Of all of our five senses, the one that we most easily overlook is our sense of smell. We touch, hear, and see at all times, needing these senses to make our way through day-to-day life. Even taste is a more important sense to us than smell, since few hours go by when we’re not eating or drinking something. Smell just doesn’t seem as important in our modern world of indoor plumbing and professional trash disposal.
But while smell is arguably our least used sense, when we do smell something, it quickly becomes our most powerful sense. Your sense of smell can transport you to a different time or place, bringing back memories in an instant that you didn’t know you had. I can remember my first day of work at a summer job in a dog food factory; the smell of the dog food was so strong that I almost threw up just walking into work.
You’ve no doubt had a similar experience. Your sense of smell lies dormant until your environment provides some wretched or pleasing type of smell. Whether it’s the smell of a musty attic, freshly ground coffee, high school boys’ locker room, an old book, amusement park trash can, your grandma’s house, baking bread, birthday candle smoke, blooming flowers, or your dad’s aftershave when you were a kid, smell is a powerful thing in our lives, either pushing us away or drawing us in.
So why do I bring up this idea of smell? Because all of us have a way that we smell that impacts how people respond to us. But this smell is more than physical; it’s also spiritual. In 2 Corinthians 2, the Apostle Paul explains that we all have a spiritual smell that either attracts people to us or repels them away. He writes:
But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.
Paul makes it clear; true Christians that are growing to be like Christ can be recognized by the smell that they give off; what Paul calls the pleasing aroma of Jesus Christ.
The reality of the human condition is that because of sin, all of us have parts of our lives that stink, that push people away and make them not want to be near us. We all too easily act like the Pharisees, whose polished facades looked good from a distance, but when you got up close to them, they smelled like dead men’s bones.
We all know the metaphorical stench of sin and can recognize it emanating from hearts filled with things like hate, bitterness, pride, and judgmentalism. We can smell their inner rottenness as soon as we enter the room, which causes us to look for ways to get away as soon as possible.
But the good news is that the gospel allows us to be cleansed of sin’s unpleasant odor Through Christ, we can be washed and made clean, as our rotting hearts are removed and replaced by clean hearts. As David writes in Psalm 51: Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. John continues on this theme in 1 John 1, writing, “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.”
But while verses like this sound nice, in all honesty, we don’t like them very much. Why? Because they force us to admit that there are parts of our lives that smell badly, which we hate. Too often, we get so accustomed to the stench of sin in our lives that we get used to it and assume that it’s not there.
Long ago in a previous life, I lived with a roommate that had an acute sense of smell; he could smell everything in our apartment. My sense of smell, however, wasn’t very strong, which caused all kinds of problems, since I tended to forget about leftovers in the back of the refrigerator.
More times than not, he’d come home from his work trips and walk by the refrigerator, wondering aloud, “What’s that smell?” I didn’t smell anything, so I’d just shrug my shoulders, not knowing what it was. He’d then open the refrigerator and search around until he found the culprit, some two-week-old leftovers of mine getting ready to be entered into an elementary science fair.
To my shame, as his strengths and my weaknesses continued to come into tension, rather than getting better at managing my leftovers, I instead become more adept at hiding them, burying them deeper and deeper into the refrigerator to keep him from realizing they were there.
While I wish I didn’t have to tell you that story, it’s a good example of how we treat the relationship between our sin, God, and the gospel. God acts like my roommate, who alerts us to the presence of sin and who eventually forces us to deal with the Tupperware containers of sin that we push to the back of our lives, in the hope of hiding the smell from everyone else.
The gospel of grace, though, allows us to deal with the shame and embarrassment of smelling bad. When we know that we can smell badly without being rejected or judged, then we can finally get the help we need to clean out the dark recesses of our hearts. The Holy Spirit renews our hearts, ridding them of everything that’s rotten. As John says in the next verse of 1 John 1:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So what’s the purpose of this spiritual cleaning project? As Paul says in the verse that I quoted at the beginning, it’s so we might be the aroma of Christ to both the saved and the unsaved. We’re supposed to figuratively smell like Christ, who in his sacrificial love, gentleness, graciousness, concern, and wisdom, drew people to him like a pleasant aroma.
When we truly become like Christ and get rid of the sin that’s stinking up our lives, he makes us become a pleasant aroma to the people around us. Rather than being pushed away by the smells of rottenness and death, they’re drawn to us by an aroma so compelling that they want to get closer. Like kids following their nose through the house to the smell of fresh-baked cookies, people will want to spend time around people who give off the fragrance of Christ.
Now, Paul isn’t an idealist. While he wants us to smell like Christ so that we might draw both believers and unbelievers to Christ, he says in the next verse that many non-Christians will hate the smell of Christ. Like a cross-cultural experience gone wrong, rather than being drawn to the aroma of Christ, many people will do everything they can to get away from it, unable to recognize the beauty of his fragrance.
So to repeat my opening question, have you ever thought about what you smell like? While we’re always aware of how we smell physically, few of us ever stop to think about what we smell like spiritually. Do we give off the pleasing aroma of Christ to the people around us?
Sadly, there are so many Christians who don’t really smell like anything. They believe in the gospel and have gotten rid of the worst smells of sin, but they haven’t pursued becoming like Christ. And because of that, they don’t carry his fragrance.
Paul, though, tells us in Ephesians 5 to “walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.” As we follow Jesus and offer up our lives for others out of sacrificial love, we take on the pleasing aroma of Christ and begin to smell more and more like him.
This may not seem like an important topic, but in a world where lots of Christians are concerned about how Christianity is going to survive in a culture so disinterested in the gospel, we have to recapture this pleasing smell of Christ. While there are lots of ways to influence the world around us, it’ll be the aroma of Christ-like love, humility, gentleness, mercy, and concern for others that’ll be a welcome fragrance in a culture that’s filled with the constant smell of decay.
When I was facing brain surgery for the removal of a meningioma, I was advised that very probably I would lose my sense of smell which includes taste. A very thoughtful friend brought to my office before surgery a gardenia, the bloom producing an amazing fragrance. Such a very thoughtful gesture I thought. The end result of the successful surgery was not only was my olfactory nerve function preserved, but my vision was restored as well. I appreciate your writing, Luke.