The Transformed Wife

When I began writing this post, I meant to write about the undressing of women in the warmer months which is happening here in California. I decided to do a word study on the word ‘modest’ and did you know that it appears only one time in the Bible? “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with modesty and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array” (1 Timothy 2:9).  Modest in the dictionary means “free from ostentation or showy extravagance.” Since it appears only one time in the Word, I decided to go to the commentaries to see what the men of old had to say about it.

“Being present and taking part silently—avoiding especially in these services anything like a conspicuous dress or showy ornaments—anything, in fact, which would be likely to arouse attention, or distract the thoughts of others” (Elliot’s Commentary). This verse about modesty appears in the context where the Apostle Paul is explaining worship in a church setting. Men are to lift holy hands; women are to adorn themselves in modest apparel and good works, learn in silence with subjection, and not teach nor be in authority over men.

Therefore, what we wear to church should not be anything that attracts attention to ourselves or distracts others from worship, but it seems that it should be this way in our daily lives, too, since our lives should be lived in worship to Him! (I do love how this commentary describes women in the church service; “being present and taking part silently.” A good reminder for us all since this is a discipline women must learn and many are rebelling against today as we can see from all the women preachers on the scene.)

“What the apostle especially forbids is that immodest manner of dressing which is calculated to excite impure desires in the spectators, or a vain admiration of the beauty of those that use it: also that gaudiness or showiness of dress which proceeds from vanity, and nourishes vanity, wastes time and money, and so prevents many good works” (Benson Commentary). Our culture is obsessed with clothes. Our closets are packed full with them. Styles change often so we mistakenly believe we must too. Most of us spend way too much money on clothes and on ourselves, yet the Lord wants us to spend our time and money on good works instead. Let’s not dress to attract undue attention from others since we are called to be shamefaced. The only thing that should attract others to ourselves is our joy and kindness towards them.

“Good works are the best ornament; these are, in the sight of God, of great price. Modesty and neatness are more to be consulted in garments than elegance and fashion. And it would be well if the professors of serious godliness were wholly free from vanity in dress. They should spend more time and money in relieving the sick and distressed, than in decorating themselves and their children. To do this in a manner unsuitable to their rank in life, and their profession of godliness, is sinful. These are not trifles, but Divine commands. The best ornaments for professors of godliness, are good works” (Matthew Henry). What are good works? Joyfully serving our families and taking good care of them. Helping those in need. Being generous with our time, money, and energy. Praying for others. It’s being living sacrifices as the Lord has asked us to be. Let’s learnt to care a lot more about this instead of how we look; for true beauty is the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit (being gentle and kind).

“A female may as truly violate the precepts of her religion by neglecting her personal appearance as by excessive attention to it. The true idea here is, that her attention to her appearance should be such that she will be offensive to no class of persons; such as to show that her mind is supremely fixed on higher and more important things, and such as to interfere with no duty which she owes, and no good which she can do, either by spending her time needlessly in personal adorning, or by lavishing that money for dress which might do good to others, or by neglecting the proprieties of her station, and making herself offensive to others” (Barnes’ Notes). There needs to be balance. Yes, let’s do our best to look neat and tidy. Our husbands do like us to look pretty and clean. Some women go to the opposite extreme and live in sweats and t-shirts all day without even fixing their hair. This is just as wrong as spending too much time and money on ourselves. We are daughters of the King and so let’s look like it!

“Your appearance is the first thing people will notice about you and thus creates an impression of who you are and what your influence will be. You are often faced with a dilemma of choosing between contemporary fashion trends and the commitments to purity and holiness of your faith…Just as I assume that the label on a product is accurate, so God’s Word challenges me to dress in such a way that my outward appearance is an accurate label for my character.” (Pat Ennis)

But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation.
1 Peter 1:15

***Now, onto dressing modestly for the warmer months! I found this skirt I’m wearing in the picture at Zappos. (It was on sale when I bought it and you have to buy it one size smaller than you usually wear.) I love it! It is so comfortable. The first time I wore it was on a walk near our home that Ken and I take every day. At the end of the walk, he said to me, “I like you a lot more in that skirt than in jeans!” I was actually surprised but happy since it’s a lot more comfortable. (I wear these soft bike shorts under them for comfort and more modesty.) I used to wear shorts in the warmer months but I’m switching to wearing more dresses and skirts since I do believe they are more modest, especially as I grow older. How do you dress modestly in summer?

