No sugar please

Sometimes, it feels like modern Christianity lives in a candy-coated world. We want to make everything nice. Wave and smile at your neighbor, no matter what you feel like, no matter if you actually know them or not. Keep your house nice, look good for church, apply Jesus like a band-aid to every scraped knee, because he'll make everything ok.



The problem is that life's not fair, bad things happen to good people, and Christians who are living the easy life aren't really living the Christian life.

Jesus didn’t tell us to be the sugar of the earth, to make everything nice and sweet, to always be smiles and please everyone you meet. In fact, I’ll bet one of the last words used to describe Jesus would be sugary. He was a hard-core, tough, rude, in-your-face man who didn’t care if he pleased people, and didn’t come so that we could have our cake and eat it to.

Jesus told us to be salt. Salt and sugar don’t often mix. They are very different ingredients which produce very different results.

Sugar can taste really good. We often eat too much of it because we like it so much. It’s the reason so many people in America are overweight, the reason so many people have diabetes or high cholesterol. Now, salt isn’t the perfect ingredient either; every analogy has its flaws. But sugar can rot your teeth, and is rarely part of nutritious food.

Salt, on the other hand, was used to preserve food in the ancient world. We can get along without sugar, but we can’t live without salt. The body needs salt to survive, which was why in some desert cultures salt was more valuable than gold.

Do we want to be the thing that makes people fat and complacent, that rots their teeth and feeds their disease? Or do we want our words to reflect the essential elements of life, to preserve the soul and help people carry on?

People don’t need more sugar. They don’t need you to be all smiles and tell them that things will get better. Life is hard, and Jesus knew it. He didn’t gloss over it. In fact, He warned everyone who followed Him that it would be hard, harder than a normal life. He didn’t expect everyone to accept His message, in fact He told his disciples to be ready for rejection. They were to be salt, not sugar.

False prophets were the ones whose words were always sweet. They said that Israel could go on doing as they please, because nothing bad would happen. They sound like the people today who say it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you believe it. The message that sounds the best, that is easiest to accept, that is sweet to the taste without any unsavory demands, is always wrong.

So be salt. Don’t let anyone water your words down to make them politically correct or more socially acceptable. Beware of sugar, beware of sweet words born of sweet intentions that lead to rot and decay. Focus on truth and walk the hard road.