Paul instructs the Colossians to practice gracious speech “always.” That’s how he begins verse 6 of Chapter 4. It says, “Let your speech always be gracious.” He adds an interesting phrase to finish the verse and his exhortation. He goes on and says, “seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” What does speech that is seasoned with salt sound like? A short perusal of the use of the word “salt” in the New Testament suggests that salt contains purifying, perpetuating, and antiseptic qualities. In coming to grips with this exhortation in my life, I believe that the “purity” of our speech refers to thoughtfulness. Salt was part of nearly every sacrifice in the Leviticus system. “Holiness” was essential! After many years in the Navy and both Mediterranean and Western Pacific cruises, I’ve heard and used every “unclean” word in the human language. My life was seasoned with the wrong kind of spices. You’ve heard it said, “he cusses like a sailor.” Well, I was a sailor. We say once a sailor, always a sailor. So, you could say that I am a role model. But that’s not the kind of role model I want to be. Sadly, when I’m not thoughtful, the spices from my old life will still season my speech. I have to remember that impure sacrifices to the Lord are unacceptable.
The preservation quality of salt often refers to the Christians’s influence on a sinful society. Our presence, values, morals, votes, candidates, opinions, e-mails, and other legal and civic activities can retard the deterioration of society. I’ve always thought it a bit ironic that when Abraham dickered with God over the preservation of Sodom & Gomorrah, there were not even ten righteous people to be found in the entire city. That’s because Lot, his wife, and his children were not the “salt” they were supposed to be. When Lot’s wife turned back in longing for the sinful life of Sodom, God turned her into a pillar of “salt.” When we tour Israel, there is a pillar near the Dead Sea that’s called “Lot’s wife.” We don’t know if that’s real or not, but the idea of Lot and his family not being the “salt of the world” for their fellow citizens in Sodom resulted in his wife being turned into salt. Is that Irony?
The last quality of salt you find highlighted in the Bible is its “antiseptic” quality. There should be some kind of “healing” character to it. People should always feel somewhat better from having spoken to us. They should have gathered something: not only positive instruction but coming into contact with us ought to do them some good and to make them feel better. I think that is what Solomon had in mind when he wrote in Proverbs 12:18, “There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” David Jeremiah tells of Larry Dossey’s study on the power of “healing words.” “One of the most significant studies he cites was carried out by a doctor in 1988. In this experiment, 393 people in the coronary unit of a hospital were divided into two groups. Half the group was prayed for faithfully by a group of devout Christians, while the other half of the group was not prayed for. Those who were prayed for fared significantly better. The study cited only two explanations: chance coincidence or the fact that prayer really works. They figured the possibility of chance being the answer as 1 in 10,000. So unless you think that study stumbled into a 1 in 10,000 chance solution, it is probably better to assign the positive results to prayer. So significant were the results that the writer said if it had been a drug that caused the positive benefit instead of prayer, it would have been labeled as a breakthrough and rushed into medical use immediately.”5
5 Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).