SMELLS

When you walk beside someone who used perfume, you smell the fragrance.

In the garden you smell the roses, jasmine, or daffodils and jonquils. When you pick lavender, dry it, and fill a piece of pretty cloth and tie it with a ribbon, the lavender fills the room with fragrance; and also repels flies.

On your return home from school you probably smell mother’s cooking. Bread or cookies fresh from the oven remind you that a loving mother prepared food to eat.

As one of our daughters returned from High school she often walked in and said, ‘Mum, You are cooking my favourite meal . I smelled it as I opened the door,’ and she sniffed at the curry.

Only a cold prevents us from smelling the perfumes until the cold disappears.

However a little skunk, the size of a large rabbit, emits a fluid with a terrible stink when either hunted or frightened.

Once on a visit to family in America friends took us to a picnic spot. On the way we drove over a skunk whose dead body lay on the road. Although dead, its body gave out a nasty odour. Even in side the car, and for the next 30 kilometres, the horrible smell remained until we arrived for our picnic, and opened the doors to freshen the car inside.

Paul, the preacher, wrote to some of his friends in Corinth, and he said that he likened Christians to good smells. We do not walk around saying, ‘Smell me.’

Our friends will know that we are Christians by our behaviour, which to Paul was like a beautiful aroma. They may even ask why you are so different.

Perfumes are made by pressing tonnes of flower petals to extract the scented oils. The flowers are sacrificed to make the perfume. Can you see the picture that our Lord Jesus was sacrificed for us to forgive our sin, and help us to behave so that we encourage our friends.

Are your friends glad to be with you because you love Jesus, and resemble a beautiful perfume who draws people to God?

‘We are unto God the fragrance of Christ among those being saved and among those who are perishing.’ ( 2 Corinthians 2;15 )