I. When the Church Loses Discipleship 00:00
Lord, we pray that as we dive into your word, you would transform us, that you would encounter us, and that we would walk from this place with the light of Christ shining. In Jesus’ name, amen.
So this year we’ve been talking about discipleship, and I wanted to start with an introduction story about what happens when the church loses the message of discipleship. Now, these are broad generalizations, I understand. But go with me on this story. Once upon a time, there was a place called Great Britain. I think they dropped the “Great” along the way. But long story short, back in the day when they were Great Britain, they were the empire of all empires in their day. They say the sun never sets on the empire, because their colonies are all over the world, so it’s shining somewhere in the empire.
And so you think about Great Britain: something that was essential and central to the power of Great Britain was Christianity. In fact, unlike America, they have a state church called the Church of England. And the idea was, we all are English, which also meant we’re all part of the Church of England and all of this. They had a moment where it really was true that their culture and their nation were operating under Christian principles, and it gave them a great amount of grace. Now, I’m not going to take the time here to tease out how that played out. But I just want you to imagine a place where everyone that you trade with, everyone that you live near, is operating under a generally Christian worldview, to the point where you can trust them better, and there’s a general sense of well-being, and there’s taking care of one another.
All of this was happening. But by the 1700s, that was no longer the case. Increasingly, there was a moral disintegration, and you saw it in the things that the people were doing. Think about Rome. What do we always say about Rome? You think about the gladiators, where they went into an arena and they’d watch men fight lions and get torn to shreds. And we’re like, “How could they do that?” Well, in the 1700s in England, they literally had something called bear baiting, where in the middle of the street they’d clear away, and they’d bring a bear, and they’d have dogs rip it to shreds. And that was part of the entertainment of the time.
That’s just the most egregious, public, obvious thing. But drunkenness was a huge problem. There were people who couldn’t afford to feed their families, and so they’d just drink themselves to death. I mean, that was a regular story. You’ve probably read Charles Dickens before, and so you’ve seen some of the difficulties that were being experienced in Great Britain at the time. And it was really a moral decay. It was like the fabric of their culture that had held them together was disintegrating. And so they were spinning out, and that meant prostitution was on the rise. That meant homelessness was on the rise. That meant drug use. There was a huge trade in opium that Great Britain was participating in.
All of these things were spinning out, because that which is the light of the world, Jesus, was dimming in their society and their culture. They were pulling away from Christianity. And the church itself was more of a virtue signal. You would go to church so people saw you going to church. Or it was a political arm. You went to the church because your people, the Tories or the Whigs or whoever else was in power, were the people that you wanted to impress, and so you went to the right churches that preached the right political messages. I know we’re very unfamiliar with this type of thing happening, ever. But obviously we’re seeing some of that happen again in America, and I want to draw that connection.
II. William Wilberforce 04:13
And in the midst of that, this man was born named William Wilberforce. You may have heard of him. He’s a pretty amazing guy. He started as a political lightning rod. He was the young up-and-coming. He was doing everything right. He was friends with all the right people. He went to all the right parties. And he said all the right things. And so he was very popular. But then he had a radical conversion to Christianity. He had what we call a born-again experience. Because, you know, he was a member of the Church of England, but it didn’t mean much in his life. But then he had a born-again experience. He’s filled with the power and the revelation of the goodness of God, and he changes his entire life.
This man, William Wilberforce: God gave him, he said, two missions. One was the abolition of the slave trade, and the second was the reformation of manners. Now, we hear that and we’re like, “Oh, he wanted them to use the right fork. How British.” That is not what he was talking about. What he meant by the reformation of manners was the reformation of your behavior. Your manner is the way in which you behave. So the reformation of your morals. And so he gets this great revelation: “My life matters. I can actually make a difference.” And he becomes a disciple of Jesus Christ, not just a member of the Church of England. That’s the invitation of discipleship.
And he got that from a particular church movement called the Methodist Church movement. And the title tells you all you need to know. They thought that Christianity was not theoretical or hypothetical. It was methodical. What Christianity actually was, was a method of living, a way to be and exist in the world. And they taught and acted like that. It actually affected their behavior. It wasn’t a virtue signal for them anymore. In fact, they were persecuted for this belief. “You mean you’re not going to sleep with your girlfriend before you marry her? Get away from me. You don’t belong in my church.” “You mean you’re not going to drink to drunkenness with us at the parties? You’re giving up alcohol altogether? No way. Get out of my church.” “You mean that everything you do is submitted to Jesus? That doesn’t sound like Church of England.” At the time… now, I’m painting a very stark picture, but this was really happening. They were saying, “I think we’re supposed to live like the words in this Bible, this book that we’re given.” And the people were like, “What do you mean? Nobody does that. We read it on Sundays, and we sing the songs at Christmas. That’s Christianity.”
No. The call of discipleship is so much deeper than that. And what had happened in Great Britain was that the church no longer was salty. It’s what Jesus was talking about today. What is salt if it loses its saltiness? The church was no longer transforming the culture. The church was being transformed by the culture. And discipleship was the solution to the problem.
III. Changing an Empire 07:19
That’s my argument today: that when William Wilberforce became a disciple of Jesus Christ, he himself, and of course the team that he gathered around him of fellow disciples, changed the biggest empire in the world and changed world history. So what happens in this moment? In the 1780s (sorry, getting my dates wrong) he has this conversion experience. By 1803 he is able to pass his first anti-slavery law. And by 1833 the first nation in the history of the world made slavery illegal and put their money where their mouth was. They paid, in today’s dollars, billions of dollars to set free the slaves around their empire. 40% of their annual budget. Imagine 40% of America’s annual budget: you’d be in the trillions at this point. It was paid to set the slaves free. That’s incredible. Because one person decided, “I’m going to follow Jesus. I’m not just going to be a church member. I’m going to be a disciple.” And he let God use him in his influence.
And it changed alcoholism. Especially gin consumption fell drastically in the time period of his life, through the reformation of manners. He passed legislation about it, but it wasn’t just the legislation. The whole culture was transformed. And the first time he proposed all this stuff, they booed him out of the House. You know, he gets in there, he gets to stand up and talk, and the British… You’ve got to watch their parliamentary procedure sometimes. They still actively boo the people while they’re talking if they disagree. It’s wonderful. Either way, they also cheer each other on, all that stuff. And they just booed him right out. He couldn’t even get a word out, because they were booing too much.
So think about this situation. Over the course of his lifetime, for 40 years, he works to get all this stuff passed. And a few days before he dies, in 1833, they finally abolish slavery and make it illegal in the empire. There’s a whole story about how he gets to hear the vote and all this stuff, and you can see it all in this movie, Amazing Grace. It’s wonderful. But all of that said, discipleship transformed the British Empire at the time. And it didn’t transform the British Empire from an abstract perspective. The people benefited. Private charities sprang up in his time, people who were taking care of the poor. Literacy rose. All of these measurable changes, because one man said, “I’m going to be a disciple of Christ. I’m not just going to be a church member.”
Now, you’ve never heard of an empire that had built itself on slavery, that had propped itself up with slavery, and then, because of a move of God, set them free at great personal cost. Oh, wait, hold on. I have heard of that, in Exodus. What happens? Pharaoh has these slaves. God moves powerfully through one man, Moses, who decides to follow God, not just be a member of the race. And Pharaoh sets them free at great personal cost. They’re loaded down with jewelry and gold and possessions as they leave Egypt. I wanted to bring that parallel up because this is not a one-time thing in history. When God moves, slaves are set free. When God moves, the empire is changed. When God moves in people following him, we actually can be the light of the world.
IV. The Salt of the Earth 10:54
So let’s talk about what Jesus is saying in the Gospel, because this is what he’s warning us of. You could have a nation that has this great prosperous moment, where they really are centered on Christian values, where Jesus really is in the heart of the culture, where there are these great gains made, and well-being and goodness, because of the moral stance of the people. There’s trust, and all of these things multiply. And then you can have it start to spin out of control, as people lose the central message of the church. Which is not a particular set of beliefs. It’s not a place to go so people know how holy you are. It’s not punching your ticket to heaven. And it gosh darn isn’t a political platform. It’s the thing where you lay down everything. It’s the place where you take up your cross. It’s the place where you become in Christ, where you become a disciple of him, where you do the things he did, talk the way he talked, think the way he thought. That’s what church is all about. That’s why Jesus says so strongly:
13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. Matt 5.13
I don’t want to be a part of a church whose main mission is to have a lot of people in the pews. I don’t want to say all the right things so that we get all the best Instagram followers. I don’t want to be a part of a church whose programs are the height: “Oh, we have the best children’s program. We have the best this program, or this event.” I want to be at the church whose mission is to become like Jesus. Not just for us, but for the world. Because I want to stay salty. Really, I want to be salty.
Think about this. Let’s say an alien species came, and they’re studying and they’re parsing out the people in your neighborhood. Let’s say you’re in southern Orange County, and they’re like, “Okay, this is a group of people that are different, because they have a different color skin.” That’s easy enough for the alien to figure out. “But you know what? They’re mostly the same. They say the same things. They believe the same things. They go to the same places. They’re actually not all that different. Maybe the skin color doesn’t matter.” Because if you go anything more than skin deep, you find that it doesn’t matter. And then the alien starts to put together a picture: “Okay, in southern Orange County, this is how the people live.” Would he find any difference in your life and the non-Christian neighbor next door? Would he be able to tell, or would it all taste the same to him? Would you be salty enough to make a difference?
That’s the question of salt losing its saltiness. It becomes the same as everything else. You’re just adding sand to your dish. At least sand crunches; it might not even be that good. You know what I mean? There’s something Jesus is getting at here: we can just become unimportant, apathetic, and indistinguishable, when we’re supposed to be the salt of the earth.
V. How Salty Salt Can Be 14:07
What does salt do? Let me tell you a quick story about my wonderful sister McKenzie. We just celebrated her a lot, because she and her husband put on our wonderful chili cook-off. I love them. Thank goodness they’re not here, because now I can really make fun of them. No, they are these wonderful people. McKenzie was making something at our house for one of our gatherings. It happened to be cornbread. “McKenzie, you’re doing the cornbread? That’s great.” She put a quarter cup of salt instead of a quarter teaspoon of salt in the cornbread. She’s like, “It seemed like a lot.” And she showed up, and you broke it, and it was salt tack. I mean, you could barely bite through it. Everything was changed. Let me tell you, I know what saltiness is like. Actually, my Uncle Ken loved it. I kept finding him in the corner, taking little bites out of it. He’s like, “This stuff is great.” It’s so funny, though. Salt is so important that in an entire dish, a quarter teaspoon’s enough. Isn’t that amazing, how salty salt can be? Let’s be salty.
Discipleship to Christ, an actual change where you think the way he thought and do the things he did, can be reduced to being a good appearance at your church, trying not to swear, and holding all the right political opinions. That’s not salty. In fact, your political views should flow out of your discipleship to Christ, not the other direction. Everybody wants to respond… Okay, this is a good question. You think, “I would never let my political views dictate what I believe about Jesus. Jesus is so central to me, so important to me.” Well, here’s the question: does Jesus agree with all your political views? If your answer is yes, automatically and without consideration, you’ve put your political views before Jesus. I can guarantee you Jesus does not agree with all your political views, because you are not perfect. You’re wrong about something. Some of you, I know what it is. No, I’m just kidding. But think about this. Jesus, and our study of him, and our encounter with him, should make us believe things differently about the world. Otherwise, you’re not salty, and you’re not effective, and you’re not changing things.
William Wilberforce found out that all of his political beliefs were wrong the minute he encountered Jesus. He changed his whole life to follow that. If your faith does not create catalytic transformation in your life, if you’re basically the same as any other non-Christian American, then you’re not salty.
VI. The Light of the World 17:28
Okay, verse 14:
14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 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. 16 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. Matt 5.14–16
Now he moves on to this metaphor of light. And what I love about this is that light, in this metaphor, doesn’t change. You’re still in Christ whether the bucket’s on you or not. You still have the light of Christ whether you’re hiding it or not. And that is metaphysically true of you. Yes, Christ has covered all your sins. In fact, the sins you commit today are already nailed to the cross. From now and forever, you have nothing to be ashamed of or guilty of. He has paid all the prices. But why would you put a bucket over a lamp? It makes no sense. He’s being a little salty here, Jesus is. Who would light a lamp and put a bucket over it? Why would you do that? This is the problem with sin: it blinds us.
VII. A Bucket Over the Lamp 18:55
Let’s take gossiping, for instance, one of our favorite pet sins. You start by saying something along the lines of, “Did you hear about Roberta?” And you tell about Roberta. And then you get this rush. You feel a little guilty, because you know something’s a little wrong with this, but you also feel a little holy, because you shared somebody else’s sin that is not your own. And so you are now holier than thou. And then you continue to gossip: “Did you hear? Can you believe what Jack did?” “I am just concerned, because Jack’s been blah blah blah all over the place.” And all of a sudden you are the keeper of all the secret information in the whole church, and you are the caretaker for everybody, because you know their sins and how they could be better, because you are working diligently for their benefit, as you and your best friends trash them every Friday night over a glass of wine.
How blind do we become when we put a bushel over our lights? Because you can’t see when you put the bucket over the lamp. All of a sudden, everything’s dark and murky. You don’t even see that it’s sin anymore. Every one of our sins follows this pattern. It tastes a little good, but you feel a little guilt. Then you want a little more. And then you keep going, and eventually it no longer has any guilt mixed in at all. The salt has just gone away. And all it is is your self-justified “I deserve this,” or “I should do this,” or “Yes, maybe it isn’t right for others, but it’s right for me,” or “I’m doing this for somebody else’s sake.” We find all the justifications in the world. We become blind. We cover our light.
This is a small example, but imagine entire churches where their discipleship to Christ has taken a backseat to virtue signaling, political agenda, need for growth, their program productivity. It’s just, “Well, we can’t get people in the door if we tell them not to sleep with their girlfriends before they’re married.” I’m so sorry, what? How blind have we become? “We can’t get them in the door if we tell them that you probably shouldn’t get drunk every Friday night.” “We can’t get them in the door if we tell them that they have to read their Bible in order to follow Jesus.” “We can’t even get them in the door if we try and tell them to stop swearing.” “We can’t even get them in the door if we ask them to actually become followers of Jesus.” Here’s the thing: you were never told to just get them in the door. That’s not the point.
One preacher said, “How you invite them in is how they’ll live their Christian life.” So if you invite them in the door as though nothing is required of them, they believe that’s what Christianity is: a place to hang out and feel good about yourself. But if you invite them in the door the way Jesus did: “Hey, take up your cross and follow me. Get on board. Let’s do this.” It’s torturous death the rest of our life, redeemed by resurrection. You have to include the “redeemed by resurrection.” Because the reality is, we need Jesus. And we need to let go of all this stuff that is just ruining your life. And even more than us, it’s ruining the life of those who don’t even know him. They don’t even know there’s an answer. They don’t even know there’s somebody to bear their burdens.
VIII. A Kairos Moment 21:58
Now, right now, we are at an inflection point. Or maybe, for the old Pentecostal people, you might call it a kairos moment. It’s a Greek word for special time. It sounds really intense, but all we’re saying is, if you look at the world, something is changing right now. There’s an opportunity for us to reach people that wasn’t there before. Today, people are open. They are searching. They want to know where the meaning is in their life. They want to know why they don’t feel fulfilled.
I hate this statistic. It totally illustrates what’s going on, though. For the first time, as far as we know, in human history, our society, America, has more women over the age of 30 who have not had a child than women who have had a child by the age of 30. That is broken. That is wrong. Now, of course, there are people (all the caveats) who are called to not be physical mothers but spiritual mothers, and everything else. But it’s a great symbol of the difficulties that are facing our culture right now: that people are not getting married and having kids. That is God’s purpose for us in Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1.28). “So shall a woman leave her mother and father and be joined with a man, and they shall become one flesh,” so that they can make families and fill the world.
How much light spreads when that happens, out of our churches! When people come in here, what do they notice? “Wait, that guy has nine kids. That other guy has nine kids.” He had 11. People freak out when Haley tells them that she has five kids. They’re like, “You do not.” She’s like, “I have photo evidence.” Because it’s just not normal anymore. Our culture has lost… okay, the value has been inverted. That’s the idea. The value, in the past, in human culture, for all of time, has been that children are your wealth. And now your wealth is how much time and money you can accumulate, and children eat away at your time and money. Okay, that was not in my notes, but it’s important.
We need to be salty. We need to be a light on the hill. And I think Saint Michael’s has done that, really. Bravo. When people come to our church (and my wife is a prime example), they all of a sudden see that big families are wonderful. She told me at one point she didn’t even want kids. And then, “Maybe, okay, maybe I’ll have one or two.” And then she saw our family. She’s like, “Can we have 12?” You know what I mean? That’s God’s transformation in people’s lives, as they see the light on the hill, as they see the saltiness, as they encounter him in us.
IX. Become Disciples 25:14
This is why Dallas Willard wrote: “The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’” (so this is the church members that we were talking about) “will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.”
Think of William Wilberforce. He decided to become a student of Jesus Christ, and he changed the world forever. In the West, slavery is illegal because William Wilberforce became a disciple of Christ. That’s the type of impact that people can have when you become a disciple of him, when you become salty, when you take the bucket off. I’m going to close with Hebrews chapter 12, beginning in verse 1:
1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Heb 12.1–2
I love that, because it tells you two things. First of all, all those things that you’re carrying, that you don’t want to give to him: all they are is weight, and sin that clings so closely. It paints it in the exact right terms. It’s just holding you back. Take it off. Take a breath. His yoke is easy; his burden is light (Matt 11.30). But how do we do that? We look to Jesus. We watch the way he moves. We watch the way he speaks. We listen to what he says. And we imitate him. That’s disciple, discipulus in the Latin: a follower, a student, somebody who is learning from the master.
So the invitation today is this. If you look at the world and it looks dark, be the light. If you’re encountering the world and it feels bland and meaningless and empty, be the salt. If the world has a problem, it’s your problem. We are called to be the body of Jesus to the world. What did Jesus do with his body? He just poured it out, that everyone might come within the means of his saving embrace. Amen.