The Gospel Confronts The Way We Use Beauty

The Gospel confronts the way we use beauty to get acceptance. We can spend hundreds of hours on a treadmill or in the tanning booth and spend thousands of dollars on beauty products and treatments and still have no guarantee that the world will accept us.

If you try to attract someone who cares more about your physical beauty, you’ll have to spend your whole life maintaining your body to hold onto them. If you try to win God with your inner beauty, you’ll have to spend your whole life morally outperforming everyone else to hold onto him - which doesn’t work anyway because the bible says that all of us are morally unclean despite our best efforts (Isa. 64:6).

Having a nice body may get you into a night club or fraternity party and having a nice moral record may get you into a certain spiritual community, but neither of these are enough to get you into the gates of heaven.

Tim Keller points out: “If we struggle to live up to others’ standard of beauty, how will we ever become beautiful enough for God’s standard?” In other words, in the end, is there any hope for us?

The answer lies in the person and work of Jesus.

Jesus had unimaginable beauty and acceptance in heaven, but he gave it all up when he came humbly as a plain man into a world that rejected him. Isaiah 53:2-3 says, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men... like one from whom men hide their faces...” Jesus lost his beauty so that you could gain yours.

Ephesians 5:25-27 says, “...Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her... to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish...”

The good news is that the story line of the bible is not what people think - that the gospel is about following all the rules so that we can make ourselves look more beautiful. No, at the heart of the gospel, is Jesus coming down out of heaven to cleanse his bride (the church) so that we might stand acceptable and confident in his sight.

This free gift of beauty is offered to all who trust in The One who purchased it for us at great cost on the cross.

Only when you realize you’ve been cleansed of all your internal beauty flaws by God through the work of Jesus, and know that even your physical beauty will one day be renewed (Phil. 3:21), will you be free from using and pursuing beauty in all the wrong ways.

Deep down we all fear being physically and emotionally exposed for who we really are. Thankfully, we have a God who was stripped, mocked, and rejected in public for our imperfections (on the cross) so that we might be covered with his perfection and never experience shame again (Matt. 27, Ps. 22).

This content was taken from a gospel-centered bible study series that I'm working on called Gifts of God. To download the Beauty & Appearance study and others go to: http://t-zach.com/giftsofgod/

Social Justice and the Non-Christian

When Tim Keller was in college, he kept asking himself: “If [some say that] morality is relative, why isn’t social justice as well?” He’s alluding to the fact that some people think life is gray when it comes to issues of morality but very black and white when it comes to issues like poverty and oppression.

To stand firm on the idea that giving money to the poor is a “duh” black and white issue but that having sex before marriage (for example) is a gray issue – is inconsistent and contradictory.

Someone might reply to this by saying that pre-marital sex is controversial, but giving to the poor is not. They would point out that giving to the poor is known worldwide as a “good” thing. It is not relative. It is just a fact. Pre-martial sex however is not.

Let’s break this down a little more. Because there is a consensus in our culture or country that giving to the poor is a good thing, doesn’t mean it is a fact. There have been billions of people scattered through many cultures and countries who have disagreed with the idea of social justice. There has been much injustice and oppression and murder since the beginning of time by various nations. So which cultures are right? Who gets to claim that they have a better grasp of the truth?

If anything, the people who have practiced injustice are more logical than anyone. If no God exists and a “survival of the fittest” is in play, then giving to the poor would be counter-productive to us staying on top of the food chain. If we are going to survive, then moving to the suburbs, ignoring the poor, and holding onto our money is the most rational option!

However, we all know that there are millions of people who don’t believe in God, yet they want to give money to the poor. Why? Is it because the reasoning behind social justice is logical? No, it is rather more illogical if God doesn’t exist.

It we are here because of a random natural act, then everything is up for grabs. Everything is relative. However, if Creator God uniquely created and shaped the world and the people in it, then our passion for every human to have dignity and value seems very "black and white".