Beauty

I’m Ashley and I’m a biblical counseling intern this summer at Lighthouse.
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I just finished my second year of college at Columbia, which is in New York, but I grew up in Torrance.
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So I’m not much older than many of you, but my hope is to share a little of my story and what I’ve learned over the last few years about beauty.
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This topic is quite close to my heart because for as long as I can remember, I’ve cared about the way I look.
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I have always wanted to be beautiful.
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Everyone does.
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Why else do Instagram influencers Photoshop their bodies or why do K pop idols get plastic surgery to alter their faces?
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Our culture is obsessed with beauty.
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We end up watching youtube makeup tutorials overspending on the latest clothing trends, planning out 10 step skincare routines.
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Why do you try on three different outfits in the morning?
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Why do you take 10 different photos before finding one to post on social media?
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And why do you stand in front of the mirror and worry about your face, your hair and your body?
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I think it’s safe to assume that you also want to be beautiful.
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I don’t know one woman young or old who doesn’t.
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I also don’t know one woman who never feels insecure about the way she looks.
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Personally.
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I once felt so insecure about my body that I restricted my diet to the point of endangering my health.
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I spent two years recovering from an eating disorder.
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It was the desire for beauty that drove me there.
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The struggle may look different or similar for you.
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But regardless, I know that beauty often feels like a never ending cycle of anxiety, exhaustion, shame, and self clothing.
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Yet I want you to imagine with me what it would be like to be free of all of it.
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What would life be like if you weren’t worried about the way you look?
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Imagine picking out an outfit in the morning without wondering what your classmates will think.
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Imagine not feeling ashamed by the number on the scale.
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Imagine posting that picture that may not look the most flattering but captures a moment you dearly want to remember.
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Can you picture it a life of freedom in my own struggle?
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I realized two very important things that I want you to know too.
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First God cares about beauty.
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He cares even more than you or I He cares so much that He tells us in his word, what true beauty looks like.
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And second God cares about you.
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He wants you to be free.
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So we’re going to look at scripture together and see what God our creator wants us to know about beauty.
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We have four main points today.
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Beauty is one defined by God, two distorted in a fallen world, three displayed in Christ and for developed through faith.
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We’re going to take these one at a time.
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Starting with our first point.
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Beauty is defined by God.
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Beauty is all over the Bible.
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The Bible describes many women as beautiful.
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Sarah Rachel, Bathsheba Esther.
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In song of songs, an extended love poem between a married couple, the bridegroom calls his bride beautiful again and again, since every word in scripture is intended by God, every word is significant.
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And since God mentions beauty in his word, we know that beauty is important, relevant and meaningful to Him.
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God cares about beauty.
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He created it.
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Yet, even though the Bible mentions outer appearance, we find much, much more about a kind of beauty that’s not as visible, the kind of beauty that God spends far more time on.
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And many more words on is internal, a beauty that describes the heart scripture tells us the Lord sees not as man sees, man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.
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And so to God, what matters far more than your appearance is your heart.
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God cares about what’s on the inside and He tells us what his standard of beauty looks like as the Apostle Peter writes do not let your adorning be external, the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry or the clothing you wear.
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But let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit which in God’s sight is very precious.
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Again, notice how scripture contrasts the outside with the inside.
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God cares about the hidden person of the heart.
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Far more than any external adorning truly precious.
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Beauty is found in a gentle and quiet spirit, in God’s sight, the kind of beauty worth pursuing is the beauty of contentment, peace and trust in Him.
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He loves it when our hearts rest in Him.
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I want us to pause and consider how much better God’s standard of beauty is compared to the world.
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The world’s standard of beauty is literally impossible.
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You have to have flawless skin and hair, a perfect form and figure.
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The standard is so rigid that most people are born unable to ever measure up.
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You simply aren’t born with ideal bone structure or body type.
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And so in the world’s eyes, you will simply never be beautiful, but God’s standard isn’t arbitrary or harsh.
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The beauty he wants to see in us is good.
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It’s a quiet soul and gentle strength.
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These qualities are not burdensome, growing in them, developing an inward beauty is not an endless race but an ever increasing rest.
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Do you want this kind of beauty?
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Are you pursuing God’s standard of beauty.
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Chances are you’re like me, you do want to pursue the inward beauty of Godliness that is very precious to God.
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You know, his standard is good.
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But if you’re honest, you also want to be beautiful on the world’s eyes.
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You’d like to care less about how you look.
