What is true beauty? There are so many contradictary opinions on the answer, it’s hard to know for sure. For centuries women have been bombarded with messages in advertising and media pushing standards of beauty that are many times unattainable by your average woman. Tan skinned, long legged, skinny models (who typically don’t even look like that themselves in real life) are plastered all over magazines and the internet, telling us we’re not good enough the way we are.

Then all of a sudden, women got fed up with these impossible beauty standards and the messages of "find your own inner beauty," "love yourself," and "be confident in who you are" were everywhere. We are constantly hit with the idea that if we just realize that we are perfect the way we are and embrace our inner beauty we will be happy and fulfilled. It seems awesome, right? Isn’t it great if we all think highly of ourselves and have full confidence in our own bodies and abilities?

Maybe not.

Now I know what you’re thinking, who do I think I am to tell you not to love yourself and have high self esteem?? That’s not what I’m saying at all. You are SO valuable and beautiful to God. Psalm 139:14 says “I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” That means YOU. God made you (Isaiah 64:8), he know everything about you and he cares for you SO much (Matthew 10:29-31). The problem lies in us placing confidence in ourselves rather than in Jesus Christ.

I recently listened to a talk by Leslie Ludy that really drove this home for me. This "inner beauty" that the world wants us to tap into is really just the “world’s solution to our feminine insecurity.” Charles Spurgeon once said, “If a soul has any beauty, it is because Christ has endowed that soul with His own, for in ourselves we are deformed and defiled! There is no beauty in any of us but what our Lord has worked in us.”

If we place all our assurance in ourselves, we’re setting ourselves up to be let down. Any confidence in ourselves should be confidence in Christ’s ability to work through us. He creates in us a beauty that never fails or fades, an incorruptible beauty. The world says we should do anything we can to make ourselves noticed and seen, when we really need to be willing to turn away from our own desires and place our lives in God’s hands. As John said, we must decrease and He must increase (John 3:30). Jesus became nothing for us, he hung on the cross bearing literally everyone’s sin but his own, because he had none. Are we willing to become nothing for him?

I’ll tell you now this isn’t a popular perspective and it’s certainly not the most glamorous, but it’s the only one that truly fulfills. Is our purpose in life to be seen, or allowing Jesus to be seen through us?

Check out the "True Beauty" talk by Leslie Ludy.