Salt adds flavor, creates thirst, In the days before modern medicine, salt was often used to disinfect a wound. When it’s applied to the wound, it stings. People won’t always appreciate your witness, because it will sting the wounds of their sin.
We often use salt as a pinch of zest for our food. Salt, as Jesus was speaking about it, was the salt of the earth- not merely to season our food and satisfy our taste buds, but the sodium chloride which kills bacteria, preserves our food, heals our wounds, and makes us buoyant upon the seas of life. The salt of the ocean waters is the salt of the earth.
Ancient Roman baptisms included placing salt on the baby’s tongue as the infant received water. Salt is an essential life-enhancing element! This baptism with salt is not unusual. Armenian babies are salted at birth. Jewish babies are cleaned, salted, and wrapped.
In this short statement Jesus was also warning his disciples to avoid two errors. First, he was saying that Christians must not forsake the world and go into isolation. Why? Salt will do no good to meat unless it is rubbed into 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. And second, he was saying that Christians must also avoid the error of being one with the world and embracing its values and ways.
To be the salt of the earth is to help make our living upon this earth a little more buoyant; it is to lift up the brokenness of the world and tend to it with the same grace which has been given us.
Read Mathew 5:13; Col 4:5-6; I Peter 3:15-16; I Tim 4:2
When I accept Jesus’ call to be the salt of the earth, I give flavor to the world around me. I help conserve God’s goodness in the events and people I encounter.
* Who do I know that needs Christ?
* What can I do with my life to create a thirst for Christ in theirs?
MORE IDEAS? See “Creative Object Lessons”
200 page e-book that explains everything you need to know when planning your very own object lessons. It contains 90 fully developed object lesson ideas and another 200 object lesson starter ideas based on Biblical idioms and Names / Descriptions of God.