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But you can’t just make yourself stop caring.
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Why is it so hard for us to look past her outward appearance?
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Why is it so difficult to see inward beauty as very precious?
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Why are we so superficial?
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Well, the answer comes in our second point, beauty is distorted in a fallen world.
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Beauty is distorted in a fallen world.
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Part of the reason why it’s so hard to stop craving outward beauty is that our culture is constantly feeding it to us.
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It’s the air we breathe.
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You see it everywhere.
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Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest TV, celebrities and pop culture, idols who gets to be famous, popular envied, who gets followers and likes and brand sponsorships.
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It’s the people who have the face, the body, the wardrobe that fits the world’s standard of beauty.
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If this ideal of beauty is constantly surrounding us, we should not be surprised that it’s so hard to see past it.
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Think about some of your favorite places to shop.
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Everything about the shopping experience is designed to make you want to spend money.
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How do they do that?
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They promise something?
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Maybe it’s equal friend group or confidence or empowerment or maybe even looking like Olivia Rodrigo, whatever it is, marketing campaigns are masters at promising you something.
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If you just buy this piece of clothing, this brand of makeup, you’ll be beautiful enough to be wanted to be comfortable in your own skin to be capable.
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Can you recognize this voice in your own life?
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What is beauty promising you?
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Is it friends, popularity, self esteem, a sense of accomplishment.
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I want us to recognize that the world is constantly promising what it can never give.
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Wearing clothes from Paxson or Brandy Melville or American Eagle will not give you lifelong friendships.
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Makeup isn’t going to magically erase your insecurities.
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Even a pair of $100 lululemon leggings will fail to make you powerful or healthy or strong.
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They’re just things.
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So why do we still want them?
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Why do we keep falling for empty promises?
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Why does all of this still work on us?
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Well, the only ultimate reason why advertisements work on us is because we want what they promise as scripture tells us each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his or her own desire.
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And so our own desire lies at the root of the problem.
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What are you desiring?
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What are you seeking to get from beauty?
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Maybe it’s acceptance you want to belong, fit in, be greeted at school and have friends in all your classes.
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Maybe you’re seeking admiration.
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If only your peers would look at you with respect and a little envy if only you could be seen as important or maybe you want security.
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Sometimes you wonder what if I’m not pretty enough to be liked by anyone?
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What if I’m alone forever?
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If we’re honest so often we’re driven by the fear of rejection, loneliness or insignificance.
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In other words, we fear how others will see us.
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I don’t just want to be beautiful.
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I want to be beautiful in the eyes of other people.
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You might be wondering what’s wrong with that.
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Maybe this is just life.
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It’s inescapable.
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Everyone struggles like that.
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So what if I want to be pretty and liked by other people?
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If you’ve ever found yourself thinking that way you’re actually not alone giving in like this is what drives people to plastic surgery.
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It’s also why a couple centuries ago women wore corsets so narrow that they couldn’t breathe and girls in China wrapped their feet so tight that sometimes their toes fell off.
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If you let beauty determine your life.
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If you submit to the world’s idolatry of beauty, it will rule you and demand everything from you, including your body, your health and your happiness.
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That is exactly what happened to me three years ago when my desire to be thin, overcame everything else in my life.
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At my lowest point, I wrote to myself, I would rather see a number on a scale go down than be happy.
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I’m afraid of not caring about my weight anymore.
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I’m afraid of letting myself become happy and ugly.
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I would rather be pretty than happy.
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I was willing to sacrifice almost anything to reach my ideal of beauty.
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And it was pretty terrible.
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It wrecked my body and my health and sucked all joy out of my life.
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I was enslaved and constantly afraid and I willingly chose this because I believed beauty would make me attractive and accepted and desirable to others.
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So please hear my heart in this, I have felt the deep shame of insecurity, constantly feeling like I was falling short, worried that no one would ever find me pretty.
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It’s painful, but you will not find rest in continuing to pursue the world standard of beauty.
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It’s a lie and a trap.
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Do you see this and to make matters worse?
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The Bible calls this endless pursuit of beauty idolatry.
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If you’ve been around lighthouse long enough, you’ve heard the word idolatry before.
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It simply means worshiping and serving something other than God.
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Beauty becomes an idol and we would rather be outwardly beautiful than inwardly beautiful.
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It’s an idol when it drives our decisions, what to eat, what to wear, what to buy.
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And this idolatry in God’s eyes is actually quite ugly.
