INNER BEAUTY
DR. JIM DIXON
2 PETER 3, 1-8
OCTOBER 17, 1993
In 1944, John Blanchard was reading a book in a Florida library. This was during World War II. John Blanchard was a soldier on leave. As he turned through the pages of the book in that Florida library, he noticed that there was handwriting on many of the pages, on the edges of the pages. He looked at the handwriting and he noticed that the handwriting was kind of soft and beautiful. He read some of the words that were written in the margins. He thought that the words were thoughtful and insightful. He turned to the front of the book, and he saw that the if had only been checked out by one person. It was a woman named Miss Holly Meynell. He looked into it further and he found that Holly lived in New York. He decided to do something very strange. He decided to write to her simply because he liked her handwriting, which he had seen in this library book, and because he liked the words that she wrote. So he wrote her a letter and to his amazement Holly wrote him back.
Shortly thereafter, John was sent overseas but he continued to write Holly. As they wrote each other through the months, they fell deeply in love with each other. There came a time when John asked Holly to send him a picture of herself so he could know what she looked like and she refused. She said, “If you really care about me, it won’t matter what I look like.”
After one year and one month, John Blanchard came back to the United States, and he was excited because he was going to meet Holly for the first time at Grand Central Station in New York City. They had agreed to go out to dinner. She told him that he would recognize her because she would have a red rose in her lapel.
It was 7:00 PM when John got off the train. He was excited as he looked for the woman whose heart he had come to love but whose face he had never seen. As he looked, he saw a beautiful woman coming towards him, tall and slender with beautiful long blond hair flowing over her shoulders. She had blue eyes. She was in a pale green suit. John thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Almost instinctively he went towards her and then he realized she did not have a red rose in her lapel.
He continued on, and finally he saw her standing there. She had the red rose in her lapel. She looked older than he thought she would look. She was almost forty it looked, and she had graying hair. Her ankles were thick. She was more than a little bit overweight. She had a gentle face. She had kind eyes. John could not deny that he was disappointed, but he also could not deny that he loved her and so he went to her, and he introduced himself. He took her hand. He asked her out to dinner. She said, “Young man, I don’t know what’s going on here, but a young woman gave me this red rose.” She told me that if you were to come up to me and invite me out to dinner that I was to tell you that you could meet her in the coffee shop across the way.” So John Blanchard went into the coffee shop. It was there he saw Holly Meynell. He realized that she was the beautiful blonde in the pale green suit, a woman who wanted to be loved for her inward beauty.
That story was told by Max Lucado in his book And The Angels Were Silent. He got the story from Guidepost Magazine. I don’t know where Guidepost got it. I know I’ve heard the story a number of times. I understand the story is at least allegedly true. It is certainly true that most of us in this room want people to like us because of what they see on the inside. It is certainly true that most of us want people to love us not for the way we look outwardly but we want people to love us for what they see inwardly.
The Bible tells us that God looks on the inside. The Bible tells us that God looks for inner beauty. The Bible counsels those of us who believe in Jesus Christ that as we enter courtship and marriage and even as we form friends, we’re to look for inner beauty as well. We’re to seek inner beauty in our lives.
Now, this morning I would like us to examine biblically two qualities of inward beauty that are so important in our relationships and in our lives as Christians. The first quality is humility. The Apostle Peter in writing to husbands and wives gives many instructions but he concludes, “Love one another, with tender hearts and humble minds.” In another place, the Apostle Peter writes, “Clothe yourselves, all of you, in humility towards one another. For God opposes the proud but He gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore.” Humility.
Now, a couple of months ago, Barb and I drove to California. Along the way we had a fight. Just a little argument. Actually, it was not that little. It went on for hours. There was a lot of tension in the car. It happened the second day as we were driving from Las Vegas across the desert and through the California desert towards Barstow. Barb felt like I was driving too fast. She often feels like I am driving too fast. You know that bumper sticker that says, “If you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.” Barb feels like that’s my philosophy of driving.
Well, things really got bad when we got past Barstow. I decided to take kind of a shortcut to Santa Barbara. I wanted to avoid San Bernardino and L.A. and kind of angle my way through Pear Blossom and Saugus and Fillmore and finally come to Ventura and then go up the coast to Santa Barbara. I have never gone that way before, but I was confident.
I turned off and just started weaving over that way. It was not very long before Barb felt I was lost. I said, “Barb, I am not lost. I know where I’m going.” Barb after a while says, “Jim, why don’t you just stop and ask somebody where we are and how we get to where we want to go.” I said, “Barb, we don’t need to stop and ask somebody. I know where I’m going and we’re doing fine.”
Of course, we began to come to cities I had never heard of before and finally I did pull over and I asked for directions. Sure enough, I was horribly lost. The directions were simple. From that point on everything went great. I wondered afterwards, “Now, why was it that I didn’t want to stop? Why was it I thought I knew where I was going? Why was it I did not want to ask for directions?” I mean, is that just a guy thing? I realized it has something to do with humility. It has something to do with pride.
