The Salt of the Earth

People Are Watching
 
A Peanuts cartoon showed Peppermint Patty talking to Charlie Brown. She said, “Guess what, Chuck. The first day of school, and I got sent to the principal’s office already. And it was your fault, Chuck.” He said, “My fault? How could it be my fault? Why do you say everything is my fault?” She said, “You’re my friend, aren’t you, Chuck? You should have been a better influence on me.”
 
While we may laugh or roll our eyes at Peppermint Patty trying to pass the buck, she was, in a very real sense, right. We should be a good influence on our friends. We exercise influence daily, for better or worse. People are watching us. What do they see in your life?

• What do your children see?
• What do your co-workers see?
• What do your next-door neighbors see?
• What does your spouse see?
• What does your church family see?

 
Do they see hypocrisy? Do they see someone trying desperately to please God, not always succeeding, but always trying? It’s tough to be sure. Yet it doesn’t remove the fact that we influence the people in our lives, one way or another. It’s essential to understand that just as our faith ought to impact every sphere of our lives, so too, we as Christ’s disciples, are called to affect our spheres of influence for Christ’s Kingdom.
 
It Begins with Christlike Character
 
In the last chapter we began looking at Kingdom Discipleship. Our Christian faith ought to permeate every sphere of our life, not just bits and pieces of it.
 
We saw in the Beatitudes, that Jesus lays out what the character-norms of his Kingdom are. It was not until he first taught us that we’re to be poor in spirit, mournful over sin, meek, hungry and thirsty for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, and peacemakers, that he then called us salt and light. Jesus shifted our attention from what every disciple’s character must be, to our outward witness and influence in the world. He tells us who we are and who we must be as a watching world looks on. Our faith may be personal, but it’s by no means private.
 
Be Who You Are
 
Jesus called us salt and light and commanded us to go out and live accordingly. In this chapter we’re going to look at the first part, what Jesus meant by salt of the earth.
 
Matthew 5:13 says,
 
“You are the salt of the earth. 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.
 
What does it mean to be the salt of the earth? To understand what Jesus meant by salt, we must know a little about salt in the first century. But first, notice something: Jesus said we already are salt. He wasn’t telling us to go out and become something we aren’t. We’re to go into the world and be who we already are.
 
This is familiar language in the Bible. God says we are holy and then calls us to be holy. It is in that spirit Jesus commands us to go out and be who we are. Let those of the world see who we truly are as Christ’s disciples, those who are increasingly growing into the likeness of their Lord.
 
Why Salt?
 
In the ancient world, salt was used primarily as a preservative. Since people in that time obviously didn’t have deep-freeze refrigerators, they used salt to preserve much of their food. That’s not a totally foreign concept for us today. There’s a traditional delicacy in South Africa known as “biltong” which are small thin strips of meat that have been salted and dried, perhaps like our Beef Jerky. Long-distance travelers in past generations carried biltong with them. In fact, it was so well preserved it didn’t even need a “best-eaten-by” date.
 
Followers of Christ are to have that same “preserving” influence in the world.  Apart from his disciples’ preserving influence, the world turns ever rottener. Our influence on the world as the salt of the earth is that of delaying, of slowing down the moral and spiritual disintegration. If our lives as his disciples conform to the Beatitudes in verses 3-12, then we will be an influence for good in our culture. Without the influence of the gospel, society will suffer moral decay and become putrid, unfit for the consumption of godly men and women.
 
There’s another interesting use for salt Scripture alludes to. Ezekiel 16:4 hints at the Jewish practice of rubbing newborn babies with salt. It’s likely this practice wasn’t for ritual cleanness, but for hygiene. It was already understood that if you didn’t pay attention to hygiene at the beginning of life, then sickness and even death could result. If Jesus had that in mind, his application would be this: we need to commit ourselves to being salt in our culture at the earliest possible opportunity.
 
It’s important, if our lives are to make a moral impact on others, that we live as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ as we live among them. We must take our stand from the very start. Of course, there will likely be a steep price for such faithfulness.
 
It is no coincidence that the linking verses between the Beatitudes and the reference to Salt and Light are verses 11-12, which say,
 
“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. [12] Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
 
We find another use of salt illustrated in Judges 9:45. When Abimelech defeated the city of Shechem, “he destroyed the city and scattered salt over it.” The use of salt was a symbolic and effective action, to render the ground infertile for the future. This is what we do as Christians when we take our stand for God in our culture. We make the soil of our culture - the relationships in our lives, our friends at school, coworkers, teammates, next-door neighbors, whomever it may be – less fertile for ungodly influences. In and of itself this will not transform our culture, but it will make it more difficult for sinful attitudes, habits, words, and ideas to take root and become the norm.
 
Does Your Coworker Know You’re a Christian?
 