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Proverbs 1122 like a gold ring and a pig snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.
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We can be very beautiful outwardly and in the sight of others while being ugly inwardly and in God’s sight and So as long as we continue to chase worldly standards of beauty, we will in reality be ugly in a much more serious way for God is the only final judge.
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This is all quite bad news.
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Not only does the world set up an impossibly high standard of beauty, but the Bible calls us out on how hopeless we truly are.
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We fall short of the world standard, we feel God’s standard even more spectacularly.
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This is very sobering and scary and it should be.
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But recognizing our hopelessness paves the way for the bright hope of the gospel.
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God loves to show his strength in our weakness and his beauty in our ugliness.
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And so we come to our third point, beauty is displayed in Christ.
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One of the turning points in my recovery from my eating disorder was seeing my spiritual ugliness.
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I was struck by how similar I am to the scribes that Jesus condemns in Luke 20 who like to walk around in long robes and love greetings in the marketplaces and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts who devour widows houses and for a pretense, make long prayers.
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I saw how my pursuit of beauty came from the same heart, a heart that longed to be honored and admired and recognized.
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I wanted to be seen, endured by others.
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And like the scribes, this longing to be praised by others, makes us indifferent, unloving and vicious, which is truly ugly.
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Do we see the sin of our hearts as ugly?
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Do we see our envy, our pride, our self-centeredness as ugly.
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Do we recognize how much worse this ugliness is compared to any earthly outward insecurity?
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Because the good news is that Jesus is so different from you and me, his beauty becomes clearer to us.
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When we see the pride of our own hearts, he called himself gentle and lowly.
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He was a friend of sinners.
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Isaiah describes him as having no form or majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him.
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He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and as one from me, from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not, this is significant for at least two reasons.
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First reason Jesus understands what rejection feels like.
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He was not outwardly attractive.
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He was mocked, hated and scorned.
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He understands you when you feel excluded and rejected.
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And second reason, this is significant, Jesus willingly gave up the splendor and glory of heaven to live a humble, lowly life on earth.
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He became a servant of the very humans he created and he came freely.
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It was love that drove him to live a difficult life and to die, a painful undeserved death.
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The good news of the gospel is that Jesus took the ugliness of our sin upon himself, bearing the shame we deserve so that we would not have to in his death on the cross.
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He was so bloody and tortured that his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance and his form beyond that of the Children of mankind.
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In other words, Jesus became so ugly in his death that he didn’t even look human anymore.
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And in his death and resurrection, he has made us beautiful in God’s sight.
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He wears our ugliness and sin.
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We wear his beauty and righteousness.
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Isaiah uses the imagery of beauty again and again, Isaiah 61 3, a beautiful headdress instead of ashes.
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Isaiah 6110.
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He has clothed me with the garments of salvation.
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He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.
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As a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels, Isaiah 62 3.
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You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord and a royal diadem in the hands of your God.
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This is Christ’s beauty.
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We are wearing his beauty, not ours, which is found in his humility and love.
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The reason why God tells us to pursue inward beauty is because He wants us to look like Christ.
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That’s what it means to grow.
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The Gospel is a promise that God will make us beautiful.
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The church is the bride of Christ made beautiful by his grace.
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Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of the water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish, this is a promise that we will be made beautiful in God’s sight.
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What does this mean for us?
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It means that God created us for beauty.
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If you want to be beautiful, if you desire beauty, there is nothing wrong with you.
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What goes wrong is when we only chase after a beauty defined by the world, one that looks only at outward appearances, you were made for more outward beauty is not a bad thing.
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Remember how many women in the Bible were called beautiful, but you were made to be more than just a pretty exterior to look at.
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And it is only in the gospel wearing the righteousness of Christ made clean by Him.
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Though you find the true beauty of Christ likeness.
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This is a beauty that is imperishable instead of fading with age, it will only grow more brilliant.
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This is a beauty that will shine in splendor and eternity.
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And this is a beauty that is very precious in God’s sight.
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Do you see this beauty in Christ?
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Are you in awe of His humility?
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His mercy, his gentleness.
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Do you long to be beautiful like Him?
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I pray that your answer is yes.
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At the same time.
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If we’re honest we often want to see Christ as beautiful, but struggle to actually see his beauty ourselves.
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I’ve been there before.
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So I would love to leave you with a few practical ways that the Lord has shown his beauty in.
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And to me, our last point for the day, beauty is developed through faith.