Do wearing dresses, skirts, high heels, and long hair make a woman feminine? Many dresses and skirts are a lot more feminine than pants and shorts but are these what make a woman feminine? No. According to God’s Word it has nothing to do with our outward appearance and everything to do with our behavior. Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price (1 Peter 3:4). It is the hidden man of the heart; a meek and quiet spirit that makes us feminine!

What is a meek and quiet spirit? It’s so easy to forget because it’s not modeled very many places. Feminism has stolen the meek and quiet spirited women, even in the Church. Our culture spends a lot more time encouraging us to adorn our fading exterior rather than our eternal interior. As godly women, we must care a whole lot more about our inward beauty rather than our outward beauty. The Apostle Paul even encourages this of wives in order to win their disobedient husbands. Yes, most men enjoy their wives looking feminine but what they enjoy even more is having a wife who is gentle, kind, and loving. And you know what God wants us to adorn ourselves with? For after this manner in old time the holy women also, who trust in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands (1 Peter 3:5). We must learn to adorn ourselves by living in subjection to our husbands rather than wasting a lot of time and money beautifying our outward appearance.

What does a meek and quiet spirit look like? I know I sure want to have one. If it’s important to the Lord, it’s important to me.

Barnes’ Notes on the Bible describes a meek and quiet spirit this way: “Of a calm temper; a contented mind; a heart free from passion, pride, envy, and irritability; a soul not subject to the agitations and vexations of those who live for fashion, and who seek to be distinguished for external adorning.”

As you can see, the opposite of having a meek and quiet spirit is feminism! We are called to not allow our emotions and feelings control us, but to control our emotions and feelings instead and make them subject to godliness. A contented mind comes from being satisfied with what the Lord has given us for godliness with contentment is great gain. The way to be freed from passion, pride, envy, and irritability is to be in the Word consistently and allow it to transform us into His image. Let’s not care about the latest fashions as much as we do about modesty and pleasing the Lord in everything. Finally, growing older shouldn’t cause us distress since it is part of God’s magnificent plan for us! Gray hair and wrinkles are fine. I know. I have them and you know what, I can still enjoy life!

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary defines a meek and quiet spirit this way: “meek, not creating disturbances: quiet, bearing with tranquility the disturbances caused by others. Meek in affections and feelings; quiet in words, countenance, and actions.” Our culture is not quiet. Everyone is yelling for and demanding their “rights” as if they are owed something for doing nothing. Godly women don’t demand anything. They quietly work at home and do what the Lord has called them to do.

I love what Timothy Hammons wrote about the National Day of Women that was just celebrated by many women refusing to show up for work to show the world just how important they are in the workforce. “In honor of National Women’s Day, I would like to praise all the women who forego the world’s call to false importance and choose to live God-honoring lives by staying home, raising their children, and submitting to their husbands as to the LORD.

These are the true women of importance. Instead of seeking their own glory, they seek to serve their children and husbands in all humility. This is what is pleasing to the LORD. They don’t protest. They don’t grandstand for false causes. They know that their true happiness is doing what God has called them to do in being mothers and wives. They know that the most important calling on a woman’s life is the family. They know that they are raising and shaping the minds of the next generation. They are not led astray by the false promises of the world. They know their Savior and follow His direction for their lives.”

Stephen Martin wrote this on my Facebook page yesterday: “A woman who is this way has a strong effect on the masculine spirit of a man. The masculine energy is aggressive and problem solving. It fights opposing masculine energy. But it receives and loves a feminine, cooperative energy. Furthermore, the feminine energy has the ability to subdue the aggression of the masculine. The more aggressive a man is, the more emotional. When the woman allows herself to be subdued, that aggressive energy in the man switches from combat to immense love for the woman.”

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation (behavior) of the wives; While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.
1 Peter 3:1, 2

Women wear yoga pants these days and they wear them every day and every where. I’m not sure about you but I wouldn’t dare wear them out in public like many women do today. My main reason for not wearing them is how immodest they are because they show every single curve of a woman’s front and back side; some are worse than others. Yes, honest men will tell you that they are immodest as well. Kerry Folan has another reason why women shouldn’t be wearing yoga pants all the time. She wrote an article in the Washington Times called Yoga pants are comfy. They’re also an assault on manners and a nihilistic threat.

