Here’s an unpopular opinion in 2023: Tattoos are a terrible look.
This is blasphemy according to our zeitgeist. I couldn’t care less.
But what’s disconcerting to me is that I fully expect to be mocked, ridiculed, pilloried, tarred and feathered even…by other christians.
That said, I have a tattoo.
No, it’s not a skull and bones or anything scandalous, I assure you.
Back in the mid-2000s, sometime during my law school years in New York City, I was hanging out with some old college friends in the East Village, and we somehow got to talking about tattoos. Being in the East Village and all, my former college roommate dared me to get one that night and even said he’d pay for it. At first, I thought he was bluffing, but it became evident quickly that he wasn’t, and that my other friends were game for some excitement.
At the time, sorry to say, I saw it more as an opportunity than as a temptation. I had already thought about getting a tattoo, though it was more wishful thinking than planned endeavor. I confess I did feel a bit apprehensive about the unexpectedness of the situation, but more so about the permanence of this decision. But that didn’t last too long.
We left the coffee shop and headed a couple of stores down into the nearest tattoo shop, and I quickly drew out my design and chose to put it somewhere inconspicuous just to be safe – on my back.
I remember it being painful, especially since it was placed on a lean spot. I also recall my college roommate getting a tattoo himself, for moral support I guess.
Here’s what I got.
I know tattoos with Chinese, Korean, or Japanese characters were in vogue at some point. Remember Marcus Camby or Allen Iverson.
At least, for me, I knew what mine meant. It reads (from right to left and top to bottom) “salt and light of the world.”
Even back then, as foolish and impetuous as I was, I still had an inkling of sense.
Though I would have never predicted that a couple decades later I’d be blogging about what it means to be a “salty family.”
Salt of the earth…in the Bible
We find in Scripture a call for Christians to be like salt. All of the synoptic gospels, meaning Matthew, Mark, and Luke, include this warning of sorts not to lose one’s saltiness, lest one become useless for the kingdom. I find it interesting that Christ’s warning comes on the heels of three different contexts.
To Suffer Persecution (Matthew 5)
In Matthew, it follows the beatitudes, the last of which is directed towards those who are blessed when they are persecuted for following Christ, for great will be their reward in heaven. The implication here is that to be salt, meaning to be an agent of preservation and purification in the world, is not unconnected to suffering and persecution for Christ’s sake.
To be the salt of the earth is to be all that is contained within the beatitudes (I.e. to be poor in spirit, to mourn, to be peacemakers, to be pure in heart, to hunger for righteousness, etc..). To not be these things is to not be salty, or to have lost one’s saltiness.
Make no mistake. This passage is a warning more than anything else. If you are not cultivating godliness and righteousness, you are becoming more and more useless to God. There is no other use for you than to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. We are to heed these words carefully.
To Mortify Sin (Mark 9)
In Mark, the warning comes after Christ speaks of the extreme measures we must take to flee from sin. Cut off limbs or gouge out your eyes if they cause you to sin, for it is better to enter heaven maimed than to suffer in hell fully intact.
Quite grisly in its imagery, but the point is well taken: be killing sin or it will be killing you. It requires a denial of self, a willingness to be cut off from your very flesh and blood. The one who is willing and able, by God’s power and grace, is the one who has salt in himself and can thus have peace with others.
To Deny Yourself and Follow Christ (Luke 14)
In Luke, it is after Christ lays out the cost of discipleship. Similar to the passage in Mark, nothing short of complete denial of self and selfish wants is required if you are a true believer. You must be willing to give up family and even life itself. If not, the statement is clear, you cannot be Christ’s disciple. And if you fail to be this way, you have lost your saltiness, “no use either to the soil or for the manure pile.”
Think about that for a moment. How useless must one be not to make it into the pile of manure? Even dung has its uses, and placing you (if not salty) in dung would detract from its purposes. This is the one who has lost his saltiness. This is the one who has not denied all to follow Christ.
Are you salty?
So where does that leave us? How do we know we are salty? Or how do we prevent ourselves from losing our saltiness?
Well, from these passages, it’s clear that salty ones endure persecution, mortify sin in their lives, and renounce all things in this life to follow Christ. But before I get any further, I must make it clear that we are justified by faith alone in Christ alone.
