94 SALT
94 SALT
Salt is well known for its ability to enhance the flavour of anything that it is put on, when it is put on our food. It increases the tastes that we love and sharpens the impact that taste has on our mouths.
When Jesus told His disciples to be ‘salt’, He was telling them to enhance the good qualities that He was teaching them, in the people around them. Encourage and support people that lived moral lives, support the truth, encourage respect for each other and those who are given authority and power of/in a situation or position, help those that are trying to do good and honourable things, encourage peace in our groups and safety in our homes and neighbourhoods and be a living example of how one is supposed to live before God and mankind.
Those who do these things will be working in God’s kingdom and for His benefit, trusting Him for their acceptance and position in His realm.
Salt also has a second effect on our food that is not thought of very much with our modern technology. Salt will preserve food and keep it from spoiling. Today, we have freezing, drying and chemicals that keep our food from rotting.
Rotting is a process where the food starts to decay and break down to a liquid to be reabsorbed into the soil to further feed the living plants. Once this process starts, our good, healthy food quickly turns into a poison that cannot be eaten and must be thrown out.
The two qualities of salt do the same thing; there is a place where our food is just acceptable, in the middle, neither enhanced nor spoiled but still nutritious. Going either way from that center will add good or bad, depending on what we add or do.
Food left to it-self will start the spoiling process very quickly and will soon reach a point where even a lot of salt will not matter.
Salt does not do its work passively but is an active agent against decay and actively enhances the substance that it is put on. Jesus also expects us to be active Christians; speaking up for right living, good morals, obedience, proper respect and healthy choices; at the same time, speaking and acting against unhealthy thoughts and actions, unsafe practices, disobedience, disrespectfulness and corrupt morals.
He wanted us to start right away, before decay could start but, because there was not a lot of action for Christian righteousness and a lot of moral decay, our world is in a very serious state of decay.
One grain of salt cannot preserve the entire piece of food that it is on; it can only preserve the area that it touches. You cannot change the world that you see but can make a difference in those people that you encounter each moment of each day.
Have you laughed at your coworkers off colour joke or told him that it wasn’t funny? Did you speak condemnation of a government decision that you don’t know all the facts about or speak up and admit that you don’t have enough information to comment on the topic? Did you speed today or control yourself to obey the laws? [Worse still, did you flash your lights to warn the speeders that there is a radar patrol car ahead of them so they would not get caught for there illegal actions? Jesus said that, if you help the wicked, you are as guilty as they are.]
Are you really salt or just religious? God knows, do you?
