wonder what people will wear to a Sunday school class about modesty. Will everybody walk in in a burka or what will that look like? For those of you that are either locked and loaded, ready to try to shoot me for something I might say about clothing standards this morning, or whether you're hoping I will dig deeply into that topic so that you can make a knowing look at the person next to you or across from you or whatever else you may be motivated to hope for this morning. Very little of this morning's topic will be on clothing per se. Having said that, I have very strong opinions about it, but I I will argue that they are derivative to the principle of modesty as defined in the scriptures. And so I'm not going to spend time on the derivatives, I'm going to spend time on the core of the thing and leave the derivations or the derivatives to you. Those are actually two different words, so don't use those as the same word. And I think with that said, I want to jump in. My objectives today, right at the top, I would love it if each of you walked out of the room this morning with a resolution to daily consider whose you are. And that was what I said I was indebted to Rob's dad for. I remember Rob standing up before, I think it was in front of a Romans class. If not, it was in another class that he was sitting into and providing some commentary on. But he just told us the story about his dad dropping him off at college. And he didn't say, remember who you are, or any of those other things. He said, remember whose you are. And Rob said that just really impressed with him. It stuck with him. It was something he made a theme or thematic in his life from that point forward. And while I had not thought of that as I was preparing these notes, as Christopher Green was praying for Rob's dad this morning, well, the Thompsons in general, this morning in the prayer room, that had occurred to me. And I thought, what a wonderful, what a wonderful thing for a father to say. So a resolution to daily consider whose you are. and to order your daily duties in such a way to clearly demonstrate whose you are and what you are in him. I had, like I said, four weeks to do this, and the story is not going to make sense. It's just going to sound weird, but it doesn't matter. So I'm just going to share it with you, and you already think whatever you think about me. Don't tell me what it is. I never want to know. But Anz and I were having a discussion about clothing. You see the way I dress. I always dress like this. I mean, either this or, I mean, this is me, right? Jeans and a t-shirt is about the worst you get from me. But I was walking out the door and Angela had asked me a question about why I was dressed the way I was and I responded somewhat cavalierly and for whatever reason, it annoyed me that she had asked me the question. In the way that she had asked me the question and I was like, Good heavens, I'm like 52, I can wear what I want to wear. And the more I, you know, I was studying this and listening to my hymns on the, you know, in the car on the way in, because that's the only way I make it through the day, frankly, otherwise I show up at work so angry I bite the head off the first person I find. And the Lord just really worked on my heart over the course of that entire day. And I kept coming back to that. I was like, why are you annoyed? Why are you annoyed? Why are you annoyed? And this question, whose are you, came into my mind. And I thought, well, I'm God's. Well, who else's? The answer is Angela's. And again, doesn't matter why, but what she was talking to me about is a perception that I was presenting myself to the world in a way that did not appropriately reflect whose I am. which was God's and hers. And again, don't get weird. I had an outfit on something like this, probably slightly more casual, but something like this. I don't know what you're thinking right now, but clean it up. It was fine. There's just a really interesting opportunity for me to think through that from a male perspective. Our wives leave the house, our daughters leave the house, and we have these rules for them, or maybe we don't have the rules for them, one of which is that the latter is actually a huge grievance for me. Fathers with daughters, prepare. I'm gonna take a hard swing at you, and I mean to hit you in the jaw. But I just thought it was such an interesting concept, and the Lord used that, not just for me to be able to think about manifesting that with Angela, but also manifesting that with the Lord. I thought, if my wife can have that idea about something as innocuous as the discussion we were having, how much more the Lord? And so it was just, it was really helpful to me. And frankly, for the last three weeks, I think, since I had that experience, I've been thinking so much about this idea of modesty in manhood. What does it look like? Usually plays a different role, right? We don't, I mean, hopefully don't put on your short shorts and low cut tops and all the rest of the things you normally associate with female and modesty. But what about how we present ourselves? I hate, and I've hated it since I was 18 going to the gym. I've spent a lot of time in a gym exercising. I enjoy exercising. I hate them. My idea of a gym is a sweaty pump room someplace with no mirrors. with chemicals in the air from whatever machinery is around you so that you don't want to stay there any longer than you have to to get your exercise and go home. You're certainly not looking at yourself in the mirror or staring down at your biceps or trying to develop some glossy glimmer while you're in there so that you can look sweaty and pumped. What are you doing there? You're presenting to the world who you are. And the testimony you're presenting is that you're your