Very happy that we have this opportunity to worship the Lord together. And a major part of worshipping God is to study His word. The three or four predominate features of Christian worship is to sing, to pray, to give testimony and to study the Word. And we are here right now to study the word. And this morning I would like to study with you just one word.

I was asking myself the question; I do not know the answer to this, maybe somebody else that has more experience than I do can tell me. When I first started to preach and teach the word of God, I used to gather together a tremendous amount of material. The first time I ever preached a sermon in a church service was when I was sixteen years old. And I had so much material that I could never cover it all.

But as preachers get older and older, somehow it seems like they can spend more time talking about less and less. And I have noticed that other people have this same tendency.

I was in a church down in Texas a few years ago and the man stood up to speak and I knew him because I had gone to school with him several years before. And he said, Now there was a time and I used to preach about the Beatitudes. Now we just studied the Beatitudes in our Scripture reading. One of the most thought provoking documents in all the Scriptures.

He said, I used to try to preach a sermon about the Beatitudes. Do you think any preacher could ever cover the Beatitudes in one sermon? I do not think they could. There is just too much there to study. So then he said, I would cut it down and then I would just talk about one. But he said, Today I am just going to talk to you about one word. One word, one word from this scripture that we studied.

And that is what I would like to study with you, just one word from our Scripture. And this is a word that appears throughout the Bible. It is an important word. It is a word that appears throughout the Bible. And let us go back, clear back to the time of the children of Israel, and it is recorded in Leviticus. And Leviticus 2 and I think as soon as we read the verse, we have just read the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:3--13. I think you will know the word that I want to study with you.

This is from the Old Testament, Leviticus 2; this is from the old covenant. Everything in a type of some reality in the new covenant. Leviticus 2:13. It says, "And every offering of your grain offering you shall season with salt; you shall not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from your grain offering. With all your offerings you shall offer salt."

What is the word that I want to study with you? Salt, salt. Salt is a very interesting substance. A few years ago I had a very good friend. We were living in Texas at this time. And this lady, this lady was a health reformer and she wanted to eat the best diet. Now if you read the health literature you will get told that if you get too much salt, what might happen to you?

Well you might get high blood pressure. So if you are afraid that you might get high blood pressure from eating too much salt, what would you want to do? Eat less salt. Sounds good doe it not? So that is what she did. She ate so much less salt that she was eating almost and her legs began to swell up, and she did not know why her legs were swelling up.

So she thought, Well, my legs are swelling up, I had better go see the doctor. So she went to the doctor. Her blood pressure is fine. Did not have high blood pressure. Doctor cannot find, on physical examination, the doctor cannot find anything wrong her. But he thinks, You know this lady there is something wrong, this persons legs are swelling up. There is something wrong.

We cannot find anything; we had better do an MRI. Now that is a very expensive test. It is electromagnetic resonance and they put you in a big machine. And they take x-ray pictures of your whole body. And they try to find out if there is a tumor. The most common cause for doing this is to try to find out if there is a tumor somewhere in your body.

And they thought maybe there is a tumor somewhere in this womans body and it is causing her legs to swell up and we had better find out where the tumor is. And do they! Oh, they did hundreds and hundreds of dollars of tests to find out what was the matter. When they got back the MRI, there was nothing! There was no tumor. There was nothing.

Well time went on and she did not get any better. The doctor was trying to figure out what was going on. Finally, it is good somebody had a bright idea after a while. They investigated the way she was living and what she was eating and suggested, maybe, maybe you need to take a little more salt. And when she took a little bit more salt, all of a sudden she was well.

And she actually did not need any MRIs or any lab work. All she needed was a little salt. And salt is, salt is more important than most people realize. In fact, none of us would be alive without a little salt. We would not digest our food at all without salt. We are absolutely dependent on salt. You see the body uses the chloride from the salt. Salt, table salt is sodium chloride.

The body uses the chloride from that salt to make a compound to make hydrochloric acid in the stomach. And without that compound you cannot digest any food. And so salt is a vital substance. And Jesus talked about it and the prophets talked about it. Let us look at something else Jesus said about it in the Gospel of Mark. Now remember what we read in Leviticus 2, everything in the old covenant is a symbol of something real in the new covenant that God wants us to experience.

