my hope for readers of "none like him"

Today is the official release date for None Like Him! I wrote this book because of two convictions I hold regarding the importance of knowing what the Bible says about God's character. 

Meditating on God's character enriches our understanding of Scripture. When I write my Bible studies, I ask my students to look first for what the text says is true about God. I have found this can be a hard question for them to answer. I know it was for me for many years. The more I learned of God’s character, the clearer it became that the Bible was first and foremost a book about who God was before it had anything to say about who I was. Once I began reading to discover God’s character I was able to see my own in relation to His, rather than independent of His. We don't often take time to meditate on God’s attributes beyond just a passing acknowledgment, but when we do, our time in the Word is enriched. My prayer is that None Like Him would help us become more fluent in our vocabulary of those truths, and that we would see God and ourselves more clearly as a result.

Meditating on God’s character is intensely practical. Our daily lives would look very different if we took God’s character into consideration. God’s incommunicable attributes, in particular, should elicit a worshipful awe from us that causes us to see and embrace our limitedness in light of His limitlessness. Without that reference point, we can become convinced of our own awesomeness and work tirelessly to sustain it. We begin striving to take on the attributes that are not ours to possess, thus committing the idolatry the serpent offered Eve: “you will become like Him.” Once we recognize our desire for limitlessness as destructive, we are better able to submit willingly and joyfully to the God-ordained limits we have been given. And we are better able to worship Him.

If you’re looking for a book to use for a small group discussion time, or just for personal reflection or growth, I’ve structured the book with that in mind. Each of the ten short chapters explores one attribute, and then concludes with verses for meditation, four application questions, and a prayer. I hope you’ll keep a journal as you read, copying out the verses and writing your reflections and personal prayers in response to the questions. But however you use the book, I hope you’ll see God’s character emerge from the scriptures with greater clarity, and that you’ll be drawn to worship Him anew as you meditate on His perfections.

Happy reading!

five lies about your body

As we head into the New Year and take inventory of what we would like to change, many women will place making changes to our bodies at the top of the list. How we view our bodies will determine whether our plans to change them are God-honoring or self-elevating. Do we see our bodies the way our Maker does?

With that in mind, here are five lies our culture tells us about how we should perceive our bodies – and five truths from Scripture to help us shift our perspective.

• Lie #1: Your body is decorative. It should be used to attract the attention of men and the envy of women. What matters most is how it looks.
• Truth: Your body is useful. It should be used to accomplish the good works that God ordained for you to do. What matters most is what it does.

• Lie #2: Your body’s appearance is flawed but fixable. You are not the right size, shape or color. But you can (and should) go to enormous effort and expense to change that.
• Truth: Your body’s appearance is designed by God. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, according to a plan. Because God is a God of infinite creativity, people come in many different sizes, shapes and colors.

• Lie #3: Your body is a source of power. It can and should be trained, toned and preserved from all signs of age. Its level of attractiveness or strength can and should be leveraged to give you dominance over and independence from others.
• Truth: Your body has a set of limits. It succumbs to hunger, fatigue, exposure, injury, illness and age. Its fragility and fleeting vigor should point you toward submission to and dependence on a strong and eternal God.

• Lie #4: Your body is yours. You are its owner. You may neglect it, obsess over it, indulge it, punish it, pamper it or alter it as you wish.
• Truth: Your body is not yours. You are its steward. Because you were bought with a price, all decisions about and behaviors toward your body must be run through the filter of, “Does this glorify God in my body?”

• Lie #5: Transforming the outside will fix the inside. By making changes to your body, you can change the condition of your heart. You can have more self-confidence, better self-esteem and greater happiness.
• Truth: Transforming the inside will make peace with the outside. A mind being progressively transformed by the gospel rejects the worship of self and the futile pursuit of happiness. By pursuing holiness, your attitude toward your body will change, as you learn to love it as a good gift from God.

It is true that our bodies bear the impact of the fall: disability, disfigurement, infertility, chronic illness, terminal illness and even advanced age make these temporary dwellings difficult to love. People who face challenges like these think of their bodies differently than people who don’t. They tend to enjoy a heightened ability to value wellness over attractiveness. They readily understand that a beautiful body is a body that simply functions as it should.

