Salt & light

December 18, 2008

I mentioned recently that my must-need-work “Issue of the Moment” is my insecurity and accompanying people-pleasing tendency habit sin.  Currently, God seems to be gently, lovingly and graciously attacking it from all sides with the intention of ROOTING IT OUT AND DESTROYING IT (read: It’s emBEDDED).  It hurts like that anyway…in a good way.

I’m always amazed at the way God brings things up.  Like, how wild is it that you can read one passage of Scripture your whole life numerous times, and probably heard numerous sermons on it and yet you read it one day and you see a completely different angle.  I love this.  God’s timing is classic.

I had that sort of aha! moment with Matthew 5:13-16.  You know, “You are the salt of the earth…” and “You are the light of the world…” and we should be both those things why?  So that God is glorified AND NOT US.  So that people see our good deeds and through them, ARE POINTED TO CHRIST.

And then I realized just how awesome these analogies are.  God is SO clever!  Because when you’re making a pot of soup, for example, and you put salt in it, when you sit down to dinner and dig into the soup, do you say, “Gee, I love this!  That salt is AMAZING!”  No!  You talk about the delicious flavor of the soup.  Or let’s say you walk into a dark room, and then someone turns on the lights, do you stand there staring at the lights?  No!  You stare at the stuff in the room.  In other words, the salt enhances the delicious flavor of the food and the light illuminates the things around you.

I’m good at doing the “right” thing.  And then feeling quite pleased with myself for being able to say I did the “right thing” (and hoping others will tell me how great I am for doing the “right thing”).  But the things I do should not be done out of a desire to keep the rules or to be amazing, but out of a desire to enhance the flavor of Jesus and illuminate who He is.

I cannot tell you how helpful this is to me.

Related posts:

1. What Do You Do At a Stop Light?
2. Insecure

Comments