You Are Salt and Light

1. 0:03 Good morning. If you didn't recognize me from the video, I like that wind-blown look. Get some fans down here, maybe give you that airbrush look. I'm Kent Keller. I'm a teaching pastor here, and it's my privilege to serve along with Pastor James, Chaplain of America.
2. 0:23 Again, we miss James. Looking forward to having you back. I talk to him just about every day. He's doing really well. For a guy in a war zone, he's doing really, really well. So please continue praying for James, his family, and all his men that are under his pastoral care and their families. About 40 years ago, maybe a little more than that, Oz Guinness.
3. 0:43 If you don't know that name, Oz Guinness, it's a name you should know. He's a national treasure. One of the great thinkers and writers we have in our contemporary context. He wrote a book called The Gravedigger File, one of his earliest books. And in it, he said, it's fiction.
4. 0:58 It's as if there's a sort of an underground network of people who are trying to bring down the church in the Western world. And he said, what we want to do is convince Christians that their faith, their Christian faith is privately engaging but culturally irrelevant.
5. 1:16 Privately engaging, culturally and socially irrelevant. In the book, he says that the Christian faith essentially created the Western world. And now they're letting the Western world destroy it. In other words, they're being their own grave diggers.
6. 1:33 It's a great read. I would recommend it to you highly. But I'd move that question. Is that the case? Have we allowed our faith to become privately engaging but socially and culturally irrelevant? If so, that's not the faith Jesus gave to us.
7. 1:50 We'll look back at a familiar passage. We just did a series not too long ago out of the Sermon on the Mount. We called it, Jesus said, what? But I'm going to return to a familiar part of that passage and take a different look at it this morning. From Matthew chapter 5, verses 13 through 16, Jesus speaking on the side of the hill to the folks gathered there in Galilee and he says this, you are the salt of the earth, but the salt has lost its taste.
8. 2:18 How shall its saltiness be restored? It's no longer good for anything except 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.
9. 2:38 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. Would you pray with me? Our Lord and our God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, it's good to be together this morning, gathered here in the presence of our God and with our brothers and sisters here gathered at Christ Church Miami.
10. 3:05 For those who are here in the house of worship, those who are joining us online, Lord, we thank you for the privilege we have to come to the presence of the God of the universe, the one who created us. Now, Lord, as we look into this portion of the written word, my prayer is always that you would speak through this broken, imperfect, inadequate vessel.
11. 3:29 Lord, speak words of truth and grace and most especially speak words of Christ to each and every one of us here. Lord, that you would take the words from the pages of this book, write them on the tablets of our hearts, and that we would be changed, we would be molded and shaped and formed more and more into the image of Jesus, the living word.
12. 3:51 Lord, for it's in his name I make my prayer. Amen. Amen. Well, as you just saw in the video, we just had a great Holy Week celebration, Palm Sunday, the Passover Seder that Thursday night, our Good Friday service, our Easter Sunday morning service.
13. 4:08 It was a great time, great week. And now we're asking the question, okay, so that happened. That happened. Our faith is not just a philosophical thing. It's not a system of morals and ethics and beliefs only. It's a matter of acts and facts. These things happen.
14. 4:24 God acted in history and time and space. Now what? Christ is risen. Now what? And so this series is, but what about, but what about, and last week, Pastor James looked at the evidences for the resurrection. They're there.
15. 4:40 They're compelling. And one of the reasons that the church exists today is because we know Christ rose from the grave that early Sunday morning that on our calendar would have been April 5 of the year. We would call 33 AD. This morning, I want to look at what that has to do with us today in terms of the resurrection of Christ making an impact on the world at large.
16. 5:01 How does the resurrection of Jesus Christ make the world different today? What I hope you'll take out of this this morning is an appreciation for how Jesus, his life, his ministry, his sufferings, his death, his resurrection, how they've not only changed our lives as individuals.
