Dear Partners and Friends,
Salt is good, but if the salt loses its flavor, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another.
— Mark 9:50
You are the salt of the earth (see Matthew 5:13). Salt seasons, preserves, heals, and cauterizes; it helps things last. To have salt in yourself means far more than avoiding a loss of flavor. It is knowing your purpose, who you are in Christ, being led by the Spirit of God, and being equipped with an answer for the fight inside. Having salt sustains life within a person: not merely being born again but knowing it, not merely being blessed but having a revelation of it. Having salt means being complete, lacking nothing, and understanding it.
A lack of salt is why so many who have moved in extraordinary gifts still burn out in the end. It is possible to live for the experience without ever developing salt, and then when trials, difficulty, persecution, and crisis come, there is nothing sustaining underneath. James speaks directly into what it means to build that kind of salt.
My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, 3knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. 4But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.
— James 1:2-4
Joy, in this sense, is not an emotion or happiness; it is a spiritual force that directly opposes darkness. When a believer is standing solid within, equipped with joy, the devil’s plans get dismantled. Joy is tied to the salt inside.
Patience, likewise, is commonly misunderstood as simply gritting it through a long season. It is not endurance for endurance’s sake; patience is proof of faith. When mature in patience, a person becomes complete and lacks nothing. That is what it looks like to know God: You are clear-eyed, clear-minded, standing firm in the middle of a perverse and crooked generation, full of the love of God, and carrying a presence that demands an explanation wherever it goes.
God’s presence is not something to travel toward; it travels within. Christ in you is the hope of glory (see Colossians 1:27). Because of this, prayer is a local call rather than a long-distance plea into the heavens. Some churches, grounded in that word of righteousness and spiritual horsepower, stood firm during seasons others did not weather well. It was not a superior building plan or a five-step system; It was salt. When a spirit of Antichrist arrives at a church grounded in salt, it leaves limping, because Christ has already risen within them.
Years ago, after an extended season of ministering to hundreds of people at a time, exhaustion hit all at once: I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t move. In that place, the Lord spoke plainly. What people can do is impressive, even powerful, but it does not impress God until they can step back and let God love people through them. Ministry gifts are not meant to run on raw output; they are meant to become a conduit, separated from the performance of the moment, for God’s own love to reach people. That shift, more than any technique, is what allows a life to go the distance instead of burning out.
The Apostle John’s Longevity
Among the men of the New Testament, the Apostle John stands out because he lived the longest of all the apostles. John was the youngest of the disciples, one of the sons of thunder alongside his brother James (see Mark 3:17). They were the two who once asked Jesus to call fire down on a Samaritan village that rejected Him and were rebuked for it (see Luke 9:54-55). The same two brothers, with their mother, asked Jesus for the right and left seats beside His throne, and Jesus asked if they could drink the cup He was about to drink. They said they could, and He told them they would (see Matthew 20:20-23).
In time, Herod moved to persecute the Church, and James was the first of the two brothers to drink that cup: He was beheaded, and by tradition, it is noted that the man assigned to arrest him was so moved by James’ faith on the way to his death that he asked to be martyred alongside him rather than carry out the sentence.
John, however, lived on. He became the disciple who put his head on Jesus’ chest, the one repeatedly identified simply as the one Jesus loved (see John 13:23). Decades later, in his nineties and having outlived every other apostle, John was living in Ephesus, having built a church there. History records that he refused to offer incense to the emperor Domitian. He was then arrested, brought to Rome, and thrown into boiling oil. He emerged unharmed.
He was exiled instead to the island of Patmos, where Jesus appeared to him and gave him the revelations and visions which became the book of Revelation. When the emperor’s own household later moved against him, the prisoners on Patmos were freed, and John returned to Ephesus, where he lived out a long, healthy life.
James drank the cup Jesus promised him, and it cost his life almost immediately; John was thrown into boiling oil in his nineties and walked out of it. The difference was not the promise; both were told they would drink the same cup. The difference was a settled identity.
John knew he was the one the Lord loved so fully that when Peter asked Jesus about his own future and then asked about John, it was because everyone around them already understood what John carried. God shows no favoritism, but John had built a relationship that let him believe, fully, that he was loved. That kind of settled identity is what produces a righteousness that repels hell and draws heaven closer.
David is the clearest Old Testament example of the same principle. He was a murderer and an adulterer by his own record, and by the letter of the law he did not qualify for what God gave him. However, he knew the heart of God desires a broken and contrite spirit above every sacrifice (see Psalm 51:16-17).
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search one out (see Proverbs 25:2), and men like John and David all pursued that kind of knowing until it produced long, overflowing lives. That is what salt does. It builds a life that outlives kings and outlives seasons and goes the distance, because the identity underneath it was never shaken.
That is the pattern underneath everything here: A settled identity produces a righteousness that repels what is dark and draws heaven closer. It does not come from more activity or a bigger platform, and it does not arrive overnight. It comes from knowing him steadily, and from knowing who he has made each person to be in him. Build the salt, and the rest follows.
Thank you for your generous support! Heather and I love you so much and pray for you constantly. Remember, this year and beyond will be a wild ride, but even on a bad day, you are anointed to be the best there is!
For Jesus,
Joseph Z
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