Women's Talk

I know a few of you from my family, my friends from down in Bloomington, but a lot of you have never met before. So thanks for having me. What an honor. Let's pray. Dear Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for spring. Thank you that the weather is warming up and that we get to see outside. the truth about the beauty that you've created, that we get to see the world coming to life again after a long dead winter. And thank you for writing these truths into nature so that we see them, whether we believe them or not, Father. Thank you for helping our unbelief by giving us all these pictures around us to teach our hearts the truth of your character.

Please open up our hearts today to hear your word, to learn about beauty, to love beauty, and to love beauty as derived from you and as pointing back to you, Father. Give us faith and pray that as we talk today, that as I talk today, that you would... plant your seeds of truth and seeds of the gospel into open hearts, and that you would guard my mouth, keep me from saying anything that is not true or glorifying to you, and cause us to go from this place looking more like Jesus Christ, our Savior. We pray this in your name. Amen. All right. Well, we are going to start at the very beginning.

and you know if you come to a talk at a church that that means we're starting in Genesis, right? So we're going to talk about the beginning of beauty, where it comes from, and I'm going to tell you guys I did not bring my Bible, and I am not intending to open, like flip around things on my phone. I just copied everything into my manuscript, and I know you guys are eating, so if you want to flip. around in your Bibles, you can, but I'm probably going to go through a lot of verses kind of fast. So, beauty was created by God. Genesis 1.31 says, and this is at the end of the account of creation, Genesis 1.31 tells us that God saw all that he had made and behold, it was very good. So, you know, at the end of each day where it describes what he made that day, it says he created this, he created that.

And God saw it, and it was good. And then this crowning day, day six, when he creates man, he says, and it was very good. He looks at everything, and it's not just good, it's very good. And the goodness of God is very closely connected with the beauty of God. So God is the author of beauty. A beautiful creation. And it is beautiful in that it comes from him and that it points back to him. Genesis 2, 8 and 9. So just one chapter later. It begins to tell us what happens after creation. And it says, And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. We talk a lot, we hear a lot about form and function, right?

So from the very beginning, God is concerned with both form and function, both with what it looks like and what it accomplishes for, in this case, if it's food, for the body. So he cares. He cares what things look like. It says, knowledge of good and evil. So after six days of creation, God created man as the crown of creation, and then he creates woman. So if man is like the crown of creation, then woman is like the jewel in that crown, right? When Adam saw Eve, he said, at last. And of course, I can't say those two words without thinking of that song, right? At last. That's always what goes through my head. And he said more than just those two words. But it's no coincidence that Adam looks at Eve and he says, at last. And he indicates with those words that he has been waiting for this moment, for the fulfillment of some desire that God planted in him for a companion that's suitable.

So Eve was a gift from God, beautiful in form and function, right? She was pleasing to the eye and was also to be his helpmate, both in companionship, in emotional and spiritual companionship, but also his fellow worker in the garden. So you kind of have the idea of like a companion and a comrade. Your comrade is being your brother in arm, the person who's working alongside, beside you, shoulder to shoulder, and you both have one aim, right? So in all of these senses, Eve is Adam's, is the completion of Adam. She's his companion in heart and body, completing him. So physically, they fit perfectly together, right? I want to...

Keep this PG rated, but there's beauty to the way the female body fits perfectly with the male body. God created that for pleasure and for good works. So when Adam sees Eve, he perceives the perfection of this companion instantly, right? And it's a little interesting. I was reading a commentary about this. It's a little interesting to think, like, he doesn't know from experience yet what that means. But somehow he actually does know. So it seems clear that God gave him some sort of special revelation at that moment to understand how Eve would complete him. He's never seen a woman before, right? He's never seen another human before. And yet he understands in the moment the fullness of God's good gift to him. All right. So God created man to appreciate and to glory in the beauty of creation.

and to participate in the cultivation of his garden. So one thing that I have learned from my dad, if you guys don't know, my dad was the pastor of the church down in Bloomington and helped train your pastors. And one thing that I've learned from him over the years is that we need to look at How God created the world before the fall to understand better our function as men and women and as humans, as like all our theology is connected to that in a way that we often forget to draw the connections. OK, so I remember when I was a kid, the first time that I ever heard somebody say that God commanded Adam and Eve to work.

