telling them, even if they think it's not loving. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good deeds. I love this. You know, this word is. There's two. There's a Greek word for good. That's not the one he uses.
Mark Clark [00:38:50]:
The word that's here is the word for beauty that you would. They would see your beauty, your beautiful works, the beautiful things you do and glorify who? You and your coolness? No, your father in heaven. That your whole life would just be a projection out. So if you're a light, you're more like the moon versus the sun itself. You're reflecting the sun light down to earth, but you're not. Some of you are like, wait, what? That's how the moon works. Wait a minute. Say that again.
Mark Clark [00:39:24]:
What happens? The moon doesn't have, you know, the moon doesn't have light source. It's a rock that sits in the sky. The only light we see comes from the reflection of the sun to us. That's your job, to be the moon, to point people toward the Father who's in heaven. Now, let me, let me end this way. Because some of you are like, my gosh, this is a lot. This is. This is heavy.
Mark Clark [00:39:49]:
I. It feels like I'm. I feel a little guilty right now because I haven't been a good salt and light person. Here's what I love, guys. Salt is so small. It's so insignificant. And so are you. Most of you are sitting here like, I can't lead a revolution.
Mark Clark [00:40:13]:
I'm never going to lead thousands of people to Christ. I'm not going to change my coworkers. I'm not going to bro. You don't know who I am. You don't know my skill set. You don't know, blah, blah. Listen, a piece of salt is very small, but it's the small things that matter. There's this guy named David Donald McCullough.
Mark Clark [00:40:32]:
He wrote this book called say Please say Thank you. Here's what he says. I'm more interested in the little things, such as remembering to say thank you and to call your mom on Mother's Day. These things may not seem very important when compared with the major problems facing our culture. Yet they may be the best place to begin. They may be the only honest place to begin. You see, if A person can't remember to say thank you to her housekeeper. It probably doesn't matter much if she writes a major theological treatise on kindness.
Mark Clark [00:41:08]:
If a person is rude to his family, the angels probably won't give a holy rip. If he preaches soaring sermons on the nature of love. So say thank you. So small and insignificant, but all of those things added up are the good deeds that point people. You don't have to lead revolutions, man. It's the small things that add up. It's the being faithful. Because when you serve your Father in heaven, he knows what he's doing.
Mark Clark [00:41:49]:
You know, I preached this sermon one time at Village. It was in the early days, and it was on adultery. And so I get up and I preach on adultery for an hour. I could do that back then. So I go for an hour on adultery, and then I take this car and I drove up to this camp that I was preaching at. And I got a phone call from one of my main guys who was volunteering at the time. And he said, something happened today that I can't explain. It's the first time you've ever preached on adultery.
Mark Clark [00:42:21]:
And as you were preaching, I noticed that the person, the woman that I was cheating on my wife with, walked in the side of the church and she sat down and listened to your whole sermon, got up and left, and I walked up to my wife and confessed everything. The first and only time this woman walked into our church and this guy rebuilt his life. We're talking about a father who is directing and making things happening in your life right now that you can't even explain, man. That's who we want you to trust and glorify. That's who we want you to love and follow and be a light for. He's so much bigger and smarter than you. It's when you try to take it on yourself that it crushes you. It's when you try to be cool that it crushes you.
Mark Clark [00:43:07]:
So, Father, I do pray in this moment that we would find great hope in the fact that even if we're not good salt and light at times, that you would take the little things and make them good things so that people would trust in you in all things. That we would point people to the Father who is in heaven, who loves them more than we ever could do. That work among us. Let us be your people. Let us be the salt and the light that this world needs. Let us not hide it. Let us not be ashamed of it. Let us walk in it with passion and be the taste of the world.
Mark Clark [00:43:54]:
In Jesus good name we pray. Amen.