It’s that season of the year again. Time to dig in the attic or make a run to Value Village and put a costume together for Halloween. So what do you plan on dressing up as this year (ask several children in congregation)? May I offer a costume suggestion? How about dressing up as a box of salt? No, I’m not joking. In fact in our text Jesus said that this is what Christians are – salt! Let’s find out what Jesus meant with this interesting word picture.
On your dinner table or perhaps right above your stove is a little shaker with some white kernels in it. How did those kernels become salty? Did Mr. Morton make them salty? No, he didn’t. Mr. Morton can’t make salt. God made those white grains in the shaker salty. It’s the same with salty Christians. We didn’t get this way by ourselves. It is God who gave us a new nature that makes us what Jesus calls “the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13).
What was it that God changed about us when he made us salty Christians? The Apostle Paul explains what we were like before God took hold of us: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts” (Ephesians 2:1-3a).
Our old sinful nature is what God set about changing in us. God needed to do this because this sinful nature of ours doesn’t just lie quietly in our hearts, like cornflakes in a bowl. It’s constantly active, influencing the way we think about God and others. When God’s 6th Commandment, for example, announces that sex before marriage and sex outside of marriage is a slap in the face of God, we hear a voice inside of us screaming: “That’s unrealistic! This is the 21st Century, not the 18th!” When we’re cruising the Whitemud, we look at the motorists in the lanes to our left and right as competitors who will steal our lane if we give them half a chance instead of seeing them as people God wants us to love. Unfortunately the sinful nature doesn’t suddenly fall silent when we step into the church. For it was that same sinful nature that caused the Apostle John in our Gospel Lesson to be resentful of the man who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name but wasn’t one of the Twelve (Mark 9:38). In the same way it’s the sinful nature that causes us to see each other as rivals, not teammates so that we think that our way of running the church is the best way and we’re suspicious of anyone who would disagree with us. What an absolutely crummy way for a child of God to think! And yet, according to the Bible, that’s the kind of nature with which each of us was born (Psalm 51:5).
Is it any wonder that if we’re ever to live with God, he’ll have to give us a new nature? The wonderful news is that God has given us a new nature, and the title “salty Christians” reminds us of that. God made some deep-down changes in us when he created faith in our hearts to believe what Jesus Christ did as our substitute. The perfect life Jesus lived became our perfect life of obedience to God. The innocent death Jesus suffered paid for every one of our sins. And then God sent the Holy Spirit who took us who once had totally self-centered, loveless, and earthly-minded hearts, and gave us hearts that beat with loyalty to him and with love for people. To put it another way, when God looks at us now he doesn’t see a saltshaker that a child has filled with dirty sand from the playground where cats prowl and microbes live. Such a saltshaker will never be welcomed onto the dinner table. No, the filth of our sins has been scrubbed clean with Jesus’ blood, and his perfect life has been poured into us so that God sees people filled with pure white righteousness. Like a beautiful crystal shaker that stands ready for service on the table of a king, we now stand in the presence of the King of kings ready to serve him as salty Christians.
So how do we serve God as salty Christians? Well think of that saltshaker on your dinner table again. If the little white kernels remain inside that shaker, can they do their job as salt? No way! Salt has got to come in contact with your breakfast egg or with your Big Mac and fries before it can do the job God designed salt to do. Do you see how this applies to us as salty Christians? You see, in this hour we’ve been worshiping God in a practice session among ourselves so that we may be better equipped to worship God when we’re dispersed among people. In about a half hour from now God is going to tumble this great big pyramid-shaped saltshaker upside down and sprinkle some salty Christians all over St. Albert, Morinville, and Edmonton to make a difference in the lives of others.
Just as salt keeps meat from rotting, so Christians, by their example, are to keep this world from going absolutely rotten. Jesus is serious about the kind of lives we lead, for he said in our text that it would be better for us to be thrown into the ocean with a large millstone hung around our head than to lead others to sin (Mark 9:42). So are we setting a Christian example for others to follow? For instance, a salty husband will remember that, as head of the family, he is to take the lead in loving and serving. Our job is not to control the family and to make all the decisions but to love the way Jesus did. Remember how the night before he died he hitched up his robe, took a basin of water, and washed his disciples’ feet? That’s the kind of loving headship God wants to see in those salty Christians he has called to be husbands and fathers.
To such a man God asks the wife and mother to submit herself - to receive his love and to enrich the life of the family through her support of him. A salty woman is not one who sees her primary goal to make the home a museum or a gourmet restaurant, but a place where the love of Jesus Christ is apparent.
Salty Christians come in junior sizes too. Your Savior has called you children to honor both Mom and Dad. When you put family responsibilities ahead of sports or video games or the computer, you show that you’re listening when God says to you: “You are the salt of the earth.” We are to do these things even though the rest of the world isn’t.
Jesus wants our salty nature to be evident among our friends too. If tomorrow at lunch you’re sitting across the table from someone who keeps saying things like, “The kind of God I want...“ or “When it comes to religion I have always thought...” somewhere along the line your salt nature has to become active and you’re going to have to say: “Hey, my friend, are you forgetting that the important thing is not what you think about God, but what God thinks about you?” Or do we suppose: “Oh, I couldn’t say that. I might lose a friend”? Brothers and Sisters, God did not make us sugar to say only sweet and syrupy things. He made us salt – people with a new nature, and people with a special assignment to uphold God’s honor in all we say, think, and do.
If there are things that get in the way of our being salty, we are to get rid of them. In fact Jesus said in our text that if our foot, hand, or eye causes us to sin, we should cut it off or pluck it out (Mark 9:43-47)! Is alcohol a problem? Salty Christians will recognize the heartache alcohol abuse has caused, and will use it in the fear of the Lord and if they can’t, they will get rid of it. We might even do the same in regard to a job or hobby that keeps us from hearing God’s Word or from supporting God’s ministry. We will even get rid of so-called friends who insist that a little recreational drug-use is nothing to be concerned about. Anything that leads away from Jesus is cause for concern because to fall away from Jesus is to journey to hell - a place Jesus himself described as “where…worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). Jesus warns us because he loves us. We know that he loves us because when we fail to act as the salt God made us to be, Jesus comes to us and says: “I forgive you.”
Dressing up as a box of salt might not win you any costume prizes this Halloween but I hope you don’t think Jesus is joking when he calls us salt. It’s an exciting picture which reminds us that God has given us a new nature and a special assignment. We are no longer controlled by the sinful nature, which wants us to see each other as rivals. We are controlled by the Holy Spirit who moves us to work together to lead others to Christ. So be what God has made you – salty Christians! Amen.
