If you were going to make a statement that would indicate the worth of someone who meant a great deal to you what metaphors would you use. "a million bucks" "gold" "silver" "pearls" "priceless" "a mint" how about "Salt"
For the past several weeks we have been following the words of Christ as he summed up what a Christian’s character should be, notice now that I didn’t say what a Christian character should be I’m sure we all know at least one of those. The beatitudes are really the characteristics of a believer. And then Christ makes a remarkable statement. A statement that would have caused a few strange looks. He said "You are the salt of the earth". Now that seems of minor significance to us, after all salt is pretty common and relatively inexpensive. We use it for cooking, it’s on every table, we spread it in copious amounts on our roads, and being this close to the water there are even times that you can smell it in the air. So it doesn’t seem like that great of a compliment.
But if we were to place ourselves in the time of Christ we would see slat as probably the most important element in our culture. Salt was so special, so unique, so sought after that in many of the early civilizations it was more valuable then gold. And so on the surface Christ was making a value judgement about those who would follow him. And if we can determine why salt was so valuable in that culture then we should be able to see some additional characteristics that Christ was saying would be evident in believers.
1) Salt keeps us healthy. Salt is essential for the well being and indeed the very existence for those living in very hot climates. It is necessary for proper body metabolism, that is the normal retention and exchange of fluids between cells.
When the body begins to lose moisture and salt content through perspiration, then the life process become threatened. In fact if the salt isn’t replaced then death may occur. That’s why people who work in very hot climates often find it necessary to take salt tablets. In Australia they have a horrid brown paste that they spread on their toast, it would remind you a little bit of axle grease that’s gone off. It’s called vegamite and if you think I’m exaggerating stop by the house Rebecca Perry left some behind before she returned to Oz. Australians grow up eaten this stuff like we eat Peanut Butter and one of the practical aspects of it is the high salt content that it contains. Israel two thousand years ago didn’t have vegamite and so salt was the key to their health, well being, strength and vitality.
So when Christ commends us as salt he is commanding us to contribute to the health, vitality and well being of society. Too often we hear the phrase "society is sick" and well that may be true, the Christian church must realize that one of the reasons we are supposed to be here is to keep society healthy.
During the past seventy years we have sought to solve the worlds problems a whole bunch of different ways, and we really need to stop and ask ourselves the question "just how effective have we been?"
1) in the 20’s education was trumpeted as the answer to our sick society. To become an educated nation was to solve all of our problems, and yet today higher education is primarily in the hands of those who deny God and deliberately seek to ignore him. Literally millions of students spend years acquiring knowledge without any mention of God.
2) Well the titillating twenties passed into the terrible thirties. The world was engulfed in economic disaster. Depression ground people into poverty and the world said let us find an economic solution and we got "New Deals." But it took a World War to end our economic woes.
3) the furious forties came and we saw the atrocities performed by people against people and we cried "give us peace, give us a political solution" Again we didn’t turn to God and we found the U.N. and Nato and the ECC, a virtual alphabet soup of organizations, however none seemed to work.
4) Well along came the fabulous fifties, science was on the move and was touted as the solution to our sick society, a veritable be all end all. And there was a explosion of scientific knowledge. The scientists of the world declared that with enough money, enough men, enough research facilities and enough time science would give us the solution to all of our problems.
And while science has certainly solves some of our problems it has only magnified others. Once again by ignoring God we have lost our perspective.
5) The fifties were replaced by the sizzling sixties. The children of the sixties knew nothing about going without education, they hadn’t been through the depression and the war years were simply nightmarish memories of their parents, and science . It was a time of social change, God was declared dead and new morals were established while old morals were discarded.
6) the seventies and eighties came and went producing yuppies and the me generation. The world was convinced that we were put here to be happy. We were told that we were a god unto ourselves and if we can please me then all the problems of the world will be solved.
7) Will the nineties be the turning point? Will it be here that the church seeks to become salt in order to provide for the well being of society? Will this be the decade that we discover it’s not education, not economics, not politics or science or sociology or hedonism that will cure the ills of the earth, that it will only be God and He will do it through His church and His people.
2) Salt Preserves This was probably one of the most important functions of salt in Christ’s day. In the hot weather of Palestine, before refrigerators or coolers the only way to keep the meat or fish you didn’t need today from going bad was to salt it. Now I don’t mean a little bit of salt I mean lots of salt. And through this process of salting putrefaction was kept at bay.
I have mentioned it before and I will mention it again and again. The reason our country is in the shape it’s in is the same reason the United States is in the shape it’s in and you know who to blame don’t you. "The New Agers right Pastor?" It’s always the new agers, it used to be the secular humanists and before them the communists, but now its the new agers right? Nope the people to blame for where we is, is us.
You see, Jesus wanted the Christians to be like salt in society the way salt was used to keep food from rotten. You ever eat salt fish? It wasn’t a long long time ago that if you wanted to get you fish to market there was only two ways to do it. One was smoking and the other was salting. Now I don’t know a great deal about smoking fish, I wouldn’t know how to keep it lit or which end you’d put in your mouth. But when I was growing up from time to time we’d have salt fish, because that’s what my parents grew up eating on Grand Manan. To prepare them you’d soak it all day, change the water a few times and then boil it, and then when you ate it you kept a glass of water hand cause it was so salty. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind at all that there was some salt in that fish.
