Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us. Peace be with you. Friends, these

weeks we're reading from the marvelous, of course, sermon on the Mount.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the gospel of Matthew. For your spiritual reading any

time of the day or night, go to those three chapters and you see the son of God

laying out for us the program for life. So we talked about the Beatitudes last

week. This week is something very interesting to me. I don't think we avert to it as

much as we should. Jesus now is speaking to his disciples and he compares them

to three things. You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world, you

are a city set on a hill. Now we're accustomed to those three descriptions. We

say, oh yeah, how crurs. But here's what I want you to see. All three of those things do

not exist for themselves. They exist for something else. Let me say it again. They're

not so much existing for themselves, for their own sake. They exist for the sake of

something else. Now what do I mean? Well look at salt. You're the salt of the earth.

In Jesus' time, so wait before we had refrigeration and all that, it's a way that you

preserve meat, especially if you had to send it or go on a journey or something. Only

this kind of cured meat would be preserved and salt had that power. It existed for the

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