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One thing I want us to recognize is that biblical beauty is strong.
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Do you remember the first Peter three passage we read way back at the beginning here, God describes inward beauty as gentle and quiet, but that does not mean being a pushover because right after this verse, Peter mentioned Sarah as one example of this kind of beautiful womanhood.
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And he adds, you are her Children.
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That is you are like her.
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If you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening, true beauty is unafraid, bold and courageous.
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In John Piper’s words, the woman who gets up in the morning and spends endless hours on her face and worries about her figure is frightened all of the time.
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She is very insecure.
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But we want mighty women of the word, mighty women of God who are fearless.
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And that comes from hoping in God and so true beauty is developed through faith in God.
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How do we do that?
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Well, becoming a fearless woman.
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If God takes time, it’s a daily decision to die to yourself and your own desires.
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So there isn’t a single answer.
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But for today, I have three brief suggestions.
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First guard your heart, guard your heart against worldly influences that are teaching you to value superficial beauty.
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It’s true that our culture is constantly feeding us a distorted view of beauty.
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You can’t avoid every negative influence.
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But at the same time, we often spend far too much time under unhelpful influences.
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Social media is especially relevant here.
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If you do have social media, what kind of beauty is it encouraging you to pursue?
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Be honest with yourself.
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What kind of beauty does Instagram or tiktok make you want?
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On the flip side?
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When you post, what thoughts are going through your head?
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Are you thinking about honoring God and loving others or are you thinking about glorifying yourself by making yourself look beautiful?
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Are you more driven by the admiration of others than the glory of God?
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I know these are really hard questions to answer honestly.
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And it was because of my own susceptibility to social media that I quit Instagram a year ago.
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I had many reasons to stay.
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I didn’t want to lose friendships.
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I had spent hours making my feed match the same color scheme.
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I didn’t want to lose my archive of photos, but none of those things were as important as growing my joy in God.
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Not saying everyone has to quit social media, but I am saying that we should seriously consider how it affects our worship.
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And for those of you who aren’t on social media if you want to be, don’t just think about all the fun you’re missing out on.
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But consider how it may be a blessing to be shielded from it.
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Often being away from social media provides the space in our lives to develop a delight in God and in His word second, grow your wonder.
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We’ve spent this whole time talking about our beauty, the beauty of people.
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But the beauty that God has given us to enjoy is far more broad.
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God has made much of his creation beautiful.
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What’s the most beautiful place you’ve been?
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For me?
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It’s Riverside Park in New York.
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I lived just a few minutes away last year and it was absolutely stunning in both fall and spring.
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The trees bloomed so vividly and God made all of it.
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He colored every petal on every flower.
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He caused every leaf to fall at the exact moment that it did.
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He made his world beautiful just because he could, as I began to recognize the beauty of God’s creative wisdom, I also saw myself as way, way smaller.
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I mattered, way less.
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God lets me enjoy his beautiful creation.
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I just want to soak it in.
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Who cares if I think my eyes are too small.
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If I can use them to see God’s beauty in his handiwork.
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There is so much to wonder at if we would only take our gazes off of ourselves and learn to look up and out, finally give yourself to God.
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And what I really mean by this is realize that you already belong to God.
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He made you.
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Why did he make you?
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Ephesians 210 tells us we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
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God created us for good works.
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He created us to actively glorify Him.
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That is the purpose of every atom of who you are, That includes your body, every arm and leg, every hair on your head, every inch of skin, every feature of your face that you feel insecure about.
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The purpose of your body is not to be attractive or to make you feel good about yourself.
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But to reflect the glory of God, can you serve your family around the house with your energy and your strength?
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Can you sing songs to God with your lips?
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Can you enjoy delicious food with a grateful heart?
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I praise God for giving us these gifts to enjoy His beauty.
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And while belonging to God does mean living for Him and living his way, I don’t want you to miss the comfort of being His, the Heidelberg catechism.
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A series of questions and answers to explain.
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The Christian faith asks in its very first question, what is your only comfort in life and in death?
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The answer that I am not my own but belong with body and soul, both in life and death.
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It’s my faithful Savior Jesus.
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Christ.
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This friends is my comfort.
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And I hope yours too that in life and in death, whether I feel accepted or rejected, confident or ashamed, beloved or despised, beautiful or ugly, I belong to Christ.
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He is altogether lovely.
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He is beautiful friends.
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Let us look at the beauty of Christ.