And I think up to that point, even growing up in a Christian home and growing up with my parents as my parents, I think up to that point that I thought that work was a byproduct of the fall. I thought that the reason we had to work hard was that sin had corrupted our world. And I have to tell you that when I heard... When I learned that work was established before the fall, I was relieved. Isn't that funny? Because I knew that I love hard work and that one of the most fulfilling things in life is to work hard at something and for it to accomplish the thing that you said.

set out to accomplish, right? Now, what makes work unpleasant is partly our sinful hearts that we resist hard work, right? I'm not saying that I don't have any tendency towards laziness. I definitely do. But I understood even as a child that the fulfillment that comes from working hard for a good thing is wonderful. And I had this fear that, you know, That work was just sort of this little thing that we got to do while we were here on earth. And that once we get to heaven, we're just going to like lay on clouds and sing all day. And that sort of made me a little nervous that maybe I wasn't going to like heaven that much. But I think that God will continue to give us good works to do. But the work will not be corrupted by sin. Which means that, you know...

You know, one of the things that makes work frustrating right now is, you know, as a mom, I often feel like my children are like monkeys, like this pack of monkeys that are following me, you know, behind. Like one of them's like standing on my head, like doing this in front of me while I'm trying to do the work so that I like to frustrate my... I'm saying this is how I picture it. I'm not saying this is all true. I'm just saying this is how it feels in the moment that there's a monkey on my head, like jumping up and down and smacking me and smacking things out of my hands to prevent me from finishing a job. That's how it feels. And then there's another pack following behind, undoing everything as fast as I can do it. That's how it often feels as a mom with young kids. Can I have an amen? Yes. We all know what we're talking about here.

So that aspect of work being undone as quickly as you can do it, that's not pre-fall, right? There is some sort of fulfillment in the work that God gives us. And even now there is, but I know that sin has made it such that it often feels like that's not the case. But just as work, just as... man being the head of woman, just as work being a good thing that God created before the fall, and it didn't just come about because of sin, we were given the job of cultivating the garden that God made. One of the greatest honors God bestows upon man is that of participating in the work of cultivating the garden.

Okay, what an honor for Adam and Eve to be lifted up by God and made participators in his good work. So God creates a beautiful garden and then in some measure, and it's hard to understand exactly how, but in some measure, God gives them the honor of participating in and even adding in some small way to the garden. So this was true before the fall. So that means that in seeking to beautify ourselves and to beautify our surroundings, our homes, our churches, our yards, our people, we are not dishonoring God. And we are not just making a concession to a world that's broken by sin.

We are fulfilling the very thing that he created us to do. Okay? Now, isn't that a beautiful thing? It's freeing, isn't it? Yeah, it's freeing. There's a tendency among Christians to be souls without bodies. All right? a tendency to act as if all things spiritual of are of god and things of the body are not of god okay that's wrong that's false god created our bodies and he created them for good works and we will not be disembodied souls in the new heaven and the new earth, we will have bodies. The physical realm is a part of God's good creation. And just because it is, it's kind of ironic because we tend to think of the body as sinful. It's like the place where sin dwells. And the mind as spiritual and godly. But a lot of my sin struggles take place in my mind, you guys. So my mind and my soul are just as corrupted by sin.

as my body is. So don't fall into this danger of separating your body from your mind and spirit. They are all inextricably connected, and they should be. If your body is suffering, your mind will suffer. This is part of what makes it so difficult to tease out depression and spiritual and mental illness struggles from physical struggles right you cannot completely disconnect that you cannot always tease out what's physical and what's spiritual and what's what's mental um we have to try to sometimes but mostly we have to put it all together and it's messy and it's hard but put it together and work on all of it um so Do not fall into the danger of thinking that what's physical is somehow in opposition to what's spiritual. God gave us physical bodies, and God created us to do physical work with those physical bodies and to beautify things physically and spiritually and mentally. It all goes together. And one divorced from the other.

is always a pit. It's a pit that you'll fall in. Don't fall in that, okay? You see it? You see it? I'm warning you all. I'm the little signpost. Do not fall here. So just like we tend to think that, well, it's not quite the same thing. Let me go back. In our culture, we also have an ideal that nature is most beautiful where it is untouched by man, okay? So we love the national parks, right? We love seeing nature where it has not been leveled by man. However, there is a reason that the national parks are where we go to visit and not the wilderness next to it that has no roads, right? The national parks, a lot of them could be a lot bigger because the...

