Written by Michael Jones
In ancient times, the bodies of newborn babies were rubbed down with salt to ward off any infection they could have easily gotten. The salt made the skin of their bodies smooth. How does salt benefit our spiritual man? The answer is the action of prayer. Just like babies, we are made clean through ceremonial washing and the applying of salt onto our skin. As His sheep, our Creator daily cleanses us with the spiritual salt to preserve us for the glory of His kingdom.
God will not answer our prayers if we have an evil desire to pray selfishly. Why won’t they be answered, you may ask? The main factor of God not answering prayer is the simple fact that God wants the very best for us. This is why we should repent of every sin we have committed when we pray. We must prepare our spirit and heart to commune with Jesus Christ, our Father. Therefore, the importance of prayer cannot be stressed enough. Our prayer must be lined up with the Word for the salt to remain within us. Matthew teaches us a crucial lesson about the importance of retaining our spiritual salt. Matthew 5:13 states, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”
Let us strive in our prayer life to make them (our prayers) beneficial to God, so they may be our finest choice of burnt offering. Let us wait upon Him patiently to answer our prayers. He has graciously sprinkled salt into our lives. Therefore, when we pray, let our prayers be sprinkled with salt and not rashness. Otherwise, if we pray empty prayers, the spiritual salt that covers our lives will cease. Then, we can actually get to the point in our walk with Christ Jesus that our desire to seek Him will be of no priority.
Our first desire should be to seek out the “true love” in our prayer life, which should be God the Father. Our first choice offering is being open and honest with our Father in heaven. When we come to a point in our lives when we are not honest with God, we sometimes lie to ourselves and pretend not to hide things from God. We may be good at hiding and holding things back from humankind, but, no matter what the difficulty is in our personal lives, we need to give it all to Him so we do not shortchange ourselves spiritually. It will take us longer to approach a mature level in our spiritual lives, and the pleasant aroma that God desires in us will erode if we keep up the spiritual immaturity.
Jehovah wants us to become spiritually smooth in our prayer life. As we become spiritually smooth (with no sins to bind us), our prayer life will become pleasing to Him. Jesus Christ wants to chip off the things in our lives that have become idols to us. These idols prevent us from getting close to Him and detour us from the Scriptures. The salt that God sprinkles within us is the only way we can be truly set free and be refined in the furnace.
Romans 8:5 states, “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.”
The Scriptures make the fact transparent that we cannot live in the flesh and still try to do the things of God. We cannot, as believers in Christ, have a divided heart. Either our prayer life will be autonomous, or it is going to remain God-centered. He should be the center of our lives. At the same time, we should remain pure in heart and soul, mind and body, and spirit. Sin has the physicality effect in our bodies, and we are born into it. It damages us relationally in our level of maturity with Christ, and God’s word teaches us that our sin makes us unholy and unfit for Him.
Genesis 4:7 says, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” As Christians, we need to resist sin with the armor of God that He has given us and all that we are spiritually. An example of this is the woman mentioned in Matthew 9:20. She had earnestly prayed for 12 years to be healed of hemorrhages. God was very faithful and merciful to heal her, answering her long-awaited prayer. We can learn so much from this woman spiritually. She did not waver, but laid down her body as a sacrifice. This was done not in a literal fashion, but in a spiritual fashion. She sacrificed her body through prayer. The woman pushed her way through a crowd to see Jesus the Christ and to hear Him speak and to be healed by Him. Finally, her prayers were answered through the faithfulness and mercy of Jesus Christ. As she touched the edges of His tzitzit (fringes), she became the sweet aroma of sacrifice that is pleasing to God.
You see that the armor of God protects every area of our body. When a person went into battle in the ancient days, they would dress in armor gear that would protect every inch of their body. The ancient Scripture protects every spiritual area in us. In Ephesians 6:13, Paul wrote, “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.” Jehovah has given us a double thickness in our spiritual armor. He has given us the armor of God, which is His Word, and the salt that He sprinkles over our lives is to protect and to preserve the spiritual man. While we continue to fight our spiritual battles, there is one more point I would like to make. It is that we are protected by His salt covenant and by His promises that are found in His Word.
No comments:
Post a Comment