The Believers Influence In The World - Salt - Part 2

The Fact: “You are salt” or literally, “You only are the salt.”
The word “you” is plural indicating the whole church is to be salt and light. The salt of the earth is you! Every Christian! The fact you are salt shows you are living in a decaying world. This is both a privilege and a responsibility.
This is our nature, not what we should be, but what we are! We cannot change what we are but we can waste what we are. Salt can lose its effectiveness and the light can be put under a bushel. This does not deny the miracle that changed us, it only defeats the ministry that challenges us.

The Importance of Salt: It’s Three-fold Usage

First, salt purifies. Salt is an antiseptic, used to clean teeth or as a mouth or eye wash. One of the characteristics of the world is impurity, the lowering of standards. This stands for the believer’s purity of mind, conduct and motive. He has a purifying influence on the world. This combats the error that because the world is rotten, Christians should disassociate from the world as much as possible. Some people think you should let the world go to hell. But the fact is that salt never does any good on the shelf. To be effective it must be applied at work, at home, in politics, in art, in science. You must get out of the salt shaker!
Second, salt preserves. Salt is used to cure meats and keep them from rotting, there were no refrigerators back then and salt was the key to preserving meat. This is the believer’s influence in the world to keep it from rotting and receiving God’s judgment. Decay is caused by death. On the outside some of the structures of our society look sound but inside they are rotting away and it is only a matter of time before they fall (government, courts, law and order, marriage, etc.). This combats the error that so many people have embraced, "man is good", "the world is good and getting better". The world systems, its governments, its science, its philosophy are not getting better, the world and the people in it are basically rotten to the core. This doesn't sit well with many Christians but it does with the bible.
Third, salt seasons, adds flavors. Christianity is to life what salt is to food, it is to add a good flavor not a bad one. Some Christians are so narrow so legalistic so religious that the flavor they add turn people away. The world proves over and over again that life without Jesus is tasteless. Just look at all the pleasure mania, the brainless entertainment, the perversion in literature, movies and music, then add murder, hatred, wars, injustice, and so on. The believer is to minister God’s life, healing, deliverance, the fruit of the Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit adding flavor to the world. Christians have no business being boring, being brainless, being unable to thoughtfully make an argument for the faith. In the world’s eyes Christians are the ones who take the flavor out of life and it shouldn't be that way.