Has someone close to you known a great health challenge? Honor their suffering by adopting their perspective, whether you ever share their experience. Trade cultural lies for the truth. May 2014 be a year in which we steward well the gifts of our bodies to bring about the will of God wherever they carry us. May it be a year in which we see our bodies as God sees them, in which we serve Him with eager hands, swift feet, and a joyful countenance. What could be more beautiful than that?


related posts:
New Year, New Self-Control
To Your Daughter Speak the Truth

to your daughter, speak the truth

“Happy girls are the prettiest” – Audrey Hepburn

I grew up with a dad who told me I was beautiful - a lot - thereby defying the conventional wisdom that daughters who are told this will define their worth by their appearance. I don’t. That’s probably because he also told me I was smart and capable and fun to be around. I somehow believed him about those things, but not about the beautiful part. Not even a little bit.

I would roll my eyes as he’d say it, reaching out to hug me, thinking to myself, “He just thinks that because he’s my dad.” My subscription to Seventeen Magazine reminded me faithfully every month that I was not, in fact, beautiful at all. My hair was stick-straight (a debilitating handicap for 80’s hair). I had a bad complexion. I had the shoulder span of a linebacker in an era when giant shoulder pads were routinely added to women’s shirts, seemingly for the sole purpose of enhancing my freakishness. I was no curvier than the thirteen year old boys I desperately hoped would ask me to dance, even as I loomed over them with my gargantuan height. Clearly, my dad was delusional.

But he was the best kind of delusional. He was the kind of delusional every daughter needs. He saw something in me that the mirror didn’t, and he routinely and faithfully pronounced me beautiful regardless of all objective external measures.

Without a doubt, we should tell our daughters that they are strong and capable, that their minds are gifts to be utilized, that their imaginations are tools to be implemented, that their bodies are vehicles for accomplishing good. But I also contend that we should tell them they are beautiful. All the time.  Whether they buy it or not. Trust me on this:

When she tells you she’s fat, tell her she’s beautiful.

When she tells you she’s plain, tell her she’s beautiful.

When she tells you she’s too X or not Y enough, tell her she’s beautiful.

When she tells you no one will ever want to date her, tell her she’s beautiful.

When she says nothing at all, tell her she’s beautiful.

She won’t believe you, any more than we believed our own fathers and mothers. But she will hear it from someone who genuinely means it, with no ulterior motive. She will hear it from you first. And that matters.

Because you don’t want her to hear it from someone else first. If we leave the soil of our daughters’ self-worth unwatered by our unconditional admiration, we send them into a world happy to satisfy that parched ground with conditional praise. What if the first person who tells her she’s beautiful is a shady guy she meets in class? Let her blossom well-watered by your compliments, offered for no other reason than the sheer joy of knowing her.

Your daughter knows when you tell her “You’re beautiful” that what you mean is “You’re beautiful to me.” And though initially she may perceive this to be the most well-meaning lie ever told to her, in time she will grow to recognize it as the most basic truth she can ever hear you speak: No matter what anyone else sees when they look at you, I see you when I look at you, and I say that what I see is beautiful. The end.

I see you. I love you. I know you. You are beautiful. To me.

We become more beautiful in the knowing. Which of us has not met someone who we at first thought to be plain, but upon longer acquaintance we grew to find beautiful? Your daughter will perceive this truth as she sees how your belief in her beauty intertwines with your love for her person. Because you know her better than any other human, your opinion counts more than anyone else’s. Only her Heavenly Father knows her better than you do, and his fearful and wonderful verdict has already been spoken.  When earthly parents model the love of a Heavenly Father who “sees not as man sees”, we give our daughters permission to measure beauty differently than their peers: by focusing not merely on the outward appearance, but on the heart.

Tell your daughter she is beautiful. Tell her, not because she needs to know she’s beautiful, but because she needs to know she is beautiful to you. In our image-driven culture, she will already perceive her physical “flaws” to the point that the face value of your words will ring untrue. But she will learn to trust their deeper significance because of who speaks them. She will learn, God willing, that “face value” is fleeting and deceptive. When every billboard and magazine cover and pop-up is telling her she is not beautiful, the knowledge that you absolutely, irrationally, vehemently disagree may just be the thing that keeps her heart whole. Don’t let the shouting match be one-sided. Tell her she is beautiful. Because, by the only measures that matter, she is.

gazing on the good of good friday

How much pain? For how long? How much blood? How many layers of flesh removed by the lash? How heavy the beam he carried? How far the distance he walked? Between which sinews were the nails placed? How sharp the thorns? How precise the work of the spear? Tell me, was it death by suffocation or blood loss? Show me. Re-enact it. Film it. Paint it. Describe it in song lyric and sacred reading. Carve it in detail and hang it on a wall. Give me the sound, the smell, the spectacle of it. Take me back to those moments, and spare no effort to help me enter into the scene.