own. Look at me. Look what I am. Look what image I want to have you think of when you see me. A resolution to daily consider whose you are and to order your daily duties. This is important. This has everything to do with being Christ's in a practical, daily way. And to order your daily duties in such a way to clearly demonstrate whose you are and what you are in Him. And by the way, when I say that, it's implied everywhere all the time that you are magnificent in Him. There are few of us in the room, if any, that are disciplining our minds and our hearts and our lives in a way that we are demonstrating the magnificence that God made us for. In our individuality, in our manhood, in our womanhood, in our contributions to community. I could spend the whole day on that particular one. But that is one of my objectives. The next is to identify ways in which the normal of a world rejecting God have been integrated and accepted into your thinking to reclaim a Christian mind. To identify ways in which the normal of the world has been integrated and accepted into your thinking to reclaim a Christian mind. To challenge God-honoring leadership in the area of modesty. And when I say leadership there, I definitely mean the traditional leadership that you would expect of men, I'll just share this story with you right here, right now. I don't have a lot of what I would call super close friends. I have a few. One family in particular, we have known for a number of years. We are extremely close friends with. We've even vacationed with them. And if you knew how Angela and I feel about other people, generally. The idea that we would vacation with other people is just mind-blowing. And we did it, and we're still friends, surprisingly. I have the utmost respect for this man in the Lord as a Christian brother. as a teacher, as an accountability partner, not about anything in particular necessarily, if you're wondering what I meant by the accountability thing, but just in all of life, scraping my thinking and my acting against the hard things of God's word. But in this one thing, he has utterly failed, and it drives me bonkers. He has two daughters, one Drew's age and one younger. Clearly I am not going to have a discussion with modesty with this guy about his young teenage daughters. That does not fly amongst men. You don't discuss the modesty of a teenage girl that's the daughter of a good friend of yours. You just let that be. Hope some woman speaks into the situation. He brings it up all the time. He is frustrated at the tension that he feels about the modesty of his daughters. And yet he will not interact with that topic in his own home. He consistently says to me, I do not feel that it is my place to interject in that conversation with my wife and my daughters. And my question to him the last time he brought it up was simply this, you're the only one in the house that knows what every guy out there is thinking when they see your daughter. You uniquely know how depraved we are. You uniquely know that the best of us engages in a tooth and nail fight with our depravity. Those are the good men, by the way. Women. And some of you are nodding. You don't know? It's like me saying I understand women. You have no clue. So we're all supposed to wear burkas? No, you are supposed to be women adorned in the magnificent beauty that God made you for. And I don't have a three fingers from the collarbone and two handbreadths from the knee and this loose or this tight. I don't know. It depends on your body style, it depends on the function, it depends on how you carry yourself and how you talk. It depends on whether you can look me in the eye while we're speaking. I have worked with women I have gone to church with women that have worn completely inappropriate clothing, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know what they were going for, but they spent a lot of money on things that didn't come with enough cloth. But they look me in the eye when they engage me, and they're intelligent. And they're serious. And there is no offer being presented there. And despite the fact that I think, that's foolish. What you're wearing is just not helpful. I don't feel like she's sinful. I don't have a standard like that for you. Some of it is absolutely sinful. Some people put on attire specifically to elicit a response that is absolutely sinful. Others do it because they're foolish. Others do it because they haven't been taught about the body style they have and how that works with clothing. Angela and I talk about that all the time. Not specific to her, just about people. Bye, wife. does not struggle in this space, right? At least I don't feel like it. As a matter of fact, I have always appreciated looking, I feel like I need to say this so I can have a liberty to say whatever else I want, the thing, and you're not always going, oh. Right? We have great discussions about this, and always have. She knows how to be beautiful. which means she's accentuating her womanhood. She knows how to be modest. She's one of the most significant intellects that I know. I don't struggle here with her, okay? Just that's an ellipsis in my discussion, but write it down. I'll put my name on it, and let's move on. What was the point of all that? Man, you need to get engaged. It absolutely is your job. I am sick to death of men that are like, I can't lead in this area. I don't wash dishes. I don't clean up the house. I don't cook. I don't come alongside my wife and this side of the other thing. I don't talk about her dresses or her shorts. I don't engage my daughters on issues related to femininity. What exactly do you think leadership is? Do what I said. That's not a leader. You're a pompous, Fill in the blank. If you're unfamiliar with their expression, I'll tell you some other time when it's not being recorded for the internet. Read, for heaven's sake. I'm not going to tell you what that second word was. Romans 14, 13. Therefore, let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this, not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother's way. And I think that's what we need to worry about. I mean, every individual can say, what I'm wearing or what I'm doing, whatever it is, is it's going to be a stumbling block to someone. I just want to be clear that if we limit this to a stumbling block of sensuality, then I've failed this morning. when God made women in their womanhood. And young men, you pay attention to this. I grew up in the same kind of world that you did, or are. We always put new colors and flavors on it, because that's what sells, but very similar. Sex saturated everywhere. And because I struggled with that as a young man, the way you struggle with it as young men, I defended my thinking by labeling things wrong or bad or whatever. And so I began to think about the beauty of womanhood in ways that had ugliness dripped around it. Ugliness in my heart and my mind, like, that's bad. Oh, and you know, faces turn away from conspicuous immodesty and stuff. And it wasn't until I got a little bit older that I really appreciated the idea that God made women beautifully, magnificently beautifully, and to recognize that while at the same time recognizing whose they are was extremely helpful to me. To look at something, a woman, even an ill-dressed woman, by ill-dressed I mean manifesting sensuality and be able to say, that is particularly beautiful. And it is not mine. It's God's. Whether she knows it or not, it's God's, was extremely helpful to me. But if you limit what I'm talking about to modesty and that sensuality sense, you've missed it. Whose you are covers all of it. It is. You can show up to work in sweats, baggy sweats and a flannel every day and you are still immodest. You say, what? You are manifesting that you care about yourself. You have chosen an identity of slovenliness or casualness and you've decided that that's what you're gonna manifest. You are not manifesting whose you are. You are not manifesting an ordered, structured, careful, creative, beautiful, truthful, positive, propositional. Does everybody understand propositional? What's it mean? Somebody tell me what propositional means. Advancing a proposition. Yes. Dependent upon language. Dependent upon language, but more than that. The truth, or it's either true or it's not true? Yeah. To make a proposition is to make a statement using language that extends a truth. By extends, I mean offers a truth. Right? God is fundamentally propositional. So much so that his son is called the Word. It's hard to say he's not propositional. If you want to manifest whose you are, then everything about your life should extend that propositional truth. And while, which I had on last night, ripped work pants and a stained shirt are appropriate for changing a starter on my zero turn, it's not appropriate for church. It's a wrong proposition. Propositions are culturally bound, they're economically bound, there's all sorts of space for it. You make the proposition that you are able to make in the best way possible for the glory of the Lord to manifest who you are and leave the rest out there. Leave the rest to the Lord. Leave the rest to the community of believers that will come around you and support you and encourage you in those things. What you say women and men. Man, study hard. Study hard. Look at the infinite detail of our Lord. He is amazing. And your mind and your capacity for reflecting that amazingness is a part of recognizing and manifesting whose you are. Read a book. Turn off your television. Our immodesty affects every area of our lives. Words used in the scripture for modesty. Grammar of modesty. Cosmias is one of the most And idos is another. Those are the two prominent words that we're going to read about and find in the scriptures. First one's in 1 Timothy 2.9. It's probably on the back of the sheet. It is. It's one of these classic modesty verses. Oh, it looks like I got one of my separators wrong. I'm sorry about that. But anyway, it's one of these classic modesty verses. It's kind of in the middle of your page, 1 Timothy 2, 9, 10, and 15b. That women should adorn themselves in respectable, that's this Cosmeo word, apparel with modesty and self-control. And you'll notice those three things go together a lot. That respectable or modest, depending on your translation by the way. Some of them say modest apparel there, which is a perfectly valid translation. With modesty, a different form of the same word, but also as we would translate it into English, perfectly legitimate to call that modesty. and self-control. Those words go together a lot. Not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness. With what? What is proper for women who profess godliness? Come on, just read it. Good works. Why is that a little bit shocking? What did we expect a verse about modesty to say? Yeah, with lots of clothing. Right? With a burqa. You guys don't know what a burqa is? It's that full headdress outfit that some Islamic cultures require women to wear out, right? Head-to-toe coverage. It doesn't say that. It says good works. Now, it doesn't mean that apparel isn't a part of it. It also doesn't mean, you know, dowdy and, you know, wallflower looking, right? Adorn yourselves, that's a very decorative word, adorn yourselves with these good works. It is your clothing. It is your speech. It is your courage. It is your presentation. It is your nobility. It is your intellect. It is your wisdom. It is your discernment. It is your skill. It is your experiences in life that God has given you. It is the gifts that