Theology for Women

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re in college and your boyfriend is rushing a fraternity. You two have been dating for awhile, and you really like him a lot. He’s a total gentleman, you get along great together, and He loves the Lord. He even feels called to the fraternity as his mission field, and hopes to be a light in that particular darkness.

But one day your relationship takes a horrible turn. He calls you over to his fraternity house and makes a shocking proposition. Apparently all his potential frat brothers think you are really hot, and they’ve decided that he can only join the fraternity if you agree to sleep with them. So your boyfriend has now come to you, pleading that you will cooperate. “Please!” he begs. “They won’t let me pledge if you don’t do this! I know this is a lot to ask, but imagine the ministry opportunity!”

Sound crazy? That’s because it is.

Think this could never happen? Think again. This is exactly what Abraham did to Sarah in Genesis 12. The couple was traveling into Egypt, and Abraham feared he would be killed because Sarah was so desirable. So what does he do? He saves his own hide by handing her over to Pharaoh. When he should have been protecting her, he instead gains acceptance at her expense.

This is a story that we are pretty familiar with, but the tragedy of it often escapes us. We tend to blow it off as if the moral standards at that time were a lot more fluid. A man prostituting his wife somehow seemed more normal back then.

But if you can imagine yourself in the horrific circumstances I described above, then you got a taste of what Sarah must have been feeling. She was not only abandoned by the man who was supposed to protect her, but she was put in harm’s way for his own selfish gain. What a lonely place that must have been.

Clearly, this story has implications for our marriages, especially for husbands. But there is a degree to which we women should learn from this story as well. It is a story about putting someone in harm’s way to save yourself, and that is something I do all too often.

For example, I can’t tell you how many mornings I’ve spent a great deal of time picking out my clothes for church. Some mornings I have tried on 4 or 5 different outfits before I found the right one! And during this process, a small voice in the back of my head wondered, “Could your obsession with looking nice be a detriment to the women who look up to you? Are you causing other women to feel a pressure to look cute and perfect and put together, since that is the example you’re setting?”

But in that moment, I prefered to prop up my own self-esteem, so I ignored that voice. And in turn, I probably fed the insecurities of many women around me.

In the world of women, we are often about survival of the fittest. I don’t care who I knock down or how I make other women feel as long as I feel good about myself. And in doing so, we perpetuate an unending cycle of bondage to cultural norms, rather than standing up and being different. We feed into an impossible standard of beauty, instead of sacrificing our need to be the best and the prettiest.

And in this way, we have continued the legacy of Abraham. When we should be looking out for one another and protecting one another from a world that measures our beauty according to waistline, we victimize one another all the more by perpetuating it.

Now all of this is not to say that we should rebel against our culture by wearing burlap sacks and refusing to shower. Heck no! We need to celebrate our beauty, inside and out. But we need to ask ourselves why we do it. Are we the type who will NEVER go outside without make-up, who always tell others about all the time we spend at the gym, and who will only wear clothes from name brand stores? If you answer yes, or even maybe, to any of those questions, then you might just have a problem.

Let us instead put an end to this story. Let us be a Church who thinks first of our sisters, and then of ourselves. Let us consider how our actions affect others, and whether we are victimizing our neighbors, as opposed to protecting them. All of our actions, no matter how seemingly innocent, have implications for the world around us. So when it comes to the Christian life and how we live in relationship to others, we should always ask ourselves–Are we selling out Sarah, or are we saving her?

For some reason I have a high number of male friends who really enjoy being naked around one another. There’s nothing weird or sexual about it–they just like the freedom of it I guess.

In fact, some of them consider it to be a valued form of quality time! I even knew some guys in college who lived together and would set aside one afternoon each week for their “naked time.”

As a girl, I really can’t relate. In no way does that sound fun to me. It only sounds awkward. And kinda weird.

With few exceptions, girls are just the opposite of boys in this regard. Unlike our male counterparts, we will do almost anything to avoid being naked in front of other people.

But why is that? Why are guys so comfortable with their bodies, whereas women are not?