Yes, it is true that genuine christians are known by their fruit, but the fruit is not what saves us. Salvation is a free gift from God (Romans 5), nothing we can attain or achieve by ourselves, but simply given to us by a gracious God. It is a gift given to His chosen people, and the fruit we bear once we have been saved is the evidence that we have, in fact, been saved.
Saltiness is a part of that fruit. We endure persecution, kill our sin, and bear our crosses daily to follow Christ not to earn salvation (which is impossible to do), but because we are grateful to God and desire to please Him in this way.
So we are salty because God has made us salty and has made us want to be salty. The desire to be salty is really our desire, though it has been implanted there by God, which means we do bear responsibility for the way we live, and we are warned to remain salty. But we can also rest assured that the One who has begun a good work in us will “bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). So we strive with hope, knowing that God will keep us faithful.
So then, what does this striving look like?
Salty as a Family
Given all that I’ve just written, we must remember that God did not create all of us from dust as He did Adam. He made Adam and Eve, male and female in His image, and gave them a mandate to multiply. In other words, He called them to raise a family. And we are their offspring.
All that is entailed in being salty, then, must take shape first in the family. It is within the context of a family – father, mother, and children, as well as grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and so on – that we are to learn to be salt of the earth. Can it be any other way?
Raised a Southern Baptist, I became acclimated to the whole business of getting saved, the alter calls, the sinner’s prayer, and the baptisms. Though I didn’t notice at the time, I now recognize how individualistic all of this is. Implicit in this way of saving people, kids more specifically, is the assumption that even though many of them are being raised in christian homes, they aren’t actually saved and require pastors and people outside of the home to bring them to a state of salvation.
Now, I’m not saying all Baptist churches are like this. There are faithful and solid Baptist churches comprised of families that really do a great job of raising up godly children.
But is this how salvation works? Is salvation wholly individualistic and untethered whatsoever to the context of one’s family? That we can preach the gospel to our children every single day, and yet, enjoy no more than a coin’s toss that they’ll be saved per God’s election, something He determined before He created the world?
If we have no control over the salvation of our children, why would God tell us to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord? Now, I do not mean that we are the primary means by which a child is saved. That is God’s domain. But there are primary causes and secondary causes. Wouldn’t it make more sense to believe that we, the parents, are the secondary causes of our children’s salvation. In other words, does it not make sense that followers of Christ bear children who will hear the gospel, see it’s power played out in the lives of their parents, learn the walk of faith, and that those things will be the very means that God uses to bring about salvation in them?
To put it yet another way, I said earlier that we are salty because God has made us salty and has made us want to be salty. Doesn’t it therefore follow that He would do the same in our children as they witness a living faith in their parents, all of this being God’s predetermined plan before He created us?
So God is the primary cause. Parents are the secondary ones. And if we are to be salt of the earth, we must teach our children to be salt as well. Is this not why we attend church services every week and have our family devotions? These are the means of our growth, our sanctification.
Saltiness must be transmitted from generation to generation.
This emphasis on family might seem off-putting to some, given the atomizing effects of industry and “technological advancement.” There has never been a time in history better suited to the individual. Modern conveniences like grocery stores, washing machines, microwaves, and so on, have made living independently from others quite feasible and, unfortunately, desirable.
It has become a custom in our society to send our children away from the home only a handful of years into their existence to be herded around with their peers for the next dozen or so years, taught by professional strangers to fit ultimately into the technological and industrial machine as wage laborers, convinced that this is their purpose in life.
This is a disaster, so completely disastrous that people don’t even realize it’s a disaster. It’s just normal life.
In this disastrous age, then, to be salty must entail protecting and preserving our families.
The Crucible of Family
To be a salty family, then, is to turn our backs against much of what is in the world. Not everything is redeemable for Christ.
As people pursue money, fame, and power, we, as a family, devote ourselves to Christ. We read His word daily. We pray together. We place our hope together in an eternal life with Christ. And we share the gospel with those around us.
As others sacrifice their relationships to get ahead, we sacrifice worldly comforts and even the American Dream to stick together as a family.
We forge our character in the context of family, loving and serving one another, doing “nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility” counting each other more significant than ourselves, and thus, the family serves as the crucible that forges our saltiness, making us useful to God and His purposes.
We live simply and contentedly and enjoy the best things in this life and in the life to come…together.
