Fundamentalism then and now...modesty

Hot Topic: What shall I wear?

Virtually every woman has her clothing standards. From strippers to ladies in the garden club from migrant workers to movie stars--we will not wear some clothing items. They are simply beneath us. Some clothes are too ugly, too poorly-made, too masculine-looking, why, too

inappropriate! We may break our own standard on some occasion or another, but we have our

dignity and quickly re-establish ourselves in what we will not wear.

And so, when the possibility of our having clothing standards that are too low is broached,

there will be an indignant response. "I am a grown woman and you can mind your own

business!"
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Sadly, I remember when I had a similar heart response on a particular occasion when I was

being challenged about my own clothing standards.

You would think that we Christian women would be more open to shoring up possibly lost or

otherwise lacking clothing standards.... than women who do not concern themselves with

living for the LORD. Perhaps we are somewhat more open to examining ourselves, but some

false one-liners floating around Christendom have helped us pull our self-righteous robes

around ourselves and have lent to our going on, unchanged, head held high.
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 Some of the mantras that keep us from self-examination and possible change are found in this jumbled response. "The Bible just isn't that specific about what kind of garments we should wear, so what your opinion is on the subject or what your pastor has to say about it is not any more important than what I have to say on the matter. Besides, I don't feel any conviction about what I wear. And what I wear can't be a problem for God, or He would have notified me. Get a life. Your problem is that you and the misogynistic men you support have your minds in the gutter. Do you need a hobby? If you would tend to winning people to the Lord, you wouldn't have time to be measuring skirt lengths. Here, you dropped your measuring tape. Haven't you ever heard that it is what is on the inside, not the outside, that matters?  People like you merely love old things and hate modern things. Sadly you can't take change.

But this is 2020. Why don't you, in your Little-House-on-the-Prairie dress take off in your horse

and buggy? Ugh. Just another judger. The legalism in the church today is why young people are leaving the church. It is why lost people will never darken the door of a church like yours. Your being so weirdly different makes you unattractive and causes anyone who might want to get saved to be repelled instead."

It is vital to line up these statements and others against the Word of God to check for their

validity. Please do this! It is important to identify and defeat false statements wherever they

are. I believe you will find these particular statements do not survive Biblical scrutiny.

But before getting to all that perhaps in another blog entry (and it is quite thought

provoking), it is important to first establish a foundation for our deciding what exactly we

should wear.

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There are distinctly Biblical considerations for a woman concerning her clothing. Here are five

of them, sticky as they are.

1. Does my authority approve of my clothing?

2. Will I offend someone with my clothing?

3. Is my clothing feminine?

4. Is my clothing modest?
5. Is my clothing otherwise appropriate?

Of course our standards should not be established by what is being sold at the mall, (or one grade above because we are Christians). But there is something else to address here. We

who have greatly cared about modesty should not be adverse to examining the issue again,

even if we feel we have dealt with this matter and have been pretty successful in our

Christian lives. Maybe there is no need for change. But maybe there is. I am thinking of that

wonderful verse of Scripture in Psalm 139. "Search me, O, God, and know my heart. Try me

and know my thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me.." With a heart open to

perhaps having the need of a better clothing standard, let us think again on the matter.

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The first question: Does my authority approve of my clothing? In a day when authority is

being cast off and all independence is being hailed, we women need to go back to the Bible

to see that most of us are clearly under command to be obedient to some authority.

Unmarried girls need to be concerned that their parents are not disapproving of their clothing.

Married women need to be concerned that their husbands are not in disapproval of their

clothes. Women under the authority of employers who have issued rules about about clothing should make sure they are not bucking those standards, of course, as they are decent. ( If the rules call for indecency , get out! ) And then there is the authority of the church. The Bible

says that all are to obey church elders. Most of the time there are no rules about what a

woman can wear to church functions. But sometimes there are those rules. For instance,

when there is an announcement in church that a pool at a church gathering  will be open and so certain clothing should be worn or not worn, a Christian woman should not ignore or defy or otherwise breach

the standard her leaders at church have set down.
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We only have to be halfway awake to realize that Christian women everywhere are declaring

themselves to be boss of their own lives and done with "power-hungry authorities" and are

openly walking in opposition to those authorities and what few rules have been set down.

