Be At Peace with One Another

Introduction

Get everybody turn to Mark chapter 9. We’re continuing looking at our being devoted to one another. Mark chapter 9. Going all the way back to verse 30. They’re making their way, they’re traveling. And this is one of those occasions where Jesus has taken the opportunity to reveal to his disciples what awaits. They’re going to make their way to Jerusalem. And Jesus, the Son of God, the Christ, the Messiah, whom they are willing to confess, is going to be betrayed, it’s going to be beaten, it’s going to be crucified, and then he’s going to rise on the third day. Jesus will make this prediction to his disciples on at least three occasions. And this is one of those occasions here in Mark chapter 9. Now something interesting when it says in verse 32 of his disciples, his closest followers, they did not understand this statement, and they were afraid to ask him.

So Jesus made this statement.

They don’t understand it. So rather than take the time, Jesus explained this to us, they decided we’re going to talk about something else. They came to Capernaum, verse 33. And he was in the house and began to question them.

Well, again, we already know one thing they were not discussing. They were not discussing what did Jesus mean by that statement, and they were certainly were not asking Jesus to explain himself. They kept silent. For on the way they had discussed with one another which of them was the greatest. Sitting down, he called the twelve and said to them, if anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all. Taking a child, he said him before them, and taking him in his arms, he said to them, Whoever receives one child like this in my name receives me. And whoever receives me does not receive me, but him who sent me. Now, for whatever reason, after this, John thinks, okay, we may have been chastised a little bit here, but I’ve got something, Jesus, you need to know that there was this man who was casting out demons, and we forbid him from doing this because he was not following us.

No question about whether the man was doing a good work and whether he could have been a follower of Jesus, he was not following us. So Jesus says, Do not hinder him, for there is no one who will be performing a miracle in my name, and be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. For he who is not against us is for us. And whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because of your name as followers of Christ, truly I say to you, he will not lose his reward. But then Jesus goes on to make some application. You are so offended by this man. What I want you to be more concerned about is not giving offense. Not causing one like him to stumble.

And so, because of that, if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It would be better if you’d in a life crippled than having your two hands to go into hell into the unquenchable fire, where there are worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. And again, in verse 47, if your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out. Jesus is saying in very visceral terms, there are some things about yourself that you’re going to have to sacrifice. You’re going to have to get rid of so you can be the kind of people you’re supposed to be. And he follows that with a couple of statements in verses 49 and 50. Two statements that some look at and think that, well, Jesus has just kind of thrown in some teachings here, but I think very much go back to the larger picture.

1. Everyone Will Be Salted with Fire

And then in verse 50, salt is good. But if the salt becomes unsalty, with what will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. It’s that last statement that we’re going to look at particularly this morning. But to understand that, we’re going to look at all of verses 49 and 50 and again try to look at it in the context of chapter 9 in general. First point is this. This statement in verse 49 doesn’t necessarily make the most sense when it’s just read on its own. But I would certainly hesitate to say that it does not relate to what Jesus already said, because I think it very much does. What, again, the preceding verses, Jesus just talked about the necessity of getting rid of some of ourselves, of literally sacrificing a hand, a foot, an eye.

If those things are leading to us to stumble, get rid of those things. It would seem that Jesus still has this imagery of sacrifice on his mind. Because then he says, everyone will be salted with fire. That idea goes back to the Old Testament when Israel’s grain offerings were to be combined with salt. They were to be offered with God and salt on the altar as well. So an offering had salt. And that may be the idea that Jesus is now making to us. I’m not interested in just an eye or a foot or a hand. I want you. You in your entirety. You need to be salted with fire. And that may also bring in some imagery from the book of Malachi, where God had promised that Levi and his sons that they were going to be purified with fire so that they could truly serve God.

