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In the midst of a recent arctic freeze in Minnesota, I sent out a tweet: “Best part of a #polarvortex is ability to be in a warm house and to cozy up and enjoy time with the family. Pray for those who are not warm.” Someone, known on Twitter as @RiskyLiberal, read my tweet and found it lacking: “Don’t pray for them—HELP them! Take some blankets, winter coats, MONEY to your local shelter TODAY.”

My initial response was to take to Twitter to defend prayer as a genuine means of help, but as I reflected on the tweet, I had to admit, she (or he) had a point. Prayer is not insignificant for a Christian—indeed it is one of the most powerful spiritual forces for good in the world—but it must be grounded in concrete action, not warm and fuzzy sentiment. I was chastened and responded, “It’s a good point! Help must be tangible.”

As God’s voice, Scripture seems designed to speak to each of us individually in whatever spiritual place we find ourselves. When I went to read the Scripture for this column, it was no surprise to find that the readings for the week spoke directly to my situation. Yet the voice of God was also found in a simple Twitter exchange. Echoes of @RiskyLiberal resonated for me in the readings from the prophet Isaiah.

Isaiah calls on the faithful to “share your bread with the hungry,” to “shelter the oppressed and the homeless” and to “clothe the naked when you see them.” Only when the people respond to actual human need, says Isaiah, will “light” emerge. Isaiah links God’s response to the “call” and “cry,” the prayers of the faithful, to their tangible actions for those in need.

At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus draws on this same prophetic tradition when he says, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world.” Who is being addressed? Who is “you”? In both cases, the Greek text uses the plural form for you. It is the apostles of Jesus and the other disciples, the members of the nascent church, who are invited to hear these words and to identify with them, and so too are these words addressed to the church today.

We are called to make these words our own, to heed Jesus’ call to be what we are intended to be: salt and light for the world. This is Jesus’ appeal to the church to live up to its vocation, to bring flavor to the dullness of life, to chase away the darkness with light.

But Jesus warns the church that if it is not fulfilling its mission, if salt is not salty, if light is hidden away and extinguished, then the people of God have lost their purpose, their reason for being. If the church is to live up to its vocation as the “salt of the earth” and as the “light of the world,” Jesus says that the church must let its “light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” It is these good works that make evident the spiritual light of prayer and draw attention not to ourselves but to the transforming power of God.

Jesus outlines these good works throughout the Gospel of Matthew, especially drawing our attention to the corporal works of mercy in Chapter 25. Here, as in Isaiah, Jesus calls us to share bread with the hungry, clothe the naked and meet the needs of the afflicted, including those who are sick or imprisoned.

Certainly, those who are afflicted include those who are suffering from the frigid cold in my neighborhood. Only by responding to these human needs through the good works Jesus calls us to perform will the Christian light “shine before others.” Praying for those in need must lead to action on behalf of those in need, for these actions are concrete signs of God’s light shining in the world. These actions are proof that prayer is not empty words or cheap empathy, but the active presence of God in individual lives and the church compelling us to transform the darkness with light and the cold with warmth.

This article appears in February 3 2014.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.