Who do we smell for?
It is recommended that you listen to this song while reading the following article:
“On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richer, Jess Gillam, & ensemble.
If you had a very wealthy friend, and it was their birthday…
You’d be confronted with this thought-
“What can I get for someone who already has everything?”
The most meaningful and unique gift one can offer is a smell.
Similarly,
what can we offer a God who already owns everything?
The same.
A smell. A fragrance. A perfume. A unique aroma that makes Him feel something.
“Let my prayer be counted as incense before You; The lifting up of my hands as the evening offering.”Psalm 141:2
Smell’s effect
Jasmine.
Fresh cut grass.
Chocolate chip cookie one minute before the timer.
Burning gasoline.
These smells all evoke a feeling within us.
Suddenly we are at the Texas State fair, near the funnel cakes.
Our mind bottles up the fragrance in the moment and labels it in somewhere in our memory.
The smell becomes the place and the place becomes the smell.
Walking into the home of the first spirit-filled, christian family I ever met, hit me like a freight train.
I was undone with feelings of home.
Rest. Acceptance. Peace.
But there was something I had never experienced before.
Worship filled the space.
I could feel it.
When I left, I missed it.
This was the fragrance of their home. It was filled with Christ.
From the corners of their marriage, to the crevasses of their dining table. Christ was the center.
I bid you to ask:
What feelings come to the heart & mind of God when the “aroma” of my prayers or the “fragrance” of my life reach his throne?
“Does my little life really hold that kind of power?” you wonder…
Indeed, it does.
“You are as beautiful as Tirzah, my darling,
as lovely as Jerusalem,
as majestic as troops with banners.
5 Turn your eyes from me;
they overwhelm me.”Song of Songs 6:5
When Christ lives in you, you are the aroma that moves God’s heart.
” For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ…”
2 Corinthians 2:15
God rests
There’s a phrase in the Bible that shows up every time an offering pleased God:
reyach nichoach— translated “pleasing aroma”
Reyach means smell. It shares its root with ruach — the Hebrew word for spirit, breath, & wind.
Nichoach means pleasing, or soothing. Its root is tied to menucha — rest.
So when Noah steps off the ark, offers his sacrifice, and “the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma” — the Hebrew is quite literally saying: God breathed in something that brought Him rest.
That’s what your life can be to him.
A place that he can rest.
A place that when he breaths in, he is so at rest, so at peace (like I was in that home) He never wants to leave.
You are already the fragrance
“Your name is better than the finest perfume.”
Ecclesiastes 7:1
Here’s what undoes me about this—
an aroma isn’t the object itself. It’s the evidence that something real is near.
You smell the bread before you see it. You smell the rain before it falls.
God isn’t waiting for you to clean up your act before he will come near.
It is the very essence of his nearness that eliminates other stenches from our atmosphere.
He isn’t overwhelmed by what you do for him,
He’s overwhelmed by you.
Your life surrendered to Him. Like an offering poured out.
3 Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard. It was an expensive perfume. She poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the sweet smell of the perfume.
John 12:3
Released
So — Is there a burning lamp in your life releasing a fragrance?
We were each formulated unique from one another.
No two smells alike.
Only you can release your fragrance to God.
With notes nobody else was given, to bring rest to the God who made us.
Stay happy.
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