This is a question I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. My first instinct is to blame the media–when I look at myself in the mirror, I see a stark contrast between my body and the bodies of the Victoria Secret models. As a result, I can’t help but be ashamed of my body, therefore causing me to hide it.

But this issue cannot be blamed on the media alone. It goes back much further than that. All the way back to the beginning of time…

Think, for a moment, back to the Garden of Eden and the Fall of humanity. What was the first thing that Adam and Eve did when they had disobeyed God? They covered their bodies.

What does this tell us? That there is a very real connection between the way we feel about our bodies and the way we feel in relation to others. In particular, the insecurities we have with our bodies reveal a more deeply rooted issue in our relationship with God.

For Adam and Eve, to be naked before God was to be fully known, inside and out. But after the Fall they didn’t want to be fully known by God, because they were ashamed of what He would find.

That said, when we hide our bodies, we are doing more than hiding our physical features. We are hiding our souls as well. We are afraid of being fully known, for fear of what people will find. We are afraid of being rejected.

Given the fact that Adam and Eve both felt the need to cover themselves, why are women so much more insecure about their bodies than men? Well this is the point at which culture partners with our sin nature to target women most acutely. Due to our sin, there is already a tendency to want to hide ourselves, but culture feeds that fear all the more by attacking a woman’s natural beauty. It mounts shame upon shame.

So how do we fight this?

Well I have one creative solution, but before I reveal it, the first and foundational step is to work on your relationship with God. No person, including yourself, can even give you the wholeness you need to stand before God and others without shame. Only your Creator, the one who granted you life with purpose and intention, and then loved you enough to sacrifice His son, can give you that security.

But in addition to that, I have a little homework for you. I want you to pick out the physical features that you like the least, and start thanking God for them. Pray that God would reveal to you how beautiful those things are. If you don’t like your nose, or your legs, or even your butt (that’s right, God thinks you’ve got a great booty! After all, He gave it to you!), pray that God would open your eyes to the beauty that He sees in them.

For some of you, you might even consider standing in front of the mirror completely in the buff, looking at your whole body, and worshiping God for it. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but your body really is beautiful to God, and we don’t praise God nearly enough for our bodies, so try it!

It may sound a little off the wall, but given that we were created in the gorgeous and divine image of God, I think it’s time we mount a grass roots effort to resist the turn of our culture. And it starts with you.

One of the topics I spend a lot of time writing, teaching and speaking about is beauty. Beauty is a central theme in women’s ministry because all women desire it. And in the face of this desire, women’s ministry fights to protect God’s standard of beauty when culture perverts it.

But having said that, what is beauty? If we are going to resist the world’s understanding of beauty in favor of God’s, we should probably know exactly what we’re talking about. Unfortunately, this is a much harder task than one might initially think. Just pause for a moment and ask yourself: How would you define beauty??

Beauty is one of those ideas on which it is tough to put a finger. We know something is beautiful when we see it, but how does one actually define beauty? After all, what one person calls beautiful, another person might find ugly. Why is beauty defined so differently by so many people and cultures?

Well I discovered the reason for this discrepancy in opinions in the very definition of the word. Wesbter’s dictionary defines beauty as follows:

1: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit : loveliness

2: a beautiful person or thing; especially : a beautiful woman

3: a particularly graceful, ornamental, or excellent quality

Notice in the first definition that an object is called beautiful according to the pleasure it evokes in the mind or spirit. Now that is quite a tricky definition given its extreme subjectivity! One person might find something to be beautiful because it stirs pleasurable sensations in them, but another person will not call that thing beautiful if it does not stir up the same feelings of pleasure.

So which individual is right? Who is to decide what is beautiful and what is not, if the only measure of beauty is an individual’s personal feelings of pleasure?

Well at this point I decided to turn to Scripture since Webster’s definition was running me in circles. If you search the Bible for the word “beautiful,” you will find that it appears about 75 times. Of those appearances, only two or three are references to men. The remaining 73 references are applied to objects that we more traditionally understand as being beautiful: clothing, jewels, crowns, flowers, cities, and God, but it is most frequently applied to women.