The beauty of nature, the untouched area is larger than just the national park. But we go to the national park because there are roads there. And there is a ranger station. And there are paths that allow us to go up and see the vista, right? And the forests are managed to some degree, okay? We actually protect. the oldest and the largest trees, and that's man doing it, and it's making it more beautiful. So we cultivate nature, and what makes it complete in its beauty is actually man's interference, right? We're sticking our fingers in there and messing with stuff, and that enhances its beauty, and it doesn't destroy it.

And again, the theology for this comes from Genesis 1, because Genesis 1 teaches us that God made a garden, so he created all of the earth, and then he created a garden in it for man, for man's pleasure, and for man's cultivation. So we are to cultivate, and if we believe that wilderness untouched by man is the apex of nature, If we begin down that road, then we end on that road by believing that the best thing that man can do is off himself, okay? And stop having kids. And this is a pervasive and wicked, wicked thought, wicked ideology that is... taken, that has been embraced by my generation and by the younger generation. And this is the source of so much self-loathing and hatred by our generations. And it's, I think, the source of many murders as well, you know, is people thinking that the best thing that man can do for itself is Go extinct. So don't think that these small beliefs don't have really, really big and dangerous consequences. So Genesis 2.15 tells us, And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. That was his purpose in setting Adam and Eve in the garden. And so even today we see our work.

as being to dress and keep the garden that God has made. All right. God values beauty. He talks in Scripture about people and lands and the nation of Israel, the city of Zion. All these are described as beautiful in Scripture, right? If you are a little bit... prickly at times. When I read how many times God tells that a woman is beautiful in Scripture, I'm like, really? Why doesn't it say they're really intelligent or something? I'm personally a little insulted by that because I'm a 21st century woman. Scripture takes note of women who are beautiful and it takes note of men who are beautiful and it takes note of places that are beautiful. And this means that God cares whether something's beautiful. The works of God are beautiful. Ecclesiastes 3.11 says, He hath made everything beautiful in his time. Also, he hath set the world in their heart so that no man can find out the work of God, the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. So God makes.

All things beautiful in his time. So the end result of all of God's good works is beauty. That's what we're working towards. It talks about the good works of men being beautiful. It says in Isaiah 52, 7, How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings of good. Scripture also speaks of sexuality as beautiful. Song of Solomon makes that abundantly clear. Here's just one sample. You are altogether beautiful, my love. There is no flaw in you. God devoted an entire book of the Bible to the beauty of sexuality and marriage between a man and a woman. It shows that he values it. He talks about beauty in worship. There are just so many instances in Scripture of God's import of beauty.

All right, so we have beauty created. Now the next thing we're going to talk about is beauty corrupted. When Eve tasted the forbidden fruit in the garden, beauty was corrupted. Genesis 3.6 tells us, So what was the forbidden fruit? It was pleasing to the eye, okay? It was beautiful. And Eve tried to use that beautiful fruit to glorify herself instead of God, right? God created it to be beautiful. And it wasn't a trick. But she corrupted that beauty by wanting to glorify herself instead of God. Ever since the fall of Adam, beauty has been used by man to glorify himself instead of God. Beauty is weaponized and idolized. It's used for self-determination. Ezekiel 28, 17, speaking of the nation of Israel, says, Your heart was proud because of your beauty. It's talking about an entire nation. But the beauty is weaponized as pride, right? It's corrupted as pride.

