If I walk in middle of Spring on the trails through high brush on nearby land, I am
confronted with the strong smell of wild blackberry bushes and honey suckle in bloom. 
The perfumed landscape is so strong that a still evening seems like your locked in a sweet fog. For nearly two weeks the smell permeates where the bushes prevail. It is heaven for bees as well. There are places where you can buy honey a bit later that is dominated by the bee work done during this blooming time.
A few miles away there are pigs, whose stinky smell is also noteworthy. The mud, excrement, and Spring rains make for a field that can smell up quite an area around their home field.
So it is with the savor of righteousness and lawlessness.
Righteousness in a people, a church, even a small home group of believers in the Lord Jesus Christ has a smell of fruitfulness and peace if Christ is followed from the heart. The smallest ones are tended to; the biggest ones have a servants’ postures and giving hearts. There is a place for the broken in spirit to be healed and the wayward to find a home as God is exalted. The smell of ongoing cleansing and its fruit in lives is common.
The opposite of following Christ is quite a contrast, because it is centered on self worth apart from God and a path defined by “I want my way.” Lawlessness is just that: I want My Way at the expense of God’s Way. Self importance and self direction are crucial. People can join together and it creates a culture of lawlessness. There are degrees of it, and it can get very bad. It leaves a bad smell over a land if it goes unchecked. Violence and unbridled sensuality can generally increase so it permeates public media, speech, governing, education, and laws. There is often an unealthy tolerance for the trampling of the poor and weak while the rich and famous are exalted beyond measure, who live in disregard to the smallest of people. The smell of arrogance replaces any notion of a healthy fear of God.
Be careful, if you are a believer in the precious love of Jesus Christ. Be careful to maintain your faith, repent of lawlessness where it surfaces. Lawlessness in a land kills love, produces harshness, and seeks to destroy the fruit of the Spirit of God. Don’t tread on this path, even if it seems to surround you. Rather, leave the smell of the love of God, because you have been redeemed. He set you on a path that can clean the heart and mind but also produce a smell like flowers in Spring.
For the reader who looks inward and finds nothing of value. Emptiness or smell from the culture of lawlessness is all you can see. Your injured heart has no peace. Then, please call on the One that can transform the heart. He is able, if you call upon his name and want no more of the filth you feel or see, to redeem you and place you on a different path. Like a mother who patiently cleans and soothes a child who is filthy, God cleans the heart with an even greater love that transforms from the inside out.
Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people. (Proverbs 14:34)
Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold. (Mat 24:12)
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I will say I was born in 1950 and it is NOT the kind of world I grew up in.
It does seem like some things have deteriorated. A biblical view of sense, however, things have actually have not changed. The intensity of a earmarks of a fallen world go up and down. Perhaps one part a century in one place may seem to have been better, but the underlying sin in this broken world has no respect of time, place, or people. The only Solution remains the same, and He came, died, and was raised to make that possible to one who calls upon him.