Yes, I had to look up what nihilistic means since it’s not a word I use. The definition: “rejecting all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless.” Wow! I thought I was hard on yoga pants! She in essence wrote that women wear yoga pants because they’re too lazy to get dressed and look put together. They care more about their comfort than anything or anyone else. I agree with her. Yoga pants aren’t something that women should be wearing outside of their home or exercise class. They are classless.

We, as Christian women, should care more about others than we do ourselves. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves (Philippians 2:3). When women wear yoga pants, they are not thinking about anybody else but themselves. They don’t care about all the men who will see them and either have to look away or possibly lust. They don’t care about the grandparents who will see them and wonder what happened to having manners and putting proper clothes on for the day. Women who don’t wear yoga pants and are modest won’t enjoy having their husbands see other women in yoga pants.

“Yoga pants make a statement about comfort and modernity. When we board a flight or run to the grocery store swaddled in cotton-lycra, we are saying to the people around us that our own comfort is our first priority. We are expressing a new kind of modern vanity where dressing down, rather than dressing up, is the power move.”

We, as Christian women, are the representatives of Christ on this earth. We should look different than the women of our day and dress in a way that brings glory to the Lord, not dishonor. We should care about our clothing, how it affects others, and how others perceive us.  We don’t live for ourselves and our own comfort. We aren’t selfish – looking out for number one. No, we’re looking out for others and care about them and yes, even their husbands.

Every morning, I get dressed. I put on a bit of makeup, brush my hair, and put on clothes that are appropriate to be seen in public. I stay this way all day long until I go to bed and I’m mostly home all day. The only time I wear sweat pants all day is when I am sick. (I don’t ever wear yoga pants.) If I can do this, you can too!

In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.
1 Timothy 2:9, 10

Written by Kenneth Wieske

A woman walked into my study a few days ago. She was nearly naked, wearing only a bra and panties.

There is just one woman in the world who, while dressed like this, can be around me: my wife. But the woman who walked into my study a few days ago was not my wife. I was very embarrassed.

She, however, was not embarrassed at all. Let’s call her: “Shameless.”

The reason Shameless was not embarrassed was because she had swallowed the lie of our modern society. This lie says the following: if the bra and panties are the same color and made of a fabric that can be used in water, then walking around in them is completely different than walking around in underwear because they are, after all, swimwear.

Shameless is a professing Christian, yet, because she has bought into this lie, she has no problem exposing her body to the whole world. I imagine she might be embarrassed to walk in the mall, or visit her grandparents, dressed only in her bra and panties. But for some reason, she does not see any problem in choosing a photo of herself dressed this way as her Facebook profile photo.

That’s how she came into my office: by my computer screen.

I have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook that I hardly know. I accept friend requests from anyone who professes to be Christian, because I want to expand my network of contacts so I can promote the work of the various Reformed organizations and institutions I work with.

However, when a contact posts things on Facebook that promote indecent thoughts, or attitudes or actions that are not Christian, I delete them immediately.

Three reasons:

Let me share with you the reasons why I deleted Shameless.

Her body belongs to her husband.

If she is not married, she must keep her body for her future husband (1 Cor 7:4). Her body is not to be exposed for the world to see, much less is to be displayed on my computer screen.

My passion belongs to my wife.

Seeing the body of another woman does not promote my sanctification or edify my marriage (Prov. 5:15-20; Job 31:1). God created man so that he experiences a very strong reaction when he sees the body of a woman. This reaction within marriage is beautiful and promotes true love. Outside of marriage it is shameful and brings destruction and sorrow.

In this world, mired as it is in immorality and sexual perversion, vigilance is necessary for a man to keep his sexual purity. When other women present themselves almost naked to him, that surely does not help in his fight against sin.

Public nakedness is a denial of Christ’s work.

When man fell into sin, his nakedness was exposed. God then gave clothes to cover the shame of Adam and Eve. An animal had to die so that their nakedness was covered. This was a foreshadowing of Christ’s work, in which He was exposed and naked on the cross, taking upon Himself our shame, and shedding his blood for us so we could be covered with the white robes of His righteousness.

