Salt Shakers

Sermon Transcript

If you’ve been a Christian for a while, say, longer than five minutes, you have probably noticed that you spend less time around people who aren’t also Christians. That’s something that’s totally normal and expected. Pastor Mike likes to compare the process of becoming a Christian, who begins to love Jesus Christ and wants to follow him, to someone who suddenly begins to love basketball. You’d expect that person to start playing basketball, and watching basketball, and you can only really do those things with other people who also love basketball. As a consequence, they’ll probably have to spend less time with people who love soccer, or bird watching, because those people are just going to be interested in doing other things. In the same way, you’d expect someone who becomes a follower of Christ to join a church, and spend time with other Christians praying, singing, serving the poor, studying the Bible, and doing the things that Christians love to do. That is time that you can’t spend with people who don’t love to do those things too.

Paul really spends most of Colossians 3 giving instructions for how Christians should put on the new self when they’re with each other, and he devotes a lot of space in the letter to that because it’s important. But in the passage we read this morning, Paul directs our attention to “outsiders”, those who are not Christians. Unlike someone whose greatest love is basketball, Christians should really care about outsiders, because no one is born a Christian – we all start as outsiders, and Jesus Christ brings us in. So what does it look like to “put on the new self” when we’re with outsiders? Paul says that when we’re with outsiders, we should always be seeking to make the mystery of Christ known. He gives us two ways to do that: persevere in prayer and walk in wisdom.

 

Persevere in prayer

Pray thankfully and steadfastly about the mystery of Christ

But he starts not with a command to the Colossians with how they’re supposed to interact with outsiders, but an exhortation to “continue steadfastly in prayer”. And specifically, he tells them what the content of their prayers should be: they should be “watchful in [prayer] with thanksgiving”.

What in the world does praying with thankfulness have to do with making the mystery of Christ known? We’ve seen in the rest of the book of Colossians that the church there was hearing from false teachers who were trying to convince them that they needed more than Christ, that Christ wasn’t enough. And as Pastor Mike has taught us, what we need is not more than Christ, but more of Christ. And if we’re not content with Christ and thankful for him, we’re certainly not going to bother to make him known to others.

If you’re often praying for a better church, a better family life, a more spiritual experience, guess what you’re going to talk about with others: how you want a better church, a better family life, a more spiritual experience! They’re going to see a person who’s looking for more than Christ, not more of Christ. And why would they then want Christ for themselves? God certainly gives us great encouragement to pray for the things that we want in him, but I know sometimes I use that as a license to grumble about every little thing that I’m discontent with, and grumbling is the grievous sin of always asking more of God while neglecting to be thankful for his immense goodness and generosity towards us. That’s why Paul tells us to be watchful – if we’re not watchful, grumbling and ungratefulness will surely sneak into our prayer lives. And the best defense against grumbling is being steadfast in thankful prayer.

Here’s his prescription: pray thankfully, and pray steadfastly. Look at how Paul himself prays thankfully. Flip back to Colossians 1, and we’ll read Paul’s prayer to the Colossians. “3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, 5 because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.” So we should thank God for our own faith because of the hope laid up for us in heaven, and for the faith and love of other Christians in our church and around the world. And he continues: 

 Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth”. What’s he thanking God for? For the faith of the Colossians, and the love they have for the saints because of the hope laid up for them in heaven, because they’ve believed the gospel, the mystery of Christ. What a wonderful thing to be thankful for, that we and our brothers and sisters have heard, believed, and grown in the good news of the grace of Jesus Christ.

He continues again in verse 12, saying he prays “giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. 13 He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” If we prayed and really meditated on the fact that each of us has been transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son, that truth is so wonderful that I don’t think we’d even have any time for ungratefulness.

