Real Self Esteem! - Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. God's assessment of you is you are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world. He's not blowing smoke at you. He's telling you this is a fact.

It's interesting, isn't it, that so many people, especially those who end up in counseling, somebody said something derogatory about them a long time ago, you know, a relative or something, and that's their image. Oh, you ought to know, my mom told me this when I was way back then, and I guess that's who I am. This is God speaking. He can't be wrong.

He's saying it exactly the way it is. He said you are the salt of the earth. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana.

Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. You probably remember this as well, but from the time we're little, people ask us, what are you going to be when you grow up? You know, what are you going to be when you grow up? As though a five-year-old has any, I actually wanted to be a cowboy.

I love the Lone Ranger. And I wanted to be a cowboy. Then I moved to being, wanting to be a football player. And then eventually, as I got older, I realized all I want is a job that I'll be able to support a family with.

I don't care what it is, I'll do it. Who would have ever thought I never had pastor on the radar at all, and then here I am. But there's another thing that happens. Many of us live our lives with regret that we never became what we thought we should be. You see that over and over again. People are upset because they never became what they could have been due to the circumstances and all those kind of things.

And they end up being disappointed. But I'm here this morning to tell you this, that if you're a Christian, you need to drive those thoughts from your mind because it's not true. You see, it's not true at all. Jesus Christ, God incarnate, has told you what you are. That's what we'll look at this morning. He'll tell you what you are.

And I want you to consider this. He can't be wrong. Jesus can't be wrong. He's the Son of God. And how He describes you will be probably the single greatest description of you ever given, even better than your mother gave you.

And your self-esteem and your self-image should be through the roof. When you really understand what the Son of God has said to you. So open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5. I've called this whole series The Disturbing Sermon on the Mount because to the audience who'd heard it, they were really disturbed. It really bothered them.

They didn't like hearing what they heard at all. We read it and see a lot of good things in it, but we read it on this side of the cross. Jews did not necessarily like almost anything that Jesus said. In fact, the section we're looking at today is one of the most positive things in the entire sermon. And Matthew dealt with this whole idea of the Beatitudes, and we went over those last week.

You have to see yourself. If you're going to be blessed by God, you have to see yourself as spiritually bankrupt, totally dependent on Him. You have to mourn over your falling short of the standard that God has for you, mourn over your own sins. You have to be meek and submissive to the Father. You have to hunger and thirst for God's presence in your life. You have to give mercy to those who are undeserving, just like God gave you mercy. And you need to use the gospel to bring peace between God and man.

And then you have to accept being persecuted by an unsaved world. And then everything changes. At that time, what really happens, I find, is the change, the pronoun changes. He's talking about they and those, blessed are those. All of a sudden, he changes and goes to one word, you, just you.

I'm going to talk about you. And it's even more so than you'd think. In Greek, as I've said often in the past, when you want to put an exclamation point by something for a sentence, to really emphasize it, they don't have punctuation that way. So what they do is they change the word order, and they put the word they're going to emphasize as the first word in the sentence. And this is a double emphatic that Jesus Christ uses here to describe. And he says, you are the salt of the earth.

Next verse, you are the light of the world. Wow. You. He means it this way.

You, you, you, you, you. This is the son of God speaking. You are the salt of the earth.

You're the light of the world. And he says are. It's indicative mood.

He doesn't say might be, could be. You could become. You are. You're the salt of the earth. You're the light of the world.

Wow. Doesn't that change the way we think about ourselves? Name anything you've ever done that makes you this important. God's assessment of you is you are the salt of the earth, and you are the light of the world. He's not blowing smoke at you. He's telling you this is a fact.

It's interesting, isn't it, that so many people, especially those who end up in counseling, somebody said something derogatory about them a long time ago, you know, a relative or something, and that's their image. Oh, you ought to know, my mom told me this when I was way back when, and I guess that's who I am. This is God speaking. He can't be wrong. He's saying it exactly the way it is.

He said you are the salt of the earth. Who are these guys? Well, all we know for sure is there's four fishermen with them right now.

This is very early on. They are not nobility. They are barely religious. They have no political power, and they're not educated. God says you're the salt of the earth and the light of the world to them.

From the world's point of view, if you used one word to describe these men, it would be the same word to describe many of us. They were ordinary. From our point of view, they're just ordinary people, but that's not from God's point of view, and he calls them salt. Now, in the ancient world, that would be quite a bit different than it is today. In the ancient world, salt was revered. The Greeks actually said that there's something of the divine in salt.

It was necessary for life, especially in the Near East. Roman soldiers were paid with salt. That was the wage they got. They would be paid with salt. Hence, if you were a terrible Roman soldier, they used the phrase back in Rome, you're not worth your salt, and that phrase is still with us today. You'll say to someone, you're just not worth your salt.

