Sugar and Salt

I have a clear glass jar filled with white granules on the bench in my kitchen, next to my oils and pestle and mortar.  Several people have helped themselves to its contents whilst making themselves a cup of tea or coffee.  They sprinkle it liberally into their drink and stir it vigorously thinking it is sugar.

It is not sugar.

But they don't know it's not sugar until they take that first mouthful and the saltiness stings their mouth and catches in their throats and makes their eyes water.

Sugar and salt.

They look the same.  So much so that they are easily mistaken for each other.  But they are not the same.  And it's only when you taste them that you can tell the difference.  And by then it's too late.

Jesus didn't call us to be sugar.  He didn't call us to a sweet and easy life, with a pallatable message to share.  His Gospel isn't the 'icing [sugar] on the cake' - an easy and tasty addition to our lives.  He called us to be salt.  To stand out, to share a message that is hard to swallow, because it calls for the complete transformation of our lives.  It calls for us to stop living for ourselves and to start living for Him.  And sometimes that sticks in the throat.

But it is the only way to live.  It is what we were made for - to find freedom when we hand our lives over to God and stop trying to be our own saviours.  And we are called to share this messgae of freedom with others.

You can only tell if it's salt or sugar when you taste it. 

What use is salt if it stays in the jar?  Some of us spend so long becoming the saltiest salt we can: going to church and reading our Bible and reading "Christian books", that we forget that there is a purpose to our saltiness.  Jesus didn't call us to be salt as an end in itself, to enhance the 'flavours' of the church.  He called us to be salt in the world, to stand out, to 'taste' different, to do life differently.  He called us to pique people's interest and to draw them close to Him.  Like the cleverly placed, overly-salted nuts you find at a bar, Jesus calls us to be salt to create a thirst in people.  A thirst for Him.

"Let me tell you why you are here.  You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavours of this earth."

[Matthew 5:13, MSG]

[And if you make a drink at my flat and you're looking for the sugar, it's the top cupboard, left of the oven.]