Well, that’s what Jesus is saying does. In fact, if you have the New King James Version and a reading from that, you’ll read that verse that everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. Well, if I’m a disciple of Christ, then I am a sacrificed person. Again, you already may think of Romans 12 and verse 1, of giving our lives as sacrifices to him. That seems to be Jesus’ point here. But we’re continuing on this thought because it’s very much going to play into what we read at the end of verse 50 of being at peace with one another. If we are sacrificed, if we are salt in that sense, then we serve a purpose. He says in verse 50, salt is good.

2. Salt Is Good

Now there’s some here in this audience that are already agreeing. Yes, amen. Salt is good. You’re going to go to dinner here in a little while. And before you even taste the food, you’re going to reach for the salt shaker, and you’re going to be sprinkling that all over the place because you know salt is good. Well, some of us like the taste of salt more than others. And certainly salt was used for seasoning even in Jesus’ day, but you’re also well aware salt served an essential purpose. You didn’t have a Yeti cooler back then. You didn’t have refrigeration. What you had was salt. And you could use salt and you could preserve food. You could make it last. But salt could become unsalty. There were unscrupulous merchants who would add impurity to salt, and therefore the salt would not retain its usefulness.

Or it may just be that over time, depending on how you stored the salt you had, it may have naturally lost some of its usefulness. The point is, you might have had something that tasted a little bit like Saul, that had some of the properties of salt, and yet it’s not good anymore. It does not serve a purpose, it does not serve a function. Well, that can’t be true of Jesus’ disciples. Salt is good. And salt isn’t supposed to lose its saltiness. Back in Matthew the fifth chapter, you may remember that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses kind of the same imagery. He says in verse 13 of Matthew chapter 5, you are the salt of the earth. That the salt has become tasteless.

How can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. He goes on to talk about how you are the light of the world. Those statements were not made in a vacuum. They follow quickly on the heels of what we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is a kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great. For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who are before you, you are. Not you can be, you should be, you will be, you are.

The fact is, if you and I are in fact being the people of God’s kingdom that he desires for us to be. If our spirits are truly poor in recognition that we need God and nothing but God. If we truly mourn over our sins and our wrongdoings and desire again to turn to God, if we hunger and thirst for righteousness, that is our overriding principle in life of what we want the most is to be righteous in the eyes of God. If we are peacemakers, if we are all those things, if we have become the people that God wants us to be, then we are salt. We serve an essential purpose in this world. You and I, we look around the world around us, and we get more discouraged every day and every week.

Well, imagine how bad that world would be if there was no salt at all. Imagine how dark this world would be if there was no light. And our God says, you’re the salt. You’re what’s preserving whatever is good. You are light. You are what are pointing people in the direction of God because they’re not seeing it anywhere else. Salt is good. Salt serves an essential purpose that we must never forget. And therefore, salt must never lose its saltiness. It must never lose its savor. Or else it’ll be fit for nothing.

3. Have Salt in Yourselves and Be at Peace

And it’s in that connection that Jesus says in verse 50 of Mark 9, have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. Remember how this whole exchange had started? Jesus had predicted, foretold his sacrifice. His disciples, rather than understanding the selflessness of Jesus and the humility that was involved in that sacrifice, rather bickered and argued about who is the greatest in the kingdom. There was no peace. They even went so far as to forbid another earnest worker in the kingdom of God from doing what he was doing simply because he did not follow along after Peter, James, and John and the other apostles. There was no peace among Jesus’ followers at that time. And then Jesus turns to these metaphors of salt. You’ve got to be sacrificed.

You are salt to God. You are good, but only so much as if you have peace with one another.

What kind of salt could they possibly be? What kind of preservation could they possibly have on this world? It’s an unfortunate truth. There’s all kinds of reasons, even among God’s people, that peace simply does not exist sometimes. The first reason is right here again in Mark chapter 9, and it’s simple pride and ego. We all want to be thought of as being great. And of course, when we are so lofty and so high up and so busy looking down on each other, then what we cannot see is above. And we cannot see God, nor do we consider our own failings and how worthless we are. Well, Jesus has been trying to have his disciples impressed with that very fact. So they could better look at, better discern each other, better understand each other.