You see, the Bible says pride is the opposite of humility. If you are humble, you don’t mind asking for help. If you’re humble, you don’t mind admitting that you’ve made a mistake. But, you see, if you’re prideful, you really don’t want to ask for help. If you’re prideful, you certainly don’t want to admit you’ve made a mistake. You don’t want to say you’re sorry. And if you’re prideful, I think perhaps worst of all you’re inevitably going to be a victim of perceptual distortion. If you’re prideful, if you don’t have humility, you won’t see things as they really are. Why was it that I was lost and didn’t know it? Because of pride. I was not perceiving things as they really were.
A few weeks ago, or actually, just 8 days ago, Florida State played Miami in a football game. Of course, Florida State is No. 1 in the nation in college football At that time Miami was No. 3. I have to admit I was kind of rooting for Florida State because Bobby Bowden who’s the coach there is a Christian and he’s very supportive of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Also it seemed to me at times like some of the players at Miami were a little… kind of arrogant. So I was rooting for Florida State. Well, Florida State won the game. They won by 11 or 12 points. They were favored to win, I think, by 11 or 12 points. I think most people who watched the game felt like Florida State really was the superior team.
After the game, the interviewers, reporters, went to the locker rooms and they interviewed Miami players. They asked the Miami players if they were now convinced that Florida State really is No. 1 and most of them said no. They didn’t think Florida State played well enough to be No. 1. They asked Miami players who they thought should be No. 1, and Miami said they thought they should be No. 1, even though they had just lost by 10 points. I thought about that. It has to be perceptual distortion. But what is that? It is pride.
Just recently I was reading that down in Texas (I think it was in Dallas) the school board had approved two brand new books for the public-school systems, history textbooks. They had approved these brand-new books. Some of the parents were curious what these new history textbooks were like, so they got permission to kind of look through them. Almost immediately they found 211 mistakes in these history books. Some of them were pretty significant, like the books had Napoleon winning the Battle of Waterloo. That’s a pretty significant mistake. They had President Truman dropping the atom bomb on Korea, which is a pretty significant mistake. These history books said that the leader in the anti-Communist movement in America in the early 50’s was General Douglas MacArthur. Of course, it was really Senator McCarthy. Pretty significant mistakes.
Then as the parents began to do a more thorough review of these history books, they found 5,200 mistakes. The publishers were contacted, one of which was Prentice Hall. The publishers said a strange thing. They said, “Except for the errors, these are the greatest history textbooks ever used in the public school system.” I mean that’s saying, “The Arctic is the best place in the world to live except for the weather.”
Now, you think, what causes that kind of perceptual distortion? It is pride. The Bible tells us that we all bring pride to our relationships. We take pride into our friendships. We take pride into our dating. We take pride into our marriages. It is pride that keeps us from recognizing our mistakes. It is pride that keeps us from saying we’re sorry. It’s pride that causes perceptual distortion. A lack of humility.
You see, we are running everything through the grid of our own pride. That’s why we have this counsel from God regarding humility and how important humility is to inward beauty. The Bible tells us that humility really begins in our relationship with God. When we come to God acknowledging our sins, we come in repentance.
You know how Jesus told the story of the two who went to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and one a tax collector. Jesus tells us how the Pharisee stood and prayed in this way. He said, “God, I thank you that I’m not like other men—proud, unjust, extortioners—or even like this tax collector over here. For I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I have.” Jesus said, “The tax collector, standing at a distance, would not even lift his eyes towards heaven but beat his breast saying, ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner.'” Jesus said, “Truly, I tell you, that man went home justified and not the other, for he who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Our humility begins in our relationship with God and then by the power of the Holy Spirit as Christians humility is to carry over into our relationships. There’s another quality of inward beauty that is so important to God. This second quality is that of sympathy. In Greek, the word is “sumpathos.” It is a word that literally means “to suffer with.” it is exactly the same as the English word “compassion,” which by way of derivation also means “to suffer with.” The concept biblically of compassion and sympathy means that you feel what someone else feels, that you’re able to put yourself in their place. You feel their pain. You feel their sorrow. You feel their joy. You’re focused on their needs.
You see, Peter, in writing to husbands and wives, tells us that all of you have unity and then he says, “sympathy.” How important this is, and how beautiful it is when we are people of compassion.
In 1870, Vladimir Ulyanov was born. Vladimir Ulyanov became one of the greatest leaders in world history. He is said to be the “founder of Communism.’ It was in 1903 that he founded the Bolsheviks. At that time, Vladimir Ulyanov only had seventeen followers but, you see, by 1917 he had 40,000 followers and Vladimir Ulyanov overthrew Czarist Russia. Ultimately the movement he founded came to control the lives of more than one billion people. Now, of course, he’s better known by the pen name he took, the name Lenin, but it is true, historians tell us, that Lenin was a man who had very little sympathy, very little compassion, very little human tenderness, particularly as the years went by.