Beauty is used for profit and for self-gratification. Proverbs 6.25 warns a young man, do not desire the prostitute's beauty in your heart and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes. Beauty is used for self-justification and intimidation. You guys... So I've got to give a little bit of context for this verse. So it talks about Jezebel. Ahab, this wicked king of Israel, is finally receiving judgment from God. And he is killed by a commander in his army at God's command. It's not just an uprising and a murder. God commands this guy, all right, now go carry out the prophecies that I, the judgments that I already pronounced against this family, this king and queen. So he goes and he kills Ahab, and Jezebel, Ahab's wife, is in another city, and she knows.

Ahab has been killed, and she knows the prophecies, the judgments that have been pronounced against her. And she knows that the guy who's coming to carry out these judgments has just entered the city. She knows it's coming. And this is what it says. When Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it, and she painted her eyes and adorned her head and looked out of the window. So there's a lot that you can kind of wonder what was going through her head. But she is not quaking in fear at God's judgment, right? She feels self-justified. And she's, I think, using that, even the makeup and the beauty, as an intimidation tactic, right? It doesn't work. Jehu says, who's with me? Throw her down! And she gets thrown out the window, and she's gone, baby, gone.

But, you know, that was how she used beauty. She weaponized it. Okay, beauty is used for idolatry and self-love. Romans 1, 21 through 27 says, For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Okay, so this does not specifically use the word beauty, but the point is beauty is beauty in that it reflects God. So if you divorce the beauty of nature from the beauty of God, then you are exchanging, you're trading out the counterfeit for the real deal, okay? So they choose, we, let me put this in first person. We choose to worship the counterfeit instead of the real, okay? We worship things that are meant...

to point at God and we divorce them from God. And when we do that, God gives us over to the futility of our minds. This is just rampant in our culture. And it says then, therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, right? So this is just a direct explanation, like clear as day. When you worship nature rather than God, then women no longer act like women. They degrade their bodies. Men no longer act like men. And it says straight out in Romans 1 that then men...

have sex with men and women have sex with women, okay? So we think that this is our culture, we as Americans think that this is asserting our freedom, and yet it's actually the judgment of worshiping nature instead of God. All right, so beauty divorced from glorifying God turns to idolatry and inevitably results in degrading and self-destructive behavior. Beauty divorced from inner beauty is empty and vain. It becomes self-glorifying instead of God-glorifying. Proverbs 31.30 tells us, Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. So we have beauty corrupted. What happens when beauty is corrupted for us personally? I don't want to finish this section without just this sort of side note, which is that when...

beauty is corrupted we want to we we tend to want to um discard it okay so the misuse or abuse of something does not destroy its valid use okay so if beauty has been corrupted for you um i don't whether that's through abuse or through a family that um that idolized the way that people look at the expense of their spirits and their minds, whatever that misuse is, does not give us permission to discard what God created for our good. We are still called to cultivate beauty. And it feels like once something is broken, it's easier to toss it in the trash can and find an alternative. But we cannot do that with beauty or with femininity either. Okay, now.

This next section is called Beauty Cultivated. So we have beauty created, beauty corrupted, and now we're going to talk about cultivating beauty, beauty cultivated. If God commanded Adam and Eve to cultivate his beautiful garden, then cultivating beauty continues to be our calling today. So I want to challenge all of us to cultivate beauty wherever we are. It doesn't matter what stage of life we are in. We are called to cultivate beauty and bring joy to those around us. And that can be physical beauty. It can be the stuff that we see with our eye. But beauty is not limited to that. Beauty has to be body, mind, and spirit. Cultivate beauty. And here's a little caveat. Cultivate beauty, but never at the expense of function. Our homes should be beautiful.