17. 5:18 If you know Jesus as Lord, you probably do or you wouldn't be here today. Maybe you wouldn't if, maybe you wouldn't be watching us online. But if you don't know Jesus as Lord, if there's never been a time, a point in time or a period of time where you intentionally, by faith, surrendered your life to him, laid down your sins, and received the payment he made on the cross for you, I would urge you that today would be a great day to do that.
18. 5:44 We'd love to talk to you about that. But the fact that you're here, you probably have had an encounter with the risen Christ and that's why you're here today. That's great on an individual level and on a church-wide basis. What does that mean to the world at large out there? Now, I want to tell you, this morning, those of you who have been with me for a while, you'll know this, but we're going to do something slightly different.
19. 6:06 In classical homiletics, which is a 50-cent word, just means preaching, okay? But you go to seminary to learn big words. So in classical homiletics, every faithful sermon should have certain parts explanation, certain parts illustration, certain parts application.
20. 6:23 I want you to know this morning, I'm going to do a little explanation, a good bit of illustration and a lot of application. So now that you understand the rules of engagement, let's get to it. What does it mean to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world in a city set on a hill?
21. 6:40 Well, first, salt of the earth, at the time Jesus is speaking these words, they don't have modern refrigeration. They don't have a way to preserve food and keep it from spoiling, and food is precious. So they use salt as a preservative. They use it as a means of keeping food from decaying and spoiling.
22. 6:58 Jesus said, Christians are like that. We are agents of preservation in a world of all that is good in the world. The classical meaning of the word conservative, just so you know, is you want to conserve what is good about your traditions, your culture, your heritage, your country, about your faith.
23. 7:20 You want to conserve those things which are good. And that's what Christians are called to be in that sense, agents of conservation, of preservation of all that is good. We fight against the decay and the decadence of the world. But salt also seasons.
24. 7:36 It enhances the flavor of things, as all of you know. We don't have to be the people who just sit around and say no to things. We're against this. We're against that. We don't like this. We disapprove of that. We don't have to sit around. Every party needs a pooper. Let's invite the Christians, okay?
25. 7:52 We don't have to be those people. Salt also seasons and makes food taste better. We can make our, let's make our culture better. And you need to know, this is a little geeky, but stay with me here. The mood of the verb that's used here is in the indicative, which means it's not a command.
26. 8:09 You need to go be salt of the earth. No, it's saying, that's what you are. You are the salt of the earth. That's who and what you are. Now, be who you are. Often when I pronounce the benediction, not always, but often when I pronounce the benediction, the last thing I say to you is, live the life.
27. 8:27 Live the life. Take what we do here in the house of worship. Take it to your house. Take it to your home. Take it to your work site. Take it into your classrooms. Take it into your social media. Take it on the road when you drive in Miami.
28. 8:44 Not an easy thing to do. Be the salt of the earth. Preserve what is good and season our culture as it is. Be who you are. Now, light of the world. Here again, the mood is indicative.
29. 8:59 He's not saying you must be the light. He's saying you are the light of the world. Now, go out there and shine. Be who you are. Live the life that you know Jesus set down for us to live and be what he's called us to be.
30. 9:15 If you follow Jesus as Lord, you are the light of the world. You are a city set on a hill for people to look at. Act and live and speak and relate to others consistently with who you are in Christ. Live the life.
31. 9:31 We are, of all people, at least we should be, light and life. Jesus certainly was and is. You know, when the Pharisees and his critics, when they criticize him, it wasn't usually for what he doesn't do.
32. 9:46 There's some of that. He doesn't follow the law the way they think he should. Basically, he doesn't bow down at their altar and kiss the ring. But mostly they criticize him for what he does do. He hangs out with all the people. the wrong people. He hangs out with tax collectors.
33. 10:03 They weren't any more popular then than they are now. He hangs out with hookers, lepers. He goes into their house and eats with them. He seems to actually like them. How tacky. They also criticize him for doing things like healing people on the Sabbath.
