More Salt, Please!

Matthew 5:13 NKJV

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men."

Have you ever been put on a sodium free diet? You soon found yourself saying, “More salt, please!”

Each of us has heard the remark: "Isn't he just the salt of the earth?"  William Barclay said that Jesus provided us with an expression that is “The greatest compliment that can be paid to a man” (The Gospel of Matthew, vol. 1, p. 114).

Salt symbolizes purity.  Jesus tells us that we are to be the salt of the earth.  We, Christians, must lift the tone and standard of our civilization through Christ’s holiness being lived out in us. As we elevate the standard, the civilization follows by elevating its standard. As we lower the standard, the civilization follows by lowering its standard.

William Barclay: “We all know that there are certain people in whose company it is easy to be good; and that also there are certain people in whose company it is easy for standards to be relaxed.” (The Gospel of Matthew, vol. 1, p. 116).

If we, as the Church, want to see the world live up to a higher standard, we must be willing to be salt--purity.

Salt has been used to preserve food for millennia.  In Jesus time, the Galilean fish were salt cured to prepare them for shipment throughout their region. 

Dennis Kinlaw tells a story about salt-curing ham in his childhood.  “Some jobs in life are hateful and yet necessary.  I remember one of those from my teenage years. In those Depression days, there was no such thing as a refrigerator.  If meat was to be kept, it had to be salted heavily.  Every fall I knew that one day I would come home from school in the afternoon and find a gutted pig lying on the back porch.  I knew there would be no playing ball that afternoon.  My job was to rub salt into the pieces of that pork as my mother cut them up.  The only thing that brightened that unpleasant task was imagining the smell of bacon frying for breakfast or the taste of ham when company came.

“One day we were having some special company for supper, so mother took me out to the smokehouse and pointed to the largest ham hanging from the rafters.  I pulled it down, opened the sack, and laid the beautiful ham out for my mother to cut.  The big butcher knife penetrated the best portion of that ham, and I waited with anticipation to see the meat.  Then I had two simultaneous and shocking perceptions.  One was of the frown on my mother’s face and the other was of the most offensive odor I have ever smelled.  The ham was full of maggots.  My mother looked at me with dismay and said, ‘Son, not enough salt.’”  (This Day with the Master, December 14).

“Not enough salt.”  Same-sex marriage. Adultery. Fornication. Drunkenness. Addictions. Transgender invasions of bathrooms. Children dying in the streets. Law enforcement officers slaughtered. “Not enough salt.”

More salt, please. Sin putrefies. Salt preserves.

Even animals will flock to a salt lick. Deer hunters will place an agricultural salt block in the woods or meadow to attract their prey. Salt pleases the palate. It tastes good.

Christ-followers are that flavor in a broken, hurting, sin-cursed world. We offer hope, zest, life, and purpose to an otherwise chaotic and meaningless existence. We extend passion for living to lost, hopeless people.  E. Stanley Jones puts it this way: “The Christian is to be salt not merely to save life from moral putrefaction.  He is to save life from losing its taste and becoming insipid” (The Christ of the Mount, 1931, p. 88).

Salt seasons. BUT, Jesus says that salt can lose its ability to season. Once its savor is lost, it cannot be regained.  What an alarming warning! Tasteless, worthless, trod under foot. Judged as outcast.

Someone has said that “The world is so churchy, and the church is so worldly, that you can’t tell the difference!” Jesus says that believers who have “lost their savor” have played the fool, become stupid, tasteless, insipid, carelessly discarding their treasure of purity of heart and life.

But the warning is against losing (playing the fool) our zest, our savor, our flavor. Insipid. The warning is against becoming so exposed to our surroundings, so corrupted by other influences, so decayed and decrepit in our faith that we just fit into our surroundings.

We lose any sense of remark-ability. Bland. Insipid. Savorless. We become ordinary, despairing, hopeless, complaining, critical people. We gossip, lie, fornicate, steal, cheat, deceive, manipulate, coerce, and live in drunken inebriation; and we call ourselves Christian. No flavor. Or we may simply dwindle in our passion, our zeal, our zest for life in Christ, until we are neutered into harmlessness, defanged and declawed until no longer dangerous, by a world system of tolerance which seeks to normatize us into submission to its conventions. Jesus says, that we lose our flavor, by playing the fool.

Rebecca Manley Pippert wrote a book on evangelism titled Out of the Saltshaker & Into the World.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:  "Everything else needs to be seasoned with salt, but once the salt itself has lost its savor, it can never be salted again. Everything else can be saved by salt, however bad it has gone--only salt which loses its savor has no hope of recovery. That is the other side of the picture. That is the judgment which always hangs over the disciple community, whose mission is to save the world, but which, if it ceases to live up to that mission, is itself irretrievably lost. The call of Jesus Christ means either that we are the salt of the earth, or else we are annihilated; either we follow the call or we are crushed beneath it." (The Cost of Discipleship, 1959, p. 117).

More salt, please.