Stay Salty

Notes from my Bible study

This week I will be posting things I have been learning from my Bible study. Over the course of the week I will share five properties of salt...five ways you can remain an effective witness for Christ.

Matthew 5:13 "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again?  It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men."

Have you ever wondered why Jesus would refer to believers as salt? I mean He could have chosen a multitude of other substances. Below are some unique properties of salt that make Christ's analogy more clear to us.

PROPERTIES OF SALT

1. Preservative
As a preservative, salt helps to prevent decay/spoiling of food.  If we reason from the analogy that believers are salt and the world is meat, then it makes sense that believers resist the spread of sin throughout the world. 
It is also important to note that salt MUST have contact (even be rubbed in) with meat to fulfill its purpose.  Even when the salt is rubbed into the meat it is very easy to tell the difference between the meat and the salt.
As Christians there are two unhealthy extremes to be applied here. One, we stay within our Christian bubble and have little to no contact with the world OR two, some Christians want to look as much like the world as possible. Both are WRONG. An example my Bible study teacher gave is tofu, it wants to look/act like meat but it isn't even close. 
When we fall into either of these two extremes, we (as the salt of the world) are not preserving anything. We are losing our effectiveness as salt in the world around us.

Only when the Church is different will it attract the world (though it may hate the Church's message at first).

Read the book of Jude (yes, all one chapter of it) and you will find that we are charged with the responsibility of contending for the Truth. 

Challenge: Pray and ask God to reveal to your heart if you are living in one of the two extremes. Are you preserving His Truth or have you become ineffective? 
Stay salty my friends.