you have that you communicate with the Christian brother and sister that you're talking to. It is you demonstrating whose you are. That you serve an excellent God. And are pursuing excellence in all areas of your life. And as if to answer the question, what good works, if they continue in faith and love and holiness, and there's that word again, self-control. But man, I want you to see here, and I think I have this someplace else too. When it describes an overseer in 1 Timothy 3, 2, it says, therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable. That's that cosmio word again. I'll tell you why I love that word. What's it sound like when I say it? Cosmio. Cosmos. And it in fact comes from that. If you just hit the right arrow button in your strong, you know, online strong concordance, that word will be right there. And in fact, they are related. It means the ordered presentation of a thing, like the stars govern in the physics that God has applied to them. Their order and structure, their ornamentation, the wonder and complexity of them, as was prayed this morning by one of the young men in the prayer room, the design itself speaks to something else, speaks to a creator, speaks to the orderer, speaks to God. And that's what women and men are called to here in these Timothy passages. Put on a form, a habit, an adornment, a clothing, a posture, an attitude, a pattern of speech, a pattern of entering into community that demonstrates this amazing God. Apt and harmonious is the, right out of the dictionary there in the Strong's Concordance, this is Thayer's actually, but an apt and harmonious arrangement or constitution, order, government, all of those things come from a design, a plan, a structure. They speak to God. Translated as modest in 1 Timothy 2.9 of women in the Coleman Standard Bible, or yeah, Holman Standard Bible is what I meant to say by that one, but also translated respectable in First Timothy 3.2. So it kind of hides that it's a similar word between men and women there, but it's the same word being used and by the same author to the same person and or church. Notice that that word for prudence is also always side by side, prudence or self-control. And then the other thing I want you to notice, it's less clear in the passage about women in Timothy, but it's much more clear in the passage about men in Timothy, that those things, as Paul builds that list for Timothy, talks about being respectable or modest and self-controlled and hospitable. And in Greek, the word actually works out better. It's a combination of two words that you would remember if you just know two English words. If you know Philadelphia or whatever, right? Love. So phylo word. And then if you have a little bit of extra vocabulary and you know the word xenophobe, which is an English word that basically means people are afraid of strangers or foreigners or what is strange, right? So that xeno word. And it's phyloxeno. It's literally the word for hospitality there. And I love that. You're supposed to be modest and adorn your life with whose you are, right? Writ large across your life. And you're supposed to love others. And the two relate. Necessarily. Notice of prudence and respectability are followed by, oh, I said that already. Sorry, guys. And so most literally, a love for the foreigner, the necessity of thinking of others and serving others. Some of you men are gonna let yourself off the hook. You're like, I don't desire to be an overseer. Are you married? Yes, you do. You don't have a choice. Are you, right, the head of the marriage as Christ is the head of the church? You may not be called to stand in a formal ministry like a talking moron up here in front of a Sunday school class, but you are absolutely called as an overseer of your home. you are called as an overseer of your wife and your daughters. To demonstrate in modesty the amazingness of who God is, that He fully owns you and how that plays out in value in your life. That your wife and your children would come to know and desire God better and that they would experience some small glimpse of the goodness of Christ. while they're here on earth. And so you must be modest and you must be hospitable and you must enter into their lives intentionally. This is a tough one. I have a lot of projects. I have a lot of facets to my identity. Hydraulic mechanic on back hose. Who knew I was going to be that? But apparently that's one of my callings these days. Went out to fix a battery on one piece of equipment, ended up ripping the entire engine out of another piece of equipment the same day because it failed while I was trying to fix the other thing. Sunday school teacher, father, husband, son, son-in-law, brother, uncle, Engineer. The number of roles I have at work is staggering. It makes my head hurt. Company owner. Didn't get there yet, but absolutely, writ large over all of it. I am Christ's. But most of us spend time identifying ourselves by, I'm a woodworker. And by the way, I do IT on the side. Meaning, for money, I do IT and identify myself as a woodworker. There's an immodesty about that kind of self-identification. That's you saying what you want to be or what you like the most. Is it wrong to do woodworking? Absolutely not. I wish I was better at it. I envy people that are good at it. I can think of one or two of you in the room. I've seen some of your stuff. I wish I could do that. But there's an immodesty about you presenting to the world what you want them to perceive you as. When that is not, I am Christ's, wholly and fully. Heart of modesty is knowing whose you are and caring for others, demonstrating in word, presentation, and action who God is, who you are in him, and drawing others into God's glory. And by the way, it should be good. It should be good. What