Why did Jesus use salt as a description for His followers? We understand the next reference, calling us light. Light shows the way, directs, guides, and helps others see what’s real. What’s up with SALT?

Today we mostly see salt as a table condiment. In recent years, we’ve been relearning that salt has great healing properties. It has been said that it helps with wound healing, inflammation, acne and other skin conditions, and more. Salt rooms have become quite popular. Salt heals.

Many in our civilized world where we rarely cure our own meat or can our own vegetables don’t realize the preservative nature of salt. The presence of the salt protects from rot and decay. Salt preserves.

When salt is added to certain vegetables, it causes a fermentation that utterly transforms the vegetable, giving it extra curative effect and changing the flavor completely. Salt transforms.

In times past, when a person was injured – a cut, abrasion, or other wound – the means of cleansing that wound was with salt water. Seems it removes bacteria as well as dirt to purify the wound. Salt purifies.

Most of us have a shaker of salt on our tables and use it to make the food we’re eating taste different than its original form. That’s been around a long time. In ages past, salt was a very expensive commodity, often kept in a locked chest on a table in the dining room to be doled out in the tiniest increments. Salt flavors.

When preserving meat, salt is laid under it, then used to surround the meat to be preserved. In the time it’s left to do its work, the salt soaks into the meat, changing it from raw and susceptible to rot and decay to preserved, able to be kept long term without loss. Salt penetrates and changes.

If we are the salt of the earth, Believer, we are supposed to have these properties, too.

• We are to bring HEALING to those around us – perhaps the physical, but most definitely emotional and spiritual.
• We are to bring TRANSFORMATION to those we encounter, introducing the One who can bring that life change they all need.
• We are to PRESERVE – to enter into the faithwalk of others and help them preserve that walk – discipleship.
• We are to PURIFY by revealing Truth in every situation, even if a feeling might be hurt. We’re to love one another enough to not allow sin to continue.
• We’re to FLAVOR our part of the world with grace and truth, showing mercy and love at every opportunity. We have a lot to counteract, so we must be strong.
• We are to PENETRATE, enter deeply into the world to release the healing, preservation, purification, and flavor wherever we can. We’re not to remain outside it, tossing our saltiness at the world. While deep in the world, we’re to be bringing about CHANGE by our lives lived in and for Christ.

Jesus talked about what happens when the salt has lost its flavor. Looking back at the meat preservation… when the time of preserving is through, the salt has packed around the meat and become hard. It has to be chipped away and broken apart. It is then tossed aside. There is no flavor left in it. It’s not reusable. It has become worthless.

However, we who are believers should never get to this point. We have the availability of the Holy Spirit to keep our saltiness intact, our purity in place. He allows us to pour His healing, transformation, preservation, purification, flavoring, penetration, and change into all around us without depleting our supply, but it takes intention and effort on our part.

Be salty today, my friend. Be salty.

Coffee, Bible, Journal.

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