What does this salt represent? Let us see if we can get any idea. Look in Mark 9:49, 50. Mark 9:49, 50 it says, "For everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt (This is Jesus speaking), Salt is good, but if the salt loses its flavor, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another."

Salt is a preservative. It preserves food from corruption. The Christian, the follower of Jesus, is to be a preservative in society to keep the world from going into utter and total corruption. We can take food like cabbage. I remember when I first, the first time, in fact, maybe it was the only time because I did not keep on doing it, I started buying it instead of making it.

But I remember the first time I made sauerkraut and I had a recipe. And all I was supposed to do was add saltwater to this cabbage. And I thought to myself, how is this going to keep from spoiling? But I just followed the recipe and in a few weeks I had sauerkraut. And so salt is a preservative. And you can put salt with meat or with various kinds of food and keep the food from spoiling with the salt. The salt will preserve it

And the Christian, the follower of Jesus, is to be a preservative in society. But what would you think? I remember when I was visiting a foreign country and they did not have any salt shakers. And they had some salt, they did not put any on the table, but it was a tropical country and so I knew that I needed some salt.

Some people need more salt than others. I was in Southern California and I was bothered so much by the heat. I just could not get out and exercise very much. And so my brother told me, he says, Well when we were in the service they used, when it was hot, they always gave us salt tablets. Why do you not take a little salt and see if you can stand the heat a little better. So I tried that and I found I could get out and work as much as I wanted in the heat-- if I had a little salt.

And I was in this foreign country and it was tropical and it was hot. So I knew that I needed a little salt. And there was no salt around. So I asked the hostess if it would be possible for me to have a little salt. I was sure they had some, and sure enough they did. But they did not have any salt shakers. They brought the salt and the salt was in a bowl, and in the bowl they had a little spoon.

And I thought, My, this is interesting. I am not really used to eating salt by the spoonfuls. But there was this salt in the bowl. And how would you feel if you had to eat your tomatoes and your potatoes, and then afterward, after you ate your tomatoes and potatoes, then you took a spoonful of salt to put down with it? How would you like that?

That would not be very good would it? Why do I bring that up? Because in order for the salt to do any good for the food, you have to mingle it with the food. You cannot just eat the food and then eat the salt. You have to mingle the salt with the food. And that is something that a lot of Christians do not like. They would rather stay in the salt shaker.

But the Christian has to be mingled with the world. Because if you are going to save your brother or your sister in this world from destruction, you must mingle with them so that you gain personal influence in their life. Just like the salt does not do you any good, you do not want to take a spoonful of salt after you eat your potatoes. You want to sprinkle the salt on the potatoes.

In the same way as the salt has to be mingled with the food, the Christian must mingle with the world. You know there are some people that want to get completely away from the world and never have any contact with anybody. Because they say, You know everybody is a hypocrite and people in this world are so wicked that I want to get away from this. And there are so many people that have wanted to do this that they have created institutions to do this.

They are called monasteries and convents where people can get completely away from the world and then they think they will be more holy. But Jesus did not do that. Do you find any example in the life of Jesus where Jesus got completely away from the people and He said, "These people are so wicked I am not going to associate with them at all?" Did Jesus do that?

If Jesus had done that, you and I could not be saved. The salt has to be mingled with the food. The Christian has to mingle with the people of this world. And oh, these people are so evil. But friend how are you going to help save those evil people if you do not ever have any contact with them? Jesus talked about this in John 17 when He was praying to His Father. He said, "I do not pray that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil."

You see, it is Gods plan that everyone, Jesus said to the people who were following Him, to the people that were there on the mount to listen to Him, He said "You are the salt of the earth and salt has to be mingled with what it is going to flavor. Otherwise it will not do any good." How is the world going to be saved if the Christians, if they can never see or be associated with the salt?

It is through personal influence, through personal contact by mingling with the people of the world that people in the world find out what the Christian religion is like and what Jesus is like. In other words salt if it is going to preserve anything, it has to penetrate it. It has to infuse itself; it has to become part of it. And so it is through personal contact and association that people are saved.