And this is especially being done concerning dress. Let's check that we not be in that crowd of

women. Surely hard consequences will be coming their way. First question down. "Do my

authority/authorities approve of my clothing?

And then there is the question, "Will my clothing offend anyone?" At this point, I am not

dealing the matter of offending a man's conscience as he encounters a woman with too little clothing on. I am addressing our offending other kinds of people with our clothing choices.

The lesson of Philippians 2:3-4 needs application in this area: “Let nothing be done through

strife or vain glory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.”

Am I going to a family reunion where there will be a family with higher standards than mine,

(standards that I think are needless) and am I planning to wear those offending clothes

anyway? Humility is the need of the hour on such an occasion. We should realize that parents

there are teaching their children certain standards and we do not need to be showing the kids that a pretty cousin doesn't have to wear silly clothes like those parents wear. Here is another scenario and the question that goes with it. Should we, simply because we can, wear clothing prohibited by a Christian school on that campus? We haven't matriculated. There are no rules against it. But would my clothing, not clothes the school would allow, give a student struggling with obedience a place to land his foot? Deference is a sweet and weightless

standard to strap onto our backs. So freeing and caring and Christlike! You would think it

would be burdensome for us, but it is just the opposite. So then, the second question we need

to ask ourselves is "Am I offending anyone by my clothing choices?"

With the first two questions answered, we get down to the matters of what kind of clothing

should I choose to wear if I am not offending anyone and if I am not going against authority.And one of those considerations should be that our clothing is distinctly feminine, number three in the list of considerations.  We know that women wearing feminine clothing is a Bible principle, as we are told in

Deuteronomy 22:5 not to wear "that which pertaineth unto a man". We also see in the I

Corinthians 6 that effeminacy in men is called out as wickedness. Obviously a woman going

after a masculine look would be sinful also. So what is a masculine look? It is what a

masculine man would wear.  If a mother doing laundry gets her boys' clothing mixed up

with her girls' clothing, there is a problem . There should not be difficulty in determining the

difference between a is a male's article of clothing and a woman's.

Entropy. Things, left to themselves, are always in a state of going downhill. Don't we know it

in about every area of life? Shouldn't we again tend to the matter of being distinctly feminine

in our clothing? The world is with us, ever subliminally beating its messages into our minds. We need to examine our clothing to see if it indeed is feminine in nature.

Now the fourth consideration .

Is our clothing modest? Here we go. You thought I would never get here. And it is here where

we especially pull our self-righteous robes even tighter about us. But let's consider the devil in

this matter. He is wily. He would have us to be deceived about what we wear when so much is

at stake. And much is at stake. As women, we know that there are sad consequences for the

woman who dresses in clothing that is well beneath our own standards. We would not have

set up a standard for ourselves in the first place if we thought an “anything goes” attitude

was harmless. No, we aren't that foolish or, frankly, lewd.

So what is modest garb? And who is the holder of the definition of what modest dress is, in

the first place? Contrary to much of what is said today, the Bible does tell us who, in general,

holds the definition of what is modest in our society. The Bible says in Titus 2 that the older

women are to teach the younger women to be, among other things, “discrete and chaste”.

The older women in the church are the teachers, then. And teachers get to define any term

and what it looks like in the field, not the student. Our godly older mothers in the church know

what is modest. We realize that older women cringe when younger women unthinkingly

clothe themselves in all of the latest fashions. I think the younger generation uses the term

"face palm". Older women are having face palms these days and Older Christian women are

especially having face palms. It should be pointed out that older women should not be letting

a desire to be friends with their daughters keep the these mentors from their duty of

teaching them to be chaste and discrete in clothing choice, though it may not be a very

pleasant duty on some occasions. .. It should be acknowledged that the older Christian

women are to be in submission to their husbands, and they both in submission to church

elders, and everyone in submission to the Scripture. That said, God has clearly designated

that it is the older women's duty to teach the younger women to be chaste.:

But, it can be the case that a woman has no older woman in her circle to look to. In passing it

should be stated that our own mothers should be looked to as our first teachers, and it is a

slight not to look to our own mothers first. But perhaps a woman does not have a mother

concerned with teaching modesty and how that affects discretion and chastity. Perhaps the

older women in the church have provided no teaching for whatever reason. In that case, there

are ways to find out what is modest and what is not. This woman, along with all others, should be searching the Scripture by herself for truths about what to wear.

