URC Daily Devotion 24 October 2025

St Matthew 5: 13

‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

Reflection

What a strange thing for Jesus to say, equating people with a small, grainy chemical, but Jesus was aware of how strongly salt can affect everything it comes into contact with, and how everyone could relate to it.

Salt is a very common mineral and it has been used throughout history as both a flavouring and a preservative. We still find it useful today, even if many of us are worried about our excess consumption of it.

We are, according to Jesus, the world’s salt, and this places an enormous responsibility on us. We should go about ‘flavouring’ the world, that is to say that we should have an effect on the world like salt has an effect on food. We should always be there, hard to get rid of, infiltrating every aspect of society, and bringing with us the power and reality of God’s love.

However, the truth is that we are not always keen to do this. Many and various can be the reasons that we come up with in order to try and avoid being salt in the world, but we need to ask ourselves, in avoiding the call to be salt, can we enable others to know Christ? Or, to ask it another way, does salt that is kept in a cellar have any effect on anything else?

Of course it doesn’t. In order to have an effect it needs to be sprinkled on the food so that it can permeate throughout. In the same way, we also need to come out of our ‘cellars’ and permeate throughout society. We need to display the qualities of God’s kingdom as we live from day to day. This is our calling. This is what God expects of us. We don’t necessarily need to go and do anything extra special, but we do need to ensure that we are living the life that God calls us to live and go about flavouring the world as we do so.

Prayer

Loving God, help us to be salt in the world.
Keep us full of flavour by your Holy Spirit,
and enable us to season the world around us
as we live our lives for you day by day.
In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen.