I love the smells of spring. Our house is situated on, what I have been told by one of the church family, what is known by the “old-timers” as Wehunt mountain and about three hundred yards off of Fightingtown Creek, which looks more like a river to me. On our small tract of land, I have found many wild flowers growing, the sweetest of which I commonly call honey-suckle. These trees bloom with bright orange blooms, and I can look out of our front door now to many of these trees down through the woods. I also planted a number of flower beds this year, so those flowers not only look beautiful right now, but they are fragrant as well. Though I have been in more fragrant garden spots before in my life, I love to walk outside and smell the sweet fragrances surrounding our house.
When you catch a whiff of a sweet-smelling, thrilling fragrance, it makes you happy that you are in the right place for that experience. Whether it is the fragrance of a flower, or your wife’s perfume, or, even to me, an old book, we all enjoy a nice smell; but what about bad smells. I can tell you all about these. I played sports in high school, lived four years in a college residence hall room, and now have four children five and younger; not to mention, I’ve had to put up with myself for 32 years!
You can imagine the difference between the sweet smells of the flower and the not-so-sweet smells of a high school football locker room. Your nose probably just made some sort of movement toward the latter part of that previous sentence. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 2:14-15,
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“Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place. For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish….”
God is always causing us to triumph? What a wonderful truth to take away from your reading this morning; we cannot be overcome in Christ! But Paul goes on to say that in our triumphs for Christ, we are spreading His (Christ’s) fragrance to all of the world. Both the saved and lost smell the aroma of the Sweet Rose of Sharon when we are living for Him in this world and triumphing in Him. And they are not the only ones – we are also a sweet savor unto the Father in heaven, when we are living in the Son.
So my question of challenge for my own life is what type of fragrance is Christ in my life. It is true that Paul says that there will be two responses to Christ in our lives: to some He will be the fragrance of death to death and to some of life to life. I have to re-evaluate the fragrance of my life, when everyone seems to be grabbing spiritual noses as they come into contact with my Christianity. Is the fragrance of Christ permeating your spheres of influence in an unadulterated, sweet-smelling savor that is wholly Jesus Christ? Or have you been soured by the dampness of continual bitterness, ill-odored by some sin that you have kept near, or become abhorrently smelly from a lack of applying the deodorant of Christian joy and love each day?
May our lives emanate the sweet savor of our sweet Savior today. There will be some to which it will be the savor of life unto life, and they will, like a flower in the spring, come to life in Christ and begin to bear the fragrance of Christ themselves – spiritual pollination.
