SKIN DEEP

Do you wish you could call yourself beautiful or handsome? If you said, “Not me,” I don’t know that I’d believe you. We all want to be beautiful to look at.But what is true beauty? We look at ourselves in the mirror and we each have our own evaluation of beauty. Each person’s ideas differ according to individual taste, but God looks on our beauty with the searchlight of the Holy Spirit, and He sees an entirely different picture of beauty. God sees beauty as coming from only one place, and that is from the inner-life on the inside of our hearts. The life of Jesus Christ flowing out of us – that’s what makes us beautiful. A beautiful person can be made ugly, or an ugly person beautiful, depending on a life lived with God or without Him. If your outward appearance has been a lifelong source of concern and anxiety, then decide tonight to center instead on the real source of beauty, the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. I have seen tense people lined before their time, wrinkled by stress, blemished by anxiety. And I have seen these same people, after prayer and dedication, softened and set free, their faces changed from a hardened mask into a radiant outward manifestation of the inward joy that is the fruit of the Holy Spirit. There is no greater beauty in all the world! Always remember: “...the LORD sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance but the LORD on the heart” ..