Faith in the Public Square

Salt, Light, and the Two Temptations

Ask a room full of Christians whether faith belongs in public life and you will get very different answers. Some feel that the world has grown so hostile that the safest thing is to pull back, keep our heads down, and tend our own gardens. Others feel the opposite pull: that the moment calls for a fight, that we should seize whatever leverage we can and win the culture back. Both instincts come from real love and real fear. And both, on their own, lead us somewhere Jesus never sent us.

This session is about a third way. Not retreat. Not conquest. A steady, faithful presence in the ordinary places where God has already put us. Before we talk about issues or strategies, we need to settle a question underneath all of them: what does Jesus actually ask of His people in the world?

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You Are Salt and Light

Jesus does not tell His followers to become salt and light someday, once they are ready. He tells them what they already are.

¹³ “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. ¹⁴ “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. ¹⁵ Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. ¹⁶ In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.Matthew 5:13-16 · NIV

Notice the plain logic of the images. Salt is useless in the box; it only does its work when it is scattered into the food. Light is pointless under a basket; a lamp exists to be set out, where it can fill a room. Both metaphors assume contact. A faith that never touches anything cannot season or illuminate anything. Jesus is not describing a private religion. He is describing people whose ordinary lives make a visible difference right where they are.

And look at the aim of it all. The point of the light is not that people would admire us, but that they would "glorify your Father in heaven." Our public presence is meant to point past ourselves to God. That single sentence quietly rules out both of our temptations: we are not to hide the light, and we are not to shine it on ourselves.

Two temptations, one calling.

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Seek the Welfare of the City

If Matthew 5 tells us what we are, the prophet Jeremiah shows us how it looks when everything around us feels foreign and even hostile. Israel had been dragged into exile in Babylon, the very empire that had destroyed their home. Every instinct would have said: resist, or hunker down and wait it out. God said something startling instead.

⁴This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ⁵“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. ⁶Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. ⁷Also, 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.”Jeremiah 29:4-7 · NIV

Build houses. Plant gardens. Raise families. And then this stunning line: "seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you." Pray for Babylon. Work for the good of the place that does not share your faith, "because if it prospers, you too will prosper." God ties His people's welfare to the welfare of their pagan neighbors.

This is not assimilation; Israel is still to remain God's distinct people. But neither is it a siege. It is settled, generous, rooted presence in a place they did not choose. Most of us live in some version of Babylon. We did not pick the cultural moment we were born into. Jeremiah tells us to stop waiting for a better one and to seek the good of the city we actually have.

Go deeper → Francis Schaeffer pressed a hard question on the church of his day: whether Christians would be known for both truth and love together, or would settle for defending truth in a way that felt cold and combative. His warning still lands. Truth without visible love rarely looks like light to anyone watching.

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Before We Build, We Grieve

It is worth pausing on how this call begins. Before God tells the exiles to build and plant and seek the city's welfare, they are a grieving people, carried by force into a land that worships other gods. Another psalm remembers it without flinching.

Psalm 137 ¹By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. ²There on the poplars we hung our harps, ³for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” ⁴How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?Psalm 137:1-4 · NIV

Faithful presence is not pretending everything is fine. If you feel the ache of living in a culture that does not share your deepest loves, that grief is honest, and Scripture does not rush you past it. But notice the order: God meets his weeping people, and then, without erasing the sorrow, calls them to seek the good of the very place they are mourning. Lament and engagement are not enemies - the tears come first, and then the work.

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Faithful in a Foreign Court

Scripture gives us people who lived this out inside the machinery of powers that did not know God. Joseph administered Egypt under Pharaoh. Daniel served in the courts of Babylon and Persia. Esther carried real influence in a Persian palace. None of them ran from their culture, and none of them tried to seize it. They served with integrity, right where they were placed.

What is striking is that they held two things at once. They were fully engaged, competent, trusted, useful to the very governments they lived under. And they were unmistakably God's, drawing a clear line when faithfulness required it. Daniel prayed with his windows open. Esther risked her life for her people. Their loyalty to God did not make them withdraw, and their engagement did not make them compromise.

Joseph, Daniel, and Esther show us that you can serve a culture without being swallowed by it, and you can remain distinct without fleeing from it. Presence and faithfulness are not enemies. They are meant to travel together.

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In the World, Not of It, Sent Into It

On the night before He died, Jesus prayed for His followers, and He held a careful tension. He did not ask the Father to take them out of the world, and He did not ask that they blend into it. He asked for something harder.

¹⁴ I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. ¹⁵ My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. ¹⁶ They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. ¹⁷ Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. ¹⁸ As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.John 17:14-18 · NIV

Three phrases sit side by side. His people are in the world. They are not of the world. And they are sent into the world, "as you sent me." That last phrase is easy to skip past and it changes everything. We are not merely tolerated in the world or stuck here waiting for rescue. We are commissioned, aimed, sent, the way the Father sent the Son.

Hold those three together and you can see how the two temptations each drop one of them. Withdrawal remembers that we are "not of" the world but forgets that we are "sent into" it. The culture war remembers that we are "in" the world but forgets that we are "not of" it, fighting with the world's own weapons of power and outrage. Faithful presence keeps all three at once.

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The Turn: Neither Retreat Nor Conquest

So here is where all these texts land. The public square is not off-limits to faith. It is precisely where Jesus scatters His salt and sets His light. But He does not send us there to win a war or to hide from one. He sends us to be present, faithful, and good for our neighbors, so that when people see our lives they end up glorifying our Father.