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NOT TOO MUCH SALT

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 1, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 33.

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NOT TOO MUCH SALT.

By Adoniram Judson Gordon

WE may in spiritual things disgust and repel men by a too raw and excessive and unmixed use of religious conversation. A pious, but very refined and sensitive minister, recently declared that the greatest provocation to anger and intemperate speech that he had ever encountered, was in the conduct of a rough and boisterous Christian, who used to shout at him across the street or in the cars, or wherever he chanced to meet him, "Well, brother, how's your soul?" He declared that he was sometimes afraid of backsliding under these greetings. It was difficult, no doubt, for him always to answer the salutation "with grace." And the reason is obvious. This man's speech was not delicately seasoned with salt. It was too salt, and so was nauseous and intolerable, and produced disgust, when it might, if fitly seasoned, have proved refreshing. It is a great art to temper one's Christian conversation exactly to the occasion.
"The gracious words" that proceeded out of Christ's mouth were as wonderful in their adaptation to the time and circumstances of their utterance, as they were powerful in their relation to absolute and eternal truth. Modulated from the most awful vehemence of rebuke to the delicate silence that only wrote upon the ground, they furnish the deepest theme for our study as those that would be masters of fitting speech. "Seasoned with salt"—the evenly mingled and thoroughly transfused grace of the gospel; that flavor of godliness in our conversation that at once preserves it from the corruption of "foolish talking and jesting which are not convenient," and the vice of sanctimoniousness and cant which are not palatable even to Christians; this is what with the greatest carefulness the believer should strive after. But our chief anxiety should be that the savor of godliness should never be absent from our conversation—that it should so permeate and sanctify our speech that, saying much or saying little, there should be that which should indicate that we had with Jesus and learned of him.
—Dr. A. J. Gordon.