Ruanna Levi - We are the Fragrance of Christ - Sunday, September 27, 2026

Thank you, Lord.

Thank you.

That your food for us is always exactly what we need.

That your word is so majestic in its work, its nourishment of us, its cleansing of us, its fueling of us.

And Father, we we need more.

We need more of you.

We need more of your presence.

We need more of your life.

We need more of your anointing.

We need more of your love.

And above all, we want to just know you more.

Come closer.

See you more clearly.

All right, you spirit on us.

Spirit of revelation in knowing you.

Smell is fascinating.

It really fascinates my mind, the sense of smell.

But I just um I was looking up some things about it, and um, and I found this.

Smell is the only sense that's fully developed in the fetus.

Born, fully able to smell.

As your primary means of learning.

But foundationally, God has created us that smell wires us to memory, and we learn the world through smell first.

Now just bear all of these things in mind because the Bible says, first in the natural, then in the spirit.

Smell is our most powerful sense for triggering memory and emotion.

And many of you would know that.

That you suddenly smell something and it brings you back to an exact moment, the whole memory package there.

It can also trigger very strong emotions.

Like someone who's been through a fire, they smell smoke, their whole body is radiating fear when they smell smoke.

And neuroscience has now understood why smell has this power to bring us instantly into a memory, into an emotion, into a sense of a reality that's beyond that particular smell.

And it's because every other sense, the sense of taste, the sense of touch, what you see, what you hear, all of that information is fed through a part of the brain called the thalamus.

And that part of the brain is like a gatekeeper.

It starts going, you need that information, you don't need that information.

That's important, that's less important.

And it starts deciding what part of all of those senses is going to be told to your conscious mind or not.

So during the day, your sense of touch is still firing the touch of your clothes, but your thalamus has decided you don't need that information.

You don't need to be constantly aware that your clothes are on.

So it just forget about that.

You you know, if there's you know a dog that sleeps somewhere in the house and it just you can hear it, your thalamus decides you don't need to keep being woken up to told the dog's still breathing.

So it just tunes out, it filters when you go to you know a new place.

There's so much visual information, but your thalamus starts deciding what's important to give to your actual awareness, and so everything is gatekeeped through that, and that takes time, and it also can filter a lot of information that you never actually think about.

But smell is the only sense that doesn't go through the thalamus, it doesn't get filtered, it doesn't get slowed down, it just goes straight in.

So anatomically, what happens is all the nerves that are in the sensation plate at the top of your nose, they feed straight in.

And they don't just feed in randomly to your brain, they feed in straight to the area of the brain for memory called the hippocampus, and they feed straight into your emotional response area, which is the amygdala, and God has designed it like that so that without filter, without delay, without deciding whether it's important or not, smell triggers memory and triggers emotion.

And we know that that can happen negatively, as I mentioned, with smoke, or like if you happen to be smelling something once when you were sick, or in a situation that was stressful to you, you will not like that smell.

As soon as you smell it, it'll make your hair stand up on your back.

Because smell is the strongest determinant of whether something was safe to eat.

Still is.

So it was the determinant of whether it was safe to consume.

But it's also key in determining whether we remember a situation as pleasant, as full of joy, as something that was life-giving to us, something that was a situation of promise or hope, or not.

And there's this incredible thing, they call it the Proust effect.

Um, it was named after a French author, Marcel Proust, and he wrote this book because what he was doing, he was having tea, and he had a Madeline, you know, those cakey, biscuity things that are French, they're so cute.

And he dipped his Madeline in tea and ate it.

And in that moment, this whole memory just went bang.

And it was another time he, as a child, he dipped a Madeline in tea.

But he didn't just remember the taste of it, he remembered that whole room, that whole situation, that whole experience.

And he was so fascinated by it.

It was so mind-boggling to him that this one second, this one smell, this taste, this thing just opened up a whole memory, the people there, the moment, the emotions there.

And so he wrote about it, and so it's still called after him the Proust effect.

And what he didn't know was it wasn't the taste, it was the smell that did that.

And as it turns out, humans have exquisite noses.

Apparently, we have the capacity to distinguish at least one trillion different smells.

One trillion.

It just makes you want to just go around and start smelling stuff.

In fact, you can work that pathway, like most neural pathways.

You can make it work, and it's important too.

Smells a very big indicator of lots of things.

So a trillion different odors we can pick up, and actually, most complex taste that you know, we go, oh, that tastes amazing.

It's actually the smell that smells amazing that you're experiencing when you eat something beautiful.

Our taste is much more limited.