I also found a frequently used phrase, “the perfection of beauty,” which is always used to describe God. What’s more, the New Testament almost exclusively references beauty in the context of service to God. In Matt. 26:10 Jesus asks, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me.” And in Romans 10:15 declares, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” Within these contexts, beauty is directly connected to the glory of the Lord.

With all of that in mind, we have a little bit more information about beauty. We know that God is the perfection of beauty, thereby making Him the ultimate standard of beauty. We also know that women somehow possess that beauty in a unique and definitive way.

How, then, are we to define beauty? Honestly, I’m still not quite sure. It seems to be an attribute that almost defies description or definition. It captures us in a way we cannot articulate, and it transports our hearts and minds to a place that is other-worldly. When we see something beautiful, we know that we are experiencing a taste of the divine, but we may not fully understand why or how.

And perhaps that is why we cannot define it–it is beyond our limited capacity to comprehend. Not until we reach the other side of eternity will we truly grasp the glory of true beauty as God defines it. For now, we must be satisfied with mere echoes of it.

What, then, does that mean for women and their understanding of beauty in the face of culture? Two things. One–while we struggle to pinpoint the basic definition of beauty, we can know that God creates certain things to specifically reflect God’s beauty (such as flowers and sunsets) but women reflect that beauty in an especially unique way. While men can be beautiful (both David and Moses were described this way) the majority of Scripture applies the description to women.

That said, women were created to reflect this attribute of God in their very essence. It is written into our beings. We were created with it, so it is an essence that no culture can undermine. Beauty is never defined by certain physical attributes, but instead as that which best reflects God. Any definition of beauty that sets itself up against the basic beauty and divine image inherent in every single woman is a definition in conflict with the beauty of God.

Two–beauty is anything that brings glory to God. Many of the contexts in which the word “beauty” is implemented involve service to and worship of God. Whether it describes the “beautiful feet” of those who spread the Gospel, or beautiful jewels of God’s temple, they are all meant to point back to God.

As women, that is the only way we should consider “improving” our beauty–by reflecting God all the more with our lives. 1 Timothy reminds us that we should not adorn ourselves with jewels, trendy clothes, or plastic surgery. The only makeover we need is one of the soul–we should adorn ourselves with modesty, self-control, and good works.

So when it comes to being beautiful, don’t seek to change or augment those things that God gave you at birth. He created you the way He did because it was beautiful to Him. The only thing we can add to such beauty is a spirit surrendered to God. Any other definition of beauty only seeks to glorify ourselves and calls God a shabby Creator. Let us instead be women who embrace a true definition of beauty, and evidence that beauty with our lives.

Well right now I am on the other side of the world visiting Southeast Asia. I probably won’t disclose the exact location until I get back, but if you want a hint I can tell you that Passion will be doing a concert here on August 3. That’s all I’m going to say!

So far the trip has been amazing! We have visited the biggest Muslim mosque I’ve ever seen (I had to wear a pink robe that covered my head so that I wouldn’t defile the temple–I looked HOT!) and then we went to a Hindu temple that seemed like it was straight out of the Old Testament. People were sacrificing offerings to golden idols and everything!

But one thing that has stood out to me the most has been the presence of women wearing the full, black Muslim covering. These women are actually tourists from the Middle East, not native to the country, but there are a lot of them around so they constantly grab my attention. I can’t help but wonder what it must be like to stare out at the world from a complete veil, no one seeing anything about you but your eyes.

But the fascinating thing about these women is that, while their entire bodies are completely covered, hiding any kind of distinguishing features about their bodies, these women still went out of there way to stand out. Many of them had the cutest little shoes I’d ever seen, or they carried beautiful, eye-catching purses. It was as if they were trying to find a way to make themselves beautiful, even though their bodies were completely hidden from the world.

I love that. I think it reflects something inherent and irrepressible about the female heart. No matter what the world does to hide it, God created women to be beautiful, and He desires that we celebrate that beauty. Our beauty reflects something true about the character of God, so we should never strive to hide it.

