Mark 9:49-50 God Alone is Our Source

The Text

Mark 9:49–50 (CSB)
⁴⁹ For everyone will be salted with fire.

⁵⁰ Salt is good, but if the salt should lose its flavor, how can you season it? Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

The Devotion

Again, we can talk about salt in terms of farming or cooking. But I want to emphasize what Christ is highlighting here:

What is our source?

Is it our good works?

Is it our devotion?

Is it anything we do?

Is it our job? Our family? Our marriage? Our singleness?

Is it what we can do with our hands or mind?

What is our source of life?

In order to live, the source has to be God.

God is not here to supplement our lives living by our way. God has called us out of our own way into death and destruction and into him for actual life.

1 John 5:1 (CSB) Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father also loves the one born of him.

The Triune God must be in you. And if he is in you, then he will be at work in you.

Salt works from the outside in order to get into the soil or into the food we eat.

Legalism thinks that if we do a bunch of good stuff, then some how that would seep into our hearts and causes us to be good in the sight of God.

Licentious (Anti-nominalism or in other words, "the law doesn't matter") thinks that God is us, God loves us enough to leave us alone.

Both are going straight to hell.

God in you and God in me will change us from the inside out.

God changes our hearts, we now get to obey God.

God renews our minds, we take our thoughts captive to Christ.

God gives us His Spirit, we are now children of God.

God gave His Son, we now have everlasting life.