Matthew 5:13 - "You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless."
If I had to put together some sort of explanation as to why I'm blogging about this then I would have to say it applies greatly to my life as well as pretty much everyone else's life. I don't want to be thrown out one day, and I don't want to be "used up." Everybody fails, but when I keep following the process of failure, I don't get anything accomplished and I'm sure if I related that to my relationship with God it might help. Christians aren't held back by sin - we are "more than conquerers" over sin when we have God living within us (Romans 8:37). Therefore, because we have no chains holding us back, we have no reason to keep sinning. But, for some reason, we all keep doing it! Well, doesn't that just sound stupid? To me it does, and to be honest, I don't know why.
But I do know that I've figured this out - God's not gonna play both roles in the relationship. This means you have to hold your end of the covenant up as well. If you start to see your world collapsing, maybe its because you left God. In essence, you have become salt that has lost its flavor. Make the commitment - each day - to choose who we're going to live for. We all fall down, but that shouldn't keep us from trying. And we know we can't do it alone so what do we do?
We ask God to help us commit; we ask Him to give us the strength ("our daily bread") to start fresh.
On top of that we ask Him to keep us from the temptation of sin, and to help us see the way out that He's already provided. (1 Corinthians 10:13)
Before you know it, we begin to head through our day feeling refreshed and renewed - and somewhat salty.
Why did Jesus use salt in His teachings? Well here's what I think might be why. Have you ever made salt before? I have, and in order to do so you have to mix ingredients, heat them up, and grind them down before they become useful. This same technique is used by God with us. He mixes us with other cultures and other people that can influence us to do greater things; He "heats" us up - by this one I mean that He convicts us when we do wrong so that we will learn from our mistakes. At last, He grinds us down to a fine dust by giving us His teachings of which we can learn to live by as well as become "salty."
Another random thought I had about why Jesus used salt to teach with was this: There's an old superstition that if salt is spilled, it means bad luck. A part of me thinks that God was looking into the future at our sayings and did this on purpose. If we pass up our chance to fulfill God's call on our lives, we pass up the chance to live a wonderful and meaningful life.
God has called us to be extra-ordinary - if you don't know what extraordinary means, it means more than ordinary. We don't live our lives day by day, we live our lives with a mindset that everything is a gift from God.
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