How Salty are You? (Santosh Poonen)

The two sides of the coin of the Christian life are... love, and... love (Matthew 22:39-40). Your life is tasteless if it lacks the "salt" of love (Mark 9:50, Matthew 5:13). And it is in the midst of conflict - persecution, insult, false accusation - that your "saltiness" as a bearer of God's peace is tested (Matthew 5:9-16). There are 3 responses to evil: do evil in return (bad); passively ignore it (neutral); actively return it with love (good) - Romans 12:21. True love overcomes evil. Everything else is just a feeling and will pass away. Will you be salt: 1. When Someone Else Harms You (Matthew 5:39-42); We're probably civilized enough to not hit back when someone hits us. But if we gossip about it or slander them to others, we have still returned evil for evil! 2. When You've Harmed Someone Else (Matthew 5:23-24); Often the way to get right with God is to first repair your relationship with your brother or sister. When you take the initiative toward peace, God looks down and says, "That's my boy!" or "That's my girl!" (Matthew 5:9). The amazing thing about salt is that when added, it disappears from sight, but adds flavor to the food. This is how we ought to love. Jesus didn't sit on a "pity pot" and pout over His rejection; He overcame it by rejoicing in it (Psalm 118:22-24). What will you do? Grace doesn't wish the thorn away. Rather, it boasts about the power of God manifest through it (II Corinthians 12:8-9). God brought restoration into the church at Corinth because one man, Paul, was willing to be poured out as a drink offering (II Corinthians 2:3-4, II Timothy 4:6). If the operating principle of your life is, "I don't do anything I shouldn't do" then you are a Pharisee. If the operating principle of your life is, "I leave nothing undone that I ought to do" then you are a follower of Jesus (II Timothy 4:5 TLB). If you feel like a failure, remember Paul, and how the man who killed other Christians, could say at the end of his life, "I have finished the course." (II Timothy 4:7) Keep the faith that God's perfect plan for your life will still be fulfilled. This is the gospel: the sinner who never did a single thing right gets to walk hand-in-hand into Paradise with the Savior who never did a single thing wrong. Heaven is made for honest people with faith. "It isn't the thing you do, it's the thing you leave undone, that gives you a bit of a heartache at setting of the sun." -Margaret E. Sangster