She can find out that the Bible does say in Proverbs 7:10 that there is "an attire of an harlot". That will cause her to know that at least there is an attire to be avoided.

She can also find that God in Genesis 3 clothed Adam and Eve with coats of animal skins. So a full covering was important, and not unimportant, like many would have us believe.

She can discover in Exodus 20 that the priests were to take care to cover their nakedness when ascending stairs. So many times our activities do cause a revealing of parts of our

bodies that we would normally cover. That indiscretion can be avoided with some extra

planning for extra coverage. So there is a principle there.

This woman with no teacher could see that the Bible says that some men in the Bible were

shamed as their garments were cut off to their buttocks. II Samuel 10:4. That Scripture alone

should cause the elimination of some garments from her closet.

So there are some Bible passages that teach us about covering our bodies. Other passages

could be referenced also.
 

Here is something else for the woman searching out the definition of modest wear. There is

plain old being honest with ourselves about what immodesty means to people in the world. If

we can't quite come to grips with what modesty means, the world, indeed, will help us out.

Worldly men openly tell us what they want to ogle. They aren't shy about it. You will note that

they never make mention of wrists, necks, faces, necks, ankles, arms. ln other interesting

facts about my past, I used to clean bathrooms at the local mall. Oh, the ways the Lord can

use your experiences! As a young woman, I realized that the body parts drawn on the walls

of the men's bathrooms and the names of female body parts scrawled on these same walls

were the parts of my body that needed to be thoroughly veiled!

We women should not be naive. Words mean things. Modesty means something and the world

knows exactly what it is. We need to make sure we have not been more interested in wearing

cute and stylish things than in not wearing things that excite men to lust. We should care

about the man who has fallen in his mind time and time again. We can indeed cause another

to sin, the Bible declares. We can do it knowingly or even unknowingly. We are instructed not

to provide the occasion for another to fall. We have to constantly tend to this. I am not even

going to address the burka argument which usually pops up right about here. It is a silly

argument. Surely we women can cover ourselves so as not to cause men who encounter us

to be tempted to lust after our body parts. Can we not take another look at our clothes and

ask ourselves if we have not slipped up concerning modesty ? Let's especially make sure that we do not by our clothing choices cause men to fall into lust. Our brothers are precious.

Finally there is another question we should ask ourselves. Number Five. Is my clothing

appropriate in every way? The Bible engages us to have beautiful clothing. We are royalty

and we shouldn't be clothed as slovenly paupers. Psalm 45:13-14. "The Kings daughter is all

glorious within; her clothing is of wrought gold. She shall be brought unto the king in raiment

of needlework.” Surely we all need to do better in this area, to the glory of God!

And there is something else in the area of appropriate clothing. From time to time, groups in our society adopt a clothing items to symbolize their causes. We have to keep up with these things so we do not even inadvertently endanger our status as ambassadors for Jesus Christ. And we surely cannot be saying, "Well, I like to wear yellow and there is nothing wrong with yellow, and therefore I will wear yellow even if my community is wearing yellow clothing tomorrow to support abortion. "

Everything we say and do should be to the glory of God. I Corinthians 10:31. We can and should represent Him alone in our clothing choices at all times. "He must increase. I must decrease.” John 3:30

In the end, that is what matters most--our pleasing the LORD and representing Him

everywhere we go. We Christian women are invisibly clothed in His righteousness. Let's renew ourselves to be visibly clothed in a way that becomes the holy sweet name of our Savior and King.

“That our daughters may be as cornerstones, polished after the similitude of a palace. “ Psalm

144:12b

Leslie Lauger