Randy's Virtual Classroom

Seasoning Your Speech with Salt

How often do we Christians today living in the United States have an opportunity to share our faith? Perhaps more than we realize.

Witnessing is hard, let’s face it. How many opportunities to bring Christ into our conversations with the unsaved do we let slip through our fingers? How often are we failing to pay attention to an opening? How often do we see an opening and shy away from exploiting it? True, some of us have a gift of evangelism that enables them to be great fishers of men, but if more of us “regular” Christians fulfilled the Great Commission what would our neighborhoods, cities and nation look like?

Further, many churches today become such “soup to nuts” and “cradle to grave” centers of activity that Christians can spend their entire lives around just Christians, attending Church meetings or social events nearly every day of the week. For many truly dedicated believers, the only exposure they have to non-Christians is at work. But there they worry about how their jobs, performance or careers might be affected if they walk around with a Bible or bow their heads in prayer before a business lunch.

This is a failure that has burdened me personally. I’m accusing myself in this writing, but does what I say resonate with any of you?

If it does, I have a suggestion, call it a concrete application of Scripture, that might help.

Paul wrote to the Colossians in Chapter 4, verse 6: “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” He also wrote to Timothy, “set an example for the believers in speech”, 1Tim. 4:12, and to Titus, “In everything set them an example by doing what is good. In your teaching show integrity, seriousness and soundness of speech that cannot be condemned, so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us.” Tit. 2:7-8.

Without any desire to be legalistic or to add any new list of sins to avoid I’d like to challenge you all (and myself) to adopt a more seasoned approach to our daily speech. I think that there is much more to these passages than avoiding taking the Lord’s name in vain, or swearing. I also think there is a possibility this means something a lot easier than just going around “preaching” at everybody you encounter or sharing words of wisdom.

I believe it is possible for us to season our speech with our belief system in such a way that our every day conversation will bear witness to God, to Christ and to our faith in him.

Interested?

Here’s my challenge: remove common English phrases from your daily speech that deny God and develop new habits of using phrases that affirm God and your belief in Him. Many phrases even we Christians use in our daily conversation serve to undermine our witness and deny our beliefs, even those Christians who never use “filthy” language or use God’s name in vain.

We can change that and give an opportunity for our faith to become a topic of conversation or we can use our speech to bear witness without “wearing it on our sleeves.” The chief targets in my mind are those phrases that imply a fatalistic or atheistic outlook to events and happenings in the world. I catch myself slipping all the time though, and you may too, so diligence and effort is required to break old habits.

Words and phrases conjuring up images of luck, fortune and wishes are in the bull’s eye of what we should eliminate. Below I have create a table of common English expressions and my suggested alternatives (many of which you’ll recognize as part of what used to be our common language, back in the good old Puritan days, but which have fallen out of common usage).

English Expression: Suggested Substitute:
Luck—- Providence
Lucky—- Blessed
Good luck!—- Blessings to you
Luckily —- Providentially
I was lucky—- God really blessed me
Fortune—- Providence
It was my good fortune — God blessed me
Fortunately—- Providentially
I wish that —- I pray that
Best wishes! —- We’ll be praying for you.
We hope you get well —- We pray you will be healed
Hopefully —- Lord willing
I hope that —- I pray that
He’s in a dice-ee situation— He’ll just have to trust God
He has chance-ee prospects—- God only knows the outcome
By chance —- In God’s will
No way! or Forget it God forbid.
Bon appetit —- May our food be blessed.
Bon voyage —- God speed
He’s doomed —- He’s in God’s hands now.
He’s up the creek —- Only God can help him now.
It’s hopeless. —- Nothing left to do now but pray.

How many more can you think of? Will you send them to me?

On a cautionary note, we must not lay down a bunch of legalistic rules or standards by which we can now judge each other based on terms such as the above. But rather, in a spirit of love and helping each other, we should encourage each other to try to insert some salt into our speech, to use our daily conversation to glorify God, and to bear witness to the truth.
The best way of doing it is just to do it. There’s no need to tell anyone else to do it; if we just start doing it, it will catch on, it will spread. That’s how colloquial expressions come into use, by people using them. Will you take the challenge?

HERE OUR PRAYERS

Here our prayers, Lord
For We have sinned.
For We are facing trials.
For We are in need.

Forgive us, Lord.
For You are kind.
For You are gracious.
For we know you are good and ready to forgive.

Restore us, Lord,
Do so out of your gracious mercy.
Do so out of your loving kindness.

Give us gladness, God.
Give us the joy that comes from the Holy Spirit.
Give us the peace that comes from the Holy Spirit.
We ask you Lord to lift up our spirits and be glad.

