You know, sometimes we read the Bible and we miss the big picture. We see stories and commands, and we don't always connect the dots. But when you step back, you begin to see these incredible parallels and echoes across centuries, which show us how God's story is always unfolding. One of those connections is between the book of Exodus in the Old Testament and the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament.

Think about it: Exodus is about God calling his people out of slavery, forming them, and giving them the Ten Commandments as the blueprint for how to live as His people. Then you get to Matthew, and what do you see? Jesus, the "true and better Moses," calling a new people, His disciples, and giving them the Sermon on the Mount. And right there, front and center, are the Beatitudes—Jesus’s radical redefinition of what it means to be His people. These aren't just feel-good sayings; they're the New Testament's fulfillment and mirror to the Ten Commandments.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out the very heart of Christian ethics. He tells us how we're supposed to live, how we're supposed to treat each other, and how we're supposed to engage with the world. And let's be honest, in our modern culture, it’s alarmingly easy to let go of these core Christian ethics, whether you lean left or right.

It happens all the time, doesn't it? We can lose our grip on what Jesus calls us to by:

• Thinking faith is just a "Sunday thing." As if our walk with God doesn't really have to shape our everyday decisions, how we vote, how we work, how we spend our money. But if our faith isn't touching every corner of our lives, what exactly is it doing?

• Using ugly words to tear people down. It's so easy in our polarized world to resort to name-calling, to talk about people we disagree with instead of to them. When we do that, we're not just being unkind; we're devaluing someone made in God's image.

• Deciding some lives matter more than others. Whether it's the unborn, the elderly, the poor, or the immigrant, when we start ranking human value, we've walked a long way from the heart of Jesus. Every single life has inherent worth because it was created by God.

• Believing "my truth" trumps everything. This idea that morality just shifts with the wind, or that we can keep lowering the bar on what's right and wrong. We often hear it when someone tells us that they are just honoring “my truth” or “following their heart”. God's truth isn't subjective. It's consistent across the ages, and it is for our good.

• Giving in to fear of the "other." Xenophobia, that fear of strangers or those from different places - it's so tempting to build walls. But Jesus tore down walls, didn't He? He called us to love our neighbor, and even more challenging, he called us to love our enemy, and sometimes that neighbor or enemy can be very different from us.

Now, let's talk about those Beatitudes. Jesus begins His major sermon with them, and He concludes that section by discussing the persecution that will come. Why? Because the Beatitudes aren't a self-help guide to "winning at life" by the world's standards. They serve as a blueprint for becoming more and more like Jesus. And here's the kicker: living out the Beatitudes, truly embracing them, might just lead to even more pushback and persecution. Think about it—"Blessed are the poor in spirit," "blessed are the meek," "blessed are the peacemakers." These are a direct contradiction to what the world usually chases: power, recognition, dominance.

Our willingness to shrug off the Beatitudes as impractical, or even impossible, tells us something important about ourselves. It tells us we might be letting the world disciple us more than Jesus is. We have a choice, don't we? Are we more concerned with "winning" in the cultural wars, or are we more deeply concerned with being shaped, day by day, into the image of our Savior?

We can't even begin to understand the Sermon on the Mount unless we get this: it was (and is) a truly countercultural message. Jesus wasn't trying to help His followers fit in. He was showing them just how much they were fitting in with the broken culture around them, and He was calling them to be fundamentally different. Guess what? The exact same call is on us today. We are called to live a lifestyle that swims upstream, a lifestyle that stands out.

So, here's the main thing we need to grasp: the key takeaway is that we must pay attention to Jesus’ ethics. We need to make sure our lives are aligned with the character of God and His kingdom.

We're Called to Be Salt & Light

Jesus didn't just give us these radical ethics; He told us what to do with them. He said, "You are the salt of the earth... You are the light of the world." (Matthew 5:13-16). Notice, He doesn't say, "You should be salt and light." He says, "You are." It's an identity, a fact, and a responsibility.

