I heard mooing from our kitchen, and it wasn't a cow in the kitchen. No, it was my wife. No, I don't mean... she wasn't mooing. No, she was doing something that caused the mooing sound. I bought my wife these charming salt and pepper shakers in honor of her farm upbringing. The pepper shaker is a pig and the salt shaker is a cow. Whenever you turn over the pepper shaker, you cause it to start this pig-snorting sound. Would you like to hear one? Nope, I will not demonstrate. The salt shaker? Well, that was a cow, and it worked in the same way. So when I hear that mooing from the kitchen, I know it's announcing that the salt is doing what salt is supposed to do-which is get out of that salt shaker!

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "A World That Needs You."

I'm sure God would love to hear the sounds of His salt getting out of the salt shaker more often. After all, the work salt is supposed to do is not inside the salt shaker, all clustered together with the other salt. It's supposed to get out and change the flavor of something!

Well, according to Jesus, "You are the salt of the earth." That's His word to His followers in our word for today from the Word of God in Matthew 5:13. He goes on to say that "You are the light of the world," and that light is supposed to be "put on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house." Look, you don't put all the light bulbs in one room in the house, do you? You'd have one blazing bright room and the rest of the house would be totally dark. You don't keep the salt all stored up together in the shaker. You scatter it around so it will be in contact with the things that need their flavor changed.

And Christians were never meant to be all clustered together in their spiritual salt shaker, just salting each other and soaking up more blessing and more fellowship. The salt's got to be in direct contact with the meat or the vegetables that need it. So guess what? You and I have to be in meaningful contact with the people who really, really need our Jesus. We're not supposed to be hiding out, playing defense all the time, trying to keep from being contaminated by avoiding the world that Jesus left us here to change!

If your social life, if your discretionary time is pretty much with Christians all the time, maybe you're missing your mission! We'll do that in heaven. We'll hang out together all that time. Right now we've got to be involved with some people who aren't going to heaven yet! It's time for you to take all that you've been storing up spiritually and start taking it to places and people where it's really needed.

It's time to be intentional about building relationships with that neighbor of yours, you know, with that lost co-worker, with some of your fellow students who need your Jesus. It's time to look around your community and find some human needs that you can be involved in meeting in Jesus' name; to build some bridges into those lives. They're all around us.

It's time to look around your community for a place to volunteer, maybe, so you can be in contact with some unreached people with some really deep needs. You just need a community connection of some kind, not just a church connection; something that will put the salt of your life in Jesus in contact with some of the lives that really need the flavor of Jesus; with some lives He gave His life for but they don't know it yet.

Don't you think we need to be actively involved in the life of our church? Absolutely no doubt! God wants that. You need it, but not to the exclusion of connecting with the world that God so loves. You are the spiritual salt where you live. So, get out of that salt shaker!