You know, people are not saved like a big group. People are saved one by one. And have you ever thought of the fact that everybody in this room has some personal contact with somebody that I do not have personal contact with? And probably most of the other people in this room do not have personal contact with? Do you have personal contact with somebody that never reads the Bible?

Do you have personal contact with somebody that makes no profession of Christianity? How are they ever going to find out the way of salvation except through you? If they do not know anybody else that knows, how are they going to find out? Maybe God has designed for them to find out through you. So He has put you in contact with that person. And what would happen?

Have you ever eaten food where the cook forgot to put salt in the vegetables? Have you ever eaten food like that? And it just does not taste very good. In fact, it is so insipid that you want to spit it out. And I want to tell you, friend, this world, people do not realize this, this world would be destroyed. The judgments of God would come on this world and destroy it except for the salt.

Just like food without it is so insipid it becomes so rotten you cannot stand it. You have to destroy it. But the salt preserves it. The judgments would come on this world and this world would be destroyed except for the righteous people that are in it and the influence they exert over it. Do you remember the story when God came down to destroy Sodom? And Abraham was interceding for Sodom.

Abraham was a very bold man. He almost got into an argument with God. But he was very careful to be reverent. And Abraham told the Lord, he said, now Lord, he says, You are the judge of all the earth, the judge of all the earth would have to do what is right. He said, can you destroy the righteous with the wicked? And so Abraham started.

I had a professor one time that said that Abraham tried to Jew the Lord. And Abraham said to the Lord, he said, now suppose there are fifty righteous people, because why did Abraham think there might be fifty righteous people in Sodom? Because his nephew Lot was there and he knew that Lot was a righteous man and he thought surely Lot would have an influence over some other people that they would accept the truth too.

And so Abraham said to the Lord, if there were fifty righteous people, would you destroy Sodom if there were fifty righteous people in it? The Lord said, no. If there were fifty as bad as that city is with all their homosexuality and their violence and their crime and their murders and all the awful things that they are doing. If there were fifty people in that city that were righteous, I would not destroy it.

Then Abraham was comforted. He knew that God would do what was right. But he thought to himself, what if Lot was not quite as successful in his evangelism as I had hoped he would be? And what if there were not a total of fifty? And so you can read the story there. Abraham started asking for lower number. Well how about forty? I still would not destroy even if there were only forty.

Well how about thirty? I still would not destroy it even if there was thirty. Abraham knew he was getting on dangerous ground. He says, Lord please do not be angry with me, but I want to ask you if there were twenty in it, would you destroy it? The Lord said, no, if there were twenty people in that city that were righteous, I would save the city for those twenty righteous people.

And Abraham said, But Lord please do not be angry with me let me just ask you one more time, he said, 'f there were ten righteous people, would you destroy it? The Lord said, no, if there were even ten righteous people in that city, I would not destroy it. As bad as they are if there were ten righteous people there, I would not destroy it. Abraham was comforted. He knew that Sodom was not going to be destroyed.

The angels went down to Sodom and Lot invited them to his house. You no doubt read the story in your Bible. And the angel said to Lot, see the angels knew there were not ten, there were not ten. So the angel said to Lot, they said, you go get your family and you get out of this city because God is going to bum this city up. So Lot went to the husbands of his daughters. And he told them he said, the Lord is going to destroy this city you get up and get out of here.

And they would not listen. They had vast possessions. They were very wealthy. They were like many people in America today. There are many people in America today that are so wealthy in comparison with the rest of the world they cannot imagine. Their wealth is so diversified into so many kinds of investments they cannot imagine how it could all go wrong and they could lose it all.

The sons-in-law of Lot could not imagine it either. They had large investments and no doubt their investments were diversified too. And somewhat as human beings, we have the idea, we think that if we get diversified enough in what we do it will not all fail at the same time. Is that not how we think? You have heard the old saying, "Do not put all your eggs in one basket." And there are some people that have a hundred baskets.

And the sons-in-law of Lot could not imagine that they could lose everything. And they had their assets scattered around town and they needed to stay there to watch over their investments. And did you know, friends, there is coming a time; there is coming a time when the Lord is going to come in judgment to this world. And it is not going to matter where your investments are.

