Salt Covenant Part Three Ending

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.

By Michael Jones