you demonstrate to the world about whose you are should be good. It should be inviting. They should want it. This next word, still in 1 Timothy 2.9, is a sense of honor, modesty, reverence, regard for others, and respect. It's you reverencing God in how you act, and you respecting others that are His. that they might come and know Him, or enjoy Him, or be refreshed more fully in Him. I'll skip the next one. I can't help who I am or what I am. I need a framework to help me think about things. And as I was studying through modesty, there were all these little pieces, right? Any of you know what a mind map is? I started with modesty in the middle, and then I pursued this branch over here, whose are you? And then I pursued this branch over here, which was clothing. And then I pursued this branch over here that was speech. And then I pursued this branch over here. There was this other thing and I had all these branches and I thought, well, how am I going to do this? Well, this is my attempt at some structure. First, know who you are, whose you are. And when you answer that question, you're going to say, I'm God's or I'm myself, my own. And you say, well, aren't there all shades of I'm this person's or I'm that person. Those are all you. If you define yourself the way society wants you to, if you dress a certain way because that's how everybody else dresses, you're really saying, I want people to perceive me in this way. You are your own idol. Tying to previous lessons. You are your own idol. You either are owned by God or you are owned by self. If you're owned by God, you must pursue virtue. See 2 Peter 1, verse 5. Add to your faith virtue. And we have a funny way of thinking about virtue. It's very fuzzy and vague, but it really means excellent for the purpose for which you are intended. A book that I read with my sons when they were young worked really well. It gave an illustration of a knife. And they love knives. They have more knives than there are days in a year. And they're still looking for more, like, oh, this one. They have dress knives, for heaven's sakes. Have I mentioned that to you? They have dress knives. They're like, well, this is a church knife. I'm like, what's a church knife? And they're different. I mean, their church knife is like smooth and wooden and delicate. I mean, it looks like a church knife. Who knew that was a category until they said it? Now I'm like, yeah, that's a church knife. Is that like a military dress sword or something? Thankfully smaller, but thank you for giving one of my sons an idea now. That was really helpful. Not. But when you pick up a knife to use it for a job, and there are different knives for different jobs. I want a box cutter when I'm cutting boxes. I don't want it when I'm hacking through the woods on my land. Not useful. The right knife, sharpened in the right way, at the right time, is a wonder. I love it. I can't tell you how many people I carry around a knife sharpener with me now when I travel because I eat dull knives. That's a confession. I occasionally forget it and I always look at Angela and go, why'd you let me forget my knife sharpener? It's just a little manual thing, so don't get panicked. I don't bring along like, you know, a bench press, a wrench drill or something like that. But anyway, it's just wonderful to use a knife that actually works for the purpose that it was intended for. It's not going to work. That analogy isn't going to work for a lot of you in the room, but it worked for my kids. They were like, oh, oh, I get it. I get what excellence for the purpose that it was intended for. That's what you are called to do. You are called to continually add that to your walk of faith in Christ. When you serve yourself, it's all about vanity. What do I look like? How do people perceive me? What do they think about me? What am I getting out of this situation? Modesty necessarily follows from virtue, control of self in word, dress, and action for the purpose of exalting God and not ourselves. The intentional direction of one's life for the purpose of serving others. It is not passive. It is 100% active. You are acting in modesty or immodesty, virtue or the opposite at all times. Immodesty is pride on display by what you wear, say, and do. Again, four weeks, I've had a lot of time to think when you're studying something like this, you know, the whole world turns into a modesty stage, right? It's like, is it modest, is it not? Are those words modest, are they not? Are my words modest, are they not, right? Two examples of modesty, extreme in my mind, notable examples of modesty and immodesty, that is amazing, that popped up this week. Both women, about 15 years older than me, had nothing to do with what they were wearing. But what they said, the one was offensive in how immodest the words were. The person, as near as I can tell, I was actually upset enough about it that I didn't have any liberty to go engage the person about it. The words were so proud. Let me tell you why you're wrong. Let me take this opportunity to show you how I've figured it out, and you don't know, and you messed up. And it was sickening. It literally was to the point where I noted myself, despite the fact that there was nothing visual about this entire experience. I could barely see the person, actually. I actually found myself looking away, like that was gonna help. Not here, somehow. But I couldn't stop thinking about how immodest those words were. And the other one was the complete opposite. The other one was just words that showed exactly whose that person was. It was a person that spoke kindness and gentleness when they didn't need to. They could have spoken with pride or with arrogance or with justifiable authority in some senses. And instead, gentle, firm, kind, humility. And