You all, by this point, know that I love New Hope.
It is a church that leaves me thinking for an entire week about the sermon, and that's the kind of church I want to attend.
Please, let this be a formal invite from me.....If you are looking for a church, you are more than welcome to come check out New Hope. I'd be happy to have you attend with me any Sunday. You pick the date, and show up and catch a ride with Clifford and I. Seriously. Do it.
Now that the inviting is over...time for the post.
On Sunday we talked about a strengthening our communities and what we need to do/who we need to be to do so. One of the verses we talked about was Matthew 5:13 that states
13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot."
If you will recall, salt used to have a more significant impact on people's day to day lives, as it was a major preservative. Still is, but today most people aren't messing around with curing their own meats...
Anyway, notice the second sentence in the verse, "salt loses its saltiness." Salt is a chemical compound that is incapable of losing its "saltiness." The only way for salt to become less salty, is to cut its purity.
Think about those 2 things for a minute. We are to be the salt of the earth. The "preservatives" of God's purpose on earth. The way we fail at this, is to lose our purity.
Pretty darn easy to do.
In the world we live in, we are constantly bombarded with distractions from our Christian purpose, which is to spread the word of God, be reflections of his unconditional love, and draw others nearer his kingdom so that they might repent and be saved in Jesus' name.
That is it. That's our job.
Most of us identify ourselves as the things that we do. I, for example, am a wife, a mother, a chiropractor....but am I the salt of the earth? Am I more focused on the things I do each day that earn me those titles, than I am on my faith? Absolutely. Some days I miss the point entirely. Some days I sit next to one of my best friends and watch Jersey Shore, and am unaffected by the gross absence of Christ in their lives. I am literally sitting next to my friend that doesn't attend church, and I'm unaffected by the absence of Christ in HER life. And the more I sit, the more I am immersed in a society and culture that not just ignores the presence of God, but can be openly antagonistic to those that are faithful, that mocks morality, the less salty I become.....and the easier it is to become so.
One thing that I have found to be true, is that the higher I rose in academia, the more the people around me had dismissed God as some sort of ridiculous mythological being. Belief in God, in Jesus, was part of lower level thinking. Generally speaking, I frequently saw that our intelligent minds (that God gave us) have become too "educated" to believe in Him.
We have become a society that must see to believe. That wants data to prove facts. That has no interest in the conjecture we call faith. A society that wants to blame gun control, or absence of God in our schools and government for the evils that occur due to a lack of God IN OUR HEARTS!
We have stopped "preserving" our faith. I would venture to say that we spend more time shopping for each other at Christmas than we do praying for each other at Christmas. The purity of our belief system is being diluted. Chipped away at by the societal status quo, and we just sit and watch and judge.
We are called to be the light of the earth. That light does not come from us. It is a reflection of God's love for all of us! Just imagine how much room we would have in our lives for God, if we got rid of some of the things that are diluting our purity.
Imagine how much God could move in the lives of others, if they just accepted the possibilty that He exists...imagine how much he could move in your life if you accept Him.
These are the things I need to focus on (that I will pray for others to focus on).
I need to start cutting out some of the distractions and the things that make it easy for me to list my faith and salvation below #1 on my list of priorities.
I have got to work on being more salty.