That doesn’t mean we should pursue vanity and become obsessed with our looks, but it does mean that at our very essence, there is something about us that reflects the beauty of God, and we should never be ashamed of it. Sometimes that even means resisting our culture’s perception of beauty, knowing that society can also hide our beauty by calling undesirable that which God called lovely. When this happens, Western culture is just as guilty of suppressing a woman’s natural beauty as a strict Muslim culture might be.

Wherever you are in the world today, celebrate who you are! God created you with purpose and detail, so I pray that He helps you to appreciate and love yourself just as much as He does.

Well I’m off to have more adventures on the other side of the world. I’ll try to check back in soon!

The other day I saw a t.v. show interviewing women over the age of 30 who’d decided to have plastic surgery. Specifically, they’d all had breast implants.

Now this was a bit surprising to me. When I think of breast implants, I think of women in their twenties who are perhaps hoping it will boost their specific careers.

But that simply isn’t the case anymore. An article in USA Today reported that from 2000 to 2005 the number of women getting breast implants increased 37%, and as the article described, “The typical person getting breast implants today is not the stripper, the model…It’s the girl down the street.”

What’s more, she’s not so much a “girl” either. She’s a woman–a wife and a soccer mom, most likely with a bachelors degree. A survey done in 2003 found that the average age of women receiving breast augmentation was 34.

About a month ago I wrote about the growing trend of anorexia in women over the age of 30, so given those statistics the rise in breast implants should be no surprise. The only difference is that there’s a stigma attached to one, and not to the other. Anorexia is frowned upon by the general population, but breast implants are becoming more and more accepted.

That brings us back to the show I was watching the other day. As the women being interviewed discussed their decisions, their reasons tended to be more personal than professional. They’d always wanted bigger breasts, or they simply wanted a makeover.

But one woman raised a dissenting voice. She argued that women only have this surgery if they are suffering from low self-esteem or have a poor body image. By having breast implants, they are attempting to prop up their self-esteem in an artificial way.

“Finally!” I thought. A voice of reason in a backwards world!

But she was quickly dismissed. One of the other women immediately replied that her self-esteem was just fine and that she’d always had tremendous confidence. Her reason for having the surgery? “I’m doing it for me.”

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, I wanted to start shaking my t.v. set. I wanted to sit that women down and ask her, “What do you mean you’re doing it for you? Where do you think the desire to have bigger boobs came from? It’s not like you cooked it up in your own brain independent of the culture you live in! You’re doing it because society has fed you the lie that women with larger breasts are more beautiful and desirable. The idea that you’re doing it for you is all an illusion!”

Unfortunately, I am not able to sit down with that women and tell her those things….which probably wouldn’t have gone over too well anyway. But I do have a blog, so I’m going to state it here:

Be careful when you hear yourself utter the words, “I’m doing it for me.” Yes, there are times when this motivation is warranted–if, for instance, you are extremely overweight and you need to do a better job of being healthy. Take the necessary steps to make that happen.

But don’t use these words to mask the real problem. It is most likely that you have been so profoundly influenced by society that you don’t even know what’s you, and what’s the culture.

The key to determining the difference can be found in Scripture. Are you making changes that are consistent with the Scriptural depiction of the human being? If you are trying to be healthy, then yes! Our bodies are the temple of God, so we should be good stewards of them.

But if you are attempting to make drastic, superficial changes to the body God has given you, whether it be through surgery, extreme dieting, or over-exercising, then you will find yourself in conflict with the truths of Scripture. The Bible tells us that we are made in God’s image, and that God knit us together in our mother’s womb. This implies an intimate, intentional purpose in every single part of your body and personality, so any attempt to alter that creation runs the risk of insulting God. It questions His judgment in making you the way that you are.

(And please don’t interpret this to mean that I am promoting some sort of Christian Science position in which doctors should not help people born with birth defects. Scripture shows us examples of healing in the lives of individuals whose day-to-day functioning was impaired from birth. Such surgery is certainly permissible, but it’s in an altogether different category from the kind of changes I have described above.)

In closing, I want to remind each one of you out there that you have been fearfully and wonderfully made. Any message that indicates otherwise does not come from God, so be on your guard against the lies of our culture. We have becomes so inundated by them that we have now begun to deceive ourselves, rather than being speakers of truth.

