There is a Roman proverb, attributed to the authorship of the writer Strabo:
“Nothing does more than sunshine and salt.”
It set me thinking. We all like the sunshine of comfortable circumstances, but we do not like the salt of the discipline of life. We like to have the sunshine of good health and do not like the salt of ill-health. We like the sunshine of a comfortable income, but we do not like the salt of straitness of means. We like blue skies, warm sunshine and zephyr breezes, and we do not like grey skies and batter winds.
But nature teaches us a lesson. We can get too much sunshine. In the tropics it is perpetual sunshine from January to December, with the exception of two intensive rainy seasons, and what is the result? The white people are pale and anaemic. They need the tonic of grey skies and bitter winds.
Just as you can get too much sunshine, so you can get too much salt. See how the scurvy breaks out on board the ship where the sailors have been forced to sustain life by food that has been salted to keep it from putrefaction. They get too much salt. Discipline is the tonic, the salt of life. There is the discipline of the home, the school, the army, the navy, the collar of business. The army is not all parade in glittering uniform before the King. Before there is the fine show there as the grinding discipline of the drill ground.
The clamour today is for all sunshine and no salt. It is the sinister menace of this generation. But there are unalterable economic laws that no man can turn aside that bring the salt into life.
Let all this be a parable to illustrate divine truth. Alongside the sunshine of our circumstances as children of God there is the salt of discipline. There as the discipline of the Father’s hand. With the sunshine there is the salt. We read, “Whom the Lord loves He chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives” (Heb. 12:6). Without this discipline we are bastards and not sons. We all need it. How many of us would have wandered far from the Lord, without the wise and loving hand of our God in restraining and chastening grace.
It is related of the late G.V.Wigram that he once went to the prayer meeting, and asked for earnest prayer, as he felt he was in danger because a fortune had been left to him. He recognized that the sunshine of easy circumstances needed the salt of discipline.
The history of Abraham illustrates our theme. Did the God of glory appear to him, and open to his enraptured vision “a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God”? (Heb. 11:10). He must perforce turn his back upon Ur of the Chaldees, and become a stranger and a pilgrim in the land of promise. The sunshine and the salt went together.
The circumstances of Solomon’s life would never have produced a David. Solomon had the sunshine of easy circumstances. He had wisdom, riches, honour, peace in his realm, long life, yet never did a man make a bigger fool of himself than did Solomon. He could write wise proverbs, but could not live wisely. Solomon could give his son excellent advice, which his son did not follow, for Solomon’s example was not likely to help his son. What sort of example was his? “Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And likewise did he for all his strange wives, which burnt incense and sacrificed to their gods” (1 Kings 11:7-8).
Solomon could write wise proverbs; David wrote experiential psalms. Solomon could write, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecc. 1:2); but David could write, “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want” (Ps. 23:1). David knew both sunshine and salt.
In reading the lives of eminent servants of Christ how noticeable is the salt of discipline in their lives. Choicest spiritual gifts are often seen in frailest bodies.
A Christian woman was once complaining to a visitor of the trials that beset her life, and how she would like them to be removed. She was wanting all sunshine and no salt.
The visitor walked up to the grandfather clock that was ticking in the corner, and proceeded to remove the heavy weights. The woman, in amazement, asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was removing the weights in order for the clock to work better. She replied, “These weights are necessary, and must not be removed or else the clock will run down in no time. The clock is useless without the weights.”
In this way the visitor tried to teach this good woman how the things she was complaining about were all necessary for her in connection with the practical living of the everyday Christian life.
We can re-echo the words of the Roman proverb,
“Nothing does more than sunshine and salt.”