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. 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. 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. 5:13-16
Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another. — Mark 9:50
Exerpts:
The demand that we let our light shine before the world has a goal: that people might give glory to our Father who is in heaven. So ultimately, the demand is that we seek to glorify God by
letting our light shine.
Page 351 - The first thing that Jesus demands that we pray is that our Father’s name be hallowed. (Matt. 6:9). In saying this, Jesus signals that his first passion is—and our first passion should be—the manifest holiness of God.....the Greek word behind “hallowed be” is built on the word for “holy” (ag{ io~)...when you turn the word “holy” into a verb like this, it means to “show
yourself holy”—hence the idea of manifest holiness....another way to speak of the manifest holiness of God is to speak of his glory.
Nothing in the universe is more valuable than the glory of God. Seeing the connection between the hallowing of God’s name as the first passion of Jesus and the glory of God as the supreme value in the universe shows that there is no conflict between these two.
What Is the Glory of God? God’s glory is the radiance of his manifold perfections. Those are
poor words for the richest reality of all....God’s glory is the outshining of the infinite value of all that God is....It is visible to the physical eye only as the glorious created world points to its invisible but more glorious Maker. “Consider the lilies of the field. . . . "
Page 352 - It is meant to get our attention and waken us to a glory of which lily-glory is only a likeness. We love to look at glory. We were made to enjoy seeing it. This is why Jesus came into the world. He came to reveal the glory of God more fully than nature ever had (John 1:14)..to die in our place so that we could be saved from God’s wrath...to awaken in us a desire for that glory... Jesus consciously aimed to reveal the glory of God. His actions and words were designed to fulfill prophecies...(Matt. 4:16)...(John 9:5; cf. 8:12)....he revealed the brightness of God’s glory as never before and by this light put everything in truthful perspective.
How Jesus Glorified God Jesus displayed the glory of God in accomplishing what God had
given him to do..... So he prayed to his Father at the end of his life, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4). That work included many miracles during his life and the great final work of redemption when he died and rose
again....when Jesus did his first public miracle by turning water into wine, John says, he “manifested his glory” (John 2:11)....When Jesus healed a paralytic and forgave his sins, “the crowds saw it [and] were afraid, and they glorified God” (Matt. 9:8). When the people saw “the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing . . . they glorified the God of Israel” (Matt. 15:31). When ten lepers were cleansed, one grateful man “turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice” (Luke 17:15, NASB). When a woman who was bent over for eighteen years was touched and straightened, “she glorified God” (Luke 13:13).
Page 353 - Everything Jesus did was done with a view to making God look great. His work was to display the greatness and the beauty of the full range of God’s perfections. But the greatest miracle of all was Jesus’ death and resurrection so that we might be redeemed from the guilt and power of sin (Mark 10:45) and have forgiveness (Matt. 26:28) and eternal life (John 3:14-15). In this great act of substitution—the guiltless for the guilty—Jesus displayed the glory of the wrath of God and the glory of the love of God.
God’s wrath is a glorious wrath (Luke 21:23; John 3:36). He could have no other kind. And God’s love is a glorious love. When Jesus came to die, as the climax of his earthly work, there was a huge sense that this was the moment of greatest groaning and greatest glory.... The glory of Jesus was manifested both in the suffering and in the triumphal resurrection afterward. (Luke 24:26). The sufferings were the pathway to glory.
But they were not just the path. They were an essential part of his glory. (John 13:31)....God is shown to be gloriously worthy in Jesus’ willingness to die so that God would be just to remove the wrath that rightly falls on sinners. And when the Father is thus glorified in the Son, he then
undertakes to glorify the Son with a mighty display of approval in the resurrection.
Page 354 - Back and forth goes the work of the Father and the Son in glorifying each other in the act of salvation. If we have seen that the Son glorifies the Father, and the Father responds by glorifying the Son, the reverse is also true. “Father,” Jesus says, “the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you” (John 17:1; 12:27-28). When Jesus is glorifying the Father in his death, it is the Father at work glorifying the Son as well; and when the Father glorifies the Son in his resurrection and exaltation, it leads to the Son glorifying the Father as well. This mutual display of the glory of God in the work of the Father and of the Son is the supreme passion of their hearts.
And the good news is that this is the very essence of their love for us. They are displaying their glory not only to make it visible for the enjoyment of soul-hungry creatures like us who were made to find ultimate satisfaction in it, but also in a way that pays for our failures to treasure God’s glory so that we can escape judgment (John 5:29).... He gives us his glory, and he pays
for it with his Son’s life. There is no greater gift than God himself in all his glory. There is no greater price than the death of God’s Son. Therefore, there is no greater love than God’s glorifying himself in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Page 355 - The central work of the Spirit is to continue the great work of glorifying the Father and the Son. He does that by opening our spiritual eyes to see the truth and beauty of who Jesus is and what he has already done in his life and death and resurrection (John 3:3, 8; Matt. 16:17).
Now, in view of the passion for God’s glory, what does it mean to “let your light shine” for the glory of God? That’s the focus of the next chapter.
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