Turn to us, and be gracious to us;
Show us your kindness.
Show us your grace.

Let the nations bow down before you.
Let them glorify your name.
For You are great and do wondrous deeds;
For You alone are God.

Preserve us through your Word.
Give us strength to obey it.

We will give thanks to You,
O Lord our God,
with all our heart,
We will will glorify Your name forever.

In Jesus name, and for His sake, Amen.

Shepherds, Sheep and Salt

“But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.” Matt 9:36 (KJV)

“For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” 1 Peter 2:25 (KJV)

As most of you know, “pastor” literally means shepherd. That’s why we call a quiet country environment a “pastoral setting.”

I’ve never been a pastor but I have learned a thing or two about being a shepherd. You see, just like the lead character in the movie “Out of Africa” (“I had a farm in Africa…”), I can say, “I was a shepherd in Scandinavia.” Well, I was for a little while anyway, in the summer of 1986. I spent the summer working on my cousins’ farm in Degeberga, Skane, in the southernmost portion of Sweden, on the Baltic Sea. It was my last summer as a civilian, that is, before I went to law school and had my brain forever transformed into a lawyer’s. One of my jobs was herding the sheep. That made me a shepherd.

One thing I learned about being a shepherd is that shepherds don’t lead the sheep. That’s right, even though we think of pastors as being our leaders, actually shepherd walk behind their flocks, not in front. This is for a couple of reasons; one is that when walking behind the flock the shepherd can see the flock. The second reason is even more powerful: sheep don’t follow leaders!

So how does the good shepherd lead his flock from behind? Several techniques are used. One is exhortation, of course, it’s not to complex–I usually just said “Yah! Yah!” Another and more precise method is using a stick to lightly pat the reluctant sheep on the butt to get them moving forward.

What does a shepherd have to watch for? Stragglers mostly, that is, the sick, the lame, the old, the tired and of course the disobedient. The shepherd walks behind so that he can see these weaker sheep when they fall, stumble or are caught in a briar. Of course the staff is more useful for the disobedient.

What’s another way you can get the sheep to go where you want them to go? Use salt.

What? What does salt have to do with it? Well you see, sheep really, really love salt. They’ll knock each other over getting to it. You’ve probably heard a lot of sermons and read a bunch of commentaries telling you something like, “in the ancient world, salt was used as a preservative”. Well, that may be true, but do you really suppose that many of the disciples following Jesus when he told them they were the salt of the earth really thought he meant to say, “you are the preservatives”? I know we’ve all heard this a hundred times, but didn’t sound a little odd to you? Didn’t it require the preacher or the commentator to go through some hoops explaining how Christians were the world’s preservatives?

Well, based on my personal experience with sheep, I propose another alternative interpretation. When Jesus told his disciples they were the salt of the earth, he meant it in a way that would be readily observable to them in a rural, pastoral setting. He meant that they would go out into the world and attract Christ’s sheep.

Feeling falling short?

The more we think of God and esteem his holiness and righteousness, the more we should be aware of our sinfulness and feel grateful and thankful for his grace and the unconditional aspects of his love. The closer to the light we get, the more obvious is the dirt in our own lives.

If we have difficulty in comprehending that is probably because we often overlook that which we have failed to do and focus only on the things we’ve actually done. Remember the rich young ruler. He’d carefully considered that he had followed all the “thou shalt nots” but then Jesus said, “sell all you have and come follow me” and he did not. That was revealing that he overlooked that sin is not just what bad we avoid doing, it’s also about what good we avoid doing.

During my lifetime, I committed both sins of commission and sins of omission. But truthfully, as I look back, the sins of commission seem rather temporal, even momentary. The sins of omission, –all those years out of fellowship and resisting God’s will for my life–are what now weigh most heavily on my conscience. All that lost time. So much I should have done (through God) but did not do!

So next time we’re in a prayer of confession, let us ask ourselves introspectively, let us consider of ourselves, what we have recently done to love our neighbor, witness our faith, console the sick, help the poor or edify the members of Christ’s Body.

Let’s not just focus on what we have avoided doing wrong, let’s evaluate whether we are doing what’s expected of us.

Let us not measure ourselves against our own unregenerate self, or against the standards of this world, let us measure ourselves against the measure set by Jesus Christ.

And then, as we become aware of falling short, let us not merely thank God for having saved us one day in the past, let us thank God saving us each and every day.

Let us thank God for saving us that very day we’re thanking Him for it. Let us thank God for saving us tomorrow, because we know that even tomorrow we will once again fall short; it’s our old nature. No matter how “mature” we might be in man’s eyes, let us ever be mindful that we still remain and will remain until we are glorified, merely sinners benefiting from unconditional mercy.