GUEST ARTICLE

Modest Apparel

Ancient Greece filled her land with beautiful temples and naked statues.  Her citizens enthroned wisdom and worshipped the human form.  As a result, degradation abounded, and man used his knowledge to devise new means of sensual gratification.  So Greece fell, and great was the fall thereof!  But amidst the ruin appeared a missionary who taught the slaves of passion about a greater servitude—voluntarily given to one who was the Ideal Man, and who though tempted in all points as a man, was yet without sin.

This apostle to the Gentiles taught the true use of the human body, and affirmed it to be a temple in which dwelt the Holy Spirit, the Spirit from on high.  Women were instructed to “dress becomingly, with modesty and self-control . . . as befits women making a profession of godliness.”  Intemperance and immodest dress do not befit Christian women.  No woman who loves God and the Bible can appear on the streets in a halter and brief set, or in shorts, which were devised in profligate fashion centers by those who pander to inordinate desire.

It is a sad commentary on our morals that we dress up our church buildings and undress our bodies—the true temples of God.  Christian women should lift the world to a higher plane, not lower it by presenting a lure and temptation to rapists and seducers.  You are the salt of the earth.  If the salt loses it strength or influence for good, how shall the earth longer be preserved?

Why should sisters in the Lord sing, “More about Jesus would I know; More of his grace to others show,” and then ruin the effect of their profession, by showing more of their bodies than they do the grace of God.  In this season of the year when the world all about you undresses like jungle savages, will you not show that Christian refinement which will make the church stand out because of your chaste conduct and modest demeanor?  It will do us little good to send missionaries to convert naked Hottentots to civilized manners, if while doing so, we revert to the breech clothes of the jungle aborigines.

If you make a claim to godliness, make good on that claim!  Certainly the world will think you are different—you are supposed to be!  God was not joking when He gave the instruction about modest dress.  There is enough lust of the flesh without your adding fuel to the fire!  BH