More Than Skin Deep, Part 1

Now, the jewelry might change through the centuries, but the principle warning remains the same. Women, be careful what you wear. Be careful how you gain attention. Be careful in what you might be communicating through what you wear. Don't wear your wealth on your sleeves so to speak. We're not here to tell everybody how much money we've got, especially outside the church then as you represent the gospel. Don't demonstrate to your world that you're all about the stuff they're after. Be careful. When it comes to choosing the clothes you're going to wear, I imagine there are many factors.

What does it cost? How do those clothes make me feel when I wear them? How do they make me look? Today on Wisdom for the Heart, we're going to see that there are some far more important, yet often neglected principles to consider regarding our appearance. Would it help you to know what those principles are? Stephen Davey continues through his series called For Better or For Worse. He has a message today that he's calling More Than Skin Deep.

Here's Stephen with today's lesson. Well, if you were to travel back to the first century, it might surprise you to find the Roman Empire absolutely enamored with clothing and jewelry and physical strength and appeal and the latest fashion. One first century historian wrote that in the empire there were as many hairstyles as there were honeybees. Hair was waved, curled, dyed, sometimes jet black, sometimes auburn. Wigs were imported from Germany and as far away as India. The most popular wigs were blonde.

I guess something's never changed there. Added to the hair were hair bands, pins, combs made of ivory, tortoise shell. And for the wealthy, they were made of gold and studded with gems. You can imagine when the apostles were writing these letters to New Testament churches, silks, pearls, perfumes, jewelry imported from India alone valued in today's economy $2 billion annually. I discovered in my studies that purple was the favorite color because it was the most rare and expensive, difficult to make.

One purple garment would cost as much as the average person's annual income. If you could afford them, diamonds, emeralds, opals were favorites. I read that pearls were actually coveted the most. Nero, the emperor, had a room in his palace where pearls were used as wallpaper.

Just sort of demonstrate he had more than anybody else in his humility. The historian Pliny wrote that the wife of the Emperor Caligula, who was assassinated, by the way, when Jesus was about 16 years old, but Caligula's wife once appeared at a function dressed in a gown covered with pearls at a cost today of $20 million. America didn't discover and invent glamour and glitz. In fact, early Christianity was growing inside a luxuriant and decadent world. Christians were living in a world that was obsessed with the physical appearance. Something's never changed there either. Women in the first century had an array of highly developed cosmetics.

You might have thought, well, you know, back then it was pretty rugged now. They were imported from all around the world. They had rouge for their cheeks, lipstick and a variety of colors, eyeliner in colors that included brown, black and green. They had fingernail polish in colors that included yellow and orange. Their dads don't want their daughters hearing this.

I'm sorry, but this is what was happening. One author wrote that as a result of this obsession in the Roman Empire, women were under enormous pressure to look beautiful and to stay fashionable. Obviously, the first century is no different than the 21st century, is it? I did a little research, which means I did a lot of Googling and found that Americans now spend annually $40 billion on cosmetics. It's a lot of lipstick.

Men are involved, by the way, we're not off the hook. In fact, I read this, Americans shelled out last year $1.4 billion, $1.4 billion just for over-the-counter teeth whiteners. In terms of cosmetic sales worldwide, the country of Japan comes in second to America. America is the leading spender. Japan comes in second. None of these figures, by the way, include cosmetic surgery.

That's another category. That's a $10 billion a year here in America. Endeavor last year, more than 17 million Americans got some kind of tummy tuck, nose job, Botox, facelift, whatever. The trouble is, none of it brings contentment. In fact, there are global surveys done, even though the United States, I read is number one in cosmetic spending, surveys respond in such a way that places our country as number 23 in the quote, satisfied with life category, end quote.

Japan, which is second in spending on cosmetics, ranks 90th in satisfied with life responses. The obsession for physical perfection is moving even more dangerous and invasive. One author wrote an article for the Smithsonian magazine, I read most of it, where he cataloged forms of cosmetic surgeries that are now growing more mainstream and dangerous. For instance, in New York, he wrote, women are having their toes surgically shortened and then strengthened with metal pins so they can fit into three inch Jimmy Choo stiletto heels.

Am I pronouncing Choo right? Okay, how'd you know? At any rate, it's not worth the surgery if you're thinking about it. In China, by the way, where beauty pageants were outlawed for years, they called it spiritual pollution.

