In His sermon on the mount, Jesus makes an absurd and impossible statement when He asks, “If salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty again?”
Chemically speaking, salt does not become not salt, so the statement is meant to make a larger point. During the days of Jesus there was a famous debate between Greek philosophers and rabbinic scholars regarding this very issue.
Jesus used this debate to make a humorous point about the nature of the child of God. Until only recently salt was used as a preservative but it also is used to correct flavor in food.
The bible refers to the covenant we have with the Lord as the “Covenant of Salt”. Jesus expects His disciples to preserve and repair the world by living out His covenant in obedience to Him, we are to be fixing a broken and hurting world by imitating Him.
So how can a follower of Jesus Christ stop being effective in the world they live much like salt could stop being salty? Well, the only way salt is prevented from being salt is when it sits in its container on the shelf.
Often, a meal tastes terrible, a soup is bland and even sweets fall short because of a lack of salt. A good quality cut of meat is lost because it is not preserved by the staying power of salt.
So too, this world is rotting and lacking the life it needs because of a lack of active believers, they are sitting on the shelf not being poured out as an offering to the Lord or as the salt of the earth they were meant to be.