34. 10:21 He actually forgives sins. Do you get the point? They don't criticize him for what he doesn't do. He doesn't play the games with us. He doesn't do, no, it's mostly what he does do. He's doing all these things and he's really, really rocking the boat.
35. 10:36 We're called to do that too. Salt of the earth, yes. Preserving what is good about our culture and our world, but also light of the world. We're to shine the light into all the darkened corners and bring it out into light. Some people would think, and they say this out loud, they say that the world would be better off without Christianity.
36. 10:59 In fact, the world would be better off without religion whatsoever. There are people who say those things. Religion is the source of all the problems in the world. The people who say these things, at best are ignorant, at worst dishonest. I am a huge fan of the Beatles music. Some of you, you're questioning my salvation right now because I said that.
37. 11:16 Other Beatles fans here? Are there other Beatles fans? Okay. And the rest of you are Neanderthals and Philistines, I assume. Okay, just so we know where we're coming from. I'm not holding them up as role models, but the genius of those four boys, especially Landon and McCartney, the alchemy of what came out of those two in about a seven or eight period in the 60s is amazing and impacts the world to this very day.
38. 11:40 Now, of the two, Paul was born on the sunny side of the street, optimistic. Landon once criticized him and said, Paul, you're all sunshine and pizzas. Because he saw the good in things. Landon, on the other hand, also a genius.
39. 11:56 Man, he was a dark, tormented soul. And to me, it's tragic he was assassinated. That should never have happened. But his last number of years, he just got darker and darker. The song that he put out as a solo artist that probably most people know more than any other is called Imagine.
40. 12:13 I'm sure you've heard it. It's oftentimes considered one of the greatest songs of pop music or the rock and roll era. I'm sure you know it. Imagine there is no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky. Imagine all the people living for today.
41. 12:31 Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too. Imagine all the people living life in peace. Well, that sounds really nice, doesn't it?
42. 12:46 By the way, Landon admitted later on, that's basically the Communist Manifesto put to music. His words. Anybody who's ever cracked open a history book or watched a newscast ought to know how vapid and nonsensical that is. In fact, the iron of it is, John Landon was born in London in 1941 when the atheistic regime called Nazi Germany was bombing his city.
43. 13:08 You want to know where no heaven, no hell, no God leads, no religion? John, you should have known. If you didn't, we can look around. Look at the glories of those atheistic states like Communist Russia, where for 70 years they tried to drive religion, especially the Orthodox Church underground, persecuting, torturing, imprisoning, killing the priests, padlocking churches, turning them into the offices of the Communist Party.
44. 13:39 Stalin oversaw the deaths of maybe 40 million of his own people on the name of atheistic communism. There's Nazi Germany I mentioned. We all know that Hitler put six million Jews to death in the concentration camps.
45. 13:58 He also killed about another six million or more other people, Russian POWs, the Polish people, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, gays, blacks. You know the first people they took away to the concentration camps? People with disabilities.
46. 14:13 They were loaded into trucks that said, humane transport for the mentally and physically disabled. Reminds me when I hear the words, women's reproductive health center. That's not what's going on in there.
47. 14:29 That's not what was going on when they took away the disabled people to the concentration camps either. They basically killed anyone and everyone that they didn't deem fit to be part of the so-called Aryan nation. Communist China, where Mao oversaw the deaths of about 60 million of his people.
48. 14:47 And everybody that opposed him, especially the Christian church, they drove underground. They still to this day, Xi Jinping and the fun bunch of the Chaikoms today, they persecute the Christians. They drive them underground. They imprison and torture and kill priests and any other religion.
49. 15:06 The Uyghur Muslims are in concentration camps today, being subjected to unspeakable treatments, including organ harvesting. Atheist North Korea, where there's one fat little man in a nation of 26.5 million starving people. And Christians are hauled away and put in concentration camps and again, subjected to unspeakable treatment.
50. 15:26 And then closer to home, closer to many of our hearts is so-called socialist Cuba. I will put air quotes around socialist because it's just communist too. The Castro regime and its successors, again, have tried to put the church out of business, put the believers in their filthy prison camps.