It's interesting. Not only that, today even we call people salt of the earth. Oh, that's a salt of the earth person. These are all descriptions that show how salt is revered and probably for a lot of reasons. I mean, what does salt do?

I mean, it's a seasoning agent, right? We all use some salt, some of you, excessively. I mean, there are people that I don't think it matters what you put in front of them, they have to salt it, every bit of food. I can still remember years ago we were at the Cooper Housing Project and doing ministry with the kids in the project, and even when ladies in our church would make spaghetti for them, before they'd eat any spaghetti, they all wanted the salt shaker and just covered it with salt. That's just what they were used to eating. Job, oldest book in the Bible as far as authorship, Job 6 says, can flavorless food be eaten without salt?

You know that. You've had flavorless food in your mouth and said, well, you got some salt? Let's try to give it some taste at all.

So it does act as a seasoning agent. He said maybe that's what he meant. Maybe we're to bring joy among the sorrowful. Maybe we're to give hope to the depressed. Maybe we're to give peace to those who are frightened.

Maybe that's what he has in mind. Maybe we're to make life palatable for people, possibly. Secondly, it's a symbol of purity. There's a purity idea with salt, so much so that if you read Leviticus 2 at verse 13, an offering that you brought to God had to have accompanying it salt, the idea that that sort of set it apart.

That would mean that we are to represent purity in a decaying culture, and that makes some sense. Salt also creates thirst. Arabs still to today carry salt and give themselves salt.

It makes them thirsty so they'll drink water so they don't dehydrate living in the desert. And those are all possibilities, but I don't think that's what Jesus had in mind at all when he talked about salt with us. I believe the primary use of salt that Jesus is viewing here is it's a preservative.

You and I are the preservatives of the earth. We preserve or withhold God's judgment wherever we live based on us. Is there biblical support for that?

Sure. You know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and you know what happened to it. Isn't it interesting that before it happened, remember Abraham's discussion with God? He bargains with God. He keeps trying to say to God, if there are this many righteous people being salt, will you withhold your judgment?

God said, yeah, and then he thought, well, may I keep it? And Abraham got down to 10. He finally said, look, if there are 10 righteous people in Sodom, will you withhold your judgment? And God said, yeah, but there weren't 10 righteous people.

In fact, there weren't even close to 10 righteous people, and so God judged them. In Romans chapter 1, you begin to see what happens when the preservative, the salt of the earth people, us, starts becoming absent of being salt in a culture, and you see what happens to mankind. You see the decline. It just keeps coming more and more and more of a decline in the culture, and he says, Paul finally writes there without excuse. They have done all these things.

They are declining. God gave them over. God gave them over, and they reap what they sow.

Even think about it from this point of view. If you think of the end times in the great tribulation period, what happens in the beginning of the tribulation? The church leaves. It's called the rapture. The church leaves this earth. Now, how well does the world do without the church here? What happens in the world? Unbelievable chaos.

It's just unbelievable. You have the antichrist and all that, but you have God pouring out judgments on the world, and the reason is the salt's gone, and so he says you are the salt of the earth. Maybe an illustration to make it a little more contemporary is this. In the 1700s, the early 1800s, there was the great French Revolution, and the king of France, just when this was beginning, he had a quote, and he simply said this. After me, the deluge.

He knew it was coming. He was prophetic, and after that, unbelievable what happened in France. The culture became extremely secular, humanistic. It became very anti-religious and extremely violent.

The guillotine, you tried to eliminate all your enemies, and they went into a complete disruptive way. 20 miles across the channel is England, and they have the same problems. They have a king. You see, they have a monarchy.

They have people that are facing economic challenges and find themselves without any power, but there was no revolution, and you wonder why was that the case, and at least in one person's opinion I read this week, his name was Woodrow Wilson. He was the president of the United States, and they asked Woodrow Wilson, why didn't England follow France in the revolution, and he said all because of one man. He said one man was born in England in 1703 that changed it, John Wesley. He said John Wesley led so many people in England to a revival and a relationship with Christ that England never suffered what France did at all. It's interesting. If that's true, there's something amazing about it. One grain of salt really doing it, creating a lot of other grains, but England didn't face the same thing.

In fact, they still have a monarchy that they honor today that doesn't have political power, but they didn't have the problems that France had at all. So what must we do, the second question, what must we do to be this preserving agent in our culture? Hmm.

He warns us, you're the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It's no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under the foot by men. First thing's logical. You have to be in touch with the culture.

You have to be in touch part of the culture. Well, have to be. See, if you have salt, if you have salt and you don't apply it to something, there's no preservation. I mean, if you think about it from the point of view of the disciples, for example, they were fishermen. Well, they knew exactly what to do. They caught their fish in the Sea of Galilee. Their big market was Jerusalem. How do you get the fish from Galilee to Jerusalem? Pack it in salt.