And um, I read this thing this morning that you know, if you have some like nice vanilla or whatever, like something you think tastes really amazing, if you actually bok your nose, it'll just taste sweet or sour or bitter or salty.

That's pretty much it.

Everything else that we describe as taste is smell coming through.

And so, apart from keeping us alive and protecting us from consuming dangerous things, smell is fundamental in shaping memory, shaping the affection of our hearts to different moments.

It's integral to strong emotions and our reaction to things.

So just think about that for a minute.

On top of that, as you probably know, every person has what they call a scent signature, a smell that is their smell, and that's made up of three things, three components.

One is your DNA, like who you are.

The second thing that goes into that is your health and lifestyle, what how much time you're outside, how healthy you are, all of that affects your skin bacteria, which is part of your scent.

And the third thing, obviously, is what you eat.

You go eat a whole bunch of garlic, you're gonna smell of garlic.

There's many different foods that make up how we the scent that is us, whether that's strong or not.

So these three things, and I think it's like our fragrance, our God-given fragrance.

Some of it is just who we are in Christ, it's like our DNA.

But some of it depends on what we're doing and what we're consuming, what our lifestyle is, what we're feeding on, all of those things.

And I used to think that, you know, the Lord is so full of grandeur, so the experience of God Himself, the experience of walking with the Lord is, you know, it's hard to get words to that are effective enough to describe him, to describe what he does in our lives, to describe his mercy, to describe his beauty.

It's like language is just insufficient.

Um, and so I used to think lots of the statements in the Bible were just sort of poetic license, somehow grappling for ways to describe walking with God.

Describe his infinite glory, his fast faithfulness, his incredible wonder, just people grappling to put that into language.

But I remember reading something a couple of years ago, I couldn't find it this morning when I was looking for it.

But it was this article, and this woman was talking about how a deep sea rover, you know, those machines that they put down to the very bottom of the ocean.

So a deep sea rover had just discovered a reality that she'd always dismissed in the book of Job as poetic license.

It was to do with the mountains in the deep, I think, and the contour of the depths of the ocean.

And it was there in the book of Job, written thousands of years ago, but she'd kind of gone, oh yeah, that's just describing the depths of God's wisdom.

No, it's there.

And so I'd kind of done that with this passage in 2 Corinthians.

If you want to turn there, it's 2 Corinthians 2, verses 14 to 17.

2 Corinthians 2:14–17

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?

For we are not, as so many, peddling the word of God, but as of sincerity, as from God, we speak in the sight of God in Christ.

I used to think being the fragrance of his knowledge was sort of a poetic license.

It's a nice sort of wafty description, our lives sort of wafting around.

But having looked at this, looking at how smell works, I actually find this absolutely fascinating.

That we are to be a smell to people, we are to be a fragrance to God and to people.

And I just want to look at that process here from this passage, and it starts with now, thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ.

And I would suggest that if we want to be a fragrance of Christ to people, Paul says right here, this is the first step, this is foundation one, that the Father is leading us.

That if we want to be a fragrance, we have to be willing to be led by God.

Led to people that we may understand, we may not understand, led to situations we may like, we may not like.

Not us, not our opinions, not people's opinions, not social media, not fear, not anything else, God.

Thanks be to God who is leading us.

And when our lives are led by that one person in this glorious, beautiful partnership between us and him, this this journey of love and trust and adventure and experience, it's a foundation for being a fragrance.

But there's a way that God leads us.

He doesn't drag us through the mud, he doesn't lead us kind of decrepit and somehow just barely making it.

It says we are led in triumph in Christ, and it is so critical that we understand this if we're going to be a fragrance to the world around us of who God is.

There's just way too many believers who do not understand that our inheritance is to be led in triumph.

Bear in mind that this is written by Paul.

He said we're always led in triumph.

And Paul's credentials for apostolic influence and power were this: that he'd given up all Pharisaic success, that he had sleepless nights, laboring in prayer, fastings, beatings for the sake of the gospel, shipwrecks, mocking, people turning on him who he himself had led to the Lord, imprisonments and endless concern for both the church and the lost and Israel.

He's like, God always leads us in triumph.

Because the triumph is not that it always looks pleasant.

Triumph is not that everything's just made easy and you kind of walk forward.

That's not triumph and it's not overcoming.

Triumph is the victory of being in Christ.

It's when there's been resistance, there's been pressure, there's been questions, there's been mountains in front of you, and the Lord has led you to overcome.

I laughed last night.

Um, some of you know there was the Lonely Mountain Running Festival here, and they have different distances.

They have like 11 kilometers, 22 kilometers, 42 kilometers, and they have 110 kilometers for the strange people.

