TUESDAY May 16th
Matthew 5:13
‘‘You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.’
Yesterday I began us on a journey through some of the teaching of Jesus as found in the Sermon on the Mount and we continue today to consider the phrase ‘You are the salt of the earth’, that is you and me, each one of us who have become followers of the Lord Jesus Christ as we have come by faith to trust him as
Saviour and Lord.
In whatever way we want to think about salt, there is no doubt that in the context of what Jesus is teaching, it is evident, or it should be evident, that as salt it means we are different to the unbelieving world around us. We need to be different because without being with different we cannot be the salt we need to be.
This verse continues with ‘. . .but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its
saltiness be restored?’ I wonder how often we have read this without stopping to think what it means?
We who are saved, are the salt of the earth, so this is the challenge today, are we the salt we should be or have we lost our saltiness?
How do we lose our saltiness? I’ll try to give an Illustration – for a number of years I was a paint sprayer and we had to mix the colour we needed to paint a particular car from a number of base colours – and the mix had to be exact! Too much of one of the base colours or too little of another of the base colours, meant the paint was not fit for purpose, it was wasted, thrown away.
For our lives to be the salt they should be, we must be fit for purpose, it is essential that we are careful with who we are, what we do and with where we go. I wonder how much do we mix with the people of God and the things of God in
comparison to how much we mix with the world and the things of the world? We need to get a balance that ensures that we do not lose our saltiness!
It can be too easy today to assimilate with the things that are of the world, that can cause who we are and what we should be as the children of God to tainted, until eventually we are more than tainted, we are spoilt, we have lost our saltiness, and Jesus continued with these words ‘It is no good (that is the salt that has lost its taste) for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under peoples feet.’
We will turn to this again in the next devotion.