A salty life

TODAY'S SPECIAL: Matthew 5:13-20

TO CHEW ON: "'You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavour, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.'" Matthew 5:13


Jesus' metaphors of how kingdom citizens penetrate secular society by being salt and light ignite the imagination. Let's take a close look at SALT.

• We know how as a seasoning it enhances flavours.

• We are familiar with its antiseptic properties that make it a preservative and a germ killer. No doubt many of us have  gargled salt water when we're fighting a cold.

An article titled "Over 60 Ways to Use Salt" includes these additional diverse uses of salt, many of which I was not aware.
Salt:

• relieves insect bites.

• removes mineral deposits from glass.

• helps lift stuck food from baking dishes.

• speeds up the cooking time of boiling water.

• stops cut fruit from browning. And on… *

Salt is a pretty useful compound!

About salt, we also know that:

• A little goes a long way. One of the easiest ways to spoil the edibility of food is to over salt it.

• It's invisible. The way salt dissolves in liquids means that its presence is difficult to detect except by taste. So it can easily penetrate all kinds of places without us even knowing it.

• Once salt is in something, it's virtually impossible to remove it.

How might these properties of salt correlate to the influence of our lives in the world around us?

* By our lives and speech we can be an antiseptic against evil and a preservative of God's ways—the righteous principles of holy living found in the Bible.

* The cleansing properties of salt may be represented by our attitudes of grace, compassion, and forgiveness.

* We need to trust the integrity of the small pinch of salt each one of us is in our surroundings. We may feel that our influence is hardly noticeable, but like a few grains of salt perk up a batch of bread or a pot of porridge, so our small but salty influence makes a difference.

* We can penetrate, practically invisibly, into many places. As part of our communities, we can be that salty presence wherever we are, from our homes to places of political office, in person to impersonally as we spread our words  through the media and online. And let them try and flush us away. It won't work. Like taking the salt out of a pot of soup, it will be virtually impossible!

PRAYER: Dear God, help me to be that penetrating influence for good in my community that salt is in our natural world. Amen.

*Read entire article "Over 60 Ways to Use Salt"

 *********
Unless otherwise noted all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.