The way we dress reflects something about our understanding of the Gospel. When Christian men and women expose their bodies in public, they are obscuring the manifestation of the power of Christ’s work in their lives – instead of dressing in decent apparel, with modesty and good sense, they mimic the world, which glories in its shame.

Conclusion:

Sadly, many readers will find this article too radical. Christian women can’t wear bikinis? Men should vigilantly avoid looking at such exposed women?

There’s a reason this seems radical: we’re so mired in worldliness that we don’t even notice it. Today’s worldly, superficial Christianity produces worldly, superficial Christians. However Christianity as taught by Christ and his apostles is a total transformation of life in all respects, accompanied by a radical commitment to holiness. The change in us is not meant to be a slight one – we are to be transformed into something else entirely: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor 5:17a). Now that’s radical! And that is Christianity!

For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ,
whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.
Philippians 3:18, 19

Used with permission from Reformed Perspective
The original title was “Facebook and the 7th Commandment”

Many women are rebellious today and want to do what is right in their own eyes. They are rebellious to all types of authority and they don’t want to be told what to do: what to wear, what to do with their bodies, and what to do with their lives. They want to do what they want to do regardless of who it hurts in the process. One example is from a man who wrote about his disgust with so many women wearing yoga pants.

‘‘Yoga pants belong in the yoga studio,’’ Alan Sorrentino wrote. ‘‘What’s next? Wearing a ‘Speedo’’ to the supermarket? Imagine if men did that. Yuck!’’ If I had heard a man say this and I have, I would be cheering and agreeing with him! The editor of the article, however, wrote, “The letter, which said adult women wearing yoga pants in public was comparable to men wearing Speedos to the grocery store, went viral. The backlash was immediate, passionate, and international.” Of course it was immediate, passionate, and international. Anyone who confronts women with the way they live is means for revolt in their eyes. This is how many are with me because I teach godly principles and God’s design for them. They were “immediate, passionate, and international” and nasty and mean about my homemaking post that went viral.

I wrote an entire chapter in my book on modesty since women are not taught modesty anymore. I warned about yoga pants since I know they are not modest and cause men to stumble. It’s a little tough on guys to continually avert their eyes when almost every single women they see is wearing them no matter what they look like in them. And what did the women do in response to this comment? They held a “yoga pants parade” in front of his house and flaunted all different colors of yoga pants for all to see. “On no, you can’t tell women what to do with their bodies.” Why, if they want to have their unborn babies murdered just because they don’t want a baby, they should be able to have them murdered. It’s their bodies!

“It was supposed to be funny, Sorrentino said, because what kind of ‘tormented, uptight individual’ could possibly care enough about yoga pants to write such a letter?” I am sure he toned it down once he saw the vitriol response to his words. Those “tormented, uptight individuals” who should care about them are those women who want to obey the Lord and not cause men to stumble. Yes, this is very foreign in today’s culture since most women are taught to be independent and do their own thing since the women’s liberation movement  freed them from the shackles of modesty, motherhood, marriage, and all the other things that they believed held women in bondage.

“I don’t get involved in much in the way of protests and marches and all of that, but this just brought me out because the guy’s letter was offensive,” said one woman. Most everything that is good, decent, and the Lord’s ways are offensive to women today. Try to teach Titus 2:3, 4 to younger women and see all the offended women come out of hiding. The things that should offend them, like evil, don’t offend them anymore. “It was the shaming and the policing of women’s bodies that struck a chord with the attendees,” said another woman. No, never tell women what is good and right and what the Lord requires of them since they are their own god now and decide what is right.

Notice the signs in the article that the women are holding at their parade; “We Wear What We Want.” Pure selfishness with no concern for anyone else. Yes, wear thong bikinis, skin tight, and short short anything because this is their right! “Love Yourself.” Do whatever they “feel” like doing since this is loving themselves. “It shows the vein that it tapped into.”  Anything that goes against their “rights” is a vein that we aren’t supposed to mess with, unless you are a brave older women who knows that the Lord’s ways are best for younger women regardless of how many are rebelling against them.

Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Judges 17:6

He that loves discipline loves knowledge, and he that hates reproof is a fool.
Proverbs 12:1