HoHum:
Have the children come up front and do Children’s Minute (http://www.sermons4kids.com/pass-the-salt.html)
Need a shaker of salt, a brightly colored shirt, a leather belt, and a plastic toy
What is this? (Show shaker of salt) Salt makes food more savory, makes it taste better, not so bland. What else can we do with salt? Here are just a few of the many uses for salt:
Salt is used in fixing dye in clothing like this shirt. Without salt, the bright colors would quickly wash out of the fabrics.
Salt is used in making leather. Salt makes leather useable like in this belt.
Salt is used in the chemical industry to make plastics. Without salt, we might not have many toys like this one.
Man has known about the usefulness of salt for many years. At one time, salt was so important that people were paid with salt instead of money. Listen to these words of Jesus: ““You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.” Matthew 5:13, NIV.
Jesus says that we are the salt of the earth. We are important and we need to act like Jesus and have Jesus in our hearts so that we can be who Jesus wants us to be.
Are we allowing Jesus to use us to be the salt of the earth?
Let’s pray
WBTU:
Many uses for salt. The most obvious use for salt in the NT is preserving meat and other foods. No refrigerators or freezers so had to use salt to preserve the meat to eat in the future.
As Christians we are to preserve this world. The world cannot stop itself from turning rotten. God wants Christians to be the salt that will hinder the process of the decay of society.
Now God uses other things besides Christians to preserve society and bring about order. However, God wants His own people, Christians, to be the most powerful restraining influence in our sinful society. The Christians are called to become like a moral disinfectant in a world where moral standards are low. It is in this sense that we are to be the salt of the earth, an influence for good in our corrupt world.
I want to emphasize this morning not the first sentence of this verse but the next two sentences. Look at how we can lose our saltiness. Some complain that salt cannot lose its saltiness unless a laboratory passes a strong electrical current through salt and divides up its properties. Hard to do in NT world. However, probably talking about Dead Sea salt that contains many impurities. This salt often mixes with dirt, rain and sun, diluting the salt and making it tasteless. It still looks like salt, but it has lost its saltiness. The residue remains but no longer salt.
What Jesus is saying here is that Christians can lose our saltiness, can lose our distinctive character, described here as diluted, worthless salt. What we have here is clearly a warning.
Salt like this cannot be restored again. Reminds me of Revelation 3:16- “So, because you are lukewarm--neither hot nor cold--I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Revelation 3:16, NIV.
When salt loses it saltiness it cannot be restored. It is good for nothing. What should we do with it? Throw it out because it is worthless.
How does salt lose its saltiness? What are some things that might cause this? To answer, we will consider 3 passages that Jesus taught about this idea of salt losing its saltiness.
Thesis: 3 ways that a Christian can lose their saltiness
For instances:
1. Loss of saltiness due to lack of commitment (Luke 14:34-35)
To determine why salt becomes tasteless, we have to look at the context of Jesus’ teaching. Need to go back to vs. 25 of Luke 14. Read Luke 14:25-27
Being a disciple of Jesus involves some suffering and some rejection. Jesus is basically saying, “If you love your family or even yourself more than Me, then you will never decide to come to Me because you will find that the cost of following Me is too high for you.”
Emphasizing salt and this salt refuses to dissolve, to carry his cross, to die to himself.
Luke 14:28-30- People mocked this man. Begins building but can’t finish the work. This person did not count the cost of the project. Now he has to face the shame of this.
Luke 14:31-33:
This is about a king who wants to go to war but does not have the adequate resources to win. He goes to war, but soon realizes that he is unable to win the battle. He has to surrender. This king has lost his freedom and maybe his whole kingdom.
See the connection here. We see why salt loses its taste. It happens when someone goes back on his original commitment. Being to follow Jesus but stop because we have so many other commitments. “If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.”” 2 Peter 2:20-22, NIV.
Began well but ended badly. The disciple who retains his saltiness is the disciple who understands his commitment to God and he sticks through to the end.
2. Loss of saltiness due to sin (Mark 9:50)
Go back to context. Read Mark 9:42-50
What causes salt to lose its saltiness in this case? Notice the beginning of this passage, vs. 42, causing a little one to stumble. This is the sin of leading others to commit sin. The Lord Jesus tells us how terrible sin is, and He gives a stern warning to the sinner. Every person is responsible for their sin. If a person weakens under temptation and sins, that is when we lose our saltiness.
Remember what Jesus said in Matthew. The salt that has lost its saltiness will be thrown out. “To be thrown out” is an expression used to indicate one’s exclusion from the kingdom of God. ““Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’” Matthew 22:13, NIV.
Here in Mark, Jesus says the same thing, but uses different words. 3 times he talks about the fire of hell. Never fool around with sin. If we play around with fire, we might get burnt. “Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned?” Proverbs 6:27, NIV.
Even so, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” 1 Corinthians 10:13, NIV. God is a forgiving God and he will help us to overcome our temptations, but might become so entangled in sin that we are we are worse off than when we started with Christ. “for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me ...” 2 Timothy 4:10, NIV.
3. Loss of saltiness due to persecution (Matthew 5:13)
Go back to context again. Matthew 5:11-13.
When hard times come and we break under the pressure, that is when we can lose our saltiness. Many times in the history of the early church a Christian was told to offer a sacrifice to the Roman Emperor or face terrible consequences. Some gave in by sacrificing and renouncing Jesus Christ. Later these people regretted their decision and wanted to come back to the church and be a Christian again. They were called the lapsi, “lapsed in their faith,” and the early church had difficulties in knowing what to do with them.
Today, most Christians are not faced with the choice of being persecuted in this way. However, most Christians today are faced with the choice of either accepting the Christian teachings on faith and morals and facing persecution or embracing the secular ways of thinking and rejecting the Christian faith. Sadly, many Christians today are similar to the lapsi, by compromising the faith and morals of the Church to be accepted by the culture. The pressure to water down the gospel and to simply accommodate to the surrounding culture is an ever present reality. But we should resist such impulses with all our strength. We already have 2000 years of church history to tell us just how disastrous such policies are. Whenever we dilute the gospel or abandon biblical truths to be cool, trendy and relevant, it is always bad news.
We have seen entire denominations go down this path with disastrous results. The truth is, it is the gospel that should be influencing culture, and not the other way around. It is the confused, lost and wayward culture that needs to be challenged with the truth of Christ.
Russell Moore “Can We Trade Sexual Morality For Church Growth?” It is a great article. He begins: From time to time we hear some telling us that Christianity must retool our sexual ethic if we’re ever going to reach the next generation. Some say that Millennials, particularly, are leaving the church because of our “obsession” with sexual morality. The next generation needs a more flexible ethic, they say, on premarital sex, homosexuality, and so on. We’ll either adapt, the line goes, or we’ll die. This argument is hardly new.... He concludes: Virgin births and empty tombs are hard to believe. Fidelity and chastity are hard to live. That’s why we don’t have a natural gospel but a supernatural one. Jesus is a voice calling us to where we don’t, left to ourselves, want to go: the way of the cross. If we want to reach the next generation, they must hear from us a Galilean voice saying, “Come, follow me.”
“Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent.” Revelation 3:19