51. 15:47 Some of you have come here from families who've suffered under those regimes. What they all have in common, every one of those have in common, is that they were led by people who believed there was no God. And since there was no God, nobody for them to ever answer to at the end of their lives.
52. 16:03 They, in fact, made themselves God. So, John, you want to imagine a world like that? We don't have to imagine it. We know what it looks like. The last century alone, over a hundred million people put to death by atheistic regimes because those in charge thought they'd never answer to anybody above them.
53. 16:22 That's what a world without religion looks like. That's what a world without Christianity looks like. Let's get closer to home here. If Jesus had never risen from the dead, how would our world be different today? Well, for one thing, it wouldn't be April 19, 2026.
54. 16:39 If there was no Jesus, if he had not risen from the dead, this might be, I hope I'm saying this right, 5ER of the Hebrew calendar year 5,786. Or it could be third month, sixth day year of the fire horse on the Chinese calendar.
55. 16:58 We tell time by the life, the birth, and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. There was a time B.C. before Christ. Don't let them tell you B.C.E. before common era. There's nothing common about it. We tell life by B.C.
56. 17:14 before he was born and A.D. after he died, after his birth. That's how we tell time today. We mark his birth as the hinge. There was a time before he was born. There was a time after he was born. If Jesus had never risen from the dead, we're not here today.
57. 17:32 There's no Christian church. There's no reason for us to be here on a Sunday morning. We might be whatever else, but there's no Christian church. There's no Christian faith. Without the resurrection, there's no Christianity. We might remember Jesus basically as just another Jewish prophet, maybe.
58. 17:53 Another rabbi said some interesting things on the level of Rabbi Shammai, Rabbi Hillel, and Rabbi Akiva. Can I see a show of hands of you who are studying the works of the Rabbi Shammai, Hillel, and Akiva this week? That's about what Jesus would be to us. Another failed Messiah whom had a very violent end on Roman gibbet.
59. 18:13 Without Jesus, obviously, there's no Christmas. There's no Christmas. There's no shopping. So maybe that wouldn't all be bad, unless you work in retail. When the period between Christmas Day and between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, basically, you make your budget those years.
60. 18:28 There's no Thanksgiving either. Thanksgiving, I don't care what they say on the modern broadcast today, Thanksgiving is a Christian holiday where the people who came to this country largely for religious freedom, largely Christians seeking to get away from the state churches of Europe.
61. 18:44 They came here, and on that first Thanksgiving day, they gave thanks to God along with their Native American friends. Thanks to God for their blessings in this new world. No Thanksgiving before the NFL and Black Friday took it over. It was a Christian holiday.
62. 18:59 Well, that'll be gone. Devout Christians came here to this country largely for religious freedom. They wouldn't have come. There would have been no religious freedom to pursue. There would have been no church for them to escape. A state church over there and come to start their own churches here.
63. 19:16 And by the way, you can pretty much forget America, too. Without the Bible and the Christian faith, there's no America. There'd be a country here, or maybe countries here of some kind, but they wouldn't be the country we have today. You cannot get a statement like, All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
64. 19:37 Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can't get that statement from any other belief system. You can't get it from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Atheism, Communism, Marxism, Islam. You can't get it anywhere else.
65. 19:53 Secular progressivism. You can only get that idea from the Bible and the Christian faith. Be filtered through the spiritual world. The grid of the Enlightenment, yes, but it starts with the founders and the framers' belief in a Christian God who gave us inalienable rights because we're made in his image.
66. 20:11 There's no Red Cross. It started in 1859 when a Swiss man by the name of Jean-Henri Donent, he's a devout, reformed Christian, he was going to Italy to do some business.
67. 20:27 And while he was on the way there, he came across the Battle of Solferino, and in a single day, about 40,000 men were killed or badly injured. And he stopped right there and he said, I've got to do something about that. As a Christian, I have to do something about this suffering.
