Camp Fire Smells and the Zestfullness of Christ

When the weather gets cool and leaves start to change (unless you live in Texas) there is nothing better than getting out in the woods and doing some camping. It’s a good way to use all the gear you bought from REI incase Y2K ever rears its ugly head again.

When you settle in for the night with your perfect spot and you get a nice little fire crackling, it’s time to bust out the perfect camp fire ingredients… marshmallows, Hershey’s chocolate bar, and some graham crackers.

The chocolate bar and graham crackers are pretty standard, so what makes the perfect s’more lies in the toasting of the marshmallow. There are different methods to this… some people just dive right in, set the thing ablaze, and then blow it out before it becomes nothing more than charred remains. Other people keep the marshmallow pretty far away, but just close enough to where it is getting heat. This is the safest way to go about it, but it takes a really long time… and you have to fight the urge to just shove the dang thing into the fire. Then you have the people that are very prideful about their toasting abilities… they find the sweet spot… the spot where the marshmallow gets the maximum amount of heat without catching fire… but it’s always on the verge… one wrong move… one wrong twist of the stick or close hanger where the marshmallow takes a sudden drop in elevation… then the whole thing could literally go up in flames.

S’mores… the perfect campfire food.

But you can’t recreate the s’more experience in your kitchen… you can try… but a key tool to making a legitimate perfect s’more is a campfire.

Campfires are great when you’re in the woods. You love the smell, you find yourself just staring at hot coals as they change to different shades of reds and oranges, you contemplate walking on hot coals like the contestants on Fear Factor… but no matter where you sit the smoke always seems to find you. Sure, you fight it for a little bit in hopes of the wind changing directions, but you eventually move your seat only to have the smoke find you again.

Smelling like campfire is unavoidable when you’re anywhere close to it.

The smell doesn’t bother you when you’re in the woods, or when you’re around other people that smell the same.

But when you get home to a nice clean house you are immediately aware of how much you stink! You want nothing more than to get out of your nasty campfire smell infested clothes and to jump into a piping hot shower… which of course, you’re not fully clean unless your zest fully clean.

When we encounter Jesus through God’s Word it’s like we just came from a camping trip and stepped into a clean house. We realize that we are dirty and in need of a deep cleaning, and we have three options: we can try to ignore the conviction and go surround ourselves with more people that smell just like us. We can try to clean ourselves through our own good works; or we can respond to Jesus’ call to come to him.

The crappy part about encountering Jesus is that we realize we smell really bad and we don’t possess the ability to make ourselves clean.

The beautiful thing about encountering Jesus is that he wants to make us clean through his works (which is the only way to be made clean) and he doesn’t want anything in return. He is the ultimate bar of zest soap.

You can ignore your smelliness, you can use your own soap and still smell funky... which is like putting deodorant on after you realize you smell... it doesn't work, or you can be fully clean through the work of Christ... and you're not fully clean unless your zest fully clean.