1 Peter 3:4

Well friends, I learned a very valuable lesson on Sunday when my internet spazzed out and I lost all but a few sentences of the post I have been working on… ouch! From now on I will write offline and copy it to the blog when I am ready to post. Needless to say though, I was slightly upset by the loss. Maybe I’ll attempt to tackle the subject again but for the time being I am setting it aside. 

I ran across 1 Peter 3:4 this morning in my notes and it has been nagging at my heart since... “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.” I have found it hard to let my adorning come from what is on the inside rather than trying to make my adorning be what is on the outside. I often trick myself away from what I know to be true and start pressuring myself into making sure I am acceptably outwardly adorned. Every girl has her insecurities and I know that my outwardly focused basis of insecurity distracts me from the first place beauty begins. Beauty begins deep down where only God sees, in the caverns of our hearts. What's in your caverns? 

Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. If your mind is anything like mine, you are tucking this into your “I’ve heard this before” file. I did this too when the thought first came to me. The more I thought about it though the more I realized how deep the meaning of this is. Sometimes the things we say seem lovely and look like they’re reflecting a beautifully gentle heart. But are they? Or are they a cover for the rottenness in our hearts, like an “easier said than done” thing? Claps for you if you’ve never been guilty of saying Jesus things in order to cover up where your heart truly is. My conviction in this is that, considering that Jesus looks at the heart, using a righteous cover up is as bad as not covering it up at all because the heart is still in the same condition.

We can only cover up rottenness for so long before the heart truly explodes through the mouth. And that, my friends, is not lovely. 1 Peter 3:4 is a call to focus on making your soul beautiful. Satan is the father of lies and that’s why it is crucial to put on the belt the truth (Ephesians 6) to gird yourself against him. So don’t make it up, make it real and make it who you are. Letting your adorning be from the beauty of your heart means giving God the reigns. The heart of your soul adorns you one way or another so let’s be adorned in gentle, quiet beauty. The moment you begin to see how beautiful Christ is in you is the moment your outwardly focused insecurities seem to fade away as well. Satan does not deserve to win through our lies of covering up our Jesus-less-ness with made up Jesus-ness, so I encourage you to dive into Jesus so much so that the true adorning is of Him… no exaggerations.