Seasoned with Salt

If you were to describe your life as a spice or seasoning, what would it be?
What seasoning does your life bring to the world? Why?

Read Mathew 5:13; I Peter 3:15-16; 2 Tim 4:2
We often use salt as a pinch of zest for our food. Salt adds flavor and it also creates thirst. In the days before modern medicine, salt was often used to disinfect a wound and to preserve food. In Matthew 5:13, Jesus was warning his disciples to avoid two errors:

First, he was saying that Christians must not forsake the world and go into isolation only looking inward. Why? Salt will do no good unless it is rubbed it. Only then will it function as an antiseptic. We are to be in the world so that the world may benefit by our difference from the world.

Second, Jesus was saying that Christians must also avoid the error of being one with the world and embracing its values and ways. When you accept Jesus' call to be the salt of the earth, you give flavor to the world around you. You bring a taste of God to others os that they can taste and see that the Lord is good. You help preserve God's goodness in the events and people you encounter.

Go back and reread Matthew 5:1-12 again.

• How do each of the eight qualities listed act as salt in the world?
• What are eight ways that Christians are in danger of losing out saltiness in comparison to these things? (For example the first speaks of humility and we might lose our saltiness by being prideful.)
• Which of these areas do you find yourself losing your saltiness?

1 Peter 3:15-16 talks about seasoning our conversation with salt to create a desire to know God. In what ways might you do this?

What might you do to become more effective as the salt of the earth?
How might your church or youth group be more effective as the "salt of the earth?"

Pray that God might make the following verse true in your life...
"Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders: make the most of every opportunity, Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone."
- Colossians 4:5-6

Copyright 1998 by Ken Sapp