Holy Women Are Beautiful!

Holy Women ARE Beautiful!

1 Peter 3:1-6

We live in a society where sex sells and sells big. Sex is used to sell everything from acne medication to every type of material possession imaginable. Everyone wants to be one of the "beautiful people" and will buy, sell or sacrifice all to be in that select group. To be sexy is everything and even eight and ten year olds seek that look. I have seen ten-year old girls dressed up and made up to look like cheap harlots. They are already trying to be sexy before they even know what sex is all about. Sadly, pedophiles do know and when we dress up children up like adults we just whet the appetites of the perverse and place our children in jeopardy.

It is no wonder for even Barbie and Ken and friends are babes and hunks. If I have seen the new more realistic Barbie I have not noticed much of a difference. They were supposed to make her more portioned like an average women to prevent young girls from becoming anorexic trying to achieve an unrealistic goal for their bodies. I guess I missed the change. I like the bumper sticker I saw that says, "If Barbie is so great why do you have to buy all her friends?"

What causes this is an over emphasis on the external and a total rejection of the internal or spiritual. The flower of youth soon fades, but the soul is eternal. It is far better to have a beautiful soul than a body that will wither in forty years and then left to decompose until the return of Christ.

Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fare and all the rest of those magazines do not desire you to be truly beautiful. Their only goal is to make money and they do it through the promise of great sex. Worldly beauty totally revolves around that concept. Just read all the advice articles in those magazines. Sex is everything and if you want to have sex you have to be desirable or beautiful and the designers and counselors of this world will show you how to become that.

Sadly, many Christian women fall for the same illusion the world creates while they would not seek its solution in unbridled or illegitimate sex. A point in case would be the mini-skirt. It is making a comeback in some areas. The designer of the mini-skirt said that she designed it to tell the world that she was ready for any man, anywhere, and anytime. That is not exactly a spiritual goal. Yet, at a homecoming in a NC church they had photos of the church and members from the sixties. In the front row of one of those pictures was the wife of one of my college professors. She was wearing a mini-skirt. Not a micro-mini, but still a mini-skirt. I know that neither she nor her husband would espouse or endorse any such philosophy as that designer’s. Nevertheless she was wearing the uniform of the philosophy thinking it harmless and just fashion.

When I was in college in the early eighties, the slit dress was just becoming popular and many Christian women picked up on the fad. I told you before that the college had a rule that the slit could not go above the knee and one young lady in Pharisee or lawyer fashion tacked it at the knee since the rule did not mention holes and now she had a slit and a hole.

When I did a study on I Timothy 2:9 and the concept of modest apparel I found that the slit dress was not a new design. The author of the commentary I was reading had been dead about a hundred years and thus had no vested interest in the current controversy. He described the various types of attire during the time of Paul’s writing and one fit the description of the new fashion. It was only worn by very young children for ease of elimination and by prostitutes who were given a long Greek name that translates as showers of the thigh. Solomon was right when he said there was nothing new under the sun. Human sexuality without God has not changed since the fall and will not change until conversion or the New Jerusalem.

The school was considered legalistic by many of the students because of the rule banning that style of dresses. However, if we stick to our belief that we interpret Scripture by its historical context as well as the grammar than it would be very easy to see that if Paul would have considered that type of attire immodest in his day it is most likely still immodest. There are other artistic things like vanishing points and subconscious symbolism and even the concept of neon signs that could be used to show that style and others are really not modest apparel. Paul says that men are to treat women "as mothers and sisters in all purity." I Timothy 5:12. When you buy into the fashion that passes away and is certainly not of a godly viewpoint you make it much harder for men to do this. I Corinthians 7:31