And the beauty should be in conjunction with and inseparable from their function. Two of my very good friends growing up lived in houses that were perfect in every conceivable way. One of those houses, it's because ostensibly the mother had intense allergy problems. And so everything was like... everything was white, everything was dust-free, smudge-free, fingerprint-free. Now, I'm not denying that this woman had allergies. I'm sure she had allergies, but it was all part and parcel with the way that they lived. Everything was perfectly controlled in their home, and I'll tell you, I was never comfortable in their home. It was... An aesthetic that was not friendly, not welcoming. And they were actually very hospitable people. They had people into their home all the time. But if you're afraid to set something down because it's going to be in the wrong place, that's not a welcoming feeling, okay? Now, my other friend, her house was also perfect. And I mean perfect, like magazine interior. Like I open magazines and I'm like, yeah, that's not as nice as...

is the house I grew up going to, you know? And the reason their houses were perfect was that, I say houses because they moved a lot. It's because her mom built spec homes and then sold them and then would build another spec home and they would move into it and then they would sell that one and move into another one. And so these houses really were like magazine spreads. And you didn't wear your shoes in the house. However... Even though it was clean and it was way too clean for my liking, these houses were welcoming. They would have been more welcoming had we been allowed to, you know, make a few more messes. But the entire atmosphere, the tone of the home was very different. So what I'm saying is, when we cultivate beauty, That should never be at the expense of the function. It has to go together, right? The form and the function go together. Now, okay, I'm going to bring up a little, I have to be careful. I have a problem with perfectly manicured hands.

I can't see any of your hands right now, so if I am offending anybody, I don't know who, and I don't know any of you well enough. But we have to be careful that our love of beauty and that our cultivation of beauty in our homes, in our bodies, in our children is not at the expense of function, right? And oftentimes when we try to look beautiful, when we try to make a space look beautiful, even if it's not in opposition, it's at least in competition with the use of that space or the use of that body, right? And so we see in our culture that women are not wanting to destroy their bodies by getting pregnant or they're not wanting to damage their bodies by carrying a pregnancy to full term. So they're scheduling early inductions or early C-sections to make sure that they don't have the final damage of those last.

several weeks of pregnancy. And then we see houses that children aren't free to be children in, right? It's easier to hand them an iPad than to let them trash the living room or play with Play-Doh, you know? So I just want to warn that there are certain standards of beauty in our culture that do send a message. Perfect hands and perfect fingernails indicate that you don't actually have to work, right? That comes from the idea that you are, and it doesn't really mean this in our culture anymore, but originally. It would have meant, if you had perfect fingernails, that you never had to do your own laundry or cooking or cleaning or really had to do any physical manual labor with your own hands. So be careful that your own beauty standards are not preventing you from being able to do the work of caring for your family cheerfully, okay? I do get a manicure every once in a while, and when I do, I'm like, I don't want to be doing no dishes, you know?

doing the dishes because it's gonna mess up my fingernails you know and I want them to last more than one day so just be careful that whatever beauty standard you put in place for yourself it's not in opposition or in competition with the work the good work God's put in front of you I mean hey if you got money and you don't have to do your own dishes or cleaning your laundry Get your hands manicured, sure thing. But if you're at a stage in life where that's much of your life is doing that type of work, then don't set that additional hurdle for yourself of cheerfulness in that work that God set before you by doing your hands perfectly. Maybe I only say that because I have really ugly hands. I have very old hands.

My hands are like 15 years older than my face somehow. So cultivate beauty, but never at the expense of function. Same goes for our bodies. We should cultivate beauty in our bodies and clothes in such a way that it does not present a stumbling block for others. So we've talked about don't set a stumbling block for yourself by having unreasonable standard of beauty. But now we also do not want to... present a stumbling block for others. There are so many ways of doing this. Of course, the first thing we think when we hear stumbling block if we've grown up in the church is what? Modesty, right? Be modest, right? And this is a real concern. We should, this is most obviously, we do not want to present a stumbling block for others by dressing immodestly. We don't want to dress immodestly to attract the eyes of another man.