I was just struck by how glorious the modesty was. And I was also struck with the demand that I felt that it put on me. There was a demand to respond rightly. Not that the person made the demand, but because of the humility, because of the modesty, There was a demand to respond rightly, to respond kindly, to respond in a way that honored the Lord. I have written a series... I was like, holy cow, what happened to my time? I have written... Let me draw your attention to the back page, the margin. I do wanna go through some of these verses with you, but we're getting close. I feel that I've made my point pretty significantly here. By the way, there's so much that could be said, right? About nakedness in the Old Testament, about how much scripture covers nakedness, about how much scripture covers speech, about all those things. But these verses that I've put on here make it clear that the scripture sees modesty in a certain way. And frankly, I don't believe that we have, and this is something I can say about myself, I don't believe that we have good categories for discussing modesty anymore because we're so busy talking about literally just the dress. And while that's important, There's a fundamental need. If you just take a woman and make her wear long dresses or long clothes or baggy clothes or whatever the other case might be, and Angela grew up in a church and school that were like this, it makes people bitter and angry. Teach them whose they are. And teach them how magnificent it is to be His. And there is something magnificent about your manhood. I said something, there's actually everything magnificent about it when it's aligned with what God wants you to be. And there is something magnificent about your womanhood. But it is not just your dress or the visibility of your skin. It covers your speech, your possessions. your social media. We could do a whole quarter of lessons just on that social media topic. But when you want to see the immodesty of a church, go look at its Facebook page or I don't have any social media, so I'm a social media idiot. In addition to all the other types of idiots that I am, I am a social media idiot. So it is easy to laugh or scoff at me. I understand that old people apparently use Facebook and young people use something else. I don't care. If you text more than 10 times a day to people outside of your family, you might as well be on social media as far as I'm concerned. And I wonder what's wrong with your life, that the here and the now are not a sufficiently significant means for you to manifest your walk with Christ, that you have to be trying to do it remotely. And this from an engineer that deals with technology and communication systems all of his life. So you've got to consider that. your ambitions, your position, your occupation, your appointment, your stature in a church. What are you presenting? And what is it saying about whose you are? Tattoos. I'm not against them, per se. I don't have one. I never intend to have one. If you asked me if I wanted one, I'd be like, no. I don't even know why I necessarily react like that. I've seen beautiful ones. I've seen disgusting ones. I've seen immodest ones. I've seen ones that I didn't think were immodest. I don't know that I would call them modest. I don't know what a modest tattoo looks like, actually. I've seen them on men and women, by the way. I've seen tattoos on men that I was like, I don't know what message you're trying to get across there, but it didn't work. Whatever it is, it didn't work. It left you looking pathetic, which is not honoring to the Lord. Piercings, makeup, styles, brands. It's all in there, people. But your speech and the carriage of your person and the presentation of your heart by the words that come out of your mouth, those are the things I hope you really walk out of here with. Because you will have a hard time as an ambassador of him whose you are. You will have a hard time being the kind of ambassador you want to be when your presentation doesn't align with it. It will just come to you. You'll be like, how can I stand here and talk to this person about these things in this way, like this? Again, a lot of you are like, oh, you mean immodest. Well, yes, I mean immodest, but I also just mean sloppy. It was a big thing with my sons. Don't look sloppy. God didn't make you sloppy. He made you excellently. He made you strong. He made you heroic. He made you smart. He made you to be leaders. He made you to be a demonstration of His strength in meekness. But when you show up sloppy, you just look like a slob. Meekness is best demonstrated by a powerful horse that consents to the touch of a person or a rider by a word or by a look instead of by the crack of a whip. That's a good definition for meekness. But when you just look like an old nag hanging out on the pasture there, that's not meekness. You're not demonstrating God. I've seen several young women in the church over the last 20 years. I don't know what clicked. I never talked to them about it, because why would you talk to somebody? Why would I talk to a young woman about something like this? But they went through this phase in their life, and I don't know, I just assume, nobody cares about me, and I don't really care about me, and they just look bad, frankly, for a couple of years. They just look bad. You know, like, you look at them and you're like, And something occurs to them, and they come out of that stage. And it is exciting. And I don't mean sexually. I mean, it's exciting because I just, I don't, I just believe, I guess. Again, I never asked them. But they suddenly become engaged in conversation. They become bright-eyed, they get involved in community, they start to contribute and challenge those around them, and their clothing changes radically. They become modest. They seem to have come to a place where they understand whose they are. And they begin to manifest that in their actions, in their words, in their deeds, in the study of their life, apparently, because of the new contributions they begin to make in community. Let's just go through a few of the scriptures. 