It’s a greasy potato chip kind of night around here. You know the kind. You’ve run out of healthy-ish snacks and grab a handful of sea salt & grease, simultaneously you grimace and smile, “Yum!”  Salt tastes so good. And don’t you worry, it is not a regular indulgence around here (smile/wink). But if salt loses its saltiness what is it good for then?

“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. Matthew 5:13

Too many times we’re tucked somewhere behind a  screen, trying to get the stuff we want, trying to hurry up and get where we want. We’re over-indulged, self-absorbed, and really lacking in any kind of recognizable saltiness. We’re not just becoming all things to all men so that by some possible means we might save some. We’re becoming captives to the world in some ways, aren’t we? To its philosophies and ideals, to its standards on beauty, material status, and the like. We’ve rubbed shoulders so much with the world system…I am not talking about the people in it…I am talking about the ideals of it…that we’ve become like the world. We’re living in Corinth here not Thessalonica (see 1 & 2 Corinthians and 1 & 2 Thessalonians). The enemy is banking on our absorbing worldly ideal so much so that we lose our saltiness.

What about our lives makes an unbeliever thirst?

Doesn’t salt make thirsty? Doesn’t it make you want a drink? Our lives should have that type of affect on others, right, like Christ’s? It should make them hungry and thirsty for something more than a 3,000 square ft. house, a beach vacation twice a year, a plush salary, more shopping and dinners out. What are we really after here in this world we’re living in? Have the exiles become the residents? Have we forgotten that we’re strangers and sometimes that means we should be found strange. I am not talking about being a socially awkward weirdo (laughing smile). I am talking about living in a manner that astonishes unbelievers and makes them stand back and wonder what in the world our deal is. This world is lost as lost can be, and sometimes we’re out there getting lost in it. If there was a stamp for this, we’d all be marked guilty.

But I want the saltiness. I want that life that makes others long to know Christ. If you’re reading this, my guess, is that you agree. That at the core of your being you desire to be whatever it is God has graciously purposed. And I am telling you the only way to be that…to be salt…is to let go of this fully-loved-by-God world. It doesn’t mean you can’t live in whatever square foot house or go on a beach vacation or go pick over-priced make-up at Ulta (smile), but it means, sister, that we can’t just blend right in. And we really shouldn’t want to.

Because Jesus died for sinners. He saved us and gave us as a gift to this lost place. A gift intended to point the way, that we may gladly happily lead the way to Jesus by word and deed. He intended us to make some people thirsty, so that we can be the very ones who offer them the satisfying cup of the Living Water that quenches all thirst. A believer seeking after the things of the world is foreign to the New Testament, because a believer is so taken by Christ, that what she gives away is that which God is pouring into her.

Whatever you do, don’t lose your saltiness, because the way to win the world isn’t through worldliness.