But there are many other ways to present a stumbling block. Another stumbling block is to neglect our appearance and communicate to a watching world that the job of wife and mother does not allow any time for us to shower or care for ourselves. Let's be careful what we're communicating. There are many, many ditches to fall in when it comes to beauty and caring for our bodies. I mean, there are just so many pitfalls, right? Another is to, this sort of has more to do with the look on your face and what we communicate with our faces. Another stumbling block would be to look like we believe that the life of a Christian is only in the mind and spirit. We talked about this earlier. God gave us bodies, and those are good gifts. God cares about our bodies and created them for good works.

and for good food, and for good times. We could talk for a week about the pitfalls that there are, but I'm going to stop there. Well, I'm not going to stop, stop. I'm not going to stop, stop, but I'm going to stop on that section. I want to challenge you all to appreciate beauty, to notice it, and to draw your kids' attention to it. Notice it in the sunset, in the fresh bloom of a crocus this week. We've just got them starting to peak up out of the ground. It's so beautiful. Notice it in the face of a stranger. Point it out and be broad-minded in your definition of beauty. Try to form your ideas of beauty in conjunction or be informed.

by scripture's definition of beauty by god's definition of beauty and not by our culture's definition of beauty it is so hard to do that okay i know i know it's hard but a lot of it has to do with what you feed on um it takes a lot of work to figure out what works with our With our body, what our style is, what works with our chapter of life, what we can wear while also nursing a baby or while also cleaning a bathroom. It's complicated, right? So it's okay. Do some research in the ungodly places and figure it out. Figure out what works for you. But as much as possible, try not to allow your definition of beauty to be informed by the world and try to have it formed by God. God made just beauty that just splashes forth from all sorts of sources, right? If you want to get outside of your own head and America's definition of beauty, it's a little harder in this.

in the globalization of the last you know decades in the internet but look at um traditional dresses okay it's harder because of globalization it's also easier because we have the internet and you can go online and be like what did traditional you know nordic dresses look like what did traditional african dresses look like what did um the beadwork on their, you know, ceremonial. I mean, this stuff is truly beautiful and it makes you realize that our aesthetic in America is a little limited, right? It's a little limited. So try to open your eyes a little bit to what was considered beautiful in the past and what is considered beautiful in other countries. And that will help just sort of blow open the dusty corners of your mind a little bit to how we define beauty in, you know, 2024 in America.

Challenge yourself to speak about beauty in such a way that your children have a truer understanding of it than you yourself grew up with, an understanding that's less shackled by the narrow definition dictated by our culture. Notice someone else's beauty and compliment it. Now, I did not say notice their cute shirt and compliment it, which I actually just did to Olivia. I was like, I love your shirt. But I'm not saying don't ever compliment somebody on their clothes, but I am saying notice beauty. Don't just notice a nice thing. Compliment somebody on their beauty. You know, there was this woman who was the cash register, cashier. She wasn't a cash register. She was the cashier at our local Aldi. And she just, she shone. And she brightened up the day of every single person that went through her line. And you think, well, that is a choice, right?

That's a choice. And so I was watching her interact with these strangers and just brighten up their day. And if you've been to Aldi, you know like they don't mess around. Like she's moving fast. But in the process of moving fast, she's also making everybody happy. We're good. And I told her, you know, as I went through the line, I said, you. are beautiful you just you are so beautiful and you know that's can be a little bit weird as a woman in America to say that to another woman but I think she understood I did not mean it in a sexual way and I just said you have like you just sort of lighten up the brighten up the room um you have a beautiful smile and I I think that that's the type of thing we need to work towards more, is noticing beauty instead of style, noticing beauty instead of chic, and putting a word of encouragement into somebody else's day. Also, challenge yourself to point out shades of beauty that you yourself don't have.

Ouch, right? But notice where somebody else thrives, even if it's something that you yourself aren't good at. Beauty is so competitive, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can lift one another up in encouragement and say, I love this. I love that. This is beautiful. We don't have to be threatened by someone else's very different embodiment of beauty. Our countenance and our appearance speak volumes about what we believe. If we believe, as 1 Corinthians 15, 19 says, if we believe that we are of all men most to be pitied, that will show in our face. It will show in our haggard and self-pitying faces. If we believe that Christ's yoke is easy and his burden is light, that will show in our faces.

and it will sound in our voices. You know, if you've ever worked a customer service phone job, you've been told, smile when you talk on the phone. The person on the other line can tell, right? Your voice changes when you're smiling, even if it's a fake smile. But if you're smiling, your voice sounds different. There's a good reason for smiling to others because it communicates what we believe about the gospel. All right, now last but not least, I know I'm I'm going a little bit over time, but our last point is beauty commissioned. Beauty has a job to do. All right. John Calvin, a friend of mine, gave me a print with this quote on it. And it says, there is not one blade of grass. There is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice. So beauty is like a giant arrow. It's pointing at something.

