He shall grow as the lily . . . and his beauty shall be as the olive tree,
and his smell as Lebanon-Hosea 14:5, 6.
A soul bedewed by God will spring into purity and beauty. Ugly Christianity
is not Christ's Christianity. Some of us older people remember that there
used to be a favorite phrase to describe unattractive saints, that they had
"grace grafted on a crab stick." There are a great many Christian people
whom one would compare to any other plant rather than a lily. Thorns and
thistles and briars are a good deal more like what some of them appear to
the world. But we are bound, if we are Christian people, by our obligations
to God, and by our obligations to men, to try and make Christianity look as
beautiful in people's eyes as we can. That is what Paul said. "Adorn the
doctrine" [Titus 2:10]; make it look well, inasmuch as it has made you look
attractive to men's eyes. Men have a fairly accurate notion of beauty and
goodness, whether they have any goodness or any beauty in their own
characters or not. Do you remember the words, "Whatsoever things are pure;
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report . . . if
there be any praise"-from men-"think on these things" [Phil. 4:8]. If we do
not keep that as the guiding star of our lives, then we have failed in one
very distinct duty of Christian people-namely, to grow more like a lily, and
to be graceful in the lowest sense of that word, as well as grace-full in
the highest sense of it. We shall not be so in the lower, unless we are so
in the higher. It may be a very modest kind of beauty, very humble, and not
at all like the flaring reds and yellows of the gorgeous flowers that the
world admires. These are often like a great sunflower, with a disc as big as
a cheese. But the Christian beauty will be modest and unobtrusive and shy,
like the violet half-buried in the hedge-bank, and unnoticed by careless
eyes, accustomed to see beauty only in gaudy, flaring blooms. But unless
you, as a Christian, are in your character arrayed in the "beauty of
holiness" [Ps. 29:2], and the holiness of beauty, you are not quite the
Christian that Jesus Christ wants you to be; setting forth all the gracious
and sweet and refining influences of the Gospel in your daily life and
conduct.
In Celebration of Life in Him,
Dr. Jim DeBruhl, gembeaux@bellsouth.net
