Tag Archives: salt

Spice Up Your Life, February 10, 2020

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

Not often enough, I take it upon myself to clean out our refrigerator or pantry. When I take on the fridge, I’m sometimes surprised at the small containers that hold some mysterious gelatinous substance that no longer resembles the original product the box once held. I sometimes try to label those things I put in there (usually called leftovers), so I know what and when they first found their way onto the shelves, but I seldom keep up and so continue to find those mystery boxes.

The pantry task is even more fun. I hate to admit it, but even after trying to do a thorough job every once in a while, but obviously not often enough, I’m surprised to find products that expired, not months but years earlier. I’m not sure how that happens. I’m beginning to think elves come in at night and change the labels just to give my daughter and grandkids, who usually prompt me and help me take not on the task, a good laugh. We fill bags of expired stuff, drag it to the trash, and in a few months, seem to repeat the same process again and again and again.

A month or so ago, I decided to do the same thing with our spices. They sit in a separate space in our kitchen because we want them handy for cooking. Makes sense, right? The problem is they don’t get into the same not often enough clean this stuff out routine. I was a little more than embarrassed when I went through our spices. We used to joke that we have a kitchen because it came with the house, but we do a lot more cooking at home now that both of us are mostly retired. The expiration date on spices becomes a little more important. I don’t think that makes any of them dangerous, but it certainly makes them less potent in recipes.

So I started the process. I began to go through our two shelves of spices and divided the expired from the nearly expired, and the not expired. You know where this is going.

The three piles were not even by any measure. I think I counted the not expired collection on one hand and those probably because they had no expiration date on them. The nearly expired pile was smaller. If I remember correctly, two would expire within a couple of months. Then I looked at the heap of spices with expiration dates long past. Remember, this sorting happened at the end of 2019. I found spices that expired in the 1990s. Did you get that? Expired more than 20 years ago! How could that happen? And what good were they if they were that old?

I’m replacing spices as I need them. Most of those expired ones, we seldom use, which is probably why they found their way to the back of the shelf and ignored for so long. But the exercise caused me to think about a couple of verses in the lectionary from this week.

Matthew records what we call Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Early in that sermon, he says this: “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.”(Matthew 5:13 NIV)

Today salt remains salty a long time because of the way we process it. Sodium chloride the chemical name, and the two ingredients in pure salt can be extracted and purified to a high degree so that our salt stays pure for decades. That wasn’t true in Jesus’ day. They used sea salt and sea salt loses its saltiness. Why? Because it isn’t pure. It has other minerals in it that, over time, break down the chemical composition of the sodium chloride that is also in the mixture.

Does that mean sea salt is bad? No, some of the minerals are good for you. It’s just that those same minerals reduces the longevity of the salt’s properties. The people of Jesus’ day understood that very well. It’s the only salt they could buy. It’s the only salt they used. They replaced it often because it lost its potency and then could no longer be used as a spice or preservative, one of its most important uses to keep meat and fish from decaying.

Because we buy our salt from the grocery store and seldom kill, butcher, and salt meat and fish to preserve it, few of us understand the importance of these properties. We know salt as a spice to make things taste better, and we might use it to remove ice from our sidewalks, but we seldom try to save meat throughout the year by salting or smoking it. We just freeze it or more often go to the store and buy it fresh without knowing or caring how it appeared on the shelf. We just wonder why the price keeps going up.

Take a look at Jesus’ words again. “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”

As his followers, we live here, we hope for heaven, but we’re not there yet. We are the salt, not of heaven, but of the earth. Live now, be salt now. Be the spice that makes the world better now. That’s part of the problem the world sees with Christians today. What are we doing to make the world a better place? If we are truly the substance in this place to make the world better the way salt makes food taste better, the world should recognize it.

I’m not a FaceBook person, partly because too often when I peak at entries from many who call themselves Christians, I have seen words that certainly don’t make the world better. I don’t see comments that lift people. I see judgment, criticism, hate, the things Jesus talked about with the Pharisees. I quickly retreat from the page before I get caught up in the vitriol that spews from the keyboards that I’m sure would never come from their lips if they were standing face to face with you. We hide behind the screen and seem to think we can say and do anything. Not so. I think we will be judged for every word we write.

The sea salt that lost its saltiness became good for nothing. People threw it out. The only positive property at that point, let it kill the grass and weeds that grew up in the road. People threw their useless salt on the path to kill the undergrowth and keep it clean; well, not so clean, but vegetation-free.