That is the way we are supposed to affect society, they can soak themselves in sin, they can try to boil us out but if’n we are doing what we are supposed to be doing then we should permeate society so even with a casual taste Christianity is the prominent flavour. Instead we have become like those new potato chips that are lightly salted. When you first taste them you’re not sure if they have salt on them or not.
The only way we are going to preserve this old world is to pack it in salt, and we’ll never do that as long as the salt is content to be in the salt shaker.
3) the third positive use of salt is for seasoning. Historians tell us that the food of Jesus day would have been very bland. In our gastronomical experimentation we have lost sight of what it must have been like. If we look at many of the third world countries even though they may not be on a starvation diet their sustenance comes primarily from rice or grain. Meat and fish is a real treat. I’ve mentioned before how a friend of mind spent some time in Zambia and told me that their staple food was called cema and that it was corn meal paste. John said that it had the same taste and consistency of wall paper paste and the only way to make it bearable was to add salt. Lots and lots of salt. Christ’s diet would have required salt to improve it’s flavour. And so if we are to be the salt of the earth part of our purpose is to add flavour to the world, to make it more palatable.
4) Salt was used for healing 2000 years ago there wasn’t a drug store on every corner. If a soldier was hurt in battle, if a farmer was gored by a bull, if a child fell down and scraped his knee there was a common treatment. The wound was bathed in salt and water. And it proved to be an excellent sterilization agent. As a matter of fact it’s still used in many countries today. When I was in Bible College our school nurse had served for forty years as a missionary nurse in Africa and her solution for most medical problems was to gargle with salt water.
The church of Jesus Christ needs to have a healing ministry in today’s world, and not just spiritual healing either but physical and emotional healing as well. There needs to be a ministry of reconciliation. We need to help in the healing of broken bodies, broken hearts, broken homes, and broken hopes and dreams.
Let’s get this straight though we don’t do the healing Jesus Christ does, but he needs us to work through. Our problem is that we try to work only in the spiritual. We divide this world into two parts the sacred and the secular. We’ll save their souls but heaven forbid that we should become involved in their lives before they make that decision.
But for all the good that salt can do it has it’s destructive side as well. Christ tells us in Matthew 5:13 But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
Did you catch it? When salt is no longer working for the well being of society, for flavouring, for preservation, for healing, then it’s only good for one thing, to be thrown out and trample under foot. But why not just put it in the dump why the reference to walking on it. Well this was in the days before asphalt or concrete and salt sterilizes the ground, it literally steals the vitality from the soil.
After conquering a city the armies of the Old Testament would sow salt through the fields and this would cause utter desolation, nothing would grow. Read the account in Judges 9:44-45 where Abilemelch destroyed the city of Shechem.
The most destructive force that the church has to contend with today are Christians who have lost their saltiness. Those who once were salt for good, but now are being sown for destruction. Every Christian will be a witness. They will either be a witness to the changing power of Jesus Christ or against the changing power of Jesus Christ. And it is a sad commentary about human nature that the negative witness will have more impact then the positive witness. It’s like the pastor who told a colleague "I have 800 members in my church" "How many are active?" his friend enquired. "All of them" came the reply "600 are active for the Lord and the rest are active for the devil" You’re going to be salt for one or the other and only you can decide.
The second comparison that Christ made was "You are the light of the world" Now here was a picture that these fisherman would understand. When fishing at night these men would have someone on the shore light and tend a fire that would guide them back to shore in the dark. If salt preserves then light points, not to itself but to a path. If you were to follow the beam of a light house or a buoy you would be in serious trouble because you’d eventually run into it. People are looking for the light that the Christian provides, but it shouldn’t lead a person to a particular doctrine or person instead it needs to lead past the person to Jesus.
1) The first person that we need to be a light for is the non believer, the pre-Christian. Matthew 5:16 (NIV) In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. I remember when I was fishing with my dad sailing into Yarmouth in the fog, I can’t remember sailing into Yarmouth without fog but that’s a different story. And we’d use our radar as much as we could but we would put a man out on the bow to keep a look out for the light from the buoys. The pre-Christian may be directed toward Christ by the Bible or a T.V. Evangelist or a book but the Gospel has to come to life in the light of a believer.
I knew the facts of salvation, but it wasn’t until I saw the reality of Christ’s changing power in the life of my best friend that I was willing to trust Jesus with my life.
2) Our light needs to shine for other Christians. During the summer of 1977 I went to sea on a 630 ft long oil tanker named the "Iving Arctic". I was a watchman, so I watched and one of the things that I watched for was lights on the shore from light houses. Now we weren’t making sure that the lights were where they were, instead we were making sure that we were where we were supposed to be. Other Christians will often provide guidelines for us, and it’s good to be a part of the body for that reason. The trick though is to stop trying to determine if they are where they are supposed to be and start focusing on where we are supposed to be.
Bottom line though is that we are supposed to shine, and we are supposed to be seen. There is no such thing as secret discipleship. Because either the secrecy will destroy the discipleship or the discipleship will destroy the secrecy. Our Christianity needs to be visible in the way we treat the clerk in the store, the way we order a meal in a restaurant, the way we treat our employees or serve our employer, in what we read and how we drive our car. If your light only shines while you’re in church it aint doing it’s job because Christ didn’t say you are the light of the church he said you are the light of the world.
The question then is this, is your light shining and if so can people see it?