They're now taking place throughout the country. And because of the desire to be taller, in fact, taller women are considered more beautiful. A procedure is becoming popular in that country where shin bones are severed, and metal inserts are implanted so that three inches of new bone can be grown. It's a dangerous operation. It's filled with risks of deformation, but you gain three inches of height.

Women throughout Asia are having surgeries on their narrow eyelids to make them rounder, more almond shaped, skin lightening products in Africa are surging in profits. The author concludes, and this is a secular magazine, the Smithsonian, you don't go there for your devotions, but he says this, he says, there is a global quest for bodily perfection, and it has generated a pathological obsession with our bodies. As I read that, I couldn't help but think of the apostle Paul. Paul wrote that the unbelieving world is marked by their devotion to their belly, he calls it.

The belly is a metaphor for the body. In other words, whatever has to do with the body, they worship, they worship. Now, the Bible doesn't endorse a disregard for a healthy body. It doesn't encourage us to misuse it and mistreat it.

I'm going to fit Krispy Kreme somewhere in there, unfortunately. It doesn't tell us that the body doesn't matter, but the apostle Paul, he strikes this balance, and this is all introduction, but let me just sort of set the stage. He writes to Timothy, and he's writing, by the way, in a day when gymnasiums were in every city. Everybody had to worship.

Everybody went there. He said this, bodily discipline is only of a little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things. It holds promise for the present life, but for the life to come, 1 Timothy 4a.

In other words, Paul makes it clear that physical exercise has some value. It's just not as important as spiritual exercise, and he knows that we can lose sight of the fact that the body isn't to be the priority, and the obvious reason he gives is that the body isn't permanent. In fact, you're going to get a new body one day. It's going to be permanent, and by the way, it'll be perfected. It'll still be you, but perfected and immortal. In the meantime, though, Christians face the same struggle with balancing physical appearance with spiritual development. We all have the desire to look as good as we can, but the potential for obsession and imbalance doesn't automatically go away just because you become a Christian.

It takes a revolution in our way of thinking, a transformation of the renewing of our minds so that we can uncover what is truly good and acceptable to God. In fact, I won't ask for a show of hands, but if I ask you to raise your hand, don't do it. Don't do it. You've been daydreaming.

Catch this. Don't do it, okay? But if I ask you to raise your hands, if there was something about you physically, just one thing that you would change if you could, if it didn't cost any money, you can do it. How many of you would change at least one thing? I think we'd all raise our hand. Some of us would raise two hands.

I'm there, two hands. Some people would change their complexion. Some people would change the size of their nose, their waist. Some would be taller. Some would be shorter. Some would be thinner.

Some would be larger. Some would like blonde hair. Some would like ball-burn hair.

Some of us would like hair, period. Unbelievers aren't the only ones who struggle with the way they look. Now, the apostle Peter is about to challenge the way we think. In fact, he's going to say that we've got to demonstrate the uniqueness of the gospel. And one of the ways we demonstrate the uniqueness of the gospel is we are not obsessed with the physical. We're not all caught up with our bodies. Let's go back to 1 Peter in chapter 3.

If you've been with us, we arrived in chapter 3. Peter is writing to wives first. He'll get to men eventually. He's writing to converted women in this context, many of them newly converted, no doubt, in the early church. They're married to unbelieving husbands. It's almost implied that they came to faith in Christ and their husbands didn't. In fact, the way Peter describes their unbelief or disobedience is that they are now obstinate. They not only are unbelievers, they don't really want to hear about it.

And it's created difficulty. As you can imagine, maybe you're living in it right now. And they've come out of a culture that I've spent time describing. It's a culture like ours that worships youth, that worships physical strength, that worships the body.

In fact, just go to a museum and look at the statues going back to the early centuries. There's a reason there are no clothes. It's the worship of the perfect body.

That's what mattered. These women in the church are saved out of that kind of decadent world of fashion and obsession with physical perfection. Let's hear what the Spirit of God through Peter has to say. Let's pick it up where we left off and we've arrived at verse 3.

4. Your adornment must not be merely external, braiding the hair, wearing gold jewelry, putting on dresses, but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit which is precious in the sight of God. Peter is essentially delivering some life-changing truth that will free women, single or married, young or old, and men too by application, from focusing on the physical, from being bound to the body. And it is a hard taskmaster.