Somebody says, oh, Pastor John, I am off shore. Well it is not going to matter whether you are off shore or not. I have my money in a numbered account in Switzerland. It is not going to matter. I have a farm also over in such and such a country, so that if I lose it here I can go over there. It is not going to matter. It is not going to matter.

The time is coming, friend, when unless you are part of the salt, unless you have salt in yourself, it is not going to matter. You are going to lose it all. That is what happened to the sons-in-law of Lot. They lost everything. They not only lost everything; they lost their lives when they lost everything. Because their heart was in this world. And that is what happened to Lots wife. You remember, she and her husband and her two daughters left Sodom.

There were four people that were going to get out. There were not ten righteous in the whole city. There were four people that were going to get out but Lots wife turned around and she turned into a pillar of salt. Because her heart was in that city. And as I have studied the message of the Bible, I have recognized that it is important to study doctrines, it is important to study prophecy, it is important to understand what happened in the past, why we are where we are at and what is going to happen in the future. That is important.

But let me tell you something, even if you know Bible prophecy, if your heart is in this world you are in trouble. You see that was the trouble with Lots wife. Jesus said one time, He said, "Remember Lots wife." And what was her problem, did she know the truth? She knew the truth. Did she believe the truth? Well she was on her way out of town. But her heart was back there. And the Lord knew and the Lord gave her and her husband and her two daughters a test.

By the way, does God have a right to give you and me tests to find out what is in our hearts? Does God have a right to do that? Some people wonder, why is God going to allow some troublous things to happen toward the end of worlds history, What is the purpose of all that? It is not arbitrary, friend, those things reveal where your heart is. And Lots wife, her heart was in Sodom. And the Lord told them, Do not turn around and look back. But her heart was there.

And because her heart was there, it just seemed that she could not resist looking. And she had great possessions that she was leaving. No doubt a beautiful home. No doubt much expensive jewels. And who knows what other investments she had in that city. Because, you remember according to the story both Lot and his family, they were very, very wealthy. Very wealthy.

And now she was leaving that behind. And you know there are some people like that today. They are afraid for Jesus to come and they do not want to hear prophecy, they do not want do hear that this world could end soon because there is something here that has got their heart and they want to hold onto it.

I remember when I was young pastor there was, there was a farmer in my church. A very godly man. But he told me what had happened to him when he was just a boy. In fact he was of high school age. And he had gone away to a Christian high school, a boarding high school. And they were have a week of prayer and they were studying Bible prophecy and the fact that we were living in what the Bible calls the last days and that the Lord was going to come.

And he told me, he said, when I heard that I said to myself, you know, Lord please do not come right now. Well why did he not want the Lord to come right then? Well he told me why he did not want the Lord to come right then. He said, my father had just purchased a brand new 1928 Chevrolet, and I had not even got to drive it yet. I did not want the Lord to come then.

A lady who was a physicians wife and they had just built a new home. And she was entertaining a preacher. And they had studied Bible prophecy, too, that we were living in the time of the end. And she told him, she says, well, I do not want the Lord to come right away. And he says, why? well we just built this home, and we built it with a swimming pool and I have not even had a chance to try it out yet.

What is the 1928 Chevrolet in your life? What is the swimming pool in your life? What is there in this world that has got hold of your heart so that what you are really feeling like when you talk to the Lord in your private devotions and you say, Lord please do not come right away. I, I want to enjoy this thing first. Do you have salt? Jesus said to the disciples, He said, Have salt. Salt is good have salt and have peace among yourselves.

Salt represents vital power, vital spiritual power. It is by means of salt that your stomach is able to digest your food and so that you can carry on life. In fact your brain, your nervous system does not operate right without enough salt. Now various health reformers in the last one hundred fifty years have propounded that you should not eat any salt. You should get all the salt you need out of your food.

So you eat more celery, beets and things that have natural salt in them and not eat any. I had a physiology teacher one time and he told me, he said, if somebody comes in and they have not been eating salt we can tell it by their brain waves. Because when the brain fires, and that is literally true when he says the brain fires There is actually an electrical charge in the brain. He says, when the brain fires, the spike is not so high in a person that is not using salt.

