A Question of Modesty

Modesty is a subject that comes up a lot in my conversations as a mother of boys, a mother with a teenage daughter, and due to the fact that I am a woman myself.  

Lately it has been a burden on my heart as I have watched someone I love dearly swing from the oppression of forced modesty by the church to the opposite extreme.

So what is modesty?  Is it the way we dress or is it a condition of our hearts?  

Let me say as a Christian woman, I do believe that we should dress tastefully for we are God’s workmanship and we are also His temple.  But true modesty does not come from the clothes we wear, it comes from the overflow of our hearts.

When our self worth is perfectly tied to who God says we are, there is no need for us to get value or worth from our outward appearances.  Being safe and secure in the love of Jesus and in our identity as daughters of the King frees us from a life of using our body to gain value.  

We find our value instead on what He did for us on the cross and in our adoption into the Kingdom.

I used to be a woman who wore certain types of clothing striving to keep my husband’s eyes from straying and to boost my own self esteem.  BUT this type of worth is empty and was fueled by the reactions I received from others.

When my focus shifted off of my ‘who am I’ mentality and became about who God says I am, I stopped having the need to compete for that type of attention.  

The more focused I became on Christ the more I wanted to live in a way that honored him.  The more I have lived a life that honors Him the wiser my clothing choices have become.  I found that I no longer had to be a slave to the fickle opinions of others when my identity stopped resting on the crux of who I was and instead became anchored to who God is and what He did for me.  

You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfolding beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God.  1 Peter 3:4 (NLT)