Salt that doesn’t flavor is useless.

“You are the world’s seasoning, to make it tolerable.

If you lose your flavor, what will happen to the world?

And you yourselves will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless.” Matthew 5:13 TLB

 Jesus didn’t call us to be bland and flavorless.

While we’re not to be obnoxious, narrow-minded or worse still, closed minded, we do have something to say. And it’s possible to say it with both compassion and conviction.

So we work hard not to offend anyone … except Jesus.

When it comes to maintaining Biblical standards and standing out in the crowd as did the three Hebrew young men in Daniel chapter three who refused to cave to cultural norms, we may not bow completely but we often ‘take a knee.’

We may just have to speak up and stand up even if it means we have to stand out!

Let me cite one example. With terrorists beheading Christians by the hundreds, if not thousands, we are beginning to call it what it is: barbaric. And it is. Yet where has our voice been while it’s been culturally correct to mutilate and murder untold innocents in the womb?

There are things that God is very clear about calling ‘sin’ and alerting us to the consequences of those things. Conventional wisdom and consensus may happily inform us that they’re now acceptable … but God doesn’t concur. Sin makes him angry because of its consequences. It breaks his heart at the same time.

Salt has a job to do. Being a flavorless believer is almost an oxymoron. Believers believe things that must set them apart from the norm. It is wrong to say we believe his instructions, yet allow perversion and wickedness to go unchallenged.

This week my job is to flavor my world … make the claims of Jesus Christ interesting and compelling to those around me. At the same time I am to act as a preservative. I am tasked with helping keep our culture from going to hell at breakneck speed.

Being seen by God as ‘worthless’ is hardly something to be proud of. Stand up. Stand out. Speak out. Let God sprinkle you effectively onto your world.