You can tell it right on the screen. They do not need to tell you, you can tell it. Salt is vital. Your brain will not work without it. And you will not work without it. Your food will spoil without. And worst of all your food does not taste good without it. Man, life is just not worth very much if you do not have salt. Your body is not going to work. Your brain is not going to work and your food is not going to taste good. And you are not going to be able to digest it.

You are in a bad situation. So salt represents, even in the physical world, it represents vital power. Now remember Jesus was using salt as a symbol. In the spiritual world what is it that gives a person vital power? What is it? Well where does your energy come from? Well somebody says, my energy comes from the food I eat, and that is true. But you could not digest it without salt.

Now in the spiritual life where does your vital energy come from? Turn in your Bible to John 15, and Jesus was talking about this. John 15, He says here starting in the first verse. John 15. "I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit: for without Me you can do (How much?) nothing."

Notice Jesus, you have to have a connection. To have vital power in your life, you have to have a connection. This vital power comes from outside. It is even true in the physical world. Our vital power comes from outside. It comes from the food we eat. In the spiritual world our vital power comes from outside if we are connected to the Lord. If we have a vital connection with Jesus Christ, we will have life; we will have vital power. And this vital power will enable us to be a seasoning for the entire world. For everyone that we come in contact with.

Do you have this vital connection? Remember Jesus says, "Without Me you can do (How much?) nothing." You cannot do anything. And so He says, "Abide in Me and I in you." And if you have a vital connection with Him then, notice how it works. The life that is in the vine goes out into the branch. Now let us think this through. Is the life that is in the branch, is it the same life that is in the vine, is it? Yes because there is a vital connection.

And so the life of Jesus is to come into my life. I am to live His life. Now what does it mean for me to live His life? We have a song that says, "Live out thy life within me." Talking about that principle. Christ lives out that His life in me. Now in the life of Jesus as you study it, you will notice two vital principles. You have to have these two vital principles in your life if you are going to have salt. If you are going to be a flavoring agent to preserve your family, those around you from corruption, and the world around you.

There are two vital principles. Let us see what they are, right from the Bible. We were in John 15, turn back to John 13, John 13:34, 35. Jesus says, "A new commandment I give to you that you love one another: as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

Jesus had love in His heart for His friends, for His family, for His disciples and for His enemies. In fact, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, He said, if you just love your friends you are no better than the rest of the world. In other words you do not have any salt. The world can do that. But if you have salt, if you have the vital connection, you cannot only love your friends and the people that treat you nice but you can love, whom? your enemies.

If you love your enemies, you prove you have salt inside. You have a living vital principle that Jesus has given to us. He said in the Sermon on the Mount, "Love your enemy do good to those that hate you. Bless those that curse you, pray for the people that despitefully use you and persecute you that you maybe the children of your father which is in heaven."

If you do that, you have salt. You have something vital inside and it has an effect on everybody around you. Have you noticed that? If you have love in your heart, the love of Jesus is diffusive like salt and it is aggressive. Now you take a little salt and you pour it in soup and pretty soon it goes throughout the whole thing. It affects the flavor of every bite.

If you have the love of Jesus in your heart not just for your friends, not just for your family but even for your enemies, the people that are nasty to you, the people that are not nice. The people that have cheated you, the people that have wronged you. Did you know that that is what gives Christianity power when the people in this world see that you have some salt. You have something in you that is different than the rest of the world. And that principle, that principle of loving your enemies as well as your friends is one, is part of the ingredient of the salt.

Do you have the love of Jesus in your heart even for your enemies? Did Jesus demonstrate that principle in His life? One of the things that made the teachings of Jesus so powerful that changed the world was that what Jesus taught is what HE was. And if you profess to be a Christian, a follower of Christ, that is wonderful. But if all that you have is just a profession, then the salt has lost its savor.

But if you have the love of Jesus in your heart even for enemies, then the salt is effective, because this world and the people of this world cannot generate that. They can generate love for their friends but they cannot generate love for their enemies. Jesus was courteous and kind even to His enemies and His persecutors. And that has had an influence that has come down the line right to the present time.

And if we are vitally connected with Christ, we will have that same love in our hearts. We will not be filled with hatred and envy and criticism and biting comments toward our enemies to try to destroy them. That is salt. It just takes a little bit. And it changes the flavor of the whole dish. Because that is the way salt is. It is powerful. There is one other principle that is involved in having this spiritual salt.

