The Holy Spirit’s Work through Us
From TABLETALK
How should Christians engage with culture? The answer to that question is hotly contested, and many proposals set down the wrong track. We discover in Jesus’ description of His people in Matthew 5:13–16 key principles to guide our answer. His choice images—the salt of the earth and the light of the world—give us sure footing for an essential orientation to the question.
The metaphor of salt focuses on its preservative power. Salt’s antiseptic qualities make it a fitting picture of how Christians are to live amid a world that is putrefying in sin. As it lives in obedience to Christ, the church plays a role in staving off the world’s moral decay.
The metaphor of light focuses on another feature of our life amid the world: illumination. It is conjoined with the notion that the church is a “city on a hill.” In this image, our Savior is referencing not just the way that a city on a hill is visible on the horizon during the day but also how it is especially visible in the evening when it is lit up by the collective lamps burning within it. If one traveled at nighttime to a city like Jerusalem, he could not have missed the lights of the city shining against the black of the night sky.
Like an illumined city in the night, the righteous lives of Christians should stand out against the darkness of the world. We must be so thoroughly transformed by Christ that the world cannot but perceive in all our conduct something that seems completely idiosyncratic and thus unavoidably noticeable.
Yes, we need to think carefully about how to proclaim the gospel to the cultures in which we live. Yet we ought never to delude ourselves into believing that we can make the gospel more attractive to the culture around us by hiding certain things about it, such as how it calls us to live. To the contrary, light is an attractive force precisely because of its stark contrast to the darkness that surrounds it. The gospel does not need us to conceal its contradistinction to the world.
In both facets of engaging the world—preservation and illumination—we must rely on the Holy Spirit. The antithetical character of spiritual salt as it interacts with infection and spiritual light as it pierces darkness will countenance no attempt at manipulating outcomes through the devices of the flesh.
We are salt and light by virtue of the new relationship into which we have entered with God through the grace that has broken into our lives through the reign of Jesus. There is no other way to enter that relationship but through the Spirit-empowered dynamics of the gospel. The sovereignty of God’s grace through the Holy Spirit regenerates dead men and causes them to be crucified with Christ so that the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in them (Rom. 8:4). The Spirit makes us to be salt and light, and only He can make others to be salt and light as well.
Jesus’ commission is neither fearful world-flight nor naive triumphalism.
This orients us properly to the missional nature of what Jesus adds in Matthew 5:16. He says that men will see our good works. Yet they do not glorify us. Rather, they glorify our Father who is in heaven. By our good works, other people recognize that God has wrought these things.
In making us agents of preservation and illumination, Christ uses us as instruments to gather the nations to Himself. A missional hope is embedded in the calling to be salt and light. Through Christ’s disciples, men and women will glimpse His light and be invited to glorify God themselves.
We do well to note that though this missional hope is executed in the arena of human culture, it is not about the transformation of human culture per se. The redemption of the earth is a prerogative that resides in the hands of Christ Himself as the second Adam. Try as we might, we cannot bring the new creation down from heaven through our cultural efforts. We cannot set all things free from their bondage to corruption. Rather, we wait in hope for what we do not yet see (Rom. 8:18–25).
What we must do is to be fully active as cultural agents in this world, serving as an antiseptic force that staves off corruption and as rays that pierce the shadows. We are to be blessedly different. In our every endeavor, we are to be peculiar to a watching world.
We do this in reliance on the Holy Spirit, in the hope that through that same Spirit, men and women will turn to glorify our Father and in so doing embrace the Son whom the Father has sent to extract them from their caves of misery and gloom.
Jesus’ commission is neither fearful world-flight nor naive triumphalism. It is resilient witness bearing. His commission accepts the perpetual reality of persecution in this passing age until Christ returns (Matt. 5:10–11). But it accepts this in the hope that as we are salt and light, Jesus is working through the Holy Spirit to draw the nations to Himself.
Christ calls us to do something difficult: to remain in the world yet to be distinct from the world. His call places us in the middle of the cascading pressure of cultures that are hostile, corrupt, and tempting. In the crucible of that opposition and seduction, we are to be salt that does not lose its saltiness and light that never blends in with the darkness.
This arduous balancing act is an indispensable feature of the mission of the church. Every generation of God’s people must engage in it afresh with faithfulness in their time and place, becoming neither Christian separatists nor Christian assimilators. Instead, we must be salt and light. And we cannot be salt or light without uncompromising reliance on the Spirit.
Dr. Daniel Schrock is pastor of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Ill.
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