So what message does Jesus give us in these words? We’re salt. We’re supposed to add spice to the world and make it better. We’re sprinkled in the world like salt is sprinkled on food. But one last thing. Remember Jesus talked about salt losing its saltiness. It happened. Everyone knew it. Salt expired which means when you bought it, you started using it right away. You didn’t hold on to it and put it away in the back of the cabinet like my 1990s spices. You kept it up front and used it often, then went and got some more.

It’s like the daily bread for which he taught to us ask. Get enough for today and use it up. Then get more and use it up. Then get more and use it up. Rinse and repeat as the bottle says. We are the salt of the world so he expects us to be used up, restored, and used up again like those little bottles of spices. That was the problem with many of my expired spices, I bought the big bottles, cheaper per ounce to save money, then threw most of them away, wasting more money because I didn’t use them up. The small bottles would have been cheaper in the long run because I threw away spices I didn’t use.

I’m learning. Fresh is better in cooking. Fresh is better in spiritual warfare. Fresh experience is better in sharing what God is doing in your life. Fresh is better to act as salt in the world. Let Jesus spice up your life so you can make the world a better place as his salt in a world that truly needs it more than ever.

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day.

Scriptures marked NIV are taken from the NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (NIV): Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™. Used by permission of Zondervan

Add some seasoning (Luke 14:34-35) December 5, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – Deuteronomy 23-25

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Luke 14:34-35
Jesus: Don’t be like salt that has lost its taste. How can its saltiness be restored? Flavorless salt is absolutely worthless. You can’t even use it as fertilizer, so it’s worth less than manure! Don’t just listen to My words here. Get the deeper meaning.

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

Sometimes I enjoy cooking. I’ll have to admit, for the first 20 plus years of my marriage, I couldn’t boil water. Carole was such a great cook, I just left it to her and enjoyed eating whatever she put on the table. It probably wasn’t fair, but whenever she was gone and I had to pinch hit in the kitchen, the kids would complain a lot when she got home. They begged her never to leave again. They remind me of some of my fiascos when we get together on special occasions.

But one day Carole said, “All you have to do to cook is be able to read. The recipes tell you exactly what to do.” Well…not exactly. But I did find a few beginner cookbooks that began to teach me what all the special words meant, like the difference between boil and simmer, saute and caramelize. So I started cooking as a hobby. And I’ve come to enjoy it every once in a while. I don’t even make a terrible mess because I have a tendency to stick things in the dishwasher right away and clean as I go to keep Carole from having to clean up behind me.

I’ve learned to use a lot of spices other than salt to flavor food since I took up cooking, but salt is still the go to spice. Salt makes everything better, kind of like bacon. If you don’t think bacon makes things taste better. Well, you just wrong. Sorry. Salt is the same way. It tantalizes the tongue like no other spice. In fact, a large portion of our tongue’s taste buds are geared to seek out that particular flavor. We can measure saltiness with our tongue extremely well.

In Jesus’ day, though, they didn’t make salt the same way we do today. Vendors gathered it up from salt deposits on the Mediterranean Sea or at the Dead Sea and then broke it up into large or small chunks depending on what the buyer was using it for. Because of its crystalline form, you could even grind it up very fine to use the way we do today, but it wasn’t nearly as pure and most often wasn’t the bright white color you see on your table.

The biggest problem with the way salt was sold in Jesus’ day, was that since the vendors sold it in blocks and it wasn’t necessarily white because it had other minerals mixed in with it, if it stayed out in the weather and got damp, the salt would leach out of the block and lose its saltiness. You would lose the salty flavor over time and be left with all the other minerals and no salt without knowing it. You can try it yourself with a salt-lick, those things you see out in dairy or cattle ranches in the summer. Ranchers put them out to keep the cattle’s salt intake up during hot weather. But it they get wet or the weather get really humid for several days or weeks, you’ll find that the animals will no longer be drawn to the salt-lick because it has lost its saltiness.

Jesus’ hearer were much more familiar with salt that loses its flavor that we are. Our store bought salt seldom loses flavor. The packaging we use protects it from the elements and we don’t worry much about losing flavor before it’s gone. But Jesus told us not to miss His deeper meaning in His words. So what does that mean?

