SEASONED WITH SALT
SEASONED WITH SALT
“Every sacrifice shall be salted with salt” (Mark 9: 49). The practical characteristic of a sacrifice is salt. It checks the tendency to decomposition in everything here. Wherever self is surrendered, then one, through grace, imposes a check on the expression of the flesh in others. Thus the speech is “seasoned with salt”. You always check the working of the flesh by salt whenever you are really a sacrifice. Whenever you promote or feed the susceptibilities of man’s nature, you are not salt; and then you are not a sacrifice. When you only repress your feelings, then you are not a sacrifice, because you are not salted with salt. You are only like a tree in winter; the sap has retired into the heart of the tree; but when the spring, the seasonable opportunity comes, it flows forth in full force, it is not sacrificed; and you cannot check others wholesomely when you are not sacrificially corrected yourself. If, when the seasonable opportunity, or the congenial company, causes the tastes or feelings once cultivated and cherished to revive, then they are not surrendered, and you would really foster and feed them in another, provided there was nothing in the atmosphere to check the unfolding; instead of evincing that there is the power of salt in you, in the very things which formerly you cultivated; and that not only had you repressed them, but that you so sacrificed them that now in their place you have a moral power to prevent the same in others from being injurious.
Repression and sacrifice are very different. The former is winter-time. You are reserved, you are a fountain sealed, a spring shut up. In repression there is a curb imposed, but no gain. In sacrifice there is a gain; that which was once an obstacle is turned to a gain by sacrifice. It is not only the crab-tree interdicted from budding; but now, grafted with the new stock, it yields the sweetest fruit.
In repression you are checked, but your heart is [p. 245] sad because of the dreary cold; but in sacrifice you have laid all upon the altar, and you can exercise a preservative power towards others in the very thing where you have failed yourself. “When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Luke 22: 32), is your experience. You are not occupied with curbing yourself, but you bring forth fruit pleasing to the Lord, and excellent for His people.
It is not now with you, ‘I have had this feeling, and I repress it’, but, ‘I have had this feeling, and I sacrifice, I repudiate it’; and the consequence is that the influence you exert on others is the self-renunciation which you have proved yourself.