Do you smell?

No. I'm not doing an intro for "The Rock" (WWE wrestling).

Last week I had no clue what I was going to speak about to the middle school youth group on Sunday night! (I came to realize this on Saturday night) So, I was supposed to be hanging out with a friend of mine, but times got a little crazy, and I knew I needed to focus on preparing a message. I had an idea of where I wanted the message to go, but didn't have a clue what illustrations or verses I was going to use.

So, I met my friend at Applebee's at 9:30 Saturday night to figure something out. He suggested this passage that he had used in years past for a devotion at a camp he worked at during the summer. The verse was 2 Corinthians 2:15:

"For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing."

You ever have one of those verses that you read and then you think to yourself: "What in the world does that mean?!" Well, this was one of those to me. Here I have this guy saying it will work perfect for my message, and I (not that I'm a scholar) couldn't even understand it at face value. So, I figured I would try to do some research on this verse. My Bible has cross-references in the center of the page, and this verse had a couple listed for cross-reference. I looked at the first one, it didn't help me at all! And then I looked at the second one. It was interesting, and I knew I was getting somewhere, I just didn't know where that was. The verse was Numbers 15:13:

"Everyone who is native-born must do these things in this way when he brings an offering made by fire as an aroma pleasing to the LORD."

An interesting piece of the puzzle was that this verse (actually the book of Numbers) was what we had been reading through for our readings to read the Bible in a year. And I'll admit, when I read Numbers, I was bored! Verse after verse was telling me how they sacrificed animals! How in the world does that apply to my life in the 21st century?!

So I started looking at what these two verses had in common. In 2 Corinthians it said we were "the aroma of Christ". In Numbers it talks about an "aroma pleasing to LORD". That phrase "aroma pleasing to the LORD" is used over 20 times in the Old Testament. I started thinking of what it meant to sacrifice animals back in the day. Many of these sacrifices were sin offerings. This is a time when the people realize the wrong they have done, and come to a place in their life where they turn to God, seek forgiveness, and have a desire to be in a close relationship with Him.

All of the sudden it was like the cartoons where a light-bulb appears over the character's head. This "aroma pleasing to the LORD" was a result of people saying that they no longer wanted to live with their sin, that they wanted to seek after God. And when God, sitting up in heaven, smelled the sacrifices being burnt up, it pleased him, because he knew why they were doing it. As Christians, we choose whether we will live in the way of the world, or if we live in Christ, and put off the sinful world. When we choose to put off sin then we become an "aroma of Christ" which is an "aroma pleasing to the LORD".

So, I ask you: Do you smell?