Jesus' Recipe for Popcorn (Part 5)

Jesus has a special unique recipe for POPCORN -- and it involves us!

SALT

Salt as a symbol of the Spirit of the Lord brings us understanding of the ancient world's high value of this substance and its properties. Salt was known as a wonderful enhancement of the taste of food and as a great preservative, permitting salted foods to last much longer and remain useful.

These qualities are being considered as the New Testament speaks to us about or own degree of saltiness in how we speak and act, with extra grace, preserving the goodness of God among ourselves and out to those who need to know Jesus as well.

The combination of saltiness as a quality, with the fire and light of the Holy Spirit, reminds us of His personal involvement in every fruitful endeavor by any single disciple or group of believers:

Colossians 4:6 Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.

Mark 9:49 For everyone shall be salted with fire.

50 Salt is good (beneficial), but if salt has lost its saltiness, how will you restore [the saltiness to] it? Have salt within yourselves, and be at peace and live in harmony with one another.

Matthew 5:13 You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste (its strength, its quality), how can its saltiness be restored? It is not good for anything any longer but to be thrown out and trodden underfoot by men. 14 You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a peck measure, but on a lamp stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men that they may see your moral excellence and your praiseworthy, noble, and good deeds and recognize and honor and praise and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

We have been given the combined qualities of the earthly substances of salt, fire and light, as well as oil, to teach us of the heavenly realities of the person and presence of the Holy Spirit residing or abiding within each true follower of Jesus.

Knowing that there is variety, quantity, and quality of these earthly substances, helps us to also see that we are responsible to be continually filled with whatever heavenly resources are made available to each of us by the Holy Spirit, in all these ways as well.

The only way for us to be filled in these ways, is to be emptied of self as we die to its influences and hand more and more over to Jesus, on a daily basis.

We are also emptied by pouring these divine resources out of ourselves into the lives of all those around us, so that they are also filled and ignited and seasoned to become more like Jesus!

All of these substances are simply metaphors to show us qualities of the Holy Spirit and His work around, upon, and within those of us who have chosen Jesus as our Lord and Savior, and continue to choose daily to follow Him.

There is one final ingredient to be added to the Oil, Fire, and Salt of the Holy Spirit, so that Jesus' recipe for popcorn is completed within us. That is His Word, His kernel sown as seed into each receptive heart that hears it.

Neil Uniacke
Executive Director