A New View of Salt
by Bill Hybels and Mark Mittelberg 
Why would Jesus use a metaphor like salt? What does salt do? These days, it makes us nervous because it can lead to high blood pressure. So we feel guilty every time we reach for the shaker. But let’s look across the spans of time and think about the primary uses of salt throughout history.

The first thing that comes to mind is that salt makes us thirsty. That’s why bars serve salty pretzels and peanuts free of charge, to get people to drink more. Or so I’m told!

Salt does something else, too: it spices things up. Who’d want corn on the cob without it? When we eat something that tastes a little bland we reflexively reach for the salt in order to enhance the flavor.

And salt preserves. We don’t use it for this purpose much anymore, but before the days of the Frigidaire, salt was widely used to prevent foods from spoiling. Certain meats could be preserved for long periods of time if they were carefully packed in salt.

So salt stimulates thirst, it adds excitement to the taste of things, and it holds back decay. Which leads us to the big question: Which of these did Jesus have in mind when He looked at His followers and said, “You are the salt of the earth”?

The short answer is, we don’t know! How’s that for candor? If you read the scholars on this question, using poker parlance, they’ll hold the three cards and say, “Pick a card, any card. Or all three cards, if you’d like.”

It could be that Jesus meant for salt to symbolize the idea of creating thirst. When Christians are in tune with the Holy Spirit, and when they live in their world with a sense of purpose, and with peace and joy, this often creates a spiritual thirst in the people around them.

At Willow Creek we often hear testimonies about this. People say things like, “I was at work, and I noticed someone in my department who lived a little differently and talked a bit differently and valued some things differently. It caught my interest. I sensed a growing spiritual thirst inside of me that I’d never experienced before.”

When Christians live out their faith with authenticity and boldness, they put a little zing into a sometimes bland cup of soup. They catch people off guard and make them wince. They wake people up with their challenges and seemingly radical points of view. And they overturn a few applecarts here and there. In short, they put some spice into the lives of those around them.

What’s more, when believers are living Christ-honoring lives they hold back the moral decay in society. I hope that’s what’s happening with the abortion dilemma, with environmental concerns, with racism, and with the breakdown of the family. As Christians honor God, he uses them to stem the tidal wave of evil that’s threatening to sweep the land.

So pick a card—any card. Any or all three might be exactly what Jesus had in mind when he used the word “salt.” But upon further reflection you might discover additional reasons Jesus chose the salt metaphor, reasons that can be easily overlooked.

First, in order for salt to have the greatest possible impact, it must be potent enough to have an effect. And second, for any impact to take place, salt has to get close to whatever it’s supposed to affect. So Jesus may have chosen the salt metaphor because salt requires both potency and proximity to do its thing.

That’s exactly what we need as Christians if we’re going to influence people who are outside the family of God. We must have high potency, which means a strong enough concentration of Christ’s influence in our lives that his power and presence will be undeniable to others. And we’ve got to have plenty of proximity. We need to get close to people we’re hoping to reach in order to allow his power to have its intended effect.

In Matthew 5:13 Jesus said that salt that is without savor and of inferior quality is worthless. It has lost its power. It won’t create much thirst, won’t add much spice, won’t retard much decay. It can have all kinds of proximity—it can be poured all over something we want it to affect—but if it lacks potency it is, Jesus said, useless. About all it does is give people something to stomp on.

By the same token, highly flavored, industrial-strength salt has great potency, but it can’t produce any results unless it touches something. As Becky Pippert wrote many years ago, unless salt gets poured out of the shaker, it remains a mere table ornament.

That, unfortunately, is a fairly good description of a lot of people who call themselves Christians. Oh, they’ve got a lot of potency in their own relationship with Christ. They walk a God-honoring path in their personal patterns of living. But they never get out where they can rub up next to people who need their influence. They’re good-looking table ornaments, but they have low impact.

Do you see why Jesus’ choice of the salt metaphor was so compelling? With it he was able to show that both components—potency and proximity—have to be employed before we can fulfill our mission to have a spiritual impact on our family and friends.

From Becoming a Contageous Christian by Bill Hybels and Mark Mittelberg