Published by The Aroma of a Christian
A couple of years ago, a lady I knew had a rather awkward and unfortunate encounter with her church. Her daughter was falsely accused of something that she did not do and they were ultimately thrown out of the church by the elders. When I met with her about a year later, I asked her if she had tried another church. She said that they had tried another church but were interrogated about why they had left their previous one and when that was explained, they were promptly asked to leave. Their reason being – ‘people of such a tainted past did not belong in a church’. She then concluded by saying, “Why would I ever want to go back to church again…those people stink!”
We’ve all used that phrase about different things in our lives. We often say “this situation stinks”, or “this problem stinks”. However I had never before heard anybody say that of a church, or rather at church people! To a Protestant Christian like me, that just did not sound right. And it seemed to me that the problem actually did not lie with the particular woman. She had approached the church looking for security, support and acceptance. Instead she got criticized, judged and humiliated. To her, something did not smell right about church. I felt compelled to take her side.
The Charisma of Jesus
There is a popular adage that goes – ‘ You can tell a person’s character by the company he keeps’. Although some versions may vary, the basic premise remains the same – the types of people who surround you speak volumes of the type of person you are. According to that yardstick, Jesus would be considered a person of very questionable character.
His company consisted of a motley crew of misfits and oddballs – prostitutes, murderers, thieves, tax-collectors, etc. And while he never went after them, they followed him around everywhere. There was something about Jesus that attracted not only the common man, but also and especially, the social outcasts, the rejected and the despised, to him. People would go out of their way just to be with him or near him – lower themselves down through the roof, climb a tree, reach out to just get a grasp of his robe. There was an aroma about the man that made him irresistible to people.
‘Do Christians carry the same fragrance that Jesus did?’ Every time I ask myself that question, I am reminded of the cryptic reply I got from that woman – THEY STINK! Recently I came across a quote by Gandhi about Christians. Gandhi, a true Hindu to the core said “Jesus I greatly admire and respect. It’s the Christians I cannot figure out.” Have Christians become mere shadows or caricatures of their founder? A stick figure in comparison to the majestic aura of Jesus from the Gospels?
As Christians, our greatest relational mandate is to be dispensers of Grace. History shows us that some of the earliest establishment of schools and hospitals were pioneered by the blood, sweat and tears of pioneering Christian missionaries – people who had the calling of Grace on their lives – C S Lewis stated that the people who did the most for humanity in this world, were those who thought the most of the next world, the world after life.
So what is Grace?
Grace is more than just being gentle, peaceful and loving, unlike the secular world’s definition of Grace. It is also about standing up for what is right, confronting someone or something when a particular boundary needs to be drawn. In simple words, Grace means sometimes doing what you just don’t feel like doing.
In the gospels, there is a charisma about Jesus that makes him so unique that people sat for three days straight just to hear him speak. He had the whole spectrum of emotions – sudden sympathy for a leper, exuberance at the success of his disciples, nobody spoke such words of love and yet spoke such red-hot scorching words against the legalistic or hypocrites. When he worked a miracle he often deflected credit back to the recipient saying “your faith has healed you”.
Jesus quickly established intimacy with anybody he met – whether it was talking to the woman at the well, or a fisherman by the lake, Jesus quickly cut to the heart of the matter and after a few brief lines of conversation, people revealed their innermost secrets to Jesus and opened up their lives to him.
Do we as his followers, have the fragrance or aroma that Jesus had? Do we go out of our way
to help somebody? Do we exercise the patience even when it is an inconvenience to us? Are we able
to love people even when we don’t feel like it?
I want us to examine our hearts today. Do we have the aroma of Christ about us or is there an area
of our heart or our lives that has the putrid stench of something going rotten? I want to encourage
you to probe into your heart and find an area of your life that just does not smell right. And when
you do, God is faithful to clean out the putrid stench of our lives and bring back the original
fragrance of Christ that we were always meant to have.
