Seize the Moment – Day 504
The Sweet Aroma of Home!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Tuesday, August 3.
How does it make you feel when you walk into a place where one of your favorite meals has been cooking?
Like you’ve come home! Smells are powerful and can invoke strong feelings of comfort and deep memories of association. God designed us this way on purpose!
Exodus 30 emphasizes the instructions for the altar of incense, the recipe for the incense, and the regulations for using it. Listen to verses 6-8 talk about the purpose of the altar of incense:
You shall put this altar in front of the veil that is near the ark of the testimony, in front of the mercy seat that is over the ark of the testimony, where I will meet with you. Aaron shall burn fragrant incense on it; he shall burn it every morning when he trims the lamps. When Aaron trims the lamps at twilight, he shall burn incense. There shall be perpetual incense before the Lord throughout your generations.
The tabernacle would have a unique smell as the specific recipe of incense was not to be used except to worship God at His mercy seat (verses 37-38). God intended our practices of worship to focus every part of our personhood on God.
Therefore, Paul commanded us in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to “pray without ceasing” and in Ephesians 5:12 to “walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.”
God’s desire is to make His home in our lives, and He has given us the recipe of heavenly home cooking that emanates the sweet aroma of our worship to the one true God!
Seize the moment and offer your life as a living sacrifice to God.