Day 3: Seasoned with salt
Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone (Colossians 4:6).
Our Father, You are the God who speaks (Genesis 1:1-Revelation 22:21). You created us in Your own image (Genesis 1:26-27) and You gave us the amazing gifts of language, speech and all forms of communication (Exodus 4:11).
In Your incredible wisdom, You designed language as part of our growth and development, and You gave us the ability to learn, to absorb, to progress, and to expand. But our natural communication reflects our human conditioning, our human experience, and our human influences. The Lord Jesus reminds us:
A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of (Luke 6:45).
You designed the heart to be full of all the things that reflect Your glory, for Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever (The Westminster Shorter Catechism). But through rebellion and disobedience, the human heart has become deceitful above all things and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9 - NKJV).
And so it is that the apostle James calls the tongue a restless evil full of deadly poison (James 3:8)—for the tongue reflects the human heart. He describes our struggle to tame the tongue:
With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? (James 3:9-11).
But just as You have created a process of growth from natural birth, so too, You have created a process to grow and develop from spiritual birth. By Your word and by the leading of the Holy Spirit, You give us the ability to learn, to absorb, to progress, and to expand. And our communication can reflect our new spiritual condition as You change our hearts—as You mold us, and conform us to the image of Christ.
You give us new standards based on love and concern for others: Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen (Ephesians 4:29).
You call us away from the constantly bubbling baseness—the heaping measures of perversity and corrupt talk (Proverbs 4:24)—in the communications, media, mainstream, and message norms of our times. You call us instead, to conversations seasoned with salt, full of the love and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Father, teach us. Give us mastery over our tongue. Teach us to to be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry (James 1:19). We submit our hearts, and our mouths to You as we pray the prayer of David, Set a guard over my mouth, Lord; keep watch over the door of my lips (Psalm 141:3).
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