A Devotion from Albert Barnes
You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. —Matthew 5:14
The text is not, “You ought to be the light of the world,” but you are; not that Christians should be like a city set on a hill, but an affirmation that they are such. Though exhortations are addressed to Christians in the New Testament urging them to lives of faith, yet they are also addressed as actually putting forth the principles of piety and as true to their God and Savior. “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord” (Eph. 5:8). Many Christians regard the Bible as filled with exhortations that they are not expected to comply with, rather than with statements of what the gospel actually accomplishes among them. God intended that the gospel should have effect, and in fact, the early effect of the gospel was such that Paul could address any church as actually demonstrating the change wrought by the Spirit of God. “You yourselves are our letter” (2 Cor. 3:2), said he to the church at Corinth, the living proof at once of the power of the gospel and of the effect of his ministry. We have fallen on different times. The language addressed to churches is not, “You are …,” but, “You ought to be,” the consistent followers of the Lord Jesus.”
True, the people whom Paul addressed had been heathen and therefore the change would be more obvious. But the ground of the address to the primitive Christians was not what they had been so much as what they then were. Besides, are a people nursed in heathenism—only yesterday degraded and sunk in abomination—to be addressed as actually in advance in Christian principles of the people of our times, trained from their earliest years in the principles of the Christian religion? Are we to expect more living demonstrations of the power of piety from the recovered populations of Athens, Corinth, and Rome than from the people of our times?
No, the gospel considers it as a matter of fact that we can appeal to you and to all Christians and say, “You are …”—not you ought to be—“the light of the world.” We can address the language of obligation and of duty to the most degraded population on the globe; we can approach the profligate and the profane and the pagan with the language, “You ought to be humble followers of God.” We can approach true Christians with the language of certainty and say, “You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.”