Salt and Light

This morning at 9am prayers Rachel W shared these thoughts on Matthew 5:  12 – 16. 

Salt – used as a preservative, stops meat going off, adds flavour, and depth of flavour. Salt makes other flavours stand out. Salt is also a natural cleanser, useful if you need to clean a wound.

Salt is essential to help balance fluids in the human body, and the blood pressure. but too much salt can cause madness, dehydration, hardening of the arteries and death. Too little salt can cause shock, coma death. So salt is essential to enable the body to work.

Salt that has lost its saltiness is just grit, and rubbish.  Salt is essential, not to be over or under used, how often have you heard a pinch is just enough.

Jesus is challenging us to be an essential element for him. To be used with wisdom and sense, Too little is useless and a waste of time but too much is overpowering and potentially dangerous, and can leave a nasty taste in the mouth!

So what about light?

Well at the risk of sounding like an overused 80’s worship song Jesus is telling us not to hide, to be light dispelling the darkness. It doesn’t matter how small the light is in a dark room you can’t take your eyes off it. In pitch black a tiny speck of light can be mesmerising, whereas light is almost impossible to ignore you can’t hide it, it will escape confines, light sneaks through cracks. Light is a force to be recognised, plants and therefore humans and animals will not exist without light. It is vital for our very being. But we are being challenged to do more than soak up this useful resource, we are being urged to radiate light as well, share this valuable treasure, to show Gods love through simple actions, as praise for who he is.    Sharing your light and holding it high so it reaches a long way enables it to become stronger and brighter; light will always force dark out.

The photo is by CCarlstead on Flickr