But I had some friends who did the 110 kilometers, and I love this post.

This friend had already run 65 kilometers straight, 65 kilometers, and she posted a photo of her watch saying 65 kilometers, and it's like 11 p.m.

or something.

And she wrote, only a marathon to go.

She only had 42 kilometers to run left.

And instead of just being like, oh my gosh, what was I thinking?

Instead of being like, this is the worst decision I've ever made in my life, instead of she would have been hurting.

I don't care how fit you are, you're hurting after running 65 kilometers.

She's like, only a marathon to go.

And I just I loved it because it was like, what an attitude.

What a beautiful attitude.

And so triumph is the victory of being in Christ, knowing He has overcome the world.

Triumph is the revelation of what is being accomplished in us and through us in a situation.

Triumph is when we look back over a season or a situation, and as Joel said last week, our final judgment on that was God is so good, and I wouldn't have rathered it any other way.

It doesn't mean every step was easy.

Like I'm not looking back over this year, going, wow, couldn't have thought of anything better to do.

But I am going, my gosh, God was good.

My gosh, what he accomplished, what he did.

Where he led me, what was possible?

What happened when people prayed?

What happened when this, you know what I mean?

You get there and you go, you know what?

I wouldn't have rathered it any other way.

That is the victory that is in our hearts.

That is the victory when we look back and go, God is good.

And that is how He leads us.

Paul says that in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 7, he says, we have this treasure in earthen vessels.

2 Corinthians 4:7

We're carrying this glory of Christ with us.

We're carrying the one who has overcome the world in us, but we're these earthen vessels.

And there's a reason for it.

That the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.

We have to be aware of how weak we actually are, how limited we actually are, to know that the power that we are being led in and with is not ours.

It's not that we're just like, you know, very clever people.

It's not just that, oh, we were lucky.

No, God deposits glory in this earthen vessel, these human fragility that's within us.

That the excellence of the power is attributed to God and not of us.

And he says this: we're hard-pressed on every side yet not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.

That's a dying of the Lord Jesus that we can engage in.

That choice not to judge, that choice to show mercy, that choice to think of others' needs.

That's a carrying about in us the dying of the Lord Jesus, that his resurrection life may also be found within us.

Verse 16, therefore we do not lose heart, even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

Everything God is doing, He is working within you an eternal weight of glory and beauty and goodness now.

So everything that God leads us into ends triumphant.

That's how it is.

The cross ended triumphant.

Twenty thousand people needing food, and one boy's lunch ended triumphant.

Everything ends triumphant in his hands.

I'm not talking about mess we get into by our own waywardness or choices that have nothing to do with God's leading.

That needs to be repented of and asking God to bring us back.

But when God leads us, it's triumphant.

You see what he's accomplishing, you finish that part of the procession, and there's triumph in the Lordship of Jesus, the majesty of Jesus, the brilliance of the counsel of the Holy Spirit, and the Father's unmatched faithfulness.

Glory is working, and we learn to overcome.

I don't know if we understand how much value God puts on his people learning to overcome.

It's why Jesus didn't just fix everything straight away.

He let the disciples live with tension.

Let them wrestle a bit.

If you read Revelation chapters two and three, the letters to the seven churches, every single one of them, the promises for if you overcome, this will be yours.

If you overcome, if you overcome, if you overcome, the Lord has so much for every one of us, but it's going to require a little bit of rising up, pressing in, overcoming what would cause us just to sit down, give up, say it's too hard.

Faith overcomes the whole world.

So back to being fragrance, 2 Corinthians 2, 14 to 17.

It says, thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph, and through us diffuses the fragrance of his knowledge in every place.

Smell.

Through us diffuses the smell of his knowledge in every place.

When Paul wrote this, he didn't understand the olfactory bulb, didn't understand the hardwareing of the brain, didn't understand neural pathways, he didn't understand that why smell triggers memory or emotion so profoundly.

But God did.

Straight away doesn't get filtered as unimportant because we're fragrants.

He doesn't say through us, release the touch of Christ.

Through us, release the sound of Christ.

He said fragrance for this very reason.

That smell gets in before some anyone can decide it's not important.

Smell affects their deepest emotions before they can go.

That's not really for me.

And that's why we are to be fragrance.

We are to be a smell, we are to be a source of memory of moments when they cried out to God.

Every single person on the planet has cried out to God at some point, whether they know it or not.

Maybe when they were a child, maybe when they're in a desperate situation.

Says in Ecclesiastes 3, verse 10 and 11, I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied.