I think as Christians He expects us to season the world. We should be out and about in the world and seen in such a way as to add His grace and mercy to the world. We should stand out the same way salt stands out as a flavoring in food. When you salt food, you know it. When a Christian walks into a room, you should know it. Not because we announce it. There are too many today that announce they are Christians but are not and that just gives Jesus a bad name. But others should see our actions, hear our words, experience our love toward others and know we are Christians. When Christ lives in us we should not be able to hide it any more than you can hide the flavor of salt in food.

The world should miss our presence when we are not around. They should recognize the absence of the fruit of the spirit they see in us when we are not around. Our presence at work or school or in line at the grocery store should make a difference in the world as much as salt makes a difference in the taste of food.

So, has your life lost its intense seasoning in the world? Only God’s spirit in you can bring it back. Let Him put a little salt back into your life.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Be salt to those you meet (Mark 9:49-50) August 17, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – Psalms 96-98

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Mark 9:49-50
Jesus: Everyone will be salted with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. Salt is a good thing; but if it has lost its zest, how can it be seasoned again? You should have salt within yourselves and peace with one another.

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

My wife likes salt. In fact, when she was growing up, her dad accused her of salting salt pork. She’s one of those who puts salt on food before she tastes it because she knows it won’t be salty enough for her. She just likes salt. She salts meat, she salts vegetables, she even salts fruit sometimes before she eats it. She doesn’t just like salt, she loves salt.

I mention this, because after you’ve lived with her a while and sit at her banquets (she is a great cook, by the way), and you go to someone’s house who is subject to a low sodium diet, food just doesn’t taste the same. You stab a big juicy piece of beef on your fork and stuff it in your mouth, chomp down on it and …. blah! There’s something missing. It’s just not the same. You know there is something not quite right about the flavor. Or you dig into that baked potato that looks so good sitting on your plate, raise a big steaming hunk to your lips and as soon as it passes your teeth and touches your tongue… There it is again. That bland nothingness that should have been such a succulent experience.

Then it hits you! “Could you pass the salt, please?” Yes, you can use other spices to help your palatte, pepper, salsa, all those herbs with names I can never pronounce or remember which goes with which dish, but salt… that’s the one that goes with everything. It’s the universal donor to make things good. Jesus said it, so it must be true, right? Salt is a good thing; but if salt as lost it’s zest, how can it be seasoned again?

Jesus told His disciples, those who followed His teachings, they were the salt of the earth. They seasoned their environment. They made the world good. They made it a place that was no longer mundane, distasteful, unattractive, blah. As the salt of the earth, we are to be that universal ingredient in God’s creation that acts as that spice everyone wants. We are to be that seasoning that causes people to be like my wife, something you just can’t get enough of. Someone you want around you all the time and in every situation.

As I write these words I’m reminded of my very good friend who passes away unexpectedly a few days ago. He was that kind of person. He was the salt of the earth. Loved by everyone, a friend to everyone. He called himself just a package car driver as a UPS driver for 43 years, but in that time, his life touched thousands of people with his humor, compassion, and genuine love for people. You were his friend whether you wanted to be or not. Gery understood what it meant to be salt and he sprinkled the seasoning of God’s love everywhere he went.

Watching Gery’s life over the last two decades of our friendship helps me understand these words of Jesus and how we are to express His love in a world that needs Him desparately. Gery thought of himself as just a UPS package car driver. He just did his job, picking up and delivering packages to the many people on his route every day. But to his customers, he was much more than the UPS guy.

The company would call a customer, “We need more information for the address you’ve given us.” “No you don’t. You don’t know my driver.” Gery would deliver. He saw a rattlesnake at the edge of an elderly widow’s porch when delivering a package on day. Most folks would just leave. Gery stopped to kill the snake, looked for others, left a note to warn the lady, and encourage her to have a professional check for more. Those who knew Gery aren’t surprised he often ran late on his route, because he often performed those little acts of kindness that brought joy to others. But he also completed his work every day with excellence.

Salt within us. Seasoning to sprinkle on those we meet and make their lives just a little better because we touched them in a way that made their day just a little brighter or a little richer or brought just a little more joy into their life because we were there. That’s what Jesus is talking about. Just a UPS package car driver? No, Gery was Jesus to those he met every day. And on a rainy Monday morning in the middle of the workday, there was standing room only at his memorial celebration as friends and family paid tribute to his life, remembering the impact this package car driver made on the community he served.

