Beautiful

Ecclesiastes 3:11 – He has made everything beautiful in its time. (RSV)

I have a sweet friend who always makes negative, unkind comments about herself. I look at her, smile, and respond, "Don't say bad things about my friend!" How many times do you hear someone making negative, disparaging comments about the way they look, or how they govern or feel about their lives? Most people do not realize how often they discredit the fact that God made each of us just as He wanted us to be, and we are beautiful in His sight.

When we hear the word "beautiful", it makes us smile, and each of us will experience a different mental image. We have heard the quotation attributed to Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in 1878, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." How often do we consider what true beauty is and where it comes from?

The Bible teaches us that God created everything, so God made beauty. The nature or image of God has to be beautiful or He could not have been the Father Creator of all the breathtaking beauty in the heavens and on the earth. Therefore, God is beautiful and beauty is one of the attributes of God.

Psalm 27:4 – One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord. (RSV)

Although God has made us in His beautiful image, our sin mars that image. The good news is that when we receive Jesus and live in the power of His Spirit, the beauty of Jesus is seen in us. People who have not received Jesus, therefore, have every right to focus on the sin in their lives that makes them ugly in their own sight. When we are regenerated by the Spirit, however, the old habit of seeing ourselves as ugly dies hard, and we have to have our thinking re-educated to see that we are beautiful in God's sight.

Remember and reflect on the words of the song by Albert W. T. Orsborn written in 1916:

Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me,
All His wonderful passion and purity.
O Thou Spirit divine,
All my nature refine,
Till the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.

Psalm 149:4 – For the Lord takes pleasure in His people; He will beautify the humble with salvation. (NKJV)

1 Chronicles 16:29 – Give to the Lord the glory due His name; Bring an offering, and come before Him. Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness! (NKJV)

Psalm 50:1-2 – The Mighty One, God the Lord, has spoken and called the earth from the rising of the sun to its going down. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God will shine forth. (NKJV)

Prayer: Dear Father of all beauty, may we see ourselves as You see us — a reflection of Your beauty. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen

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