Having lunch with our son Isaiah. One of the things we’re trying our best to teach our children is what it actually means to be salt in this world.
Not harsh. Not argumentative.
Not looking for someone to correct. But rooted in truth, full of grace, and courageous enough to stand when everyone else is being pulled in another direction.
That feels especially important as Isaiah learns to navigate high school, friendships, social media, and a culture that will constantly tempt him to trade conviction for acceptance. We want him to know that you can be kind without compromising, gracious without going silent, and loving without watering down the truth…
Looks like we touched another nerve on Instagram and Facebook. This time about food, but not in the sense that you may be thinking.
Evidently people are pretty passionate about salt...
We have been doing this online for 12 years, and in 12 years you see a lot of posts take off. You learn the shape of it.
You learn which ones will be fun and which ones will bring the critics out, and after a while very little surprises you.
This one surprised us.
Three weeks ago we posted a simple two-liner that has reached almost 1 million people already. Posts like this generally don’t go that viral in our world, and because it seemed to resonate with people, we published a follow-up two weeks later.
This one has been going bonkers, with more than 4.5 million views in 72 hours.
Normally, it’s pretty exciting when a Biblically based message goes viral. In some abstract way, it validates your calling and even identity as a Christian influencer.
But the virality of these posts came at a cost because when you cast a net as wide as 5.5 million people, you’re bound to reach people who don’t share your viewpoints, and this really stirred up the anti-Christ spirit that so heavily reigns online.
Truth is, we’ve spent a lot of our extra time managing a comment section unlike any we have handled in a while.
Some of it has been beautiful, and we will get to that, because tens of thousands of people used that thread to tell strangers what God brought them through.
But some of it was ugly in a way we did not expect.
People took the image of salt stinging and ran it all the way to the claim that Christians are violent people who enjoy causing pain. We were accused of things so far outside anything we meant, believe, or have ever taught that we honestly could not have imagined them before this week.
Here’s the thing.
We are not writing this because our feelings got hurt. We have been at this long enough to take a hit.
We are writing it because a reaction that size is never really about the person who posted.
It touched a nerve.
People saw the word sting and heard hurt.
But those are not the same thing.
Salt does not create the wound. It touches what is already wounded.
And sometimes healing stings.
That was the point of the original post, and it is the part we clearly needed to explain more fully.
When truth touches a place in our lives that is wounded, compromised, infected, sinful, or simply wrong, it may be uncomfortable. It may expose something.
It may convict us. It may even sting.
But the sting is not the purpose.
Healing is.
And there is an enormous difference between truth that stings because it touches a wound and a Christian who wounds someone in the name of truth.
That distinction is at the heart of everything we want to say here.
What Jesus Actually Meant by Salt
Here’s the thing most of us miss.
When Jesus called His followers salt, He was not handing out a compliment about being interesting or simply adding flavor to a room.
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” — Matthew 5:13
Salt in the ancient world was ordinary, necessary, and incredibly useful.
It preserved food. It slowed decay.
It was used in cleansing and wound care. And throughout history, Christian teachers have repeatedly connected Jesus’ words with the preserving influence His followers should have in a world affected by corruption.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus, dating back thousands of years, recommended salt in the treatment of wounds.
Origen, writing in the third century, compared salt preserving meat from decay with disciples helping preserve the world around them.
Augustine taught that believers restrain corruption by their very presence.
William Barclay emphasized salt’s cleansing properties.
Sinclair Ferguson described Christians as having a preserving impact on a society that, left to itself, will decay.
Preservation matters.
But preservation is not the whole picture.
Salt preserves what is healthy while helping address what is wounded.
It helps keep corruption from spreading, and when it touches a wound, it may sting.
But again, salt did not create the cut.
The wound was already there.
That is the distinction so many people missed in our original post.
Sometimes Biblical truth touches something in us that is already wounded:
A lie we have believed.
A sin we have justified.
A destructive habit.
A broken relationship.
A part of our past we have never surrendered to God.
An area of our health or home where we know something needs to change.
When truth reaches those places, our first reaction may not always be comfortable.
But discomfort is not automatically harm.
Sometimes the sting is the beginning of healing.
Salt Was Never Given to You as a Weapon
Here is the part we should have said louder the first time.
Salt can sting a wound. But salt is not supposed to create the wound.
That distinction changes everything.
Anyone who has ever gotten salt water into a cut knows that it can sting. The sting does not mean the salt caused the injury.
