Ephesians 5:2 - That Nefarious Cinnabon Store

"...and be walking in love, just as also Christ loved you and delivered Himself on behalf of you, an offering and sacrifice unto a sweet-smelling aroma."

-Love.  Be walking in love, presently, constantly, always.  We are following and imitating this One Who IS Love.  His love is constant, faithful, unending, everlasting - it never ends, never fails.  There is never a moment when He does not love, does not act in ways which are consistent with His amazing selfless unconditional love.  This is the fountainhead of our forgiveness, both that which we received at the Cross and experience every day, and that which we extend to our fellow man.  The love of Christ poured out for us, immense and free, washing and covering over our warts and wounds and waywardness like a heavenly tsunami.  Yes, He did say ‘I love you this much’ as He stretched out His hands and died.  Loving us till the end, He died for us, in our place, taking the punishment which we so richly deserved.  He died to Himself as He died for us, and showed us what love and forgiveness really looks like.  Thus we are truly able to imitate our heavenly Father.  We forgive, we love, because He first loved us (cf John 3.16, 1John 4.10).  This the divine order, the way it has always been since Calvary on back to the beginning of creation.  God loves, He blesses, and those thus blessed turn around and pass it on to others, they multiply and fill the world with the life and love and breathtaking goodness of God (cf Genesis 1.28, 9.1, 12.2-3).

-Yes, the love Christ showed when He laid down His life was a pleasing sacrifice and a fragrant aroma to God.  The same holds true for us, as we love and lay down our lives and our rights and whatever ways we’ve been transgressed against on behalf of the ones for whom Christ did die.  It gives God great pleasure when we His children act like Him, when we reflect what He is like.  This is precisely why He made us in the first place, to be His image bearers, to bear His likeness throughout His creation.  Every time we forgive our brother, when we give grace and let go of some way in which we may have been offended, we execute a divine transaction.  We are acting just like our heavenly Father, and we bring great pleasure to His heart.  Our lives become to Him like the nefarious Cinnabon store at the mall, that sweet-smelling aroma which draws you in like a delectable tractor beam, filling the entire place and surely wafting all the way up to heaven (in much the same way as the soothing aromas of flame-broiled meat and baking bread and fragrant incense which the Lord insisted on having in the temple used to do - cf Leviticus 23.18; Numbers 28.6; Exodus 30.34-35, 30.7-8).  Loving forgiveness flowing out of the lives of His children makes Him so happy, so proud.  ‘Well done, My son, My daughter.  In you I am well-pleased.’