SALT
AND
LIGHT
BY J.P. TIMMONS
February 9, 2019
©2019 CCI PUBLISHING
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“You are the salt of the
Earth, but if salt has
Lost its taste, how shall
Its saltiness be restored?”
♥ Matthew 5:13
I’ve not said anything about it on social media or anywhere else but I have been grieving for quite a few months now—grieving over the loss of some Christian ministers who died before their time when they should have lived longer to fulfill their destinies. Grieving over the state of the Church that allowed them to die when the Church is supposed to be the Tree of Life in the world today. Grieving over the cold hearts of so many in churches today—both clergy and parishioners. This is truly a sign of the end because Jesus said in the Olivet Discourse: “And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” (Mt. 24:12)
Last night at 3:33, which is a time that the Lord often awakens me when He wants to talk or show me something, the Lord reminded me of what He said about salt and it was a revelation about the failure of the Church to fulfill her obligation to be a preservative. After all, salt is a substance that is used world-wide to improve the taste of food but prophetically it represents a preservative—the Church is supposed to be a preservative in the world—to preserve people, animals, and even things like God’s government, His morality, His will, His Word, etc. But we have failed so miserably—we can’t even preserve our own family members!
For the past three years, Evie and I have been praying about a new church here in the USA—the Training Centre and church that the Lord showed me in a vision back in 1988 when He said prophetically about the timing: “The hearts of the people wouldn’t be ready.” The Lord told me prophetically back then that He had something for me to do that nobody else could do. And that has been a burden for me ever since because I’m not sure exactly what He meant by that. We normally think that the Lord has many people who can do what we fail to do but obviously that is not the case. So it’s a burden in the sense that I don’t know what it is but I don’t want to fail the Lord—I want to accomplish what He’s called me to do before I die. And because my main calling is to lead the Church in spiritual warfare I believe it has something to do with that because even today—thirty years later—churches don’t want to enter into warfare. Yet from the personal prophecies that we received from the Lord back then--the last one being in 2001--it seems to be an issue of timing and we feel that the timing is near because of the state of the Church.
A few years ago I ministered at a church in Tulsa where the Lord gave me a series of messages titled, “Building Order Out of Chaos—Divine Government for a Divine People.” The Lord moved tremendously in prophesy and prophetic praise. Today I am listening to a recording of one of those services. The Lord said that “the spirit of Achan was loose in the churches” and that although He has called for war and He “should hear the sound of swords being sharpened for war” He said, “All I can hear is the sound of money clanking around.” The Lord said, “My people don’t want to eat the Bread of Life anymore; they want prosperity.”
My brothers and sisters, it’s time for the churches to repent and return to their first love—it’s time to do what the Lord has called us to do in the Great Commission and it involves spiritual warfare—not building mega churches for entertainment and the worship of mammon while our brothers and sisters in Christ are being devoured by the devil and the world is going to hell!
The Holy Spirit spoke very strongly to me back in 1988 after my first missionary trip to Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast for 4 months. I returned home and began going through all my mail in grocery sacks. I took Charisma magazine back then and as I opened it up I saw on just about every page different church and ministry advertisements for some conference. I noticed one in Dallas with a “special room rate of $139 a night” for the week-long conference. I said, “Lord, for what just the room rate alone costs I could feed a pastor and his family for a year in West Africa.” The Holy Spirit cried out, “The world is going to hell and all these churches are doing is having conferences!”
Oh, how far we’ve fallen from our first love! How we have failed to look upon His face every day and feel the beating of His heart for the Church and the world.
So much of what the Lord has revealed to the Church in previous decades is lost today because of the many false gospels being preached. Instead of building “line upon line, and precept upon precept” as the Lord tells us in the Word we have allowed the enemy to steal so much revelation that men and women of the faith who have gone before us paid a price to receive from the Lord.
I believe based on the condition of the churches today—the genuine churches and not the false ones—that many if not most of us have “lost our saltiness.” Jesus also said, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden … nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.”
But are we being salt today? I think not; are we being “light to the world” every day? I think not. And if not, then why not? Perhaps we need to examine our society, our own lives and how we spend our time. Today so many people, including Christians, spend too much time on social media. It has greatly replaced face to face social interaction and ministry. But it’s difficult to spread salt and light across the internet to somebody and it’s especially difficult to send the anointing over the internet.
RESTORING THE SALT
Jesus made a strong statement in Matthew 5 regarding salt. He said, “How can it be made salty? It’s no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.”
“Thus says the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the originator of God’s creation; I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am doing to vomit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I’m rich; I have become wealthy and need nothing,’ [“they won’t eat the Bread of Life anymore”] and you don’t realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked … so be zealous and repent.” (Rev. 3:14-17, 19, CSB)
If we don’t want to be “thrown out” then we need to repent and be zealous once again about the Great Commission—to be the salt and light that Jesus has called us to be in the world today. We need to get the mind of the Holy Spirit every day and be about the Father’s business just like Jesus did when He walked the earth and is doing now in Heaven as He’s seated next to the Father.
And the main thing we need to do as the people of God is to be a demonstration of the Gospel and allow God’s love and His Gifts of the Holy Spirit to flow through us to the Church and to a sin-sick, sighing, dying, crying world. But in this article, the main focus the Lord has given me is for the Church so that is what I want to write about—your ministry in and to the Church because that is one of the biggest problems in churches today—the lack of body ministry.
If you have not read it then I’d recommend you go back on our website archived teaching articles and read a teaching article from 2012 titled, “Mrs. Smith and Other Inconvenient Truths About the Modern Church.”
It’s a short article but points our two serious problems in most modern churches: 1) people are not encouraged to operate in nor trained to receive their spiritual gifts, as a result the Word says, “the body [of Christ] is weak,” 2) there is little genuine love—agape love—in most churches today. We have become self-centered and merely feign loving others. That’s why Mrs. Smith is wheeled into services every Sunday in that wheel chair and then wheeled out again. That is precisely why the ministers I wrote about earlier died of cancer when they could have been healed and delivered.
We have a tendency in the Church today—and it’s been that way a long, long time but it’s not the will of the Lord—to feel sorry for people who have been diagnosed with terminal cancer or something else and we may say, “I’ll be praying for you” but we really see it as their problem and not ours! Do you see it? The Lord says in the Word, “For just as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of that body, though many, are one body—so also is Christ … the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ Or again, the head can’t say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that are weaker are indispensable.” (1 Cor. 12:12, 21-22)
When we hear that Sister Smith has been diagnosed with terminal cancer do we act like she is an indispensable part of the Body? No! We act like it’s her problem. Yes, we know that God heals but it’s up to Sister Smith to get her own healing. Our pastor normally prints her name in the church bulletin with something like, “Please pray for Sister Smith; she has cancer.” But then Sister Smith dies and we move on and repeat the same mistake. In fact if we had the Eye of the Eagle we would say to ourselves, “I know God heals but we never seem to see it at our church, why not?”
In 2001 we had gone down to Bozeman from Helena and while we were gone a man left a message on our recorder that he had a rare form of cancer and the doctors had only given him 5 days to live! When we returned home and listened to the message, before phoning him I knew by the Spirit that I could just pray for him over the phone and he would be healed and delivered from the spirit of cancer. But the Spirit checked me because He wanted us to go over to Portland, Oregon, where this man was an elder in the largest Charismatic church in Portland. The Lord wanted us to not only pray for the man; He wanted us to teach the people and especially the leadership of that church about love. When we arrived at his house there were 72 intercessors including the Executive Pastor of that church. Praise God that he had so many intercessors! But they needed to be taught what we all need to be taught—we don’t love each other in the Church like Jesus wants us to. We don’t understand the Scripture I wrote above from 1 Cor. And we certainly don’t obey it. Like I preached at one church years ago, “If you find out Sister Smith has cancer, why don’t 5-6 of you men make the decision to go home with Sister Smith, get flat in the floor and pray until that spirit of cancer leaves?” Then you are demonstrating faith to the Lord Jesus and also that you really love Sister Smith. But no, we don’t want to miss the NFL Cowboy game on T.V. after church and, after all, it really is Sister Smith’s problem and not ours.
In 1980 the Lord told me very plainly, “Son, the devil is going to put cancer on more and more Christians.” I didn’t ask Him at the time why this was the case or how the devil was going to do much more of what he’d been restrained from doing before. I didn’t learn why until years later.
I made a decision while praying on December 31 that in 2019 I want “to be more and do more” for the Kingdom of God. I hope you will do the same—be a salt preservative to somebody at your church or in your neighborhood. Make the decision to love people unconditionally the way the Lord expects us to do. You’re the best that Jesus has and people need to see Jesus in us and His power flowing out of us.
MARANATHA
