The Fragrance Invites You In

If you are like me, you walk by a flower and do what? You smell it, right! Who doesn’t enjoy lovely floral scents? Do you know that flowers need to attract hummingbirds, bats, bees, butterflies, and other insects to transfer pollen to other flowers, thus creating fertilization?

Flowers have a fragrance to attract pollinators. A flower produces scent within its petals. During warm weather, the essential oils contained within the petals evaporates, producing the flower’s unique scent. This fragrance alerts the pollinators that the flower is ready to be pollinated. Some flowers emit their fragrance during the day while others do so at nighttime. The scent is the strongest when the flower is ready for pollination and diminishes as the need for pollination declines. Most flowers produce a delightful fragrance, others can be musky or spicy, while others rancid, and still others actually have no scent at all.

I enjoy the scent of most flowers. Some of my favorite smelling flowers are hyacinth, gardenias, and roses. Sometimes seeing and smelling certain floral scents stirs up evocative feelings, emotions, or memories. Just seeing a brightly colored butterfly perched upon a pink flower on a beautiful summer day brings a sense of calmness and peacefulness.

The strong scent of a hyacinth at Easter takes me back to my childhood, as my mother always had one on our dining room table during that holiday. The smell of a rose simply invites love. In our culture we often use the phrase “Stop and smell the roses” as a reminder to slow down and enjoy and appreciate the beauty of life, to stop and allow the sweet fragrance of life to permeate into our souls.

In Scripture we are told that we are to be the sweet fragrance of Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 2:15-16 we read – “Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance rising up to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those who are being saved and by those who are perishing. To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume. And who is adequate for such a task as this?”

In that passage, I believe Paul is likely pointing to Roman victory parades, in which incense was burned as a way for the Romans to let everyone know that they had been victorious. To the victors, the smell was pleasing; it represented freedom and life. However, for those who had been defeated, the smell was unpleasant, because it represented captivity and death.

The idea that this pleasing aroma affects both “those who are being saved” and “those who are perishing” is interesting to me. In my understanding of that passage, similar to the Roman victory march, for those of us who call ourselves Christ-followers, this pleasing aroma, a heavenly scent if you will, reminds us that despite our sinfulness, because of Christ’s death on the Cross, we have conquered death (victory) and are made alive with Him (Ephesians 2:4-6). On the contrary, for those dead in their sins (Ephesians 2:1-3) and far from God, I believe this pleasing aroma reminds them of that deadness, increasing an awareness of the need for Christ to remove the chains of death, captivity, and bondage to Satan.            

So, today I ask, are you giving off a sweet heavenly fragrance? Or, do you smell a fragrance that is drawing you in? Either way, ask God for more of it!  

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