Because if I had just been there to see it I would understand - I would understand the extent of my sin and the miracle of the resurrection. Because if I could just register these images and speculations deeply enough in my psyche I might better celebrate the beauty of three-days-later.

But would I? Do I? Or shall I look beyond the suffering of skin, scalp, sinews, suffocation to the harder truth to which they point? Shall I look beyond the stock-in-trade of Good Friday observance, these CSI-worthy musings, capable of capturing only the smallest part of what transpired on the cross? For if I seek to internalize the suffering of Christ, surely I must look beneath the externals. If I seek to internalize the sufferings of Christ, surely I must look to his rejection.

Rejection. I have known it – I have known the visceral shock, the hot-and-cold nausea of learning that another human being believed me guilty of something I had not done, believed it to the core of their understanding, believed it to the exclusion of hearing any defense on my behalf. You hate me. You hate who you think I am. You wish me harm. You have passed your sentence on me. You will not change your mind.

Now it begins to come into view, what happened that day.  It begins to, yes, if I extrapolate the depth of that pain, multiplied out to the nth degree. Rejection to the multi-billionth power. The Passion Play, seen through this lens, begins to feel flat. The crucifix above the altar begins to look like so much wood and pigment. As hard as I gaze, it does not speak of this weight, this crushing weight, so much greater than a timber across the back. As intently as I focus, it does not render the sting of this scourging lash, so much more brutal than a cat-of nine-tails.

But I am not there yet, no – my understanding is not yet as awakened as Good Friday demands. For in my limited experience of human rejection, on the day that my fellow man turns his gaze from me, the loving gaze of my Father does not waver. On the day that my fellow man pronounces me cursed, my Father still shouts that I am blessed.  Blessed to the uttermost.

But not so, the Son. Not so, the sinless Son, rejected to the uttermost.

So my gaze is lifted to the great good of Good Friday: the Father’s face turned eternally toward me because it was turned from the Son. The sinner accepted, the sinless rejected. The punishment that brought me peace, no mere matter of thorn and nail. The curse that brought me blessing, no mere matter of blood and bone.

This Good Friday may the eyes of my body soberly acknowledge the blood and the nails. But may the eyes of my heart gaze on the rejection that secured my acceptance, and glory in the willing death that brought me life.

gladness immeasurable

I am standing with both of them, the one that looks like me on the left and the one that looks like her father on my right. They are tall, tall as me, and full of the willowy grace of hastily retreating girlhood.

He regards them. He smiles and says: “I’m glad I don’t have daughters.”  He means it as a compliment. A lighthearted joke. We smile back and laugh.

I smile, yes - but I am thinking it was funnier the first time someone said it. When they were perched in a shopping cart in tutus, all of two-and-a-half feet tall. How many fathers of sons have said this? How many times?  I’m glad I don’t have daughters. Glad. I’m glad about it.

Why, I want to ask? Why glad? Are sons so much easier to raise? There are two of those under my roof as well. What is it about daughters that their absence in your home is a relief to you? Is it their emotions? Sons have those, too.

But I can see the answer as you look at my girls: how can that sweetness be brought safely to adulthood? Men you understand – the paths of their thinking, the patterns of their acting. If your sons act rashly with women the consequences can be minimized. If my daughters act rashly with men the consequences can be massive.

You think I should be afraid. You ascribe truth to the common crass joke that with a son you only have to worry about one set of sex organs, but with a daughter…

I reject this analysis of the risk. I reject the fear-mongering apparitions of predatory sons and pregnant daughters as motivators for my parenting.  These are the substance of a philosophy that believes a pregnant daughter is the worst thing a parent has to fear. This is far from the truth. My greatest concern cannot be that they reach marriage unsullied and unharmed - it must be that they grow to love God above all else. If they make mistakes on the road to adulthood, even mistakes with permanent consequences, we must face them bravely and run to their Savior for forgiveness and help.

Do you think that your sons are at less risk to be harmed by wrong decisions? You take too much comfort in their lack of a uterus. You have calculated the risk only in physical terms. There are always consequences for sin - some of them just gestate longer. If you considered my daughters as valuable as if they were your own, you would raise different sons. In all likelihood, one day you will have daughters. Raise sons who choose them well.

I am glad I have daughters.  You must hear this: Glad. They are strong and smart and serene. They know what their bodies are capable of. They know what men’s bodies are capable of. They are not afraid of your sons. And neither am I. They will know if your sons are worthy of their attention because their father’s example has hard-wired them to recognize character. Instead of intimidating someone else’s sons at the front door, he has wooed the hearts of his daughters every day of their lives. I am glad I have daughters, and by God’s grace the father of their husbands will be glad I had them, too.

