Saltless Salt

Recently, I was doing some time in God’s Word one morning and I could not get past this passage – it was stunning to me:

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. Matthew 5.13, NASB95

The topic is obvious: Tasteless, powerless salt. The indictment is frightening: We can be salt that is useless, tasteless salt.

Now, I’ve a confession to make: I love a good sprinkle of blood-pressure inducing salt on my food. Nothing is worse than bland, flavorless food. It’s almost as bad as lukewarm water. And you know what the Lord Himself thought of that.

So, when the Lord speaks of flavorless, unpungent, wimpish salt, He has my attention, and how.

Salt is given to make a difference, to lovingly “sting the palate.” Salt is not made to be “like” the bland food it falls upon. Its job is to “stir up” some senses, to flavor and to improve what it touches. In short: TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE!!!

Today, I look about me in the realm of church things and I see flavorless salt everywhere. Lives are so afraid of being labeled as controversial and offensive that they have become weakly irrelevant by their compromising doctrines and lifestyles. They are so busy “relating” to the culture, that they have become like the culture, as flavorless salt – just a “form” of the real salt that stings, challenges and enhances (2 Tim. 3).

Maggie Thatcher used to say: “I smell the stench of appeasement in the air.”

I do to. In spiritual things.

And I am frightened.

For our Lord indicted such an age in saying, “Who can make tasteless salt salty?”  and, “Tasteless salt is good-for-nothing.”

Chesed v'shalom, (Grace and Peace)