Sep | 09 | Adam’s Nostrils

Key Word:- CONSIDER

Title:- Adam’s Nostrils

1 Corinthians 12:17
the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling?

No doubt, you will have heard the old, old Joke :
“My Dog has no nose!”
“Well how does he smell?”
“Awful!”

It’s not funny I know, but it’s the way the interior of our cars smell sometimes when we leave them standing awhile. We need to open the windows put the A.C. on, clean it and get an air freshener.

Sadly my mother in law had no sense of smell. As a youngster she befriended an outcast at school simply because she was the only one who could not smell the awful body odour the poor person exuded. It’s true, when everyone moved away in sickening disgust, her lack of smell allowed her to be kind without being offended. Now there’s a thought.

Our sense of smell is one of our two chemical senses. The other being, the sense of taste. However the sense of smell is the dominant one and the sense of taste is subject to it. Get a bad cold and you know how bland, good food appears to taste.

Our sense of smell is so powerful that when you smell skunk, you are smelling only 0.000,000,000,000,071 of an ounce of scent! Yet no two people can experience the same smell the same way. A rose may smell sweeter to you than to others. Even our ability to detect odors changes throughout the day and a woman’s sense of smell is keener than a man's (tell me about it) and is related to her cyclical levels of estrogen. Smell is relational, directional and even works when we are asleep. Did you know there are smell alarm clocks that can wake you in the morning silently by emitting a known smell that says to you… ‘wake up?’ The smell of percolated coffee or fresh bread maybe? Ahhh Smell. Isn’t it wonderful? Yet though we can differentiate between over 10,000 different odours, our vocabulary is so very limited in its descriptive ability to describe these qualities. Watch any wine tasting event and you will be amazed at the adeptness of choosing other smell descriptions to describe a wines particular aroma.

So I find it very interesting that God breathed life/lives into Adam's nostrils. This wasn’t mouth to mouth resuscitation as we know it, this was not a holy kissing, this was the breathed infusion of immortality and it came through the nostrils! Some say this is indicative of the activation of the conscious mind, others that the spirit of man resides in the head of man, after all to be thoroughly dead is to be brain dead. Well I shall leave those discussions and musing for your consideration, my point is this: How do you smell to God? How do you smell to other people? Are you sweet or foul?

When the Holy Spirit unlocks the spiritual olfactory membranes in another persons heart, we who possess Christ become to them, attractive, sweet smelling and even intriguing. Everyone else, every other non-Christian somehow does not smell right! Interestingly enough we Christians are a foul stench to those who have yet to have the Holy Spirit activate this spiritual membrane in them, oh yes, in the unsaved and unregenerate nose, we Christians stink! Watch and pray friends, watch and pray, for salvation and life, one way or another, leaves its mark around the nostrils of men.

Listen:- Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place. For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death, and to the other the aroma of life leading to life. And who is sufficient for these things? 2 Corinthians 2:14-16 KJV

Pray:- Lord thank you for the soothing and sweet smelling aroma that the sacrifice of your Son is to You, once and for all, forever and ever Amen. Now Lord make all our sacrifices to You smell sweet, and may we also be the attractive aroma of life to those who would be saved and the dangerous pungent stink of death those who will not, that they may be even ‘disgusted’ into life. Amen, let it be so.