Ecclesiastes 3:10

He has made everything beautiful in its time.

Also, he has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the fullness of work that God does from beginning to end.

God has put eternity in everyone's hearts.

And so the idea is when they smell you carrying Christ, it awakens that emotion.

Something feels different.

Something reminds them of something bigger than today.

Something stirs within them.

God is making everything beautiful in its time.

And the fragrance that we release is to call people again and again and again back to the knowledge of Him.

The memory of moments when He's touched their lives.

We're to be fragrance that triggers that.

Not only with our own self, but with the knowledge of God.

And that means that our greatest responsibility is to be growing, filling ourselves steeped in knowing God ourselves.

So that the fragrance becomes stronger, the fragrance becomes purer, the fragrance is closer to the presence of God Himself.

And so if you remember when I talked about what makes up our scent, I said it's our DNA.

And when you receive Christ, you received that scent.

But it's also our own health.

You choose not to wash your clothes, not to have a shower for a week.

It's unpleasant.

It's unpleasant the fragrance you're releasing.

And it's the same in the spirit.

We've got to be washed constantly by the word.

We've got to let the Holy Spirit cleanse us.

We've got to let God go.

You know that bitterness?

It's like it smells.

You know that judgment?

It's it's not pleasant.

And we cleanse ourselves, and so we smell better.

Undealt with stuff smells.

And the third thing was what what we're eating.

Are we feeding on the Lord?

Or on something else?

Because it's going to affect your fragrance.

What you consume.

Are you consuming fear?

Are you consuming just endless social media?

Are you consuming just what your opinion is?

Or are you consuming the presence of God, the word of God?

Because it affects our fragrance.

It affects our capacity to pervade the space around us.

And the thing about fragrance is it's being released whether you're aware of it or not.

Like if you wear perfume, you put it on and you're aware of it for about one minute.

And after that, you stop smelling it.

But hours later, you can walk into a room and someone goes, What perfume is that?

Because that fragrance is still pervading.

You stop thinking about it, but it's still affecting the people around you.

And so we're releasing it whether we think about it or not.

You don't switch off your fragrance.

You're releasing that fragrance at home, in friendship, at work, at the shops, at church, everywhere.

You don't have fragrance that you just turn on when you're about to minister to someone.

It's constant the fragrance that's being released.

It's why Jesus didn't have set ministry times.

He was diffusing a fragrance.

It's why Peter could walk down a street and people are healed.

He's releasing a fragrance.

And that fragrance was so strong, bodies responded.

Like broken limbs responded.

That's how strong a fragrance can be.

And so my question for all of us, me included, is what do I want to release?

What do you want to release?

What knowledge of God are you releasing?

What do you want to grow in so you can release more of it?

Because we're fragrance of Christ to God by our interactions with the world.

Both with those who are saved and those who are not yet saved.

You're not the fragrance of Christ to God in your quiet time.

You are fragrance before the Father by your interactions all day.

That's what this says here.

How you conduct yourself in the likeness of Christ among people is your fragrance before the Father as well as to the people around you.

And I just want to quickly look at that before I finish.

The term sweet aroma is mentioned so many times in the book of Exodus and Numbers.

You can look it up.

I don't have time to go through them.

It's like 50 different times.

Sweet aroma.

It shall be a sweet aroma.

It shall be a sweet aroma.

You shall prepare a sweet aroma.

And why it's there is God is setting up protocols for worship, for sacrifice, for prayer, for interacting with his presence in those two books.

And the term sweet aroma is always in reference to sacrifice and offering or anointing oil and incense.

So it always is connected with something that we chose to give of our time, effort, resources, heart that was a sacrifice that cost us something.

Or it's related to incense, which represents prayer.

Those two flows in your life, the flow of prayer and the flow of things that cost you, is a sweet aroma before God.

And so if you want to be a sweet aroma, then there's going to be choices in how you interact with people that will be costly.

There's brothers and sisters all over the world that are risking their lives to share the gospel.

But they may be completely hidden.

Spending time with someone that's effortful.

Kindness when you're tired, love when you've got your own needs.

But the father smells it.

It's a sweet aroma.

Every single time it's a sweet aroma before the Lord.

I've spoken on it before, what made up the incense.

But it was a complex mix of things that represented prayer in the temple.

Things that were hard to get.

And it represents the effort in prayer that's an intentional offering before the Lord.

It's holy to him.

It is so holy to him when you put time into prayer.

Song of Songs verse 1 says this.

While the king is at his table, my spikenard sends forth its fragrance.

A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me that lies all night between my breasts.

My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blooms in the vineyards of Engedi.