68. 20:43 Hence was born the Red Cross, and that's why it is the Red Cross, largest relief agency in the world today. And the truth is, throughout history, wherever there's suffering, wherever there's injustice, wherever there's slavery, the gospel goes and people are uplifted and their rights are advanced.
69. 21:01 Civilization is ennobled wherever it goes. Consider the role of Christianity just in that, the end of slavery. It was committed Christians in Great Britain. John Newton, who gave us Amazing Grace. John Wesley, who unintentionally gave us the Methodist Church.
70. 21:17 William Penn, youngest prime minister in the history of Great Britain. And William Wilberforce, who worked together for decades to get rid of slavery. First in England itself, and then throughout the British Empire. And it was largely committed Christians who were the abolitionists in this country who worked together for decades to get rid of that scourge in America, our national birth defect, the original sin of the colonies and the states, human slavery.
71. 21:47 It was Christians who came together and said, this is not right. These are people made in God's image. They should not be enslaved and treated that way. This may surprise you. The beginning of modern science has its roots in Christianity. Forget what you've heard about the war between science and faith.
72. 22:05 It didn't start that way, and it doesn't need to be that way today. What we know of is modern science today has its roots in Northern and Western Europe after the Protestant Reformation. And that happened because Christian thinkers, let me put it this way, God-fearing people.
73. 22:24 They were not all Christians, but they all had an idea that there was a God. And they believed that this God, probably the God of the Bible, at least somebody a lot like him if they were committed Christians, that he was a God who intelligently and intentionally put the cosmos into existence, including our earth, and put us little image bearers of God on this planet.
74. 22:47 And if our God, in whose image we are made, made the cosmos to work according to natural laws, then we, his image bearers, should be able to discern, discover, understand those natural laws, and by them, make predictions.
75. 23:04 Thus was born modern astronomy, modern medicine. All the modern sciences we have today came out of Northern and Western Europe after the Protestant Reformation. That's not an accident.
76. 23:19 There are so many civilizations that are hundreds, thousands of years older than ours, and yet they didn't come up with these things. Why? They're smart people. They had the wrong philosophical and faith basis for what they believed. They didn't believe in a personal God to set the universe up to work according to orderly fashion, orderly laws that we, as his image bearers, could discover.
77. 23:43 Related to that, especially modern medicine, we've got a number of medical students here today. I'm so glad for that, some of you who are already in medicine as a profession. Western medicine largely came about by following the example of Jesus of Nazareth, who went about healing the sick, the broken, lifting up those who are the outcast and the downcast.
78. 24:06 He went to the blind, the deaf, the lame, even the lepers. And so in his name, Christians have built clinics and hospitals all over the world. How many mercy hospitals are there in the world? How many St. Mary's, St. Andrew's, St.
79. 24:22 whoever's are there in the world? Raised up by Christians, driven by the impulse of the healing power of God, Jehovah Rapha, God the Healer, and Christ, risen with healing in his wings. And today, it's largely medical missionaries who go into all the hot zones in the world today, places where most people fear to tread, where diseases break out, whether it's AIDS, Ebola, or even the common ones like malaria.
80. 24:49 They go in Jesus' name, where others won't go for any reason to try to be healing to people who are desperately in need of it. And education is a Protestant Reformation that launched what we know as modern education today. There was an explosion in literacy coming out of the Reformation so that people could read the Bible.
81. 25:08 They wanted people to be literate so they could read the Bible, and they gave it to them in their own languages. The only Bible they had up at the time of the Reformation, unless you read Hebrew and Greek, the original languages, the only Bibles they had were in Latin. People didn't read it then either.
82. 25:25 Those of you who went through Latin, you know what I'm talking about. Nobody read it then or spoke it then except they're very highly educated. And so the Reformers said, we need to put the Bible in the people's hands so they can read it. They need to be educated. The first real public schools came out of Geneva, Switzerland when John Calvin was there because he said, it shouldn't just be the princes and the nobility and the royalty and the rich and the powerful.
