The Kind of Lovely that Stays

Jesus came as the Second Adam, and this means the renewal of the human race. Last week, the exhortation was particularly aimed at men. This week the exhortation is for the women.

Ladies, the Bible teaches that your glory, your strength is found particularly in your beauty and your powers of nurturing life. This glory and power is found in those women who fear the Lord, who place their trust in the God who runs the universe, and who consequently obey His word regardless of their circumstances.

But fear is often the great crippler of women. After the first sin entered the world, God told Eve that her temptation would be to rule her husband. Peter tells wives to win over disobedient husbands without a word, to use their gentle and quiet spirits, their beauty inside and out. But women often see dangers coming, see the way things might go wrong, see how their husband or father or friends are missing something, and they wrongly think that they should talk about it.

Of course speech is a gift to all men and women, but the Bible gives specific warnings to women about their words. It’s better to live on a roof or even in the middle of the desert than to share a house with a contentious or angry woman. A contentious woman is like a faucet that won’t quit dripping.

Ladies, you were made to beautify the world, to cultivate life, to be the glory of men. That’s what you were made for. But this isn’t a magazine beauty, a faddish beauty, this is fundamentally the beauty of the fear of the Lord. A woman who trusts the Lord, a woman whose heart rests in the goodness of God, that woman is lovely beyond compare and in a way that cannot be lost, that cannot fade. And that kind of lovely is precious in the sight of God; it is fearless in the face of hardship and danger.

Today is Palm Sunday, the day we remember Jesus our King come to Jerusalem for us and for our salvation. He came to His own, but His own did not receive Him. But we are here because, by the grace of God, we want to receive Him, we have received Him. And to receive Him is to trust Him, to fear Him alone, and to cast all our cares upon Him.