Ultimately, the best way to determine whether you’re doing what’s best for you, or if you’re simply in bondage to the opinion of others, can be found in the following question: Are you doing it for God? Sometimes the desires we have for ourselves can be deeply misguided, so we should never use our own, personal fulfillment as a barometer of right and wrong. Ultimately it’s about God and what brings the most glory to Him. Anything else is idolatry.

*To read the whole USA Today article, you can check it out here.

Right now I’m in Atlanta hanging out with my 10 year old cousin, and we’ve been having a blast! We’ve gone to Stone Mountain Park, Lake Lanier Water Park, and last night we had a “Camp Rock” sleepover with one of her friends.

(In case you don’t know what “Camp Rock” is, it’s a movie that debuted on Disney last night starring the Jonas Brothers. And if you don’t know who the Jonas Brothers are, then you are hopelessly uncool and I’m afraid I can’t help you.)

My cousin and uncle live in a suburb of Atlanta that is so idyllic it makes me feel like I’m living in the 50’s. All the houses are perfect with nicely manicured lawns, all the kids are friends with each other, all the parents hang out together, and they all go to the same school (which also happens to be amazing–it’s nice and it’s safe and the teachers are wonderful). Oh, and everyone is pretty…even the dads.

And that’s exactly why I’ve always loved coming here to visit. It’s always been the kind of place I wanted to raise my family. However, I’m starting to wonder if it’s not quite as perfect as I always thought. I’ve started to notice something during this trip that I hadn’t noticed before. It first grabbed my attention a couple days ago at my cousin’s swim meet, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since…

I was standing near the pool waiting for my cousin’s race to begin, when I noticed three women standing in front of me. What caught my attention was that they all pretty much looked the same–thin, athletic, toned bodies, blond hair, manicured hands and feet, and cute outfits. From the back, they almost looked like teenagers–but they were in their late 30’s or early 40’s.

As I observed these women I started to feel a little insecure about myself. Not only were they in better shape than I am, but I wondered if I’d be able to make my body look like that after I’d had kids. These women didn’t look like they’d actually given birth to human children! They instead had the bodies of 18 year old girls.

Well I decided to start looking around at the other people nearby so that I would stop feeling so insecure about myself, but to my dismay I saw exactly the same thing. Actually that’s a lie–some of the women were brunettes. But they were all skinny, toned, and cute. There were a couple women who had, well, women’s bodies, but they were the exception to the rule.

At first I thought, “Is this what lies ahead for me? Does the quest for model-like bodies never end?” But then I comforted myself with the idea, “This probably isn’t normal. I bet it’s just this neighborhood. Surely there can’t be many communities like this one.”

I was wrong.

The next day my cousin and I went to the water park, and I saw more moms with breast enhancements than I ever thought possible. They were as skinny as rails and you could see the muscle tone in their stomachs. Again, not all of the women looked like this, but there were enough of them to be noticeable. After all, this wasn’t Los Angeles–this was an Atlanta suburb! What is going on here??

Well I think I found a possible explanation…

USA Today recently ran a story revealing that more and more women over 30 are struggling with eating disorders. It explains, “Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia have long been considered diseases of the young, but experts say in recent years more women have been seeking help in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and older.” The article then cited the following distressing statistics:

In the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, Park Nicollet Health Services’ Eating Disorders Institute saw 43 patients ages 38 and older in 2003 — about 9% of its total patients. For the first six months of this year (2007), the institute has treated nearly 500 patients 38 and older, about 35% of its total.

The Renfrew Center, a network of treatment centers in the eastern U.S., said about 20% of the 522 patients treated at its Philadelphia center in 2005 were 30 or older. In 2006, about 13% of the 600 patients were in that age group.

Body image is no longer the concern of teenage girls alone. Women of all ages are feeling pressure to look a certain way and to fit a particular mold. And it’s no wonder! It’s not as though you spend years feeling a certain way about your body, and then suddenly wake up one day feeling fine. In fact, the pressure is bound to get worse as your body fights the effects of age. If you give in to your insecurities now, and if you believe the lies that society tells women about their bodies, then you are sentencing yourself to a losing battle.