You have to be in touch with it. You have to have contact, and one of the problems that the churches had even in America is we became a salt warehouse. That's not right. We should not be a salt warehouse. We got salt everywhere here. Yeah, but you're not applying it anywhere.

You're not interacting or interfacing with the culture or the people of the culture, so that's one thing you have to do absolutely for sure. Jesus kind of understood this. Remember, he said, I send you a sheep out among wolves. The sheep were salt. He said, yeah, I send you out among wolves. Didn't say it would be easy. I mean, can you imagine sheep getting together and say, what do we need to do?

Well, we need to go find a wolf pack. We need to interact with these people, but that's the analogy that Jesus used, and I think it's a good one. But more importantly here, I think, is he said you have to maintain your saltiness.

You have to see your life that way or see who you are that way. Notice, he says, if the salt has become tasteless, can you make it salty again? Now, in their world, there were two kinds of salt. Sea salt, which is pure. In fact, we still see restaurants have sea salt.

That's pure. We got sea salt. But most of the salt in Israel at the time was dead sea salt. Dead sea salt's not pure.

In fact, it's not pure at all. It has a lot of minerals in it. That's one of the things, but it also has gypsum.

It has lots of gypsum. If you have gypsum in your salt, you can't eat it. It won't preserve.

You see, it's of no value at all. It becomes tasteless. And even when they use salt sometimes as part of their fertilizing process, you couldn't put gypsum on a field.

You'd kill everything on the field. And you'd ruin the soil for a period of time afterwards. So the only thing you can do with tasteless salt, as he's saying, is you can make a sidewalk out of it.

That's sort of what he says. He says, except it be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. Salt is not doing what it should be doing. And he says, there's the warning that I have for you.

That's the warning about this completely. Now, what I find interesting about that is that what he's implying here is that if we lose our unique qualities of salt, according to Jesus, we become tasteless and good for nothing. That's an interesting assessment. Jesus told us two of the most wonderful things about it. We are the salt of the earth and we're the light of the world. And then he says, yeah, but if you become tasteless, you're good for nothing. See, in that sense, we're God's plan. The whole idea is how is God going to influence a sinful, dark world? Us.

We're the plan. He says, yeah, because you are the salt of the earth. If you're really beatitude people, he says, you will be salt to your culture.

You have to interact with the culture. The American church has not been very good at this. The American church has become more often than not a sequestered group of people. Everything about the idea of the church is how much can we do in these walls and not having to do with them out there. That's not a good thing. That's not what Jesus has in mind. Notice he also doesn't cause sugar.

And I think it's pretty interesting. The difference between sugar and salt is this. Salt irritates.

And if you don't believe me, next time you get a cut, don't worry about mercurochrome or anything like that. Just put some salt on it. And you'll find out just how irritable it is. Salt can irritate you. Hence, that's why he told them, blessed are you when you're persecuted. Because when you act as salt, you're going to be an irritant. And you will be persecuted.

That's okay. You see, he said it later in John. He says, the world will hate you because it first hated me. What was Jesus? He was salt. He said, that's what I want you to be just as well. I want you to be salt.

So then he moves on in verse 14. You're the light of the world. One of the definitions Webster uses for light is this. Something that enables you to see. What a simple definition of light.

Think about it. You'd have perfect eyes, but if you don't have light, what? You can't see anything. There's no value of having sight if you don't have light. The only thing that gives it is light. In 1 John 1.5, he writes and says, God is light. That the essence God is light. In 1 Timothy 6.16, God dwells in unapproachable light. God is light.

Creation is dark. Light is of God. Christ is called in John, the light of the world. In Psalm 119, his word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.

And then Paul goes in and says, look, you've got to be light. Hold your place there and go with me to Ephesians chapter 5 verse 8. Ephesians chapter 5 verse 8. The apostles, both Peter and Paul picked right up on this. They never forgot what Jesus said about light. So in chapter 5 of Ephesians, Paul was warning them about falsity, immorality and all that.

And he says in 7, therefore do not be partakers of them. And then he says this, for you were formerly darkness. Now, what's interesting is he didn't say you were formerly in darkness. He said you were formerly darkness.

That's who you were. He said but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of the light.

So notice he picks up what Jesus said. He didn't say you talk about the light. He's saying you are light. You were darkness.

Now you are light. He said live as children of the light. For the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth. Notice goodness and righteousness has to deal with how you live and truth is what you say.

Trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness. But instead even expose them.

For it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light. For everything that becomes visible is light.

Everything. Our job is to expose what's dark. We're to shine light on things with truth.

But we're to be an example with our lives. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time.

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