Internal Beauty

Everyone loves things that are beautiful, and, as women, we have a desire to be beautiful. The world puts great emphasis on outward beauty. It bombards us with advice on how our hair, teeth, skin, cloths, etc. should look in order to be beautiful. But that beauty is all external. God has a different plan. He wants us to be beautiful on the inside (1 Samuel 16:7). We have to decide who we want to be beautiful to, God, or the world. If we are living for the Audience of One the answer is God. Our desire to be beautiful should be a desire to be beautiful to Him. Being beautiful to God is living a life fully surrendered to Jesus Christ, and striving to be more like Him. It is having a personal relationship with God and making Christ our identity. We must be in The Word, seeking to know the Lord and walk in His ways. Inward beauty isn’t something we can just “spray on” like perfume. It takes time and effort. We should be spending at least as much time getting inwardly beautiful in the morning as we spend getting outwardly beautiful. Of course, it’s God who does the work in our hearts and makes us internally beautiful, but we need to have soft, moldable hearts for Him to work on. Our hearts can be like Silly Putty (soft and easy to shape), or they can be like the hard shell the putty comes in. The difference is between God being able to mold us, and Him having to break us. A beautiful heart is soft and moldable. When we have inward beauty, we are beautiful to God, and our lives bring Him glory. Each of us has a desire to be beautiful. Who do you desire to be beautiful to and what are you going to do with that desire?