This is what it means.

Well, the king is at his table.

The word in the Hebrew there is a surrounding setting.

When the king, the lordship of Jesus, surrounds me, when his reign surrounds me, when his authority surrounds me, then what I'm carrying, my fragrance, sends forth its smell.

And the more we surround ourselves, our thinking, our heart, our lives, our decisions with the authority of Jesus, the more you're going to release fragrance.

Spike nard, which is what is the actual perfume there.

It was very costly.

You've got to go to the high mountains of the Himalayas, and you have to find these flowers, and then you have to dig up the roots.

They're a rhizome.

And in that root is spikenard.

There's things in your life that are so precious, that have been hidden, that the Lord has put there.

And they're not difficult, I mean, they're not easy to just obtain.

When the Bible talks about Spike Nard, it's referring to what has been an effort and a cost to nurture within you.

And that fragrance comes forth when we live surrounded by his lordship.

And it says there in that place that a bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me.

That is the sacrifice of Jesus, the cross of Jesus.

And it says, it's lying here in my heart, even in the night, even in the dark places.

What Jesus has done is lying here right over my heart.

It's so beautiful, it's so full of affection to the Lord.

And it says, My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blooms in the vineyards of Engedi.

Henna blooms represent the redemption price, the full price of redemption.

That's what Jesus is to you.

That's what Jesus is in that place of his lordship and your fragrance.

His lordship and your fragrance.

What he has fully paid for for you.

What has been fully done for you?

What was accomplished on the cross, full freedom, full healing, full deliverance, full abundant life.

In Mark fourteen, verses three to five, you know the story, I won't read it.

But Mary comes with an alabaster flask of Spider.

It's everything to her.

It was to be poured out on the wedding night.

It was their right to marriage, right to safety, right to security.

It was her most precious possession.

Broken open.

And the house was filled with the fragrance.

And she was filled with the fragrance.

And it accomplished something to Jesus that he said is going to be talked about forever.

Because what we do out of love for Jesus, out of sacrifice for him, he will talk about forever.

And the people around us might understand it, might not understand it.

He understands it.

And the house is filled with the fragrance.

Everyone in that house smelled the fragrance of her offering.

And everyone around you smells the fragrance of your love for the Lord.

I want us to understand that we're releasing this fragrance that is designed to trigger hearts to want to come closer to God.

It is designed to awaken people at a very deep level.

Not with words, not by touch.

All of that's good.

Great.

But whether you're aware of it or not, your life, your love for the Lord is releasing a fragrance when you walk into a room, when you spend time with someone.

Consumed with the word of God.

So our fragrance is strong and touches people.

You know, Warren gave us a word last week that it's time for the lost sheep to come home.

It's time.

It's time.

It's time for cities to be transformed with the knowledge of God.

And he said in that word last week, I am calling the lost sheep home.

I'm calling them under my protection.

I am calling the lost sheep to the wedding feast.

I am opening up the doors to open heaven's church, doors into the community.

The community is ripe for my harvest.

Arise, my children, be bold, be brave in me.

My hour awaits arise.

If it's time, we want to be releasing a pure, glorious, beautiful fragrance that doesn't get dismissed.

It goes straight in to the emotions of people's hearts, the longing of people's hearts, the deep, deep desires within them.

And when you release fragrance, can't be dismissed, can't be deprioritized.

It's why we it's smell.

Can you just reach out your hand to someone near you?

Let's just pray for each other.

Father, we ask that we would truly step into the fullness of what your word says, that we would be your fragrance.

On our best day, on our worst day, when we're aware of it, when we're not aware of it, that we would be releasing the fragrance of God in every place.

Father, we ask for a new measure of your word within us, that you'd give us a new hunger for your word, that we would be feasting on your word, that the scent of your word, the scent of who you are, would pervade from our very lives.

Lord, we ask that you would cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

And Lord, that the knowledge of you would be released.

Lord, that we would be a sweet aroma.

Lord, we're willing to lay down our lives in worship to you.

Lord, show us what that looks like moment to moment.

Show us what it looks like.

Person to person, day to day, situation to situation.

Surrounded by your Lordship, our fragrance will go forth.

We love you, Lord.

Make it strong, make it pure.

Let it cause the sheep to come home, God.

Let it call to the eternity that's written deep in people's hearts.

Let it call to that eternity and draw them to you.

Thank you, Father, for the majesty of the way that you have set up your world and set up your church.

Perfectly equipped to draw people to you, perfectly equipped to carry the good news to every tribe, every tongue, every situation, every generation.

We love you, God, and we say yes.

Amen.