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/