4. Accept One Another

There’s other reasons as well that you and I, we we oftentimes butt heads, we just don’t have the peace that we ought to have. Go over to the book of Romans with me very quickly. I’m gonna go ahead and put out there in Romans chapters 14 and 15. This passage has been made to walk before and to apply to perhaps issues that it does not talking about. I’ll be very honest. I’m not looking at it for an exact reason that Paul’s writing, although it comes close to home. The heart of Paul’s arguments in the book of Romans, throughout the book of Romans, is there’s underlying tension in the church. And that underlying tension has nothing to do with what are people believing about Jesus. It has everything to do with the kinds of people that are in the church.

And the fact that in the church there were people that historically had not gotten along. That historically did not understand each other. Even in the church in Rome, it had gone through these periods of history, whereas at one time the church in Rome may have predominantly been of Jewish background. When the first disciples went back to Rome and they proclaimed the gospel in the synagogues. But then there seems like there was a period of time in Rome when the Jewish Christians were forced out of Rome, as we even understand, Aquil and Priscilla had been forced out of Rome because of some arguments over one Christus, Christ. And then it may be at that time that the Gentile converts kind of became the predominant group in the church in Rome.

Whatever the reason, when Paul is writing to the Romans and he’s making all these arguments about how we are saved by faith, he’s not looking at it from the standpoint of Martin Luther in the 1500s. He’s not saying that, you know what, we really focused on obedience too much. That’s not Paul’s problem. That’s not the problem in Rome. The problem in Rome is how do you bring together Jewish Christians who have for their whole lives held to a law and thought that righteousness came from a law? How do you combine them with Gentile Christians who have no background in that law? One thing, faith. Law didn’t save you. Faith in Christ saved you. So whoever you are, whether you were Jew or whether you’re a Gentile, if you have faith in Christ, then you belong to God’s people.

Now, that’s the theology of the whole thing. But when you come to the 14th chapter, Paul begins to look at some more practical issues. And so he says, beginning in chapter 14 and in verse 1, now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgments on his opinions. Well, what is this person who’s weak in faith? It has, again, nothing to do with what does he believe about Jesus. He believes the right things about Jesus. He’s a Christian. He doesn’t even really have anything to do with is he doing what Jesus asked him to do? No, not about that. The one who is weak in faith, according to chapter 14, is the one who could not eat all things.

Probably looking at a Jewish Christian whose conscience would have been afflicted had he gone into the marketplace and seen meat that could have possibly been offered to an idol. So Paul says in verse 2, one person has faith that he may eat all things. But he who is weak eats vegetables only. The one who eats, verse 3 is not to regard with contempt the one who does not eat. And one who does not eat is not to judge the one who eats, for God has accepted him. Again, I recognize Paul is dealing with a particular issue, and we’re not going to try to make the passage walk on all fours to reach all issues. But the overriding principle is still one that you and I are grappling with today.

Accept one another. And not to judge one another’s opinions. Goes further in the 15th chapter in verse 7. Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. For I say that Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the fathers. And for the Gentiles to glorify God for his mercy, as it is written. Therefore, I will give praise to you among the Gentiles, and I will sing to your name. And he says, Rejoice, O Gentiles with his people. And again, praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and all the peoples praise him. Again, Isaiah says, There shall come the root of Jesse, and he who arises to rule over the Gentiles, in him shall the Gentiles hope.

Now may the God of hope fill you all with joy and peace and believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. What is Paul saying here? You accept one another. Does he say come into total agreement? No. He says, accept one another. Because God has accepted the Jew. And God has accepted the Gentile. And he did not say to the Jews when they came into the church, stop being a Jew. And he did not say to the Gentiles when they came into the church, stop being Gentiles, become Jews. No, Christ accepted them. Now you accept one another. That is at the heart of so much of New Testament teaching. When Paul will talk about the mystery of the gospel in Ephesians, the third chapter.