You do not mean to offend or challenge. I know this. My head measures your words and finds no fault, but my heart measures the culture that has taught you to repeat these lines. You catch me at a vulnerable moment.

They are running - running, I tell you – toward womanhood. No more tutus and sequined shoes. The heavy-lashed eyes of their dolls have long grown accustomed to the darkness on the highest shelf in the closet. On a day not far distant those two rumpled beds will remain neatly made side by side in the room they share. There will be no more jumbles of hangerless clothes, no twisted cords of curling irons, no fine dust of beauty products adhered to the sink top with a film of hairspray. They will be gone. Let it be known that there has been gladness in their growing and going. Let it be known that I have been glad beyond measure.

Our soul waits for the LORD; he is our help and our shield.

For our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.

Psalm 33:20-21

new year, new self-control

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A new year is upon us, and unless this one is much different from others, our conversations will be laden with talk of fitness goals and holiday diet missteps. The New Year is traditionally a time for resurrecting our self-control, so this is no surprise. But this New Years' I have a different form of self-discipline in view - one with potentially longer-lasting impact than dropping a dress size.

I recently came across an article showing ads from the 1930’s and 40’s selling products to help people gain weight. The ads made claims that sounded completely comical to our 2012 ears: “Add 5lb of solid flesh in a week!” “Since I gained 10lb…I have all the dates I want!” I showed the ads to my daughters, whose response was “Mom, I don’t think those are real. Have you checked that on Snopes?”

But they’re real alright, despite how preposterous they seem. My first reaction, I am ashamed to admit, was that I was born too late. How great would it be to live during a time when well-padded women held the glamour-girl title? (As long as I’m being honest, I had a similar reaction to learning that in South America women get implants in their bottoms to achieve their culture’s ideal shape. By some cruel twist of fate, had I been born on the wrong continent? Why couldn’t I live where hips were hip?)

But of course, to seriously entertain these thoughts is to drink a Kool-aid that has been served up to women since the dawn of time: the belief that ideal physical beauty exists and should be pursued at all costs. For much of human history, the curvy beauty has prevailed. Statues of women from ancient Greece and Rome celebrate a body type we would call “plus-size” today, as does Renaissance art. Historically, padded women were considered beautiful because only the rich and idle could achieve such a figure, and because curviness indicated fertility. For women of past generations curviness was extremely hard to achieve unless you had the money to eat well and work little. Thanks to trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, this is no longer the case. Ironically, the rich and idle of today strive to look undernourished and overworked. And the rest of us rush to follow suit.

So, would it have been better to live during a time when well-fed women were hailed as beauties? I doubt it. Because the issue is not “fat versus thin” – it is “perfect versus imperfect”. There has never been a time when women have not defined themselves by (enslaved themselves to?) some ideal of physical beauty. Though its definition may change across the centuries, one element remains constant: it is always a definition of beauty that is just beyond our reach. We want what we cannot have. If curvy is hard, we want curvy. If thin is hard, we want thin.

The expectation of physical perfection hits modern females early and often.  In middle school, girls cut themselves to deal with the pressures of conforming to the ideal. In middle age, women do, too – but allow the surgeon to hold the knife. We carve the record of our self-loathing into the very flesh of our bodies – a self-marring, a literal carving of an idol. Increasingly, physical perfection is the legacy of womanhood in our culture, handed down with meticulous care from mother to daughter, with more faithful instruction in word and deed than we can trouble to devote to the cultivation of kindness, peacemaking and acceptance that characterize unfading, inner beauty.

In this as in all things, there is hope and good news for the believer: one day we will be free of our self-loathings and will live in harmony with our physical appearance. We will be given new, incorruptible bodies – bodies that are no longer on a collision course with the grave. We dare not reduce this future hope to that of an eternity with thinner thighs or a smaller nose. We must celebrate it as the day when vanity itself is dealt a fatal and final blow.

But how should we live in the meantime? By all means, we should steward the gift of our physical bodies – but for the sake of wellness, not beauty. Two women can step onto two treadmills with identical fitness goals and widely different motives. Only they will know the real reason they are there.

January is typically a time when we talk a great deal about calories, work-outs and weight loss. What if we didn’t? What if we didn’t talk about body sizes at all? What if we made it a point not to mention our own calorie sins or victories in front of our girlfriends and daughters? What if we started living in right relation to our bodies now, instead of at the resurrection? What if every time we looked in the mirror and were tempted to complain we said “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, laying claim to the future hope that our bodies will one day celebrate function in right relation to form, living in the glorious truth of that future hope now?

