Woman Thou Art Loosed! 20th Anniversary Expanded Edition (19 page)

F
URTHER
C
HALLENGE
:

http://wtal.destinyimage.com/ch12

We are fascinated with beauty. There are contests of all kinds to determine who is the most beautiful of all. Advertisers spend millions of dollars to promote beauty pageants. The beauty industry is one of the largest in America. Women spend huge amounts of money on makeup, fashionable clothing and jewelry. Plastic surgeons are kept busy cutting and tucking extra flesh and reshaping features to make people more attractive.

In spite of all this attention, what is the true beauty of a woman? What is it that makes her genuinely attractive? Many feel unattractive because they don’t meet a certain image to which they have aspired. Others are constantly frustrated in trying to get someone to notice their attractiveness.

No scientist has ever been able to make a woman. No doctor has been able to create a woman. No engineer has been able to build a woman. However, God has made fine women. You don’t have to look like a TV commercial to be beautiful. No one stays 21 forever.

We must learn to thank God for who we are. Don’t be a silly woman watching television and crying because she doesn’t look like the girl who opened up the window in the game show. You are not supposed to look like that. If God had wanted you to look like that, He would have made you like that. God will send somebody along who will appreciate you the way you are.

While waiting on that person, start appreciating yourself. Remind yourself, “I am valuable to God. I am somebody. And I won’t let another use me and abuse me and treat me like I’m nothing. Yes, I’ve been through some bad times. I’ve been hurt and I’ve been bent out of shape, but the Lord touched me and loosed me and now I am glorifying God and I’m not going back to where I came from.”

R
emind yourself, “I am valuable to God. I am somebody.”

As I mentioned earlier, there is an important lesson to learn from the account of Samson and Delilah in the Old Testament (Judg. 16). The Philistines were Samson’s enemies and they could not kill Samson with swords or bows, but they found a door. The Bible says that Samson loved Delilah. He became so infatuated with her that he was vulnerable.

It was not Delilah’s beauty that captivated. It was not even her sexuality that destroyed Samson. Samson had known beautiful women before. He had slept with prostitutes. It was not just sexual exercise that caused her to get a grip on this man. I’ll call it the Delilah syndrome.

Beauty and sex appeal are not the areas to concentrate on. When you focus on the wrong areas, you don’t get the right results. Society teaches you today that if you have the right hair, the right face, the right shape, the right clothes and the right car, then you will get the right man. Then you expect that you will buy the right house, have the right children, live the right life and live happily ever after. That is simply not true. Life is not a fairy tale.

God put some things into the feminine spirit that a man needs more than anything God put on the feminine body. If a woman knows who she is on the inside, no matter what she looks like, she will have no problem being attractive to a man. If she knows her own self-worth, then when she comes before that man, he will receive her.

The enemy wants you to be so focused on your outer appearance that you won’t recognize your inner beauty, your inner strength, your inner glory. Your real value cannot be bought, applied, added on, hung from your ears or laid on your neck. Your real strength is more than outward apparel and adornment for men. This real thing that causes a man to need you so desperately he can’t leave you is not what is on you, but what is in you.

You need to recognize what God has put in you. God, when He made the woman, didn’t just decorate the outside. He decorated the inside of the woman. He put beauty in her spirit.

G
od decorated the inside of the woman. He put beauty in her spirit.

The Scriptures talk about not having the outward adornment of gold, silver and costly array. The Church took that passage and made a legal doctrine out of it. It was declared that there could be no jewelry, no makeup and no clothing of certain types. We are so negative at times. We were so busy dealing with the negative that we didn’t hear the positive of what God said. God said that He had adorned the woman inwardly.

“
Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands
” (1 Pet. 3:1a). Notice that it didn’t say a woman is to be subject to all men, just to her own husband. God did not make you a servant to all men. You have the right to choose who you will be in subjection to—and please choose very carefully. “
That, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives
” (1 Pet. 3:1b).

Understand that the word
conversation
there refers to lifestyle. You will not win him through lip-service; you will win him through your lifestyle. He will see how you are, not what you say. He will watch how you act. He will watch your attitude. He will watch your disposition. A real problem for women believers today is that with the same mouth they use to witness to their husbands, they often curse others. You cannot witness to and win a man while he sits up and listens to you gossip about others.

“
While they behold your chaste conversation
[lifestyle]
coupled with fear
” (1 Pet. 3:2). It didn’t say anything about your ruby red lips or your long eyelashes. He should behold your lifestyle, your chaste lifestyle.
Chaste
is a word that means pure. Wives can win a husband by reverencing him.

Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of
putting on of apparel.
1 Peter 3:3

If that verse meant you could not wear these things, then it would mean you must be naked. Woman’s beauty and strength are not on the outside. There is more to you than clothes. There’s more to you than gold. There’s more to you than hairstyles.

Society promotes the notion that beauty is found in these outer things. However, if you keep working only on these outer things, you will find yourself looking in the mirror to find your value.

You could go broke fixing up the outside and still be lonely and alone. You need to understand that what brought Samson to Delilah so much he couldn’t get up was she became a place where he could rest. He laid on her and slept. The man was tired. She gave him rest. He needed it so desperately that even though he knew she was trying to kill him, he couldn’t stay away.

If satan can work Delilah’s strengths against men, then God can use them for men. If you are married, you can enrich your marriage through inner beauty. If you’re not married, when you do get married, you’ll understand it’s not the necklaces you wear that make you attractive. It’s not the twists you put in your hair. It’s something that God puts in your heart that actually affects the man.

Y
ou can enrich your marriage through inner beauty.

“
But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the
ornament of a meek and quiet spirit
, which is in the sight of God of great price
” (1 Pet. 3:4). God gave you the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit that is more valuable than any outer form of jewelry. It is worth more than gold. It is more powerful than sexual ability.

When Samson hit Delilah’s lap, she calmed him. Can you see what made Adam partake of the forbidden fruit, knowing it was evil? The Bible says Eve was deceived, but he knew. Do you see how powerful your influence is? The enemy wants to capitalize on what God put in you. That is why you must watch what goes through your doors.

“
For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves…
” (1 Pet. 3:5). This is how they decorated themselves in the times of the patriarchs. Sarah was beautiful because she exhibited inner beauty and lived in obedience to Abraham. “
Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters ye are, as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement
” (1 Pet. 3:6).

You are Sarah’s daughters when you are not afraid with any amazement. When you resist the temptation to react to circumstances and maintain a peaceful, meek and quiet spirit in times of frustration, then you are Sarah’s daughters.

Jesus called the infirm woman. He unleashed a daughter of Abraham. If you can stay calm in a storm, if you can praise God under pressure, if you can worship in the midst of critics and criticism, God says you are Sarah’s daughter.

If you can keep a calm head when the bills are more than the income, and not lose control when satan says you won’t make it, if you can stand in the midst of the storm, you are Sarah’s daughter.

If you can rebuke the fear that is knocking at the door of your heart, and tell that low self-esteem it cannot come in, and rebuke all the spirits that are waiting to attack you and make you captive, you are Sarah’s daughter.

If you can stand calm in the midst of the storm and say, “I know God will deliver me,” you are Sarah’s daughter. If you can walk with God in the midst of the storm and trust Him to bring you through dry places, you are Sarah’s daughter.

If you can judge God faithful, and know that God cannot lie, understanding that satan is the father of lies, you are Sarah’s daughter.

If you can stand there when fear is trying to get you to overreact and fall apart, you are Sarah’s daughter. If you can stand there and push a tear from off the side of your face and smile in the middle of the rain, you are Sarah’s daughter.

God is adorning you with glory, power and majesty. He will send people into your life to appreciate your real beauty, your real essence. It is the kind of beauty that lasts despite a face full of wrinkles, gray hair, falling arches, crow’s-feet and all the pitfalls that may come your way. There’s a beauty that you can see in a 90-year-old woman’s face that causes an old man to smile. God is decorating you on the inside. He is putting a glory in you that will shine through your eyes. A man will come along and look in your eyes. He will not talk about whether they were blue or whether your eye shadow was right or not. He will look in your eyes and see trust, peace, love and life.

G
od is adorning you with glory, power and majesty.

Appreciate the ornaments of God. Let God give you a new attitude. Let Him wash everything out of your spirit that is against Him. Let go of anger, hate, frustration and bitterness. God wants you unleashed. He repeats today, just as He did two thousand years ago, “Woman, thou art loosed.”

Beauty comes in many ways. However, true beauty is always on the inside. A faithful wife is more precious than words can express. The inner beauty that makes you valuable to God will also make you valuable to others. Some may take just longer to notice it. Regardless of how long it takes, know the attractiveness and beauty that is within.

A
faithful wife is more precious than words can express.

Perhaps you are scarred by the past. Maybe you think you are unattractive and unworthy. Nothing could be more untrue. God painted a wonderful piece of artwork one day. That painting is you.