83. 25:50 It shouldn't just be their children who get an education. The common person should get an education too. Early Sunday schools were largely efforts to get people to be able to read so they could read the Bible. You probably know that all the Ivy League schools, with the exception of Penn, all the Ivy League schools were founded as ministerial training schools.
84. 26:10 They were founded to train ministers of the gospel. They've all forgotten. We have not. And it's still in their charters, even though they're embarrassed by it to this day. Human rights, civil rights, Christians have always led these things because we know that's what Jesus would do.
85. 26:26 And lifting up the rights of minorities, women, children, the oppressed, great leaders like Dr. King, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I speak a lot about Dr. King. I'm a great admirer of his. I want you to know, I know he was not a perfect man. He had his flaws.
86. 26:43 Great people have great flaws, and he's no exception. But God raised that man up at a time we needed him to advance the rights of blacks in this country and other minorities as well. Well, it's Christians who lead those movements, lifting up the right to life for the unborn child, dignity of life for the elderly, even the prisoner, even those on death row.
87. 27:05 And, of course, for our church today, we're so especially concerned to fight human trafficking because those who are trafficked, those are God's image bearers. Those women, those little girls, little boys. Ladies, if you were here last Sunday night, you know what I'm talking about.
88. 27:22 You can't hear their stories without just breaking your heart. And we're in the fight to say this should not go on in this city. And we work and we pray toward the day when the scourge of human trafficking will not be a part of Miami anymore.
89. 27:39 And then there's government. I say this with some hesitations, but the form of government we have today, the form of government we have today is largely a product of the Bible. Romans chapter 13 gives us a very limited form of government.
90. 27:56 It basically says the government, civil government, is ordained by God to do three things. Promote the common good, restrain evil, and punish those who do evil. Promote the common good, restrain evil, punish those who commit evil. That's what the government should be doing.
91. 28:13 There's nothing in the Bible that suggests the government should be there to take care of all of our needs from womb to tomb. And the mistake that people who call themselves progressives or whatever names, the mistake they make in saying that there should be a government program, the government should provide all these things, and they think that's the Christian thing to do, the mistake they make is that Christians are called to be charitable.
92. 28:36 We're called to be people who give. We're called to be people who address needs. There's nothing in the Bible that suggests that we outsource our compassion to the all-knowing, all-wise, all-seeing, all-compassionate government. Doesn't work.
93. 28:52 I mean, it works great, except for everywhere it's ever been tried. No, we are called to be the ones to reach out and extend a hand of compassion and benevolence. And the church does it better. Churches and synagogues, we do it much better than any government agency, I promise.
94. 29:10 We do. So we have the government we have. Again, the system we have. I don't claim all the people who are in it. But as you know, we get the government we deserve. Lily Tomlin, the great theologian philosopher, once said, 98% of all Americans are decent, honest, hard-working people.
95. 29:28 It's the other 2% that get all the publicity. But then again, we elected them. That's what she says. I'm just passing it on to you. And then let me talk just for a minute about the arts. Whether you know it or not, Christianity has impacted the arts. The performing arts, the spoken arts, the visual arts.
