Are You Salty?

“Why are you so salty?”

If you spend time on social media you have probably seen someone refer to someone else as being salty. According to dictionary.com, salty is slang, and it means to be irritated, angry, or resentful, especially as a result of losing or being slighted. If someone complains on social media about not getting their way, they are accused of being salty. In our culture, being salty is not a good thing. “Easy bro. Don’t be so salty.” 

In the Bible, being salty is a good thing. In Matthew 5:13 Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.” Christians are called to be salt. We can think of that in terms of adding flavor to life through our love and good works, or as being an agent that creates thirst that only Jesus, the Living Water, can satisfy. The most likely characteristic of salt that Jesus had in mind was that of preservation. Before refrigeration people used to pack their meat in salt so that it would last longer. We can be preserving agents by leading people to Christ so that their souls can be saved for eternity. 

Satan wants to spoil the world through perversion, but we have been called to save the world through preservation. 

Did you know that different bodies of water have different amounts of salt? If you were to take a ton of water out of the Pacific Ocean, and then remove the salt from that ton of water, you would have 79 pounds of salt. If you did the same thing with a ton of water from the Atlantic Ocean, you would have 81 pounds of salt. If you took a ton of water from the Dead Sea, the saltiest body of water on earth, you would have 500 pounds of salt. 

In the same way, people can have different levels of saltiness, but it isn’t supposed to be that way. Jesus has called us all to be salt. You should not be less salty than anyone else. The world may not want you to be salty, but Jesus does. You are the salt of the earth. How salty are you? 

The Most Important Person

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinkley, Jr. Although he would make a full recover, the new President was hospitalized until April 11. Even with the leader of the free world lying in a hospital bed, the country moved right on along.

Five years later in the city of Philadelphia, municipal workers walked off the job and began a twenty-day strike. As garbage piled up in the City of Brotherly Love, all of Philly began to stink, and the trash posed a health threat to the city’s residents. It makes you stop and wonder, who is more important: the President of the United States, or garbage collectors?

Both positions are vital to the health of the nation. While the President may hold “the highest office in the land,” there is an established order of people to immediately step into his role if need be. He is important, but he is no more important than the citizens over whom he presides. The same is true within the church. People often think of the pastor as being the most important person in the church, but that is simply not true. What if no one showed up to run the sound or lights? What if no one showed up to keep the nursery or work with children? What if the teachers or singers did not show up? Each of these people play a vital role in the health of the church.

In I Corinthians 12:14-18 Paul wrote: “For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.”

In the body of Christ some are the President and some collect garbage. Neither is more important than the other. We each have been given a gift by the Holy Spirit, and He wants us to use that gift. It may be tempting to look at what other people do and envy their gift, or feel as if our gifts do not matter as much as other people’s, but that is the wrong perspective. The body functions best when every part is working together, not against each other. Whether you are called to preach, teach, sing, or serve, do it to the best of your ability.

Man’s Best Friend

Dogs are often referred to as man’s best friend. They have earned that monicker because they are loyal pets. Cats are fickle (no offense, cat people). Cats have this look in their eye where you can just tell they think they are better than you. Cats think they are in charge, and you only exists to meet their needs. Dogs, on the other hand, seem to live for one thing, and one thing only: to get your attention. Dogs love their masters, and they are willing to look the other way on our shortcomings because they just want to be with us.

In a way you could say dogs worship their owner. In fact, we often use the word master instead of owner. That kind of sounds religious, doesn’t it? The biblical words used for worship in the Old Testament carry the idea of prostration, of lying down in homage before someone. But one of those Hebrew words used in the Bible is derived from the relationship of a loyal pet to his master.

In his book titled Worship: The Christian’s Highest Occupation, A.P. Gibbs used the concept of a rescue dog to portray how Christians should worship God. When someone adopts a pet out of a bad environment, whether it be an abusive home or a stray off the street, the dog realizes he is being taken out of a bad situation and put into a better one. He doesn’t fully realize this right away, but over time he continues to learn just how good his new master is. Because of his learned appreciation, that dog will become a loyal pet; he will truly be man’s best friend.

As Christians we do not necessarily understand the full scope of God’s goodness when we are new to the faith; we could argue that we will never fully grasp it. But over time, the more we learn about God, the more we will want to worship Him in appreciation for all He has done for us. There may even be times when God doesn’t make sense; there will be tragedies, sicknesses, even pandemics and unrest.

Unbelievers and the those younger in the faith may struggle with the goodness of God, but those who have known God longer, those who have witnessed His track record, will have an easier time. They can say, “I don’t understand why this is happening, but God has rescued me. God has been good to me. God has never let me down. Even though I don’t get this, I trust God has a plan.”

With the loyalty of a dog, let us worship our Master. With the appreciation of a rescued dog, let us trust the goodness of our Master. Let us be people of worship.

One Race

Racial tensions continue to mount in our country, and this always bothers me. People like to point fingers of blame at certain individuals for creating the problem; I have seen some blame the recent skirmishes on President Trump, as if these same instances of murder-by-cop and protests-turned-looting didn’t happen multiple times under the previous administration as well. If we want to blame people, there are a few we can blame.

First, we blame the perpetrators themselves. The ones who commit acts of racism are dead wrong, and no one is to blame for their actions but themselves. Second, we blame Adam and Eve because racism is a result of sin. Every act of evil perpetrated in the name of hatred is the result of the absence of Jesus in a person’s life. We have tried to legislate away racism, but obviously that does not work. Racists need Jesus, just like every other sinner.

But I would also propose we blame Charles Darwin, or as I like to call him, “The Father of Racism.” Before his complete fiction known today evolution, all people were rightly viewed as being one race. Darwinian evolution teaches that humans came from lesser life forms, and the natural result of that way of thinking is to view one race as more evolved than the other. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton wrote a book based on Darwin’s, and he went a step further, calling for selective breeding of people to eliminate the less desirables (Darwin praised his book). Influenced by both Darwin and Galton, Ernst Haeckel introduced Darwinian evolution and Galton’s “judicious marriages” into Germany. He championed a German colonialism that viewed Germans as being at the top of the evolutionary ladder, while what he called “wild races” (the “negroes”) were in between primates and people. This is the Germany into which Adolph Hitler was born, and his holocaust was the natural result of this mindset. (By the way, Margaret Sanger was also greatly influenced by this way of thinking, and she founded Planned Parenthood as a way of “exterminating” the “undesirables” that were produced by lesser races)

Amazing, isn’t it? Society wants to “cancel” George Washington because he was racist, but we teach Darwin’s theories to our children. Charles Darwin has done more to promote racism than any single person in history (not including Satan, of course).

The reality is we are all part of one race—the human race. We are all homo sapiens. There are no evolved races and wild races. We are each fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. Whether male or female, African, Asian, or American, we are each more than 98% identical, and the major difference is in the amount of pigmentation in our skin. The difference in our skin goes back to the Tower of Babel, not to an imaginary rung on the ladder of evolution. We need to love each other as God loves us, as Jesus called this the second greatest commandment: “There is a second just like it—You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39).”