Too often, as followers of Christ, we've basically retreated from the world around us. And by "the world," I mean our everyday environment, our home, the culture we live in. We Christians often like to complain about culture, to shake our heads and say it's "bad." But culture is not inherently good or bad. It's just... where we live. There are good things in it, and there are broken things in it.

We get so afraid of the sin in culture, so worried about being tainted by it, that we withdraw. We often end up creating our own little Christian bubble. We've got Christian music, Christian movies, Christian clothing, even Christian coffee shops. And what's the result of all that? It lets us off the hook from actually engaging with the world. But Jesus expects the opposite! He wants us right in the middle of it, yet still distinct, still different.

Think about salt. In the first century, salt was a big deal. It was a preservative – it kept things from spoiling. In that way, we're called to preserve the good in our culture, to slow down the decay. But salt was also an additive. It made things taste better; it enhanced the flavor. As Christians, we should be serving our communities, working for their flourishing. We should be working to make things better, not just complaining that they're bad.

But Jesus also warned about salt losing its "saltiness." Now, pure salt can't actually lose its saltiness; chemically, that’s impossible. So what was He talking about? He was talking about salt being mixed with other substances, becoming diluted and ineffective. In simple terms, when Christians stop acting like Christians, when we lose our distinctiveness, we become useless in preserving and influencing culture.

Tim Keller once talked about how churches (and Christians) can relate to the city around them. He said we can be:

1. In the city: Just existing there, but not really connecting.

2. Against the city: Seeing it as the enemy, always fighting it.

3. Of the city: Blending in so much that we lose our own unique Christian flavor.

4. For the city: Actively working for its good, for its shalom, as Jeremiah said—its peace and prosperity.

Keller argues that only that fourth one, being for the city, is what the Bible truly calls us to. We see this in Jeremiah 29:7, where he tells the exiles to "seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper." That's our call!

So, we have to ask ourselves: how are we falling into the trap of mixing so much with the culture that we're no longer an effective Christian influence? How are we letting our "Christian-ness" get watered down? As an example, we see it on the left when specific Christian moral codes that are outlined in scripture are argued away, or the relaxing of those standards are justified. On the right, we see it when we embrace postures of anger and hatred toward those with whom we disagree - when we abandon the Sermon on the Mount in favor of political victory.

When we lose that distinctiveness, that unique Christian flavor, our witness just becomes worthless. It's like Jesus said: "It's no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet." He's not talking about losing our salvation here, but losing our voice, our impact, our ability to point people to Christ in the broader culture. Today, pressures from all sides—from the left and the right—are constantly pushing us to give up our Christian witness, to conform. When we succumb to those pressures, we lose our ability to reveal to the world who Jesus really is.

And here's a tough truth: sometimes, living this out means you’re going to be lonely. You should feel uneasy and not at home among the many voices on the conservative side, and you should feel uneasy and not at home among the many voices on the progressive side. You will often find yourself a bit unsettled, a bit of an outsider in both camps. And that's okay, because it means you're leaning more and more on your church community. We need each other, don't we? We need that space where we can truly belong, where people sympathize with and share our unique, Christ-centered perspective on faith and culture. If you almost always feel comfortable and “at home” with one side or the other, you might be losing your “saltiness”. It could be a reminder to consider your approach to engaging with the world.

What's more, Jesus tells us we are to be lights in the world. This means we're supposed to help reveal God's truth to a world that desperately needs it. But here’s the key: our ability to shine that light, to reveal God’s truth, is directly tied to how much we actually live like Christians in the world. It’s not about how loud we are, but how clearly our lives reflect His character. Let's be salt and light, friends, right where we are.

So, if I could wrap this up, I would encourage you to abandon the question of what is most likely to create the most “wins” and jettison the concern about what “works”, at least when it comes to Christian ethics. Instead, embrace the call to become increasingly like Jesus, and let God determine the results.