Either it points to God or it points to man. Just like we have to serve somebody, beauty has to serve somebody. Is it self-serving or is it God-serving? Beauty must adorn our faith. Outward beauty must point to God just like inner beauty does. Outward beauty devoid of pointing to God is just vanity, okay? And inner beauty... that doesn't point to God is just moralism. These both end in very ugly places. Beauty for beauty's sake is superficial and empty. Real beauty cannot only be seen, but also be heard and felt. A beautiful home is not beautiful if there's no food in it, right? It's empty and sad. A beautiful home is not beautiful if there's no laughter, if there's no music, if there's no books.

I think I can safely say that. Beauty for beauty's sake is an affront to our creator. He created us with hearts and minds, and it's a package deal. Beauty used to draw attention to ourselves is immodest, even when it isn't revealing. All right? I grew up in a time when modesty and, you know, now they call it... Purity culture, was that what it's called? Okay, so like a lot of the kids that I grew up with were homeschooled, very conservative, very like Bob Jones, Bill Gothard, like that stuff, if that means anything to you. But this is sort of the culture that I grew up, not in, because that wasn't my family, but many of the families from our church were.

from that culture, from that Christian subculture, I should say. And there was one family in our church who was homeschooled, but it was clear that their priority was to distance themselves from all of that. And so this daughter had since started attending public school, and she wasn't going to flaunt her body in an immodest way. revealing way because she knew that that wouldn't fly in our church and that really she knew I think on her conscience she would have known that that was wrong however No one had ever taught her that immodesty is not just revealing, wearing a top that's too revealing. And this girl was an attention whore. She loved being the center of attention. And the way she accomplished it was by always pretending as if she didn't want to be the center of attention. So if someone said, how are you? She would say, well, why do you care? And that was just her default. She was just toxic. But she was my friend.

And I remember her coming home from school one day and telling me that she had worn a blanket as her dress to school. She had put on this big blanket and pinned it in such a way that she could wear it to school all day. And she's like, everybody was just so surprised that I wore this blanket to school. And, you know, it's just what I felt like wearing. And I'm like, yeah, it's just what you feel. felt like wearing, you know. But everywhere she went, she was just bound and determined to have people comment on her dress. So she was always wearing something funky and weird. And I'm not saying don't ever wear something funky, but she had only one purpose. It wasn't for fun. It wasn't for her own personal enjoyment, even though that's what she claimed. It was only because she wanted people to notice her. Don't be that. Please don't do that.

There's more than one way to be immodest, and if you are wearing a ball gown to a basketball game, that's immodest. If you're wearing basketball attire to a wedding, that's immodest. There's a lot of ways to be immodest, and it's by drawing unnecessary attention to yourself for the wrong reasons. Look like a woman. Glory in your womanhood. This is something that's been a challenge for me growing up. I was always a tomboy, always hanging out with my brother and his friends. And I have never had curves. And men's clothes, I've always been a little too tall for women's clothes. And so it's just always easier to wear men's clothes.

And in high school, I was always shopping the vintage clothing stores, and that was kind of a thing then, but I just dressed like an old man. I was always wearing a Mr. Rogers cardigan and some old corduroys hanging off my hips. That was my aesthetic. And as I got older, I learned that I needed to dress like a woman, and I needed to... cultivate femininity and I still have a lot of men's pants in my wardrobe and I wear them regularly so I'm not trying to set up some crazy rules here but I am saying that you should look like you like being a lady okay and you should look like a lady Like, it's okay for people to know that you have a set of breasts and a set of hips. That's okay. We're supposed to. And in our culture, you know, maybe in other cultures that was needed to be completely hidden. But in our culture, it's not. It's not immodest for people to know that there is, you know, a female body there. We should look like we're happy to be women. And we should teach our daughters the same.