But Peter begins by saying, let me challenge you regarding your notice. He uses the word adornment in my translation. The word he uses for adornment is the Greek word cosmos, which gives us our word cosmos. We just literally take it that way, transliterate it to refer to the ordered universe. It also gives us the word cosmetics, which refers to the ordered universe, or the ordering of the face. That's what it means. And Peter highlights three kinds of ordering of the physical.

Braided hair, wearing jewelry, and putting on dresses. All right, now be careful here. Peter isn't forbidding anything.

He's prioritizing things. He's not forbidding things. There are people that go to this text. There are denominations that go to this text and come to the conclusion that a woman cannot let her hair down in public, either braided or loose. They take their cue from this text.

Others take from this text the fact that a woman cannot wear jewelry in public. In fact, I was talking to my older brother a couple of days ago, wishing him a happy birthday. And I was happy because he's older than me, and that's how I could wish him a happy birthday.

I was happy. But at any rate, he told me about a ministry trip he took to Romania shortly after Ceausescu was killed, the dictator. And on the inside, they found that the church had indeed been growing, the evangelical church, but it was facing struggles. And a lot of them, like the churches in America, over interpretation of Scripture. And he said what struck him was that they were embroiled, the large churches he was in, in division over whether or not a woman could wear a wedding band in public. And this text was at the heart of the debate, and he said churches were literally splitting over whether or not a woman could wear a wedding ring.

And men, of course, as well. They had come to believe that Peter's forbidding any kind of jewelry, and wedding bands are jewelry, thus wedding bands are forbidden. Well, if we apply this verse consistently as Bible students, if Peter is forbidding a woman from braiding her hair and wearing jewelry, he's forbidding a woman from wearing a dress, which I doubt he's doing, right?

I think the words are telling. The word Peter uses here for braiding occurs in the New Testament only in this verse, and it's not a reference to hairstyle as much as it is a reference to the activity of braiding, of the time that it took. This isn't just a couple of pigtails and you're out the door. Just look at some of the pictures that come from the first century of the braiding, the extensive braiding, this kind of braiding Peter refers to took hours of time each day, hours of attention, and in Peter's day, it had become a public iconic statement of leisure and wealth. It was a way of sort of showing off.

It set you apart. Again, Peter's not forbidding it. He's not concerned about pigtails. He's concerned with priorities here. Notice further the word he uses for wearing gold jewelry. The word for wearing, again, is rare, found only here.

In fact, it can be translated putting around. It's a broader picture. This isn't just a gold ring. This is actually an ostentatious display of wealth. In fact, Isaiah, we won't turn there for the sake of time, but in an earlier chapter, he gives us kind of a rare look into the use of jewelry and other ornaments women wore in the early centuries.

He talked about the practice that included wearing expensive bells, jewels on their sandals, women wearing jewelry around their ankles, wearing multiple bracelets on their wrists, and upper arms and necks, wearing finger rings, nose rings, dangling earrings. In other words, you don't just see this woman coming. You hear her coming. Isaiah's description and Peter's description as well is of a woman who loads it on to get attention.

Men do the same, don't we? Now, the jewelry might change through the centuries, but the principle warning remains the same. Women, be careful what you wear. Be careful how you gain attention.

Be careful in what you might be communicating through what you wear. Don't wear your wealth on your sleeve, so to speak. Don't show off, especially in the church. We're not here to tell everybody how much money we've got, especially outside the church then as you represent the gospel.

Don't demonstrate to your world that you're all about the stuff they're after, so be careful. Don't focus on the physical. Now, the third adornment mentioned, you notice in the text at the end of verse three, is putting on dresses. This doesn't mean you can't wear a dress. It doesn't mean you can't wear beautiful clothing. In fact, Peter, by the way, let me just say this as an aside, is not telling Christian women to look unkempt. Do your best to look unattractive, plain, and there are churches that believe that, and so everybody wears one or two colors, and it's as plain as it can be.

He's not suggesting that. He isn't forbidding braiding hair, jewelry, and nice clothes, but what Peter's going to do, and he's kind of setting it all up, is he's going to redefine beauty. He's going to tell us what true beauty is. He's going to tell the women in the assembly that true beauty is more than skin deep. The world never gets past the skin. True beauty is beneath that. Now Peter moves on to tell us what and how. Look at verse four. But let it be the hidden person of the heart.