Of course, Lenin was married. His wife was named Krupskaya. Some of you know how there came that point where she was just totally exhausted because of her daily vigil by her mother’s deathbed. And yet she had to sleep. She did not want to leave her mother. She was afraid that her mother might die. She came to Lenin and she said, “Would you watch my mother for a while just so I can get a little sleep? If she needs anything, will you wake me up?” She woke up the next morning and found her mother dead. In tears she came to Lenin and she asked, “Why? I told you to wake me up if you needed anything.” Lenin did not even look up. He just said, “She didn’t need anything,” and went back to work.
How would you like to be married to a guy like that? How would you like to be married to a woman like that? I mean, Lenin was apathetic instead of sympathetic. He was without feeling. He did not feel the needs of people around him. You see, the Bible tells us that as Christians, those who believe in Christ as Savior and Lord, we are to seek to be like Jesus. When we look in the pages of scriptures, you go through the Gospels, you see how compassionate and how sympathetic Christ is. How many times in the Bible do we read these words, “And Jesus, moved with compassion, said…” or, “Jesus, moved with compassion, went…” You see, His actions, His words, were prompted by compassion and this is what He wants us to be like in all of our relationships.
Perhaps some of you are sitting there thinking, “I’d like to be more compassionate,” and, “I’d like to be more humble,” and, “I’d like to have those qualities,” and, “I’d like to leave this place today and I’d like to become more of a compassionate person and more of a humble person,” and, “How can I do that?” I hope that if you do not remember anything else today you remember what I’m going to say here. It is not enough to try. I mean, you can leave this place and you can try to be more compassionate. You can leave this place and you can try to be more humble. The likelihood is you will just fail. It will hurt your self-esteem.
The Bible says an incredibly important thing in the book of 1 Timothy. The Bible says, “Train yourselves in godliness.” “Train yourselves in godliness.” It does not say, “Try to be godly.” It says, “Train to be godly.” That’s an incredible distinction, so important. You must remember this. Train to be godly. I think most of us want to be godly. I mean there are ungodly things in our life. There are certain sins maybe we want to get rid of. There are also positive, beautiful qualities we want to acquire such as sympathy and humility. How can we become more godly? How can we become more like Christ? Not simply by trying, but by training.
Now, I hope you understand what I mean. If I were to say, “Do you want to go flying with me?” and you were to ask “Well, do you know how to fly a plane?” and I were to say, “Well, no but I’m willing to try,” you wouldn’t want to go with me. I think that is true. I need to train before I fly a plane. If I were going to run in a marathon and you said, “Well, have you really prepared for this? ” and I say, “No, but I’m really going to try,” I would fail. If I ran in a whole bunch of marathons but I never trained, it wouldn’t matter how hard I tried. I would still fail, and that is how it is in the Christian walk in our pursuit of godliness. It is not enough to try. It is important to try. I mean the Bible does say, “make every effort…” but what we really need to do is train.
You cannot get more basic than this. Training begins here and in prayer. We give a lot of lip service as Christians to prayer and to Bible study, but how many of us are really just bathe in prayer and in Bible study daily? When we come to that daily devotional time in our life, how many of us really ask the Lord to make us more humble and ask the Lord to give us more compassion so that the power of the Holy Spirit might be released in our time of prayer, in our time as we study God’s Word? This is so basic to training. I mean time spent in scripture and in prayer.
How many of us are humble enough just even for a moment to go to some close friends in Christ and ask them to prayer for us? I mean are we willing to say, “I really want to be a more humble person and I want to be a more compassionate person. Would you pray for me?” I mean, do we use the priestly intercession of believers? Do we avail ourselves of that?
That is part of training, too, and maybe more to the point. We just came through this missions conference. We completed it last Sunday. We invited hundreds of you to actually enter into ministry right here in Denver, in the inner cities and in food distribution, in tutoring, in prisons—hundreds of you. If you want on-the job training, if you want some training that actually teaches humility and compassion in the midst of ministry, choose to do that. It is not enough to just try. You have got to train if you want to be more sympathetic and have more humility.
You know, some of you have heard of Ruth Bell. Ruth Bell, when she was a teenager in Korea going to school, was a ways away from her childhood home in China. She thought she was going to go on to become a missionary in Tibet. She thought perhaps she would never be married, but if ever she were to be married, she wanted a very special kind of husband. Ruth Bell, as a teenager, wrote these words: “If I marry, he must be so tall that when he is on his knees, as one has said, he reaches all the way to heaven. His shoulders must be broad enough to bear the burden of a family. His lips must be strong enough to smile, firm enough to say ‘no,’ and tender enough to kiss. Love must be so deep that it takes its stand in Christ and so wide that it takes the whole lost world in. He must be active enough to save souls. He must be big enough to be gentle, great enough to be thoughtful. His arms must be strong enough to carry a little child.”
Ruth Bell wrote those words as a teenager. She did not know then who she would marry. Of course, Ruth Bell married Billy Graham. I think both Billy Graham and Ruth Graham have these qualities. I mean, you look through what she wrote as a teenager. You see words like “tender” and “gentle” and ” thoughtