Sermon Tone Analysis

If God is utterly good, then it’s not surprising that people who live close to God reflect his character and are marked by this same quality.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches what it means and looks like to be living within the kingdom of God.

Living within the kingdom of God means living under God’s reign—living with God as king.

And that means a radical change of life and attitudes, in order to reflect or imitate God our heavenly Father.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a whole new set of rules.

It is rather a description of a new quality of life.

It describes the thinking and behavior that should characterize the followers of Jesus when they submit to God’s reign in their lives and acknowledge that Jesus himself is Lord and King over all.

Salt was used to stop meat or fish from going rotten.

Salt counteracted the natural process of decay and corruption.

So Jesus implies that in a world that is rotten and corrupt through sin, his disciples should be people who stand against that by the way they live and speak.

We are to be different, as distinctive as salt is from rottenness.

And then he told his disciples, “You are the light of the world” (Mt 5:14).

They must have been rather shocked at such a statement!

What did Jesus mean?

Did he mean that they would be preachers of the truth of the gospel that would bring light to people in the darkness of ignorance and sin?

Of course that is what Jesus meant.

But look at what Jesus actually stresses when he explains what he means by “light.”

He did not say, “let your light shine so that people will hear your personal testimony, or listen to your great preaching.”

No, this is what he said:

When Jesus talks here about “light” he is speaking about lives (not just words).

He is calling for lives that are attractive by being filled with goodness, mercy, love, compassion, and justice.

When God’s people live in God’s way, and model the goodness of God for others, then that will bring others to see the truth about God and to know and glorify him and not themselves.

Salt and Light are God’s reflective qualities working through and outwardly in our life.

All throughout the epistles Paul writes so much about good works.

What it is and what it is not.

We know good works is does not produce salvation.

But that true good works is a fruit of the spirit.

Listen to what Paul says in Titus.

So long as we are crystal clear that good works are not the source or grounds for our salvation, Paul insists that once we have experienced God’s salvation we are called to respond to his saving grace and redeeming love by living lives that are characterized by goodness.

As people saved by grace, we are to be people committed to being and doing what is good and right, in our personal and public lives, in the church and in the world.

We could go on and on and on with verse after verse after verse.

God has made it very clear where the goodness that He want us to show comes from.

For He himself is the source and the giver of all things perfectly good.

The cross is the ultimate expression of the goodness of God, and the resurrection proved its victory.

The cross and resurrection are not just the proof of God’s goodness, they are also the source and pattern of any and all goodness we can do as Christians.

So let us pray for the power of the Spirit to bear this fruit of the Spirit, and cultivate it in our daily lives, especially in the public world of our work and in all our social relationships.

Do what is good!

Do what is right!

And let God take responsibility for the consequences.