Salt: How Your Little Faith Can Make a Big Difference

Many of us grow up with something planted deep inside: a desire to make a difference, for our lives to matter. We dream of feeding the hungry, of putting someone through school who could never afford it, of housing those who have nowhere to live, of finding the cure for cancer. We read about David and Esther and Daniel and Paul, and something in us says, I want to count for something like that.

But a while ago the Lord showed me something that reorders all of it. God does not measure people the way people measure people. What men call success, God often calls failure; what men call failure, God often calls success.

For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God.

Luke 16:15 (NKJV)

A different kind of greatness

When James and John came asking Jesus for the top two seats in His kingdom, to be His associates, one on His right and the other on His left, He did not scold the desire. He welcomed it. The instinct to matter, to be great, to be first, is not sinful. Sin has only bent it in the wrong direction.

So Jesus essentially says: you want to be great? Wonderful. But greatness in My kingdom is not the first seat at the top; it is the first place at the bottom. Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant. That, He says, is My cup.

Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all.

Mark 10:43-44 (NKJV)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached this very verse in a message called “The Drum Major Instinct,” and he drew out its beauty. Because greatness is defined by service, he said, everybody can be great, since everybody can serve.

You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve... You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct”

You do not need a job to serve, or a fortune to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. And in God's eyes, that servant is great.

Everybody has salt

So no, not all of us will find the cure for a disease, or fund a hundred scholarships, or feed millions of hungry people. But every one of us has been handed something small, something that looks like almost nothing, that if we let God use it can make an enormous difference. Jesus called it salt.

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?

Matthew 5:13 (NKJV)

Have salt in yourselves, He said. The salt I want to put in your hand today is the salt of faith, faith as small as a mustard seed, the kind Jesus said could move a mountain. Let me tell you about a man whose small faith in written-off people changed the course of history.

The man who believed in a monster

In Acts 9, one of the most brutal men alive, Saul of Tarsus, was suddenly stopped by God, converted, and began to preach the very gospel he had been destroying. This was a man who had orchestrated the deaths of Christians, dragged men, women, and children off to prison, ruined their businesses, and shut them out of public life. In our own terms, imagine word going around that the world's most notorious terrorist had repented and become a pastor.

Of course no one believed it. Many were sure it was a trap, that he was only pretending in order to find out where the believers were meeting so he could kill even more of them. He could not get so much as a house fellowship to lead in Jerusalem, so they quietly sent him home to Tarsus. And there he sat, on his way to being lost forever in the footnotes of history.

Then a pastor named Barnabas, leading a large and fast-growing church in Antioch, did something no one advised him to do. He put his faith in this man. He traveled roughly 280 kilometers, there and back, nearly a month's journey, to seek Saul out. And when he found him, he brought him to Antioch.

From there Saul, now Paul, was sent out on the first great missionary journey. They took along a young disciple named John Mark. But at Perga, for reasons Scripture never explains, Mark quit and went home to his mother. You can imagine how it stung, how the loss of one person who never preached or sang or ministered still set the work back. Later Paul and Barnabas parted ways sharply over whether to give Mark another chance.

Two men looked at the same John Mark and asked opposite questions. Paul asked, what can this man do for the work of God, especially now that he has deserted? Barnabas asked, what can the work of God do for this man, even though he deserted?

And Barnabas was right. Years later Paul, near the end of his life, writes: only Luke is with me; get Mark and bring him, for he is useful to me for ministry. The one Paul once refused to travel with became a fellow laborer, a leader Peter names from Rome, and the man who wrote the Gospel of Mark, the account of Jesus that later became a foundation for Matthew and Luke.

You already have the faith

Let me draw out what this means for you. First, like everyone else, you already have faith that can make a difference. The question is never whether you have faith; it is what you have used your faith to believe. When you say I do not believe in this person, you are actually saying I believe the worst about this person. That is still faith. It is just aimed at a lie.

This is the enemy's real strategy. He is not mostly trying to weaken your faith; he is trying to get you to place it on a lie. Saul was nearly lost because everyone but Barnabas believed a lie about him. Their faith was making a huge difference, a negative one. Barnabas made his difference simply by refusing to believe the lie.

Second, you do not need big faith to make a big difference. A mustard seed moves the mountain. It does not matter how bad someone looks right now; real faith in them can outlast the bad. Someone once said, I was saved when I put my faith in Jesus; I was transformed when I realized Jesus had put His faith in me.

Third, this kind of faith is a risk, but with an enormous payoff. Mark and Saul were surely not the only people Barnabas ever gambled on, and not all of them turned out. It cost him too, his standing with the Jerusalem brethren when he went after Saul, and his friendship with Paul when he refused to give up on Mark. But ask Barnabas if he would do it again, and I think he would say yes without hesitation. Every Gentile Paul reached was fruit of Barnabas's faith. Everyone who reads Mark's Gospel is reading the harvest of it. He slipped quietly into the background of the story, and a little faith in two people changed the world.

Go to Tarsus

So do not leave here without deciding to be salt. Find someone the world has given up on, a Paul abandoned in the dustbin of history, a Mark who has failed one too many times, and be a Barnabas to them.

Maybe it is the person who walks into church for the first time today, not the best dressed, not knowing a single verse, going through a divorce or a hard patch. Make up your mind to depart to Tarsus and go find them. Maybe it is someone you would love to see come to Christ; stop preaching at them and start telling them, I believe in you, because God believes in you. Have lunch, share coffee, invest in their life first.

And maybe it is that person at work or in this church who has disappointed you again and again. Everyone else has written them off. Take the risk one more time. Say it out loud, to yourself and to them: I refuse to give up on you. Then watch what a mustard seed of faith can do.