Pass the Salt, Please!!

Sodium is an extremely active element which always links itself to another element.  Chlorine is a poisonous gas.  When combined, chlorine stabilizes sodium and sodium neutralizes the poison of the chlorine.

The result, sodium chloride is common table salt, a highly stable substance used through the centuries to preserve meat, enhance flavor and, prior to modern medicine, help clean and heal wounds. (This is probably where the term "rubbing salt into a wound" came from, don't you think?)

For a Christian, love and truth are a lot like sodium and chlorine. Both are essential elements in a believer's life, but pursuing one without the other can be damaging and dangerous.

Love without truth is, well, flighty and often blind.  Often it will combine with strange or perverse doctrines. It is highly unstable.

Truth, on the other hand, by itself can be offensive and sometimes even poisonous. Spoken without love, it can turn people away from God. It can wound, even kill a person's longing for the nurturing presence of Christ and his people.

When truth and love are combined in an individual or a church we have what Jesus called "the salt of the earth." We are able to heal spiritual wounds, preserve and encourage the best in one another, and bring out the personal zest and unique gifts of each person.

Today, may we seek to let our words and actions be grounded in truth and delivered with love.

God, when I become complacent, remind me that I am salt and leaven and light and that my purpose is to season and enrich the world with Your love.

Matthew 5:13

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.

Tamara