G. Campbell Morgan, former minister of Westminster Chapel in London, in his book How to Live, told a story about a conversation he had after he finished preaching one evening. A man approached Morgan to tell him he had invited a fellow employee, one with whom he had worked for 5 years, to attend the church service. He then said, “My suggestion came as quite a surprise to my friend. He responded to my invitation by saying, ‘Are you a Christian?’ And when I answered, ‘Yes, I am,’ he replied, ‘Well, I am too!’ Here we had worked beside each other for years, and we never knew that we were both believers in Christ. Wasn’t that funny?” To the man’s surprise, Morgan retorted, “Funny? No, it isn’t funny at all! You both need to be born again.”
 
It was inconceivable to Morgan that two men could be truly saved and work side-by-side for 5 years and not be aware of their relationship as brothers in Christ.
 
The Loss of Saltiness
 
In the last chapter we read George Barna’s summary of the “state of the church,” that he gleaned from his many years of poll-taking and statistical analysis. He concluded that, sadly, the church today is almost indistinguishable from the rest of society. He was not talking about being different in a superficial and outward way that you might notice in some legalistic churches. Rather, he was addressing fundamental moral and ethical differences that Christ ought to make in how Christians live. From all appearances, the church today, in far too many quarters, isn’t serving as the preserving agent Christ said she is. It seems the salt is losing its saltiness.
 
What happens if salt loses its saltiness? According to Jesus it might as well be thrown out onto the street, which was the garbage dump of the ancient near east, to be trampled by people. Some scholars have wrestled with this part of the verse, suggesting that salt can’t stop being salt. It can’t be anything other than salt. Therefore, it can’t really lose its saltiness. So, what did Jesus mean?
 
Although salt can’t lose its saltiness per se, it can become adulterated, impure, and contaminated. If it becomes sufficiently mixed with sand, for example, the salt will no longer be useful as a preservative. It loses its effectiveness. What do you do once something outlives its usefulness? In the case of “saltless salt,” you throw it away. It’s no longer any good. The world is described in the Bible as fallen, sinful, rotting and in need of help. It’s with that backdrop that Jesus tells us we are salt and we are to be salt.
 
The Power of Small Beginnings
 
Think about that for a minute. Just like salt, Christians may seem small and insignificant, even powerless in a culture like ours. Yet we have the ability to influence every segment of it and permeate the whole. It’s easy, almost seductive, for us to become consumed with polling data and despair we aren’t as numerous and as powerful as others. But we must never give in to Satan’s lie that we are effective only when we have large numbers, a show of strength, or our person in the White House.
 
Who turned the Roman world upside-down? I love how the King James Version renders Acts 17:6. It reads,
 
These [that is, the first Christian disciples] that have turned the world upside down are come hither also;
 
The verse describes the first Christians, that little band of no-names, who were making their rounds in the Roman Empire, affecting everything they touched with the power of the Gospel.
 
One Bible commentary summed up that verse this way,
 
What a reputation these Christian had! The power of the gospel revolutionized lives, broke down all social barriers, threw open prison doors, caused people to care deeply for one another, and stirred them to worship God. Our world needs to be turned upside down, to be transformed. The gospel is not in the business of merely improving programs and encouraging good conduct, but of dynamically transforming lives.
 
That’s Kingdom Discipleship! That’s the vision our Lord holds before us when he calls us salt. Though we may be small in number and seemingly powerless by human standards, we, like that little band of disciples, can still turn a culture upside down, one person at a time, one family at a time, one church at a time.
 
We may be powerless on our own, but with God all things are possible. If Jesus told us we are salt in this world, then we better behave like it. In their book, Turning Point, Marvin Olasky and Herbert Schlossberg recount the following story,
 
“The original Cassius Clay (not the boxer who changed his name to Muhammed Ali) was an affluent slaveholder in Lexington, Kentucky. He could have lived a comfortable life, at least until the Civil War. But Clay believed that chattel slavery was ungodly, and he also believed that society should be ordered on Biblical principles.
And so Clay freed his own slaves and then tried to reach fellow Kentuckians by publishing an antislavery newspaper.
“Clay’s writings show both personal faith and a belief in the uses of reason within revelation. “He emphasized God’s faithfulness not only to individuals but also to societies, and he argued that Christians should use their God-given intellects to structure society along Biblical lines. “Clay wrote, “Let true Christianity prevail, and earth will become the foreshadowing of Heaven.”
His motivation was to allow the gospel to transform first individuals and then the society.”
 
That’s Kingdom Discipleship. That’s what it means to live as salt in a society, to prevent or delay society’s moral and spiritual decay. Jesus said,
 
“You are the salt of the earth. 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.
 
Jesus declared we are salt. Therefore, let us live as salt and be a Kingdom influence for the glory of our King and the good of our neighbors.
 
Walking Points

• How are Christians like salt? What is the relationship between godly character and being the salt of the earth?
• What does Matthew 5:10-12 say the consequences of living a godly life and taking a stand for Christ are?
• What are the similarities between 1 Peter 3:8-18 and Matthew 5:3-16?
• List the spheres of influence in your life. How are you acting like salt in each of those areas?
• How can a Christian become so watered down and compromised that he or she ceases to be salty?
• What are the areas in your life in which you have lost your saltiness? Why do you think that is? What can you do to get your saltiness back?