Remember salt represents vital power. And in this world knowledge is power and money is power. But in the Christian religion love is power. And it is the most powerful force in the universe. It is the one word according to the Bible that most completely describes the character of God according to 1 John 4. But there is one other part of this vital power. And if you look in the Gospel of John chapter 15 Jesus talks about this, too.

Notice what He says here, verses 9, 10, John 15. "As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Fathers commandments and abide in His love." If you are going to abide in the love of God, what do you have to do? What did Jesus say? You have to keep the commandments. In fact, in Gods order of government you cannot separate love from righteousness. You cannot, because God is love He is righteous.

Now we puny people like we are, we do not comprehend all about that yet. We may not be able to explain why God had to destroy Sodom, but He had to. His righteousness demanded it. Love demands righteousness. I tried to think this through in my mind and I realized I have a very puny mind, too. We are so far from the Garden of Eden. Even when we were first created, we did not have as good a mind as the angels, we were created lower than the angels, the Bible says.

But love demands righteousness. Let us see if we can understand that just a little bit in our puny human way of thinking. Love not only demands righteousness, perfect love demands perfect righteousness. Now some of you here have children, some of you here have more than one child. What do you do when you have two children and they get into a fight? What do you do? You have two children and they get into a fight, and you are the parent.

You just go and say, oh, I just love you both. I am not going to lay hands on anybody because I love you so much. Is that what you say? Or do you want to stop the fight? If one of them has already got a bloody nose you say, well we will just let them go on until one of them is totally victorious and the other on is laying down on floor, is that what you do?

It is not what I would do. You see it is not the loving thing to do, to let the fight go on until one knocks the other one out, is it?

Do you see that is Gods problem multiplied a billion times, or more? God has created people and He has given us freedom. But, friends, let us face the facts, we have abused our freedom. And in our world people are getting killed, people are getting cheated, they are getting stolen from. People envy what somebody else has and so they go and they take it by violence.

And if they are big enough and powerful enough, they can make it legal sometimes. And does God just say, "I just love you so much, you will just have to fight it out. Is that what God says? No. Do you see that if you really love somebody, love demands righteousness, and perfect love demands perfect righteousness. And God has perfect love. And because God loves you, notice what He did.

Look back in Deuteronomy chapter 33, it is almost the end of the book. It is Deuteronomy 33:2, 3. It is talking about when God came to the children of Israel on Mount Sinai and He gave them the Ten Commandments. It says in the middle of verse 2, "He came with ten thousands of saints; from His right hand came a fiery law for them. Yes, He loves the People." Why did God give His law? What is the reason given? Because He loves the people. And remember love demands righteousness. Perfect love demands perfect righteousness.

If you love your children, you do not allow one of them to take a knife or a gun after the other one, do you? And that is a crude way of thinking that we humans can understand. But Gods love is higher than our love; it is much more perfect than our love. And because He loves us He gave us, He gave us a law. And that law will keep us from hurting one another.

Do you realize that if every single person in our world would keep that law, that just over night that almost all the troubles in our world would stop? Now the world that we have today if everybody started to keep the law, there would still be some people that had cancer and were in the hospital and were in various kinds of difficulty. But the greatest portion of all the evil in the world and all the awful things that are happening would stop overnight. Right in the world right now if everybody decided to keep Gods law.

The divorce courts would be out of business because of the seventh commandment. The vast majority of all the court cases, the courts would not have a backlog of cases anymore. They would not have it if people decided to keep Gods law. And that is another vital component of the salt, the spiritual salt. You cannot really have love in your heart without righteousness, it is impossible.

Jesus said if you love me, John 14:15, "If you love Me (Do what?) Keep my commandments." Notice in John 14 how closely Jesus linked these two points. John 14:21--24. "He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him. Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, 'Lord how is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world? Jesus answered and said to him, 'If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Fathers who sent Me."

Do you have salt? Remember without the salt the food, well you want to vomit it. You do not like it, it is insipid. The meal is not worth anything no matter how much time you spent without some salt. And, oh, friend, it does not take a lot of salt. Did you know that God does not need a lot of people in the world to finish His work? He does not need a lot. He does not need millions and millions of people to finish His work.