Looking to cultivate modesty should not come at the expense of beauty. We should teach our daughters and dress them in such a way that they too are really happy to be born girls and ladies and women. I love this quote. Your dress, I can't remember who said it, probably some godless woman, but she said, I like for my dress to be tight enough to show I'm a woman and loose enough to show I'm a lady. I think that's a good standard. So make your beauty, commission your beauty. Your beauty should be commissioned to say something about the gospel. We want to make biblical sexuality attractive to strangers. We want to make it attractive to children. People should not look at our life and our appearance and our face and hope that whatever befell.

Us never befalls them, you know. Our spirits should not make the world alluring to our children. Our love of beauty and cultivation of beauty should inoculate our children to the world's empty beauty, which is devoid of true joy. I think of two different women that I grew up with going to our church. And as, you know, like 11-year-old girl, I remember noticing that both of them had lips that always looked like this. Just these tight little lines, and I thought, well, that's an odd thing about their faces. And at that age, they didn't really know that it was, like I said, it was a whole package deal. And really, their lives were perfectly controlled, okay? Their children were always controlled, and their homes were always controlled.

By the time their daughters were in early adulthood, they were both estranged from their mothers. Now, I'm not saying that you can draw a direct line from that straight line of their lips to their estrangement from their daughters, but it's connected, okay? The way that your face looks speaks volume about the gospel. And your daughters are watching. Your sons are watching. So, make commission beauty. to speak truth from scripture. One last thing that I feel like I can't talk about beauty without at least mentioning body image and weight. Our weight is not a function of our sanctification. Women's bodies come in all shapes and sizes. And you might look at me and think, well, easy for you to say you've got our culture's definition of a nice body.

Like currently, you know, if it had been 100 years ago, I would have been popping pills trying to gain weight, right? And, you know, I told you guys it was a struggle for me. I wanted to dress in men's clothes. I usually did because it's hard to find clothes that fit when you're just very tall and thin. However, this does not make me godly. It doesn't make me self-controlled. It doesn't make me sanctified. Men love curves. So for me, you know, through all my life, I've been like, well, wouldn't it be nice to have some curves? And it looks so beautiful and it looks so feminine. And I've never had that. And that's okay for me, right? That's okay. I can live without curves. But you can live with curves. And you can love the fact that God gave you curves. And you do not have to be our culture's definition of...

thin or attractive or healthy to be attractive and healthy. So don't tie your weight to your idea of whether you are pleasing to God, because that's just not how it works, okay? If you have to work on your weight, if that's something that is necessary for you, don't talk about it in front of your daughters, okay? Don't set them up for having the same twisted ideas about body image that our culture teaches. If you have to be on a diet, make it very clear that it has to do with wanting to be strong enough and healthy enough to continue to care for your family and not to fit into your old genes. That's just a toxic way of talking about our bodies. God gave us good bodies that come in all shapes and sizes. And for all that our culture gets wrong, I really love the body positivity image or movement, sorry. I love that. Let's embrace all the different shapes and sizes and colors, okay? And let's make sure that our daughters know to do the same. In closing, I want to give you guys two resources, two books that are both really short and really good. One is called True Beauty by Carolyn Mahaney. I listened to that this week in preparation for this talk.

You can listen to it on Hoopla if you guys have that. You can get the audio book for free. You can borrow it for free, but it also comes in paperback, and it's cheap. Carolyn Mahaney, True Beauty. Yeah, and the second one is not about beauty, and yet it is so good. It is called Competing Spectacles. It's by Tony Renke. I don't know how to say his last name. Competing Spectacles. Treasuring Christ in the Media Age. And it has to do with what we set our eyes on informing what our hearts believe. So on the one hand, we think whatever we believe in our hearts is going to determine what we look at. But it goes the other way, too. Whatever we set our eyes on ends up changing our functional theology. So those are two books that I really highly recommend on this issue.

Let's close in prayer. Dear Father, we thank you for this day. Thank you that we can be here together. Pray that you would bless these women, bless us with a vision of your beauty, and cause us to want to look like Jesus. And we pray all this in your name. Amen.