Weekly Devotion: Seasoned With Salt

“Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” Colossians 4:6

“Salt” is a substance used worldwide for a variety of purposes, but in this text we find it used metaphorically to season our “speech”. God likens “grace” to “salt” and the word “seasoned” implies that there is a time and place and amount to speak. To understand why God chose these words; we need to see how “salt” was used in the Old Testament.

“And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt.” Leviticus 2:13

So from the beginning of the law, God required “all” of his “offerings” to be salted. If Christian’s are to be a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1, 2), then it fits that God wants our speech to be salty when we offer his word to others. This is why Jesus called his disciples “the salt of the earth”.

“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” Matthew 5:13

So we are not only to have our speech “seasoned with salt” while on the earth, we are “the salt of the earth”. To grasp what Jesus is saying, consider some of the other uses of “salt”.

·         Purifying agent / antiseptic

·         Flavor enhancer

·         Preservative

·         Thirst inducer

Christian’s are to be “purifying agents” to cleanse and help heal spiritual wounds. We are to be “flavor enhancers” that spice up life with true joy. We are “preservatives”, not only for keeping the faith, but also by living by God’s standards in a morally corrupt world to preserve a lawful society. We are to be “thirst inducers” to make others want to be filled by God’s righteousness (Matthew 5:6). A wise man once told me, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Even though you can’t make a horse drink, you can put some “salt” in his oats!” Water is likened unto God’s word (Eph. 5:26) and God’s Spirit (John 7:38, 39), so we should make lost people thirsty for the “water of life”!

“And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” Revelation 22:17

Friend, have you taken “the water of life freely”? Salt is white too, wouldn’t you like to be made clean and white? Would you ask God to cleanse and save you today? “Salt” was also used for wages at the time of Christ, which is where the saying “worth your salt” comes from; in fact, our word “salary” is derived from “salt”. Think about wages / payment; we can either accept Christ’s sacrifice / payment for our sins, and become the “salt of the earth”, or die without Christ and be sacrificed ourselves and “salted with fire” as payment for our own sins...

“For every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt.” Mark 9:49