Now, before we dive in, let me just make a comment or two. The word for heart here is cardia, gives us our word cardiology. It's the seat of who you are. As a man thinks in his heart, your heart doesn't think, your heart's a muscle that's pumping, but it represents the seat of who you are. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. There's a lot of debate about you asking Jesus into your heart. A lot of people say that's a terrible expression.

I think it's a great expression. You're asking Jesus to come into the very seat of who you are, represented by your heart. In biblical terms, the heart for the believer represents the regenerated nature. That's the place where the Holy Spirit in his inner private work of grace is bringing about what we call the fruit of the Spirit that demonstrates itself outwardly. One author writes, it is in the heart where true beauty becomes real and long lasting.

Now, Peter's contrasting, then he's doing a play on words. He's contrasting the physical world, the cosmos, with the spiritual world, the cardia. He's drawing a contrast between cosmetics and the cardia, that which is external and that which is internal, that which is physical and that which is spiritual. He's basically telling women to focus on their heart, to get dressed up from the inside out, first and foremost, to spend more time grooming their heart than they groom their bodies, to spend more time spiritually than physically.

Just what should we be developing in the privacy of our hearts? Peter is giving these women two qualities. Notice in verse four, a gentle and a quiet spirit, a gentle spirit. This is a word that could mean gracious.

You might write that in the margin of your Bible or consider it. It's a word that refers to kindness as opposed to being demanding. By the way, gentleness is in the list of one of the fruits of the Spirit, right? Galatians chapter five, the fruit of the Spirit includes this word, which means this isn't for women only. This isn't just a feminine quality but a masculine quality.

We'll get to men eventually in this text and the audience will be packed with women, I'm sure. Sometimes the word gentle is translated meek. You might pick that up in your memory. You might remember that Jesus is called meek, Matthew 11 29. Meekness doesn't mean doormatness. This word gentleness does not mean weakness. It's actually a word that refers to power under control.

It's emotion under control. So Peter isn't recommending that women become doormats at best or open to abuse at worst. He isn't suggesting that women can't share their minds or their opinions. In fact, Jesus was known by the same quality. He definitely spoke his mind and shared his opinion but the Lord was never out of control.

He was intentional. Let's go on to the next. Peter adds the second quality. He adds a quiet spirit. She's quiet.

And all the men said wisely nothing. Is that what this means? Especially in church, come in, be quiet.

No. This doesn't mean she never makes noise. The word Peter uses is a word that relates to peace. She is literally at peace. This is a unique Christian distinctive out there in the world.

A woman is not at peace with who she is. The gospel allows you to understand your identity is in Christ and when you understand who you are in relation to the gospel of Christ that can give you a settled confidence. You belong to him. He's made you the way he's made you. He's crafted you uniquely by his creative hand and you're at peace. In a multi-volume Greek dictionary known to seminary students in here, simply as kiddel, it describes this word as someone who calmly bears the disturbances created by others without creating disturbances themselves.

That's good. Someone who calmly bears the disturbances created by others without creating disturbances themselves. And when you think of the immediate context here, this inner quality is critical and totally dependent upon the Holy Spirit. Here's a believing wife. She's married to an obstinate man who cares nothing about the gospel as we've learned.

He wants nothing to do with it. And in the midst of that obvious distressing turmoil, she has a sense of peace. Things around her are, you know, like war at times, not to mention the culture, but she has settled confidence of her acceptance with Christ. There's turmoil everywhere and she has this sense of graciousness and confidence.

An old proverb puts it this way, a woman whose smile is wide and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears or how she looks. This beauty is more than skin deep. This is an undeniable work of God's Spirit. It's going to be so unusual that Peter implies that the unbelieving husband won't be able to ignore the fact that there's something different about her. He's caught up in the war.

She seems to be at peace. It's amazing how much we can communicate about Jesus Christ and his gospel by our actions and by the way we present ourselves. There's actually quite a bit more for us to learn from today's passage, but we don't have time to continue. We'll stop here and resume this lesson on our next broadcast. Stevens in a series called For Better or For Worse. Today's lesson is called More Than Skin Deep. This series became the basis for Stevens' book with that same title and it's available today at a very special price. Call us at 866-48-BIBLE to learn how you can get a copy. You'll also find it on our website which is wisdomonline.org. I'm Scott Wiley and I hope you'll be able to join us next time as we bring you more wisdom for the heart.