Inside Out part 3
"What matters is not your outer appearance--the styling of your hair, the jewelry you wear, the cut of your clothes--but your inner disposition. Cultivate inner beauty, the gentle, gracious kind that God delights in" (1 Peter 3:3-4 MSG). Isn't it funny, the things that we give so much importance to? Outward stuff. Appearance realm stuff. Stuff that fades. But this is the stuff that we let dictate the inward stuff. The real stuff. As the King James Version puts it: the hidden man of the heart. And I think that word, "hidden" is important. Because sometimes you have to look a little bit deeper to find what really matters. The deep calls out to the deep. What's inside (Jesus, love) connects with itself. What I mean is, the Jesus in me connects to the Jesus in you. We are all one body. HIS body. But we'll seemingly let anything--the smallest, most insignificant things--come between us. That's outside in. Jesus said it like this, "Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment" (John 7:24). And righteous judgment doesn't mean getting up on your high horse and getting religious on people. It means EXECUTING the righteous judgment that God the Father handed down to Jesus the Son on the cross. NOT a judgment that said, "I'm mad at you and I have to kill you so that I can stop being mad." Nobody--not even God the Father--killed Jesus. Jesus laid His life down so that He could take it back up. The judgment wasn't a death sentence. It was a life sentence. The judgment of God was, "You ARE dead in your trespasses and sins, but I have come to bring you out of death and into life!" And He did that by showing us the Father. By filling us--on the INSIDE--with the Holy Spirit. By giving us the love receptor we needed in order to know and believe that love of God that was always there! And when that love is inside--when we KNOW that love is inside--then it can come out. Then the hidden man of the heart is revealed in the actions of the body of Christ! In our verse in the Message Bible it doesn't say "get inner beauty." It says, "cultivate inner beauty." You can't cultivate something you don't already have. When we look in the mirror with an unveiled face--with the stone of the Law taken out of the way--we can see the glory of God. And we are changed into that same image from GLORY to GLORY. We become what we behold. Our true identity--Jesus--inside of us comes out as we learn more and more who we really are. But we don't change into something we're not. We mature into what--into WHO--we really are. Who we've always been before the world hissed in our ears and lied to us and told us we're anything but the image and likeness of God. Buried underneath all of that outward stuff is the real you. It's inside. And, believe it or not, you're full of it. Filled to overflowing with it. What's inside comes out naturally. And tomorrow we're going to look at how we tap into that source. How we enjoy the gift that we've been given. How we manifest the truth of God's love for us and in us and through us!