Seasoning a letter

We all know what Jesus calls us Christians:

“You are the salt of the earth. …”

And we have a good idea what He means by that:

“… if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?” (Matthew 5:13, ESV)

In other words, salt is about “taste,” according to Jesus. It is about flavor.

Jesus’ question is a rhetorical one, of course, with the correct answer being, “It won’t.” Salt’s saltiness won’t be restored if it’s gone, because there is nothing else hanging around the pantry that can make salt salty once it loses its flavor. Salt is the end of the line of saltiness, as it were. It is the last hope for saltiness in the room. If salt becomes “no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot,” as Matthew 5:13 continues, then there is no back-up plan to impart saltiness to the food in the kitchen. Everything will be insipid. Likewise, God has no “back-up plan” for Christians if Christians are not salty. We are the plan!

I was writing a letter to someone, and it was fairly insipid. I was keeping it “lite.” I had some spiritual reference in there, but it was rather tame because I was not sure whether it was my place, whether it was the time, or whether it was of the Lord to speak more boldly to the young man what I saw going on in his life.

I was interrupted in my letter writing by my husband, who happened to stop by from work and asked me to read a chapter of the Bible to him. Providentially, I read Mark 9. When we got to the last verse, he told me he had never noticed the end part of that verse before and asked if I had any guesses about what it meant. The verse was this:

“Salt it good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves … (ESV).

I said, “It looks like a command,” a command to be salty, to have flavor, to not be insipid and timid or PC or a sell-out or a coward in our interactions with people, but to have a godly boldness.

My husband went off to work again and I had the permission I needed to return to my letter, which I now regarded as “not good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” I tore up insipidness and decided to start over and speak the truth in love. The Apostle Paul says to “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time” (Colossians 4:5, ESV), and I realized that I should not let this time slip away without sharing words of truth, which God promises never return to Him empty.

The next verse in Colossians 4 goes on to say:

“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt.”

Graciousness and salt—worthy ingredients for a letter.