What Do You Smell?

de·o·dor·ant noun:  an agent for destroying odors.

an·ti·per·spi·rant noun:  an astringent preparation for reducing perspiration, usually containing aluminum or zirconium and used to prevent body odor and clothing stains.

per·fume noun:  a substance, extract, or preparation for diffusing or imparting an agreeable or attractive smell, especially a fluid containing fragrant natural oils extracted from flowers, woods, etc., or similar synthetic oils.

I am just going to assume that everyone who reads my blog uses one of the three items listed above, hopefully daily.  I mean, let’s be honest here, we don’t want to smell bad, do we?  It would be bad enough if we had to smell ourselves, but it could be quite embarrassing if others smelled us at our worst, right? 

But today I’m going to look at these items another way, from a more Christian point of view.  If you were to look at these items with that Christian perspective you might see deodorant to be the Bible.  It’s there to destroy the horrible odors of darkness from invading your life and making you smell bad to others, right?  Yet, not everyone uses deodorant and therefore allows odors to consume them, so to say. 

Then you have antiperspirant.  It is like prayer, in my opinion.  It’s there to keep you from having things come onto your body and make you smell, right?  And yet once again this is something that not enough people use.  Instead they start to smell badly for all the world to notice when they come upon them 

Oh, and what happens when you use the deodorant and the antiperspirant together?  You get added protection right?  When both are used together you get to keep the odors from attacking the body, and if the odors get past that layer of defense the deodorant will destroy them.  That is just like how prayer and the Bible work together, isn’t it?  Through prayer we are able to fight off the enemy's attacks.   Prayer in conjunction with our Bible knowledge can easily allow us to destroy the enemy before he makes a foothold on the body.

That leaves the perfume.  If you ask me it’s more of a cover up. cover-up It tells others that you may or may not smell bad due to the bodily odor, but they’ll not be finding out because we’re going to disguise those issues, if they are even present.  To me that is what a lot of Christians do.  Instead of using prayer and the knowledge that the Bible could give them, they instead make themselves smell good to the world so that even their closest friends won’t know what is really going on in their lives.

This week I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t use actual perfume, or that you are a bad person for only using actual deodorant, or antiperspirant.  Instead I wanted to take a different approach to show you exactly how integral some of the things we take for granted in our lives really are to having a strong Christian walk.  It’s easy to forget our Bible reading or prayer any day if it isn’t routine.  But, when we do forget either or both of them then we open ourselves up to an attack.  So, just like odor can attack when you forget to use deodorant and/or antiperspirant you are easily accessible to the enemy's advances when you forget to do even the most routine of things. 

In other words, don’t forget the simplest of things:  Be in your Bible daily, and spend time with God.  You just might make the world a more pleasingly fragrant place.