1 Corinthians 6, 17, 19 through 20, but he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. Dot, dot, dot. There's more that's said there. So, but the end of all of it, glorify God in your body. Where am I getting all this nonsense about who you're owned by and demonstrating it? Well, I'm building that argument here with these first few verses. Who owns you and what is required of you as a result? Well, God owns you. And your daily walk, the manifestation of your walk, needs to be that He owns you. Romans 14, seven through eight, for none of us lives to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord. And if we die, we die to the Lord. So then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lords. There's no sense of male or female there. There's we, both. Psalm 115, 1, not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Your name give glory. Not vanity, but virtue. Don't look at me as me, look at me as I reflect Him. For by the grace given to me, Romans 12, 3, for by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. Each according to the measure of faith. God has given me something, he has done something in me, and let me consider now how to reflect that out to the world. Each according to the measure given. 2 Corinthians 10, 17-18, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. Which is a summary quotation from Jeremiah 9, 23-24. You should go read that sometime. For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends. 1 Peter 3. Really one through six, but you'll see I've only chosen a selection of verses here. So that they may be one without a word. It's talking about wives and husbands, believing wives, unbelieving husbands. So that they may be one without a word by the conduct of their wives. When they see your respectful, that's that Cosmios word again. Respectful in pure conduct, do not let your adorning be external, the braiding of hair, the wearing of gold, or the putting on of clothing, 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, sorry for my separator there, which in God's sight is very precious. Do good and do not fear anything that is frightening. I puzzled over that last clause for the longest time. I was like, why are we talking about frightening things? A modest person is so convinced about whose they are and so absorbed in trying to demonstrate that to the best of their ability that it casts out fear. Fear about whether or not I have any valid identity. Fear about whether my life matters. Fear about how others will consider me. Fear about attempting great things for God. Fear about living within a box that's rightly defined. Did I live within the box of modesty? Did I manage Christian whitehood right? Motherhood right? Fatherhood right? It casts out all those fears. I know whom I belong to. And I know, as a sinful man will, that with the best of my abilities I am pursuing Him, and I am frequently confessing the daily wrongs that I do. But that's my best. That idea of living modestly without fear pops up over and over again, actually more in the Old Testament, which I was really surprised by. 1 Timothy 2, 9 and 10, we read that one already, that's that classic modesty verse, you guys have been beat over the head enough with that, I'm pretty sure it's tattooed on your brain. We read the passage in 3.2 which talks about an overseer also being modest. I just liked a couple of these and actually Proverbs 9.13 I'm going to ask you to turn there as well. It's what I meant to include and didn't. Like a gold ring in a pig's snout is a beautiful woman without discretion. I cannot tell you how many times I have had this experience. You meet a woman, often there's some questionable modesty going on. You think, she looks really good. And then she opens her mouth. And you just wish she'd never spoken. You no longer can bear to look at her. The woman folly is loud. She is seductive. And she knows nothing. So the woman wisdom therefore would be what? These are not trick questions, people. Quiet. Quiet. Not necessarily not speaking, but not loud, right? You know the difference between a loud person and a person with quiet respectability and authority. That's right. Quiet and knowledgeable. Sure, absolutely. Knowledgeable. Women, if I could leave you with any key pursuit that you could take on that might adorn you with greater modesty, whether that's an issue in your life or not, knowledge. Knowledge of him whose you are and knowledge of his created order, which opens up to you every intellectual endeavor that's true and beautiful in the scope of humanity. Be knowledgeable. and be pursuing it always. The virtuous woman, we're really capitalizing on that idea of virtue, dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong. Her clothing is fine linen and purple, not dowdy and pasty and unseen and unrecognized. She adorns the magnificence of her womanhood appropriately. I don't know who's had this experience and hasn't. If you have ever seen a woman, and this is for men, but women did a little study on this. It's very interesting. Just a quick side note here. In a research effort about beauty, and by the way, if you think beauty is all subjective, you drank the Kool-Aid and you need to get off that ship. Only in this time period, uniquely in history, do we make that be true. It has never been true previously. Read the little footnote at the bottom. You can see how that culture has made it be true so that they can move into