Let Your Speech Be Seasoned with Grace

Let Your Speech Be Seasoned with Grace

By M.T. Clark — P-2076 | 09/23/2026 – Today’s Audio Podcast

Today’s Message on YouTube:

Today’s photo of a snow-capped Adirondack mountain rising above a valley of orange and yellow autumn foliage under a dramatic peach-and-gold cloudy sky, comes to us from yours truly, as I captured this photo of a photograph on display at the Albany International Airport in Colonie, NY, on September 11, 2026.

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I share this photo of an Adirondack summit set against an autumn valley to visually represent our arrival to another midweek summit, so happy hump day, and to remind us on this first full day of fall that the Lord’s beauty follows us through every season and that a life of freedom in Christ is worth the small step it takes to walk in it today.

I took this photo of a photograph on display at the Albany International Airport on the morning of September 11, 2026, on my way to the Freedom in Christ Ministries family gathering at The Cove in Asheville, NC. That morning was the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and I was, in a small way, exercising my freedom to fly on a day that had once made a lot of Americans afraid to fly at all. It struck me that walking with the Lord is often like that. He calls us to choose freedom over fear, one step at a time, and He is faithful to be right there with us when we boldly speak up or step out in faith and “do it afraid”.

Speaking of how the freedom we have in Christ shows up in the things we say,

Our series, “Rooted in Him,” continues today with Paul’s instruction to let our speech be seasoned with grace.

Let Your Speech Be Seasoned with Grace

The Apostle Paul finishes the section on walking wisely with a short instruction about the way we talk, in Colossians 4:6 (NKJV) where he tells us to: “Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one.”

Paul knows that the way we speak carries more weight in our witness than we tend to admit. The witness of a life of faithfully representing God’s kingdom for years can still be undone by five careless minutes of inane, worldly, or thoughtless speech. Paul isn’t asking us to be silver-tongued or clever here. He is asking us to let grace and salt season every conversation we walk into.

As Christians, our speech is to always be filled with grace. Always means we are to speak with grace at every moment, in every setting, and with every person. That can be a tall order, but we have to understand that grace in our words is the unearned kindness we extend to the person in front of us, even when they haven’t earned it and even when they aren’t offering it back. Grace-filled speech acknowledges the real weight of what someone is carrying, and it refuses to add to it.

Grace doesn’t mean saying only nice things or avoiding hard truths. It means that when the hard truth needs to be said, it is delivered from a heart that is for the person, not against them. A hard word given in love is still a grace-filled word, and it is received very differently than a hard word given to prove a point.

After grace, Paul says our speech is to be “seasoned with salt.” Salt in the ancient world was known to be two things at once. It was a preservative that kept food from spoiling, and it was a flavor that made food worth eating. Paul is saying our words should do both. They should preserve what is worth preserving, and they should flavor our conversation with the things of God.

Speech seasoned with the Lord’s salt has substance. It is honest, it is thoughtful, and it doesn’t waste people’s time with empty pleasantries or half-truths. When a believer opens their mouth, the person listening should get something worth hearing. That doesn’t mean every sentence is a sermon. It just means that our conversations carry the seasoning of a person who has been walking with the Lord and has something real to say.

Paul closes the verse with the practical purpose of graceful and salted speech: “That you may know how you ought to answer each one.” Grace and salt in our speech are what prepare us to answer the specific person God puts in front of us. Not every answer fits every person, and Paul isn’t giving us a script. He is telling us that a grace-filled, salt-seasoned believer is a believer who can meet the moment when it comes. Our speech will deliver grace and salt in the measure that is necessary for each individual.

As hard as it may be to believe, when we follow Him, the Lord will shape our speech to be more gracious and “salty”. Before I came to Christ, my speech was neither gracious nor salty, at least not in the Christian sense, yikes! My speech was harsh when it should have been kind, and it was foolish when it should have been wise. Harsh, unkind, and foolish words often came out of me that I couldn’t take back, and I hurt people I loved with a carelessness I still remember.

After the Lord saved me, one of the first things the Holy Spirit started to work on in me was my mouth. It wasn’t a dramatic overnight change. It was the slow, steady renewing of what I said and how I said it.  As I read God’s word and was changed by His grace, instead of my foolishness or echoing the lies of the world, I told people to believe in, and to follow Jesus.  Instead of a steady stream of lies, I became committed to telling the truth. Instead of foul language from the world and the bitterness and angst of my pre-Christ hopeless existence, I started speaking pure words of hope and encouragement. Over the years, God smoothed the roughness of my speech and replaced my worldly wisdom with something worth saying. I am still far from perfect, of course. In frustrating moments, I may regress with a quick profanity or lash out with a thoughtless harsh word, but the overall direction of my speech is different now. I speak according to God’s direction and seek to direct others to Him.

There is one more thing worth noticing about this verse. Paul is telling us to prepare BEFORE the conversation comes. Grace-filled speech doesn’t happen spontaneously in the moment of pressure. It flows out of a heart that has been steadily seasoned by time with the Lord, by God’s word settling into us, and by the everyday practice of choosing kind words over cutting ones. The person we are when nobody is listening is the person we will be when somebody is.

So, before you walk into today’s conversations, ask the Lord to season your speech. Let Him fill your mouth with the grace He has already shown you, and let Him give it the salt of a life that has been walking with Him.

Every step we take toward the Lord is a step in the right direction. So, keep on walking and talking with God.

— M.T.

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