As the culture is declining, the Church is detaching. It’s easy for this to happen. We feel helpless to stop the slide of society away from biblical values, and because this reality is so discouraging, we prefer to spend our time with likeminded believers. To be sure, such fellowship is needed and encouraged (Heb 10:25), but we must balance this with a reminder that our calling is to influence the culture, not avoid it. This, then, begs the question. What are we supposed to do? The answer is found in remembering what we are supposed to be, something we see on the kitchen table every day – salt.
The Lord Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth” (Mat 5:13).1 The scope is wide (“the earth”), meaning that believers in Christ are a potential influence for good on everyone everywhere. Like salt, our impact is intended to be a preservative from moral corruption. First, we must model purity, keeping ourselves “unstained from the world” (Jas 1:27). Then we can preach against impurity, declaring both sin’s penalty and provision. But staying salty is a real challenge. Rather than influencing culture, we tend to be influenced by it. When this happens, this type of salt, Jesus said, “is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet” (Mat 5:13). When we lose our saltiness, we lose respect, and the value of our influence is treated as worthless.
But we must be involved in people’s lives. Salt has to be on things and in things to have an impact. We must have meaningful engagement with lost people around us. This means spilling out of the saltshaker of our comfort zones to reach others with the gospel while maintaining a good testimony.
Are assemblies having a salty influence in our day? Are we engaged with the issues of our time because we are involved with people? While some of our assemblies are shrinking numerically, we should be fair enough to acknowledge that some congregations outside of our circles are growing for good reasons. Men are boldly preaching truth, and people in their localities are intrigued by it, even impressed. They are standing up for biblical values in relation to marriage, gender, the sanctity of life, male leadership in the church, etc. And people know that they are! Do people in our communities know what we stand for? Yes, we must declare the unchanging gospel and teach assembly principles. But we must not let other biblical subjects fall by the wayside. Is our preaching connecting to the culture? Is it relevant? If so, are we salty enough to let our voices be heard? Are we bold enough to preach against sin and how Scripture defines it? Are we bypassing particular subjects so as not to offend? Are we censoring some of our online sermons to avoid drawing attention? Would protests in front of our buildings be too much to endure because we stood for the Word of God? Would we prefer our communities to know less about what we truly believe so that we can enjoy our relatively hassle-free lives?
These are challenging questions, but if we are losing our influence, it’s because we have lost our saltiness. And if we lose that, the world will take our whole message with a grain of salt.
1 Bible quotations in this article are from the ESV
