I like flavor! Lots of flavor! Anyone who has eaten with me knows, whatever I pick off of a menu, or whatever I eat at home, it is going to have extra spices and be extra spicy. If you opened my refrigerator door today at my house, every single shelf is filled with different sauces, spices, and toppings. Something for nearly every type of food.
Now maybe my particular preference borderlines an obsession, but let’s face it, who wants bland food! We want to enjoy our food. People are attracted to food that is seasoned well. It makes them want to come back for more.
The Bible says our speech ought to be properly seasoned as well, making people open to hear our message, open to hearing more. Most of us have a hard time listening, so the more we season our speech, the more interested the hearer becomes.
Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man (Colossians 4:6 KJV).
Paul tells us of two ingredients necessary to be able to get through to anyone. Yes, if we apply these two principles it is a sure-fire way to make sure people will listen.
The first ingredient to getting someone to listen is to speak with grace, that is, speaking to them kindly, generously, even if they don’t deserve it. But it’s hard for me to ever use that word grace, such specific a word in the Scripture, without the background knowledge of the grace shown to me, giving me all that I don’t deserve. When we apply that to our speech, it seems like such a little thing in comparison. So how we speak, with grace, is an unbelievably tasty ingredient in helping people want to listen.
The second ingredient Paul admonishes, is to season our speech with salt, an ingredient that gives flavor, preserves, and purifies whatever it is applied to. In relationships, speech seasoned with this ingredient aims to deepen the relationship, it intentionally aims to preserve our relationship, and is therapeutic in that it seeks to cleanse anything that might be impure in it.
Imagine how many relationships we have damaged with impure speech, speech that we can’t ever take back. While we can’t go back and fix most of the damage we have caused in the past, we can allow our speech going forward to be more productive, more winsome.
If we could just make it a habit to carefully and intentionally prepare our hearts and our minds to apply “grace seasoning” to our speech, imagine all the mistakes we would avoid. We all have comments we wish we could take back and certain conversations we will always regret letting slip. Sadly, I have a few of these myself, ones that to this day, going back decades I still regret. I pray that as I grow in my walk with Christ, by applying these simple ingredients, I am able to avoid future unseasoned speeches of regret.
Dr. Ronald J. Barnes, Jr.
President / CEO
June 28, 2022