feminism, LGBTQ, plusness, all the rest of it. When they wanted to twist the truth of God, they made beauty be subjective. But you take a beautiful person and an ugly person and show them to a two-day-old baby. Guess who the two-day-old baby looks at 85% of the time? The beautiful person. Well, who culturally indoctrinated the child to think that was beautiful? I don't know, but that was fast. If I could learn how to indoctrinate children in two days, my sons would get a dose. When you show a beautiful, beautiful man and an ugly man to a woman, the split in how much time they spend looking at them according to the research, is fairly even. It's not true with men. Show a beautiful woman to a man, or a beautiful man to a man, beautiful, handsome, right? To a man, men look at beauty. Like, how much time, how much time? Look at beauty. Women, ugly men, good looking men, eh, good looking men, ugly men. Same woman, good looking women, ugly women, almost twice the amount of time they spend looking at good-looking women, attractive women. So this isn't just something that men struggle with. Men struggle with it as a sexual idol. Women struggle with it as an identity idol. That's identity though, right? I want, I want that. There is beauty and you women And you men, frankly, need to be pursuing it for yourselves in order to demonstrate whose you are. Beauty makes a demand on your life. We don't have time for that topic. It's a whole separate lesson, but beauty makes demands. When you see a thing that's beautiful, it demands a designer, a creator. It demands order and structure. It demands complexity. It demands humility. I could never do that. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. I just love that the definition of a modest woman is strength and dignity. It's not wallflower. It's not that ugly meekness that we think of when we talk about women being modest. We'll just be modest, sit in the corner, don't be seen, don't be heard, don't be conspicuous. That's not this woman. When the virtuous woman walks into a room, people look. But there is a demand that they then see her God. They see who she is. They recognize that she is not theirs and that she is significant and strong and dignified and honorable and that the order of engagement for her is on planes of dignity and honor and respect. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit. But in humility, count others more significant than yourselves. We have heard this argument about humility so often, and it always comes back to, well, consider your brother. And the counter response is, well, that's your brother's problem. And it is. It is your brother's problem. But I just gave you an example where men and women struggle with this issue of modesty, men as a sexual idol, or a sexuality idol, if you will, and women as an identity idol. So you're not just talking about the men, you're talking about the women as well. Well, I can't be responsible for everybody's thoughts. No, you can. But you can be responsible for the thoughts of the brother and sister right in front of you. The one right around the corner, the one you're going to go see at church, the one you're going to go visit, the one you're posting to or may read your post on social media or fill in the blank. And I really, I'm sorry if you feel hemmed in by need to consider other people's weaknesses, but it's right here. Is it helpful that those whole series of passages say it is your responsibility that when you are aware of how you affect those around you, you need to be responsible for that effect. So I'm frankly just completely insensitive to you not wanting to be shackled. You aren't shackled. I wish you'd stop seeing this shackled. You have great liberty in the Lord, but you are absolutely responsible, and not because I say so, it's because it's blatantly clear in the scriptures. So you can either say, yes, Lord, or you can say, no, Lord. Good luck with the latter. a resolution to daily consider whose you are and to order your daily duties in such a way to clearly demonstrate whose you are and what you are in Him. To identify ways in which the normal of a world rejecting God has been, that should be has been, I knew I was stumbling over that sentence all morning, has been integrated and accepted into your thinking to reclaim a Christian mind. and to challenge God-honoring leadership in the area of modesty. Those have been my purposes this morning. I will have to leave it to you. I did not discuss my leadership bubble at the bottom of this page, but men, I wish you would really, men and women, but particularly you men that keep making that ridiculous statement about not having the ability or the responsibility or the accountability to enter into this modesty discussion with your wives and daughters, you just gotta look at this word paideia in the scriptures. You gotta study it out. Look up that Greek word, find every verse in the scriptures that uses it, get a copy of the Septuagint so you can go back into the Old Testament as well. You are absolutely called to it. And it is a high calling and an important one Teach your daughters whose they are. Teach them that their womanhood is magnificent. Not on sale, not cheap, not something that the world demands of them, but something they have from God that is useful in the world for God's glory. and then treat your wife in a way that demonstrates that to those daughters. Oh, so much I wanna say there. Lord, I felt distracted coming in. I felt distracted during the lesson. My self-assessment of this is that it was rambling and incoherent. And yet they're your words, they're your scriptures. And so I'm just asking that you would take these men and these women and make them your own. Demonstrate your glory through their lives each day. By your grace, amen.