And you and I, we begin to think of the mystery of the gospel and the things that were not revealed. And of course, our mind goes to the revelation of Jesus, that Jesus is the one who’s going to redeem mankind. And truly that was something that was hidden. But when Paul talks about the mystery of the gospel, the mystery of the gospel was that God would unite Jew and Gentile in one body in the church. The evangelical movement in our country has done some good.

5. Live in Peace Even Though They Don’t Agree

There is a basic sense of morality that still exists in our country that does not in so many places around the world. And we can look at historical trends and religious movements in this country and say that that’s a good thing. The evangelical movement has been a disservice to God in our country for this reason. Christians are viewed as a voting block. In our world, in our society, Christians are viewed as a voting block. That the world looks at Christians and they say, okay, Christians believe in a certain set of issues. Christians are going to be very pro-Second Amendment. Christians are going to be probably against taxes. They’re not going to want health care, universal health care. Christians are going to be pro-Israel. And therefore we’ll side with Israel in the Middle East and whatever they do.

Christians will be very much pro-civil authority because we’re a voting block.

That they look at a church and the first thing they think is that they don’t believe the same things that I believe. Maybe I’m not just a strong, ardent Second Amendment. Or maybe I don’t think we have any business in the Middle East. Any issue you want to talk about, they look at the church and they say, no, the church believes those things.

And actually, what God wants in the church is that it’s in the church where people who don’t believe the same things on those things. That they live in peace with one another. That the church is not defined by, do they all think that the Second Amendment is a I’m from rural Alabama. You’re all thinking, no, what’s he talking about? I probably believe the same thing on that so many of you do. But here’s the point. It doesn’t define my religion. It doesn’t define my relationship with Christ. What I believe about guns or what I believe about civil authority, what I believe about tax code, what I believe about who I should vote for and why I should vote for has nothing to do with who we are in the church.

What the world is supposed to look at as the church is the people who they, of all people, they live in peace with one another, even though they don’t agree on those things.

I’ve got to make sure people know where I stand on this. I’ve got to make sure people know where I stand on that. And what I firmly believe is that God’s saying there’s something that trumps all those things.

And the people that don’t agree with you on those issues, they can be a part of my church too.

And what God wants us all to know is that we can be a part of his church.

And therefore, we must be at peace with one another. Therefore, we must learn to accept one another. Not to make sure that the other people, that they had the exact same viewpoint on world and government and politics, black lives matter, police brutality, whatever it is.

We don’t all have to agree on those things. But we have to be at peace. We have to accept one another.

And we have to give honor to our God.

6. Have This Attitude Which Was in Christ Jesus

And his disciples had failed at taking the same lesson. Ultimately, when we find ourselves not at peace with one another, it’s because we failed to take the same lesson as well. Philippians 2, the passage so well known to many already.

Therefore, if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship with the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintain the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind. Regard one another as more important than yourselves. Not merely look out for your own personal interest, but also for the interest of others. Have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a bond servant, and being made in the likeness of men.

Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name. So that the name of Jesus, every knee will bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth. And that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Have this attitude in yourself, which is also in Christ Jesus. So many times we’ve gotten it backwards. Our Lord was glorified.

But only after he was humiliated. We very much want to be glorified here. We very much want people to think that we’re right. We very much want people to agree with us on so many things. We want to be viewed as wise. We want to be used as smart, as noble. And the glorification comes later. The glorification only comes after we’ve humbled ourselves to each other, and only after we’ve been at peace with each other and accept one another and have had the mind of Christ. Your salt.

Conclusion

Don’t let salt lose its saltiness. If it does, what use is it anymore? Therefore, be at peace with one another. Not agree on all things. Not view the world through the same prism and the same experiences which you don’t have. No. Be at peace. Accept one another. Don’t judge one another’s opinions. Be at peace. And we will, in fact, be salt in this earth. Thirty minutes. Alright, so you’re going to leave. Alright, Tim’s got some sauce. Excellent. I’m not going to sing. I’m going to drink some water.