701 Salt and Light Part 2 - Matthew 5:14-15

In your workspace, are you a lights on or a lights off person? I am Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. I'm grateful that you're here. This is episode 701 on our podcast on our daily devotionals. Thank you so much for listening to these. Yesterday and today we've been talking about being salt and light in our world. And we're reading from Matthew chapter five today, I'd like to read verses 14 and 15. I'm reading from the English Standard Version. "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, 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."

We started talking yesterday about being salt and light, and yesterday we talked about the salt part of this, about how we're supposed to make the situations we're in, in the relationships that we have a little different. We make them taste different. We give them flavor. It's not really us, that does it, it's the Lord living in us in the way that he calls us and directs us. And the same thing happens, the same principle takes place with light. Now, I asked about, are you someone who likes to have light or not? I used to be someone who turned on the lights all the time and my wife was constantly turning them off, but I believe we're all dependent upon a little light.

You never really been in total darkness. If you have, you didn't move, you can't see what to do. I once tried to walk through a warehouse when the lights were out, and tripped over something I didn't think was there and ended up breaking one of my fingers and having to be in a splint for a long time. We can't get very far in the dark. God has provided light. He's responded to our needs, by giving us this world and he creates this relationship. It's so cool about light because light chases darkness, it's not the other way around. Darkness doesn't overtake light, light overtakes darkness. It's almost as if God is mast in our world, partly because of our fall. And partly because we can't stand the brightness and the light of him in his natural state.

But he came to us as Jesus, and we can see him that way and we can see his actions and we can read about his life on our planet. And then when we follow him, our actions and our lives pass that light along to our friends and to the people that we work with.

I talk about verse 16, which we won't go into today, there's another podcast where you can read about verse 16. But Jesus calls it your light because it's our light. The light comes from our good works. The things that we do in the world when we live following Jesus, we expose him. The light that comes from us makes him visible to the people around us.

Our actions confound a little bit, the people who don't follow him because they don't understand our motives and they don't understand our motivation. They don't understand the joy that we experience and the peace that we get when we follow Jesus. So today, I want to challenge us as marketplace Christians, as people who live following Jesus in the normal everyday chunks of the world, let's live according to our faith in Jesus, let's follow him and ask him for direction.

The actions that he prompts us to take are all designed to help other people see him and come to him. Jesus is working this great strategy. That makes him and his kingdom visible in our world. And we are part of that strategy because we are the light of the world. Let's live like that light today.

Thank you for being a marketplace minister, and thank you for putting yourself in a position to bring a little bit of that light to the world. I want to challenge you to join a community of us who are struggling to do this as well. And our struggle is not hard, it's easy. And it's easier because we do it together. Check it out at https://community.Followerofone.org.

Thanks very much.