What Smell Lingers On You?

You spend an enjoyable evening sitting around a campfire with friends. After your guests leave, you strip off your clothes, and leave them outside, because even after the fire has burned out, the clothes still smell like smoke. Not to mention, they have chocolate stains from the s’more you dropped into your lap.

You eat a delicious meal that has garlic in it. It sure tasted good, but long after the meal is over, the smell of garlic and the proverbial garlic-breath live on. The chemical compound found in garlic gets into your bloodstream causing your skin, hair, urine, and sweat to smell as well.

That greasy spoon restaurant you ate at, boy was the food good, but unfortunately you bring the greasy smell home with you.

Before smoking was prohibited in many public places, you found yourself smelling like cigarette smoke even if you didn’t smoke yourself.

And those flowers you picked up at a roadside stand, soon a pleasant fragrance is wafting through the room.

Why do certain smells stay with you, usually the unpleasant ones? Generally speaking, whether or not a smell lingers depends upon if the physiochemical properties of the aroma’s chemical compound are prone to binding to the oils of your skin, the fabric of your clothing, or how the olfactory (sense of smell) receptors in your nose detect the molecules.     

Not only do we smell like fire smoke, garlic, greasy food, or cigarette smoke when in those environments, we also become the choices we make. Pizza every night for dinner and a lack of exercise soon puts you in poor health. Sex outside marriage leads to guilt and shame, not to mention intimacy issues. Unwise spending habits leaves your finances in shambles. We so often sacrifice “worthwhile” for “instant gratification.” And just like certain smells, our harmful attitudes and actions linger, often for a lifetime. 

The Bible’s wisdom literature (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Psalms, Song of Solomon) teaches valuable lessons about the meaning of life, often reflections and wisdom, from those who have walked life out. Solomon, the writer of Proverbs, and the wisest man to ever live other than Jesus (1 Kings 4:29-34, Luke 11:31), ends Chapter 4 of Proverbs with a menu of ways to guard against the harmful odorous attitudes and actions that linger, those that cause us problems both today and down the road. We are told to pay close attention to what God says (vv.20-22), avoid perverse and corrupt talk (v.24), don’t have wandering eyes (v.25), and watch where you walk (vv.26-27).

Right in the middle of these verses we find the fulcrum, that which all the others are balanced upon; the key to avoiding pursuits that leave lingering odors. Here is what we read in v.23 – “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

Click here to read Proverbs 4 in its entirety.

The heart is the starting point for the activities of life. Later on, still in Proverbs, we see this – “Listen, my son, and be wise, and keep your heart on the right path” (23:19).

So, I ask you today, are you prayerfully and regularly guarding your heart? Does your life produce an unpleasant odor or a pleasant fragrance? What smell lingers on you?

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