Read the Old Testament. God worked miracles over and over again with just a few people. But He needed a few people just like you need a little bit of salt to make the food taste good. And Jesus said to the people that chose to follow Him, He said, you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its savor, its flavor, it is not good for anything.

What does it mean when the salt has lost its flavor? Who is the salt? The salt is the people who profess to followers Jesus. If you are a Christian, you profess to be part of that salt. How does the salt lose its flavor? Well if you do not have the love of God in your heart and you are not obedient to His commandments, you have lost your flavor. The people of the world look at you and they say, well he is no different than I am.

And when the people of this world can look at you and say, he is no different than I am he professes to be a Christian, and he goes to church but he is no different than I am. When the world can say that about you or me, the salt has lost its flavor, it has lost its savor, it is not good for anything anymore. You see the salt that has lost its flavor is the person that professes to be a Christian, a church that professes to be the true church. But they are not living what they profess.

Or shall I say it really straight? The salt that has lost its savor is a hypocritical Christian. And when that happens the dish cannot be flavored anymore. And so then the elder or the deacon or the Sabbath School teacher or the pastor or somebody, he goes to visit somebody who wants to study the Bible with him and he says, "I do not want to go to that church, they are a bunch of hypocrites over there."

I do not know how many times I have heard people say, "I do not want to go to that church it is full of hypocrites." Well now the serious question is, is it so? Is it so? If the salt has lost its savor, you can know theology, you can know Bible prophecy you can know everything but the dish is insipid. It does not taste good. That is the problem, by the way. That is the problem with the world today, with the Christian world today.

In our prophecy seminar we studied last weekend about the seven churches. And what was the problem with the people of God in the last days, the professed people of God? What was their problem in Revelation 3, do you remember what it was? They said, we are all right and Jesus said, you taste so bad I am going to vomit you out of My mouth. That is the dish that does not have any salt in. You taste it, it is so bad you say, oh my, it will give me indigestion, just one spoonful.

Are you salt, do you have salt? Jesus said, have salt and have peace with yourselves. Now there is one more point on salt but we are out of time so we cannot discuss it. There is one more point of salt that you ought to think about. I will leave this for you to study out. Paul talked about it; he said, let your speech be grace, with grace seasoned with salt (See Colossians 4:6), What does that mean?

When people hear you speak, does what they hear taste good or do they want to vomit out and not hear it anymore? Well, what will make it taste good when they hear it? Now I realize we are mixing metaphors but that is a metaphor that the Bible used. Your speech is to be savored with salt it says in Colossians 4:6. What is it that will make your speech sound good to your spouse or to your children or to you parents, what is it? Well it is if it has salt in it

What is the salt again? Let us review this just before we quit so we will have it crystal clear what the two components of salt are.

Salt has two components, sodium and chloride. Spiritual salt has two components too. The first component is the love of Jesus inside so that you love other people, even your enemies. And the second component is, what? If you really love Him, what? You will be obedient. And when people see a person that is obedient, but they are not just obedient in a legalistic sense. They are obedient because they love the Lord.

And they are so obedient to Gods law that you would not be worried even if they had your wallet. By the way, if somebody is perfectly obedient to Gods law, you do not need to worry if they have your wallet. And when you have that, then you become the salt of the earth. And it just takes a little bit of salt to go through the whole world that everybody can decide what he or she wants to be; what they want to do.

Do they want to receive that vital characteristic? It is the salt, the people that have salt, the people that have this peace among themselves that are going to be taken to heaven. Do you want it? Do you want to ask the Lord to give you some salt so that when you speak, the way you live, it will have an effect on all the people around you? It will permeate and diffuse all the people around you.

And they will see, see this is the problem today people say that Christianity is not real because they have not seen it. They have seen a bunch of Christians that make professions and they do not live what they profess. And they say Christianity is phony because of who they are looking at. They are looking at somebody that does not have any salt. Do you want some salt in your life so that your words will taste good? So that your life will send a fragrance, an aroma a good taste into other peoples lives who are not yet saved? But could find out the way of salvation by watching you?

If that is what you want I would invite you to pray with me, just bow your heads while we pray together.