96. 29:46 Christianity has had a huge impact on that. And it's basically like this. We have realized that as God's image bearers, our God is a creative God. He creates out of nothing. He gives us order. and beauty and symmetry and as his image bearers we have from him the impulse to want to create and create things of beauty and classically speaking art was to reflect well on his creator I realize of late there are distortions and vandalisms of that kind of art but classically speaking art was to create works that were reflective of the glories of our creator and so think of what we have that is inspired by the bible itself handles messiah box passion of saint matthew newton's amazing grace and I would maintain as a fan of that great irish gospel quartet called you too their song 40 is a beautiful meditation on psalm number 40 and then in the visual arts we have da Vinci's last supper and his salvatore monday last supper one of the great masterpieces of the world salvatore it's not for sale salvatore monday was sold about nine years ago for a mere 450 million dollars the most expensive piece of art ever sold to a private collector you've got hubert and jan by night's the adoration of the mystic lamb got the michelangelo's creation of adam and all the massive works of the sistine chapel i'm sure some of you have been there all biblically inspired rembrandt's return of the prodigal son absolutely beautiful beautiful painting beautiful beautiful work of art rafael is the transfiguration and then in literature and this may surprise some of you what i'm about to say in literature without the bible without the christian faith we wouldn't have the lord of the rings it's an extended allegory of the gospel tolkien was a very committed christian we wouldn't have the chronicles of narnia and this is what some of you will say are you kidding we wouldn't have the harry potter series the harry potter i'm not kidding harry potter is an extended allegory of the gospel some of you are questioning my salvation again i promise you give me five minutes and i'll show it to you beyond beyond doubt she wrote it as an allegory of the gospel from the opening chapter to the final scenes it is an extended allegory of the gospel of christ i realize she said some things of late that go against that but but so be it she wrote it and i think that's exactly what she intended to do and we talk about art whether it's spoken or visual or or song or music or we just had a great outpouring of affection for our artist in residence dotty green and if you've never seen goddy's paintings what a what a magnificent way that woman had of capturing the beauty of god's creation here in south florida and putting it on canvas it was amazing so god created us in his image to be creative to bring works of art and work of beauty into the world and all these arenas all these arenas christians have led because we've taken seriously that all men are created in the image of god they should be treated with dignity and respect nobility compassion and yes even given works of beauty to admire and all these things have happened because of the life of jesus of nazareth if he had never been born if he had never lived and ministered and preached if he had never done the miracles that he did if he had never died for our sins and risen from the dead none of that would have happened the western world would not exist we would not be here today and this world would be a very dark cold and brutal place to live all because of jesus of nazareth we have all the blessings that we have in the world today napoleon bonaparte is a name you know late 18th century early 19th century french statesman military leader and would-be emperor of europe we're not 100% sure of his religious beliefs he wrote a number of things that were very critical of the established church but he also wrote something that's a bit of a legacy for him that some people question the authenticity of this the research i've done on this tells me this is authentically from napoleon and i'll just close with what he had to say napoleon writes i know men and i tell you jesus christ is no mere man superficial minds see a resemblance between christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions that resemblance does not exist there is between christianity and other religions the distance of infinity alexander caesar charlemagne and myself founded empires but on what did we rest the creations of our genius upon sheer force jesus christ alone founded his empire upon love and at this hour millions of men will die for him in every other existence but that of christ how many imperfections from the first day to the last he is the same majestic and simple infinitely firm and infinitely gentle he proposes to our faith a series of mysteries and commands with authority that we should believe them giving no other reason than those tremendous words i am god i marvel that whereas the ambitions ambitious dreams of myself caesar and alexander should have vanished in the thin air a judean peasant jesus should be able to stretch his hands across the century and control the destinies of men and nations it's amazing isn't it that god takes the short life and the violent death of his only son and he uses that as the best thing that's ever happened in this world as the means of salvation for all who will his life his death his resurrection have changed the world it's changed my life that's why i'm here today it's probably changed yours and that's why you're here today but if you're here today and you don't know jesus and he's never changed your life today today i would urge you come and meet him and let him change you forever and for good as well if jesus had never come if he'd never been born raised lived and died and raised again how much darker and more brutal this world would be but he has come praise god he has come and he lived and he died and he rose again so that we can follow him in his train one day will you pray with me once again our lord and our god we thank you for the gift of your son jesus we thank you for what he's done for his life his teachings his miracles his example but most of all for his atoning sacrificial death where he himself took upon took upon himself the sins of the world became the sins of the world that he might put them to death and pay the price that our sins deserved he offers to us his righteousness today all by faith all by grace lord now of your mercy and by your grace we pray to extend that mercy to us this very day and to all who know him we'd be lifted up and to those who don't know him they would be beckoned to come meet him face to face let him change their lives as well if we make this our prayer in jesus name amen

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