The cut was already there.
And spiritually, that gives us an important picture.
Truth can sting when it exposes something we would rather not see. It can confront our sin, pride, habits, compromises, excuses, and beliefs we have held for years.
But the Christian’s assignment is never to create wounds so we can pour truth into them.
If your understanding of being salt has you looking for arguments, humiliating people, hunting for someone to correct, or enjoying the fact that your words hurt someone, you have missed the point.
That is not healing.
It is harm.
And Scripture gives us an important guardrail:
“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” — Colossians 4:6
Notice what Paul puts together.
Grace and salt.
Not one or the other.
Grace is the manner and salt is the substance.
A Christian with grace and no salt can become so afraid of making anyone uncomfortable that truth disappears.
A Christian with salt and no grace can become harsh, self-righteous, and unbearable.
Neither reflects Jesus well.
Sometimes truth will sting. But if we are the ones doing the cutting, we cannot blame the salt.
Jesus also warned about salt losing its taste. The Greek word He uses is related to the idea of becoming foolish or dull.
Salt stops doing what salt was designed to do.
And there is one more thread worth pulling.
“You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.” — Leviticus 2:13
The covenant of salt appears again in Numbers 18:19. Salt carried associations with covenant, faithfulness, belonging, and shared fellowship.
So when Jesus reached for salt, He was not describing a weapon.
He was describing something associated with preservation, cleansing, covenant, and ultimately restoration.
Not a battlefield.
A table.
“I’m grateful to be here, receiving encouragement, recipes, and whole-body transformation. Even after trying times, I trust you and Mama Z. The spiritual aspect completes the system: body, soul, and spirit.”
— Ellen D.
Why It Hit a Nerve, and What We Are Owning
Nearly three million people saw the second post in about two days. It was shared more than 25,000 times, and 99% of the people who saw it had never heard of us.
Numbers like that do not mean we said something clever.
They mean we brushed against something sore.
Why did so many people see an image about salt stinging a wound and immediately hear, “Christians enjoy hurting people”?
Because a lot of people have been hurt by Christians.
And suddenly the reaction makes much more sense.
Some people have had Scripture thrown at them instead of being loved through repentance and restoration.
They have been corrected without being cared for.
Confronted without being discipled.
Condemned without anyone staying around to help them heal.
They got the sting with none of the healing.
And if that has been your experience, we understand why our original post may have landed differently than we intended.
But we also cannot allow the abuse of truth to cause us to abandon truth altogether.
Because there is another dangerous conclusion hiding on the opposite side:
If it stings, it must be harmful.
That is not always true either.
God has shown us things about ourselves that hurt to admit. Scripture has confronted us.
People who loved us have told us things we did not want to hear.
And looking back, we thank God they did.
The discomfort was not the destination.
It led somewhere:
Repentance.
Freedom.
Restoration.
Healing.
So no, being salt does not give Christians permission to hurt people.
But neither should we confuse every uncomfortable truth with harm.
Sometimes truth stings because it has touched the very place God wants to heal.
Honey Has a Job. It Just Isn’t Yours.
Gabriella L. left a good-natured correction in the comments: “Honey is a preservative.”
She is right.
And we should say so plainly because we are not against honey, and neither is Scripture.
“Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.” — Proverbs 16:24
Sweetness has a place.
Encouragement is Biblical.
A gentle answer really does turn away wrath.
Our concern was never that Christians are too kind.
Our concern is that kindness has quietly replaced conviction as the whole of our identity, so being agreeable became the entire assignment.
Andy C. caught the distinction in one line: “A lot of people are confusing salt with sugar.”
Honey and sugar are something you offer. Salt is something you are.
Honey soothes.
Salt may sting.
And both images help us understand something important about love.
There are moments when people desperately need encouragement, tenderness, compassion, and comforting words.
There are also moments when love tells the truth because leaving the wound untouched would not be loving at all.
So the question is not simply:
“Did it sting?”
The better question is:
“Was I trying to heal or trying to hurt?”
Jesus did not say, “Try to sprinkle a little salt into the conversation when you feel brave enough.”
He said:
“You are the salt of the earth.” — Matthew 5:13
This is about identity before it is about speech.
Your life should preserve what God calls good and carry His truth into places that need healing.
And when you speak:
“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” — Colossians 4:6
Grace determines how we speak the truth.
Love determines why we speak the truth.
And healing should help shape what we hope that truth produces.