Now it’s not as though I think that all women are doomed to be overweight once they have children, so we should embrace obesity. It’s important for us to take care of our bodies, eat healthy, exercise, and maintain our beauty as a gift to our husbands.

BUT, there is also a degree to which we should celebrate our bodies the way God made us. The fact of the matter is that having children requires us to sacrifice our bodies. We’ll get stretch marks and we’ll gain weight in areas we never gained weight before. Our bodies will bear the marks of bringing a new life into the world.

Yet those marks that we so despise are actually marks of beauty! God created the gift of life, and women get to serve a blessed role in that process, so whatever God calls good, we must also call good. Fight the message that our culture sends women to look a certain way. Take care of your bodies, yes, but rejoice in the journey of life, and all the sags, bags and bulges it brings along with it. Our culture may reject those signs of aging as being ugly and undesirable, but Scripture reminds us that “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

*In case you’d like to read the whole USA Today article that I cited above, you can check it out here.

A couple days ago I was talking to a friend about a book she’s been reading that’s been really encouraging to her. The book deals with lies that women tend to believe about themselves, which is definitely a relevant topic to women, so I took a look at it. As I glanced over the Table of Contents and read the lies that the author identifies, there were a lot of lies that she had pin-pointed, and most of them hit the nail on the head in my life. However, there was one lie that stuck out to me, one I didn’t agree with: The lie that “We must learn to love ourselves.”

Now let me say up front that I haven’t read the chapter, so I cannot pass any kind of real judgment on the material contained inside of it, but my friend summarized it as follows: We do not need to learn to love ourselves, because we already do. God commanded us to love others “as we love ourselves,” and this command implies that we already love ourselves. That being said, the challenge is not loving ourselves, but loving others. If anything, we need to spend less time thinking about ourselves.

This argument is a common one. You will hear many a Christian argue against the self-centeredness of our culture. We love to think about ourselves and how to best serve ourselves. And for that reason, any teaching that encourages us to love ourselves *more* would surely feed our self-centeredness all the more.

While there is some truth to this claim, I must admit that I largely disagree. The kind of “love” to which these people are referring is not love at all–it’s vanity. And we must never confuse love with vanity, because the two are exact opposites. In reality, vanity comes from the same source as low self-esteem. Both the vain person and the person with low self-esteem are constantly thinking about themselves and how to make themselves feel better, worthier, greater. The only difference is that the vain person is succeeding.

That being said, self-centeredness must never be confused with love. If love and self-centeredness were the same thing, then to fulfill the command of “loving others as you love yourself” would mean placing an unhealthy emphasis on others. Rather than being in bondage to pleasing yourself, you’d be in bondage to pleasing others.

With this in mind, our standard for loving others must not assume that we are loving ourselves well. If we love ourselves poorly, then we will subsequently love others poorly as well. So how do we love ourselves rightly? By loving ourselves in a way that honors God. Our first priority should never be ourselves–it should always be God. Everything we do should center on God and our love for God. Once we get to the point where God is the center, everything else in our lives will fall into its right place. Instead of putting ourselves first, which will subsequently lead to a life centered around serving ourselves, we’ll learn to love ourselves in a way that keeps God first, and glorifies Him. The goal will be God’s glory, not our glory, so the way in which we love ourselves will fall in line with that priority.

Let me give you an example of this: One way to love yourself is by loving your body, not because it draws attention to you or makes other people jealous of you, but because God created you in His image, so your body is therefore beautiful. Or, you can love your personality, not because it makes you popular and everyone likes you, but because God shaped your personality in a certain way, and all of your gifts are echoes of God’s own identity. In this way, loving your body and loving your personality are simply ways of loving God, and worshipping God. This kind of love does not lead to vanity, but to blessed self-forgetfulness. We are no longer thinking, “me, me, me,” because we only have eyes for God.

So, I disagree with the author of my friend’s book–we do need to learn to love ourselves, because love ourselves is an integral part of loving God. And this is SO important for women, given the way culture teaches us to hate the bodies and minds we have been given, thereby stripping God of glory that is rightfully His.