What if this New Years’ we decided to fast not from food but from body-talk? Sure - hit the gym, eat the Paleo diet, run six miles a day, wear Spanx from neck to knee  - just stop talking about it. Stop telling your friend she looks skinny – instead tell her you love her sweet spirit. Choose compliments that spur her to pursue that which lasts instead of that which certainly does not.  If someone comments on your own shape, say thanks and change the subject. Banish body-talk to the same list of off-limits topics as salaries, name-dropping, and colonoscopies. Apply the discipline you use to work out to controlling your tongue. Do this for your sisters, and by the grace of God, we could begin a legacy of womanhood that celebrates character over carb-avoidance, godliness over glamour.

Sister in Christ, physical perfection is not within our grasp, but, astonishingly, holiness is. Where will you devote your energy in the New Year? Go on a diet from discussing shape and size.  Feast on the Word of Truth. Ask this of yourself for your sake, for the sake of your friends and daughters, for the sake of the King and His Kingdom. On earth as it is in Heaven.

“Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Matthew 15:10-11

cracking the dress code

Recently I read an article addressing choice of dress among Christian women. It was written by a man, so I was particularly interested to hear how he would approach a topic of such delicacy from a male perspective. What I read was a sensitive, well-presented plea for Christian women to consider the weaknesses of their spiritual brothers when choosing their clothes. Though many discussions of dress focus on “how short is too short” or “how low is too low”, this one avoided these legalistic pitfalls and took aim for the heart: what is your motive for choosing the clothes you choose?

The plea to bear with our Christian brothers by covering ourselves is an important one for Christian women to hear. Dressing modestly is one of the simplest ways a believer can distinguish herself from the world around her and keep herself free from sin. But any female over the age of eleven can tell you that modesty may not be the biggest hurdle to overcome in aligning our fashion with our faith.

Consider the following incident related to me by my thirteen-year-old son: With summer approaching, the band at his middle school planned a party at a local water park. Several moms went along as chaperones. One of the mothers, a woman presumably in her forties, chose to spend the day in a very small bikini that showcased her enhanced assets. As she snoozed in the sun, she became the topic of lively and inappropriate discussion among her son’s classmates.

I have to ask myself: Did this woman wake up the morning of the trip and ask “What can I wear today to excite lust among my son’s peer group?” No, the question she more likely asked was “What can I wear today to impress my own peer group?” – a group in this case, composed not of both genders but of one: other women.

While dressing for the attention of men is problematic, dressing for the attention of other women is epidemic. The question “How do I look?” implies the answering inquiry “Relative to whom?” Far more powerful than the desire to dress to tempt a man is the desire to dress to trump another woman. It begins in elementary school, at an age before many girls have even begun to think about boys at all.

My son's bikini-clad chaperone wanted to be the hottest 40-something woman at the pool. She may not love Jesus, so I am going to have to let her off the hook. But what about me? How do I compete with other women by the way I dress? Do I dress to be the trendiest? The wealthiest? The thinnest? The fittest? The quirkiest? What about the purest? In certain circles, even modest dress can be a venue for self-promotion. There is nothing inherently righteous about a denim jumper or culottes. Nor is there anything inherently sinful about platform peep-toe stilettos. Is having great fashion sense wrong? I don't think so - I know women with effortless style who I would never say distract with their dress. The heart of the problem, then, is not the length, style or fit of any particular outfit but my craving for the superlative, the “-est” of any wardrobe choice – a craving rooted in the desire to elevate myself above others.

Crazily, those black and white habits the nuns wore in The Sound of Music are starting to make more sense, aren't they? They take all the guess-work out of dress-work. Unfortunately, they wouldn't exactly achieve the goal of diverting attention off of myself if I wore one on a grocery run to Walmart. American women live in a culture of endless clothing choices. Without a uniform as an option, we will have to train ourselves to focus more on the "why" of those choices than the "which".

Here is the bottom line: Godly women do not seek to elevate themselves above others – not by immodest dress, and not by competitive dress. They seek to provoke neither the lust of men nor the envy of women. They love preferentially by keeping the focus off of themselves. Clothed inwardly with the righteousness of Christ, their outward clothing becomes a matter for sober consideration: How can I best reflect the character of God through my wardrobe choices? May we, as daughters of the Living God, be measured not by our hemlines but by our humility. May our character outshine our clothing, so that whether we wear a habit or a hula skirt Christ is magnified.

Well, maybe skip the hula skirt.

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