The Best Thing in That Comment Section
Now for the part that made the whole week worth it.
While one group was arguing, another group started telling their stories.
Strangers, in public, under their real names, on Facebook of all places.
One woman wrote that she always shares what she has been through because she knows if Jesus saved her in the middle of her mess, He can do the same for someone else.
A man told us he had been reading the Sermon on the Mount that same morning, had asked the Father to show him what it means to be salt, and then found the post waiting for him.
Person after person named what God brought them out of and gave Him the credit where their own families could read it.
That is what we were trying to say from the beginning.
“You received without paying; give without pay.” — Matthew 10:8
Your testimony may be one of the most healing ways your saltiness becomes visible.
Not your ability to win an argument.
Not your talent for correcting strangers.
Your life should make the truth of God harder to dismiss because people can see what His truth has produced in you.
There is tremendous power in another person saying:
“This is what I was.”
“This is what God did.”
“This is where He brought me from.”
“And He is not finished with me yet.”
You do not need a platform for that.
You simply need the courage to tell the truth about what God has done to one person who needs hope.
“Thank you so much for everything you all do, and especially today for the Scriptures. I really needed those today.”
— Mary G.
Losing Your Saltiness Is Not Loud. It Is Slow.
Now the warning no one seems to want to hear:
Nobody wakes up and decides to go dull.
It happens one softened sentence at a time, and the softening often arrives with a reason that sounds like love.
You do not mention it at Thanksgiving because you want peace at the table.
You skip the hard half of the verse because somebody is struggling.
You say nothing about what changed your health because someone may think you are judging them.
Every one of those choices may be defensible on its own.
But stacked together over years, they can become a pattern of continually avoiding truth.
That does not mean wisdom never tells you to remain silent.
Scripture teaches timing, gentleness, restraint, and discernment.
There is a difference between wisdom choosing the right moment and fear continually avoiding the truth.
And only you and God may know which one is happening in your heart.
Bottom line: we need to pray for discernment and be led by the Holy Spirit in everything we think, do, and say.
Every. Single.
Day.
So What Does Being Salt Actually Look Like?
This is where all of this has to become more than a viral saying.
Being salt does not mean becoming argumentative, abrasive, or obsessed with correcting everyone around you.
It means carrying truth in a way that preserves what is good and brings healing where something is broken.
It means telling your children what Scripture says even when culture says otherwise.
It means protecting your marriage according to God’s design.
It means refusing to call destructive habits healthy simply because confronting them feels uncomfortable.
It means telling the truth about what you eat, what you bring into your home, what you believe about your body, and what God has taught you through your own healing journey.
It means telling the truth about your past and what Jesus delivered you from.
It means speaking with enough grace that people can hear you and enough conviction that the truth can actually help them.
And sometimes it means being misunderstood.
Jesus warned us about salt losing its saltiness.
So ask yourself:
Where have you become so concerned with being liked, accepted, or non-offensive that you have stopped offering truth that could actually help someone heal?
In your faith?
Your marriage?
Your parenting?
Your health?
Your home?
Your friendships?
Your workplace?
You do not have to be harsh to be salty.
You do not have to be cruel to be courageous.
You do not have to be argumentative to stand for truth, especially on social media.
But neither can you help preserve what is good or bring healing by continually watering down what is true.
Christians, your assignment is not to make truth sweeter.
Your assignment is to carry it faithfully and lovingly into a wounded world.
Speak it with grace.
Live it with integrity.
Give it with love.
And remember:
Salt can preserve. Salt can cleanse.
Salt can sting.
But the goal is healing.
Jesus said:
“You are the salt of the earth.” — Matthew 5:13
Know your assignment.
A Prayer for You. 🙏
Righteous Father, thank You for the story You are writing in my life, and give me the courage to share it when You open the door.
Let my picture of You always be shaped by Your love and Your Word.
Give me wisdom to know when to speak and grace in how I speak, so my kindness is honest and my boldness is gentle.
Make me salt the way Your Son meant it. Help me preserve what You call good and carry Your truth into the places that need healing.
When Your truth touches a tender place in me, give me the humility to lean in and let You do Your good work.
When I speak into the lives of others, fill me with compassion, wisdom, courage and the grace of Jesus.
Keep my faith bold and fresh, so I speak Your truth with love wherever You send me.
Let my life make somebody thirsty for living water.
Amen.
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~ Dr. Z & Mama Z
Oh I love it! So true
I love you both forever!