Empowering Others // How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Pt 7

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

There are three types of people. People who control you. People who drain you. And people who empower you. We all know which one out of those three we’d rather hang out with, right? And if we’re going to live an extraordinary life … we all know which one out of those three we’d rather be, right?

Now no prizes for guessing which type of person I'd rather work with and you see this sharp polarization between manipulators and empowerers in every sphere and category of life. At home, with our families, at work with our superiors, our peers, our subordinates, you see it in social settings where some people try to be the beautiful people, the trend setters by manipulating you and other people, by causing conflict creating casualties just so that they can be king or queen of the castle.

Do you know people like that in your life? Yeah me too and it's not a lot of fun being around people like that but here's an even more horrifying thought, which category do you and I fall into? Are we manipulators or empowerers? Hmm?

Maybe that's not a question that some of us are too comfortable in confronting but in a sense that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today. We're smack bang in the middle of a series of messages that I've called ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’ and if we want to live such a life then this is an issue that we really, really need to get sorted out.

Have you ever been used by someone because they wanted something that you have? Some gift or ability that you have that suits their agenda. Maybe some money or resource that you have that they want in their pockets instead of yours and so they butter you up and they use you to their own ends and then they drop you like a hot potato when they're done with you.

It's not a nice feeling is it? You've just been manipulated and used. So now put the shoe on the other foot, if we become that manipulator in someone else’s life we may well end up leading an extraordinary life but for all the wrong reasons.

We want to live an extraordinary life for all the right reasons, at least I do, so what do we learn about this facet, this aspect of Jesus life? Well it turns out that He was very much into empowering people not manipulating them.

You may well know that famous Sermon on the Mount, in fact if you're a regular listener you may remember we did a whole series on that a few months back on the program. Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, all about God’s abundant blessing. But I want to take a look for a moment at the tail end of that sermon and just re-visit it again today from a different perspective. Let's have a listen, Matthew chapter 5 beginning at verse 13. Jesus said to them:

"You are the salt of the earth but if the salt loses its taste how can its saltiness be restored? It's not good for anything anymore but it's thrown out and trampled under foot.

"You're the light of the world. A city built on a hill can't be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket but on a lamp stand and it gives light to the whole house.

"In the same way let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven."

Now that may well be a very familiar passage to some. The more familiar it is the more likely we are to skim over it than to stop and really think about it. So let's stop, let's think about it from a different perspective, from the perspective of the people who were sitting there on the grass by the side of the hill having a listen to what Jesus was saying.

Because this is absolutely one of the most empowering things that Jesus ever said when we understand the context and what it meant to the people who were listening.

See in their bland subsistence world, a world where they ate the same boring foods day after day, a world devoid of the culinary diversity of the affluent west in the 21st century, flavour was everything, flavour stood out, you noticed it and the primary way to enhance flavour, the way it stood out from the blandness was to use sea salt.

"You are the salt of the earth"

Jesus said to them and when the sun went down there were no city lights, no neon signs, there were no fifty inch plasma television screens, there were no electric lights in their ceiling, when the sun went down it was pitch dark except for some small candles and maybe a fire.

So candles stood out, it punctuated the darkness and a city, a city with all it's candles and small fires, well that stood out for miles, I mean miles. You, Jesus said to them:

"You are the light of the world."

Now put yourself in their shoes for a moment – poor insignificant peasants living the same bland and insignificant life that their forefathers had lived in the same place for generations; the same life that they were living in their thirty or forty years on this earth. The same lives that their children and their children's children would surely live for generations to come. And Jesus says to them, can you believe this:

"You are the salt of the earth."

You are what brings flavour, you are the light of the world, you bring light into the darkness. They were asking themselves what? What does He mean? This is us He's talking to here, me? Salt? Me light? Insignificant me?

What did Jesus mean by this? Well here's what Jesus meant. Jesus was saying to them, I'm here to turn your boring little world upside down because when you believe in me, when you hear my words and live them, when you follow the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, my Father in heaven, through me something happens to you, you change.

All of a sudden you become the salt in the bland, tasteless, unchanging, subsistence world of the people around you. All of a sudden through your relationship with me you add flavour to people's lives because when they're poor in spirit, when they're mourning, when they're powerless, when they're hungering and thirsting for justice, when they're being persecuted you can be the blessing.

You are the blessing because I'm in you and you're in me. You stand out like salt on your lamb roast. It's as though you became light in the dark world. Yes you, you are the light of the world because I'm the light of the world, you bring flavour and light and meaning and warmth and goodness and kindness and love into this dark, mundane, insignificant corner of the world in which you live.

You're salt, you're light. You the marginalised, you the oppressed, the simple, the uneducated, the lowest of low in the geopolitical scheme of things have significance because you are in me and I have something for you to do.

Do you see the scene now? Do you hear the power, the awesome power of what Jesus is saying? Do you see what it meant to those people who were there on that day who were listening?

What if you and I became empowerers instead of manipulators? What if we saw the good in other people and help them to grow the good in their lives which ultimately displaces the bad? Now you and I can apply that in any part of our lives and I read a great Tweet the other day:

"Management is getting work done through people; leadership is developing people through work."

See that for me is exactly what Jesus was about and when we empower people all of a sudden we're able to achieve so many more things because they appreciate it, because we've earned their loyalty. It seems to me that right there is what an extraordinary life is all about.

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