So what does that tribute and Jesus words mean for you and me? Just a package car driver? No. Just a clerk? No. Just a nurse or a doctor or a soldier or a CEO? No. We are not just a…name what ever you might do as an occupation. If you are like Gery, and do what Jesus tells you to do, you are Jesus to everyone you meet every single day.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Are you salt or asphalt? (Matthew 5:13) January 8, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – Isaiah 7-11

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Matthew 5:13
Jesus: You, beloved, are the salt of the earth. But if salt becomes bland and loses its saltiness, can anything make it salty again? No. It is useless. It is tossed out, thrown away, or trampled.

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

We don’t think much about salt today. We put it on our food for flavoring, but that’s about it. But even today, if you really look at the many uses for salt, you find what a useful compound it is. In the kitchen it can be make things salty or take the bitterness out of some foods. It can preserve meat, fish, and foul to allow you to keep those things outside of refrigeration for long periods of time without harm. It helps you peel eggs, makes egg whites whip better, prevents cheese from molding, and keeps milk from spoiling.

You can use salt to clean a greasy pan or keep things from sticking to a pan. You can put out a grease fire with it. Or shine your silver with salt. You can keep your mirror from fogging with a saltwater solution and you can remove stains from your clothes with salt. Salt can clean your teeth, relieve sore muscles and aching feet, soothe mosquito bites and bee stings, and help a sore throat.

Salt was so important in ancient times, Roman soldiers often received part of their pay in salt. Our word salary finds its root in the word salt. The word salad finds its history in the word salt because people would sprinkle salt over raw greens to make them more palatable. Salt was highly prized and most governments restricted its production and taxed it because of its universal use.

Now, are you beginning to get a feel for how important salt was for those who initially heard Jesus’ words? He tells His followers, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the single most popular condiment, the single most important spice, the single most taxed item in the world. Something not just used by everyone, but universally needed by everyone because you carry the message from God to the rest of the world.”

Meditate a little on Jesus words for a minute. You are the salt of the earth. Think about what He was telling you and me. Without salt, you die. Without salt, the world is not only flavorless, but nothing alive as we know it can exist. You, as one of Jesus’ followers, hold a crucial place in His kingdom. You might think yourself an unimportant cog in the wheel of the intricate machinery of God’s universe, but you are. Think about a Swiss watch. Hundreds of single gears work together to make the watch operate with high efficiency and accuracy, but remove one of those tiny pieces and the watch no longer works. It will stop and until the watchmaker replaces the missing piece, the watch continues to keep inaccurate time or remain at a halt.

God wants every part in place so His plans work perfectly. Can He make allowances for your absence? Yes. Will He work around you and without you if He must? Yes. But that is not His plan. His plan includes you in His garden, in His home, the one He’s building with your wants and wishes in place. Holes in His plans are not what He wanted when He created the world, but God also wanted men and women who would willingly follow the path He wanted them to take, not creations that followed like robots follow their programming instructions.

So He gives us a choice. We can be salt for Him. Useful. Flavorful. Giving life and utility to the world around us in the manor He chooses in His overall plan for the world and His individual plan for each of us. Or we can choose to take our own path. But when we do, we are like that salt that looses it’s saltiness. It’s like the salt mined from the ground over which water flowed to removed the pure mineral leaving asphalt, useful only for paving roads. So when the “salt [mined from the ground] loses its saltiness, can anything make it salty again? No, its useless. Tossed out, thrown away, or trampled.”

Am I going to allow the world to let me lose my edge, my saltiness for God? Am I going to let the world decide that I will not be useful to God and His kingdom? Am I going to lose my enthusiasm and excitement for the things of God after all the blessings He gives me from day to day? Am I going to just stand by and let His plans go on without me? I know God’s plans will be accomplished. I know everything He wills finally comes to fruition with or without me. God doesn’t need me, but I need Him. And I want to be a part of His glorious plans. I want to be on His winning side. I want to experience the greatness of His kingdom.

I can only experience God’s kingdom by maintaining that intimate relationship with God that keeps my spirit pure, like the purity of salt. Nothing added, just plan sodium chloride. I must operate like that salt mine. I must let God throw out all the impurities, all the asphalt, so that all that’s left is the pure salt. However He chooses to do that is His business. Sometimes it will take His gentle prompting to teach me. Sometimes, it might take pretty tough discipline. Sometimes it will bring me joy and happiness, and sometimes it will bring me pain and sorrow. But I know that with God in charge of the mining operations, He can keep me in perfect balance so that I can be salt to the world, or my neighbor, or my family, as He chooses me to be.

How about you? Do others see you as salt or asphalt?

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.