Dear Pilgrim, are you aware of how beautiful your aroma is?

Dear Pilgim, are you aware of how beautiful your aroma is today?

I can see from the look in your eyes, even the tears now welling in your eyes, that you are all too aware of what you perceive to be the foul stench of sin wafting around you. How you desire to be completely pure, to be free from the daily battle that corrupts and stains even the purest offering you can bring Him. How your heart trembles with sadness that even your love for Him is tainted. You think about your righteousness being like filthy rags before Him, and you are broken, emptied of self, bowed low before Him.

Dear Pilgrim, I urge you to take in a deep breath – and listen to the voice of your Beloved:

How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride!  
How much more pleasing is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume more than any spice!

Oh Pilgrim, what a precious truth it is that unlike the idols which cannot smell, Yahweh can! As He breathed out into the nostrils of man His very breath, giving him life and fellowship with Himself, so too as man walked with the LORD in the Garden, the LORD breathed in the pleasing aroma and fragrance of fellowship with him – and He declared that it was very good.

Sin caused a stench in the nostrils of our Holy God. But Pilgrim, come with me to Golgotha. Walk soberly. We are walking on the Holiest of ground. Kneel with me here at the foot of His cross. Lift your face – see Him there, Lamb of God, bloody, disfigured, bearing your sin, my sin, in His body on that tree. And as you gaze upon Your Saviour, take this truth into your heart, that He gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. As He hung on that cross, He was a fragrant offering! Only the Son of God could possibly bear all of our sin on His shoulders and at the same time be a fragrant offering before His Father. For this is His beloved Son, whom He loves, with Him He is well pleased.

Precious Pilgrim, do you see? The Son is a fragrant offering to the Father. As you come before your Father, in the Name of His beloved Son, trusting only in Him, in His righteousness, then everything you offer your Father becomes a fragrant offering, acceptable to Him. Your prayers rise up as a precious, holy fragrance to the throne room just like the incense from the golden altar before the Ark of the Testimony in the Tabernacle. Your acts of love towards your brethren become a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God. You are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.

And as you worship your Saviour, the Beloved Son, kneeling at His feet, pouring your heart out to Him, for Him, in adoration of Who He is, all He has done and all He will yet do, the Garden is once more filled with the fragrance of perfume.