And Paul adds that we should pray steadfastly. What do you think would happen if tomorrow morning, you started your day praying, “God, thank you that even though I’m a sinner, because of your awesome mercy you’ve delivered me from the domain of darkness and delivered me to the kingdom of your beloved Son. And you haven’t done that just for me, but for every one of your people all around the world, and I thank you that I get to be part of a church made up of some of those people. Father, I thank you for the faith of my brothers and sisters, that I get to see it and hear about it, because of the hope laid up for all of us in heaven.” What would happen if you prayed something like that every day for a week, a month, a year? It’s going to change not just your heart, but what you talk about with people. If you read mystery novels every day and are thankful for them, or watch sports, or study birds, or whatever, that’s what you’re going to be thinking about and talking about with others. So when we pray steadfastly and thankfully about the mystery of Christ, that in him we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins, others are going to see that and hear that because we want to make the mystery of Christ known.

 

Pray for others to declare the mystery

Paul also asks the Colossians for their prayers. Especially, he asks for prayers so that he’d be able to declare the mystery of Christ in a way that is effective and clear. 

First, Paul asks the Colossians to pray for “an open door for the word”. In Acts 14:27, Paul and others report that God had “opened a door of faith to the Gentiles.” And in 1 Cor 16:9, Paul writes that a “wide door for effective work” had been opened to him. An “open door” isn’t just a prayer for the opportunity to share the good news, but for it to be effective in being received with repentance and faith! Actually, Paul doesn’t ask for opportunities to share the gospel, because he just assumes that he’s doing it and others are doing it. Trying to share the gospel is just simple faithfulness – we really need prayer to be able to speak clearly, and for God to make that work effective.

Sometimes my prayers sound like this. They sound like, “God, help me to have an opportunity to share the gospel with this person.” How does that sound? “God, help me to jiggle the doorknob a little bit. Help me to knock quietly. Give me the courage to peek in the window.” I sometimes think of evangelism as something that I should do, and it is something we should all do. But when I think of it as an obligation, I’m doing it just to do it. But when we continue steadfastly in prayer, with thanksgiving for the gospel, and reflect on how good Jesus has been to me, I not only want to tell people about him, I genuinely want them to believe. Then our prayers are going to sound less like, “God, help me knock on the door so I can feel better about myself”, and more like, “God, I pray that you would bust that door down, I pray that you’d blow that thing off the hinges”. “I ask that when I share the gospel, I’d be so overwhelmed with the goodness of Jesus that my friend is too”. That’s the kind of bold prayer that Paul’s asking for. So pray for open doors for yourself, and for your leaders and brothers and sisters.

We can also have great confidence that God answers that kind of bold prayer! Paul was definitely confident when he asked for prayer for open doors, because he’d seen God open doors. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas are put in prison in the city of Phillipi. Acts 16:25: “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened.” After that, the jailer and his whole family believe and are baptized. God unfastened the physical bonds on Paul and Silas and the prisoners, and opened the physical doors, so we can be sure that he can unfasten the bonds of sin on the human heart and open a door for the gospel. 

Paul also asks the Colossians to pray that he’d be able to make the mystery of Christ clear to outsiders, which is how he says he ought to speak. A “clear mystery” might sound like an oxymoron. But a “mystery” refers to something that we can’t understand by ourselves, something that has to be revealed to us, not something that is just plain impossible to understand. It’s the kind of mystery in a mystery novel; it’s not plain while you’re reading, but if the author has done their job, it’s clear by the end. That’s how Paul talks about the mystery of Christ, as something that needs to be revealed. And the good news for us and for those we speak the gospel to is that it has been revealed! Paul calls the mystery of Christ “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” in Colossians 1:26. Just as God used Paul to make the mystery fully known to the Colossians, he asks them to pray for him to continue doing so. So we should pray for our leaders, the missionaries we support, and our brothers and sisters that they’d be able to make the mystery clear.

Now, this is Paul, who wrote like half the New Testament under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and spoke so clearly that he got thrown in prison for it, where he’s writing this letter, asking for help to speak clearly. How much more should we be asking our brothers and sisters to pray for us to speak clearly when we tell others about the gospel, which is how we ought to speak! 

One other thing to note is that Paul just assumes that he ought to speak clearly when he speaks about Christ. Do you have the same assumption? The longer you’ve been a Christian, the easier it is to use those $10 theological words like redemption, or consummation, or eschatology, which is actually a good thing because those words capture something about God, but they’re only worth something if the person hearing them understands what they mean. So if you’re praying for someone, pray that they’d be able to talk in a way that’s not only true, but clear to the person they’re sharing with. You don’t have to have a 100,000 word vocabulary to say, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ has come again”. That’s how the mystery of Christ gets revealed – when ordinary Christians speak it in clear, plain language, and pray for open doors for the word.

 

Walk in wisdom

After Paul encourages the Colossians to pray steadfastly, and especially to pray for him to make the mystery known, he tells them how they can be declaring the mystery themselves to outsiders. He instructs them to walk in wisdom. He tells us to focus on three areas where we need to walk wisely: be wise with time, wise with speech, and wise in answering each person.

 

Wise with time

First, Paul tells the Colossians to “make the best use of the time” they have with outsiders. If you’ve been a Christian for a while, you might notice that even as you are growing in the gospel more, growing in love for God, and actually being more prepared to tell others about Jesus, you’re getting less time with outsiders to do so. That’s actually a normal part of the Christian life: as we grow in love for God, we also grow in love for God’s people, so we naturally spend more time with brothers and sisters in our church and in other churches. It takes time to worship on Sunday mornings, and go to Citygroups, and love your families, and meet in smaller groups to pray, and even just do your own personal prayer, study, and meditation on God’s Word. We shouldn’t stop doing these things – they’re how we grow in Christ and love for all the saints – if we gave all of them up so that we could spend all our time with outsiders, we actually wouldn’t have anything to offer them!

Paul’s instruction then is to be wise with the time that we do have. When you’re not with outsiders, make the most of your time by praying for them. I know Pastor Mike often encourages us to have 3 non-Christian friends or family members located in Philadelphia, that we have a chance to see regularly, that we pray for regularly. Is that something that’s on your prayer list? If not, why not? Paul wants us to recognize that the time we have is short; especially in our church’s context, people just move away often, so the time we have with them is often shorter than we’d like. And more importantly, Jesus is coming back soon, and we want him to find us at work.

So consider what time you do already regularly have with non-Christians. These are times that God has providentially given us to make the mystery of Christ known to those who don’t know him, and they’re times that we ought to be wise with by making the most of them. So how do we make the most of the time that we already have with outsiders? Paul tells us to be wise with our speech.

 

Wise with speech

To be wise with our speech, Paul tells us to “let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt”. Now what does salt do? It adds flavor, and makes food interesting. If we take honest stock of a lot of our conversations with non-Christians, we’ll probably find that they’re just not that interesting! They’re the kind of conversation that any two people could have, Christian or not. I’ve got a few conversations about sports, or work, or politics that I’d like to send back to the kitchen for a little more salt!

But how do we make the most of our time with outsiders by adding salt to our conversations? Jesus told his followers that they are the salt of the earth. And he doesn’t just say that to apologists, pastors, and those with hot takes, people who speak and argue well. He tells ordinary Christians, you are the salt of the earth. So when Jesus tells us we are salt, he gives us a kind of salt-identity that we have just by virtue of being followers of Jesus. What makes us, as followers of Jesus, distinct from the rest of the world isn’t that we have better takes on current events, happenings at work, or politics. In fact, we’re not interesting because of what we know, but because of who we know.

Imagine you’re having the most boring conversation with the dullest person in the world, and then they tell you that they’re friends with an astronaut. What do you think you’re going to talk about next? Didn’t the conversation just get more salty? We’re just not that interesting: but we know Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, the Lord of the nations, the King of Kings, who is full of grace and truth, and who loved us and gave himself up for us.

Our big problem is that we just think we’re more interesting than we actually are. And we think we’ll be able to commend the gospel by studying apologetics, or current events, or studying up on the things the world is interested in so that we can talk with outsiders about those things. This is exactly what Jesus is talking about when he says that if salt has lost its saltiness, it’s no longer good for anything and is trampled underfoot. In an attempt to win over the world through worldly methods, we become just like the world, and we’ve lost the thing that actually makes us salty. Satan would be perfectly happy for us to spend all day talking about contentious cultural issues or apologetics provided that we never mentioned the name of Jesus. So be wise with your speech, in the limited time that you have, by talking about Jesus.

Paul also tells us to let our speech be gracious towards outsiders. Guess what happens when the gospel of Jesus Christ is in the front of our minds through our prayers and seasoning our conversations with salt. We remember that we too were once dead in our sins, walking and living in sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, as Colossians 3:5 reminds us. We remember that we were outsiders. We remember that we received the grace of God’s unmerited favor when Christ died for our sins, and receive it daily through his forgiveness and favor, so we can extend grace to others. Remembering the grace we’ve received should cause us to speak graciously to outsiders, because our God is the God who turns outsiders to insiders. It should cause our speech to be gentle, it should cause us to always hope that God will save the person we’re speaking to, and to see each person as made in the image of God. To speak graciously, remember the grace that you’ve received.

 

Wise in answering each person

Finally, Paul tells us that we should be salty with our speech so that we may know how we ought to answer each person. Knowing how to answer each person is really just a result of our wise speech when we talk about Jesus. There’s an old joke that if you’re not paying attention in Sunday School and someone asks you a question, you’ve got at least a chance of getting it right if you just say “Jesus”. When we talk about Jesus, we’ve got a good shot at being able to answer each person!

One thing that is going to be discouraging to you if you’ve spent more than 30 seconds talking with an outsider about Jesus is that they’re going to have tough questions, and even objections, to your faith. Each person has an objection, and we do really want to answer each one. But hell! But the Crusades! But the Bible has errors in it! These are real questions, and I imagine that you’ve also seriously wrestled with those things, and others. But knowing how to wisely answer each person is not the same thing as just answering each objection in order until there are no objections left. I’m convinced that that approach doesn’t work because I’m a Christian, and I still haven’t answered every single question I have, and I bet you’re the same way! What drew me to faith wasn’t the right answer, but the right person. 

Deep down, people’s questions and objections aren’t usually really about the facts about God, but the character of God. The question is, “Who is God? Is God cruel? Is God distant? Does God care how I live my life?” So knowing how to answer each person means adding grace and salt to your speech by talking about Jesus, in whom we see the character of God most fully revealed, the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. I can’t fully explain the reality of hell, but I know that God is not cruel, because a cruel God does not send his only Son to die for his enemies. I don’t always know what to say when someone dies, but I do know that Jesus came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly, and that we’re going to follow him in his resurrection. I can’t give a perfect explanation of why evil exists in the world today, but I can tell you that Christ is going to come again and wipe every tear from every eye. It’s the facts of the gospel story – Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again – that wisely answer the objections of each person. We are wisest and make the best use of the time when we do nothing other than point people to the Lord Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the one in whom the fullness of God is pleased to dwell.

Sadly, one of the reasons that some of the objections we’ve talked about are so common is because they’re just incontrovertibly true about some people and churches who bear the name of Christ. There is real oppression and real hypocrisy in the history of the church, and these things can make Christianity seem irrelevant if not downright wrong. But if those are your objections, you should know that there is something real, something salty, something relevant and true, standing behind the Christian faith, and that is the person of Jesus Christ. Each of us is born as a slave to sin, so that we can be nothing other than selfish, and selfish people are always going to be enemies of God. But Christ died for his enemies so that the bonds of sin could be broken, so we know that he is a liberator and not an oppressor. And all people are sinners, whether they were born in 2000 AD or 2 AD, so we need Jesus to set us free today just as much as people did when the New Testament was written. Jesus Christ came to put an end to hypocritical religion – he actually gives those who trust in him a new heart, not just a new set of rules. And because he rose from the dead, he’s in heaven right now ruling over the universe and praying for his church. On the last day, he is going to return to gather those who believe in him to eternal life and to condemn those who refuse to give up their sin to eternal punishment. So look at Jesus, turn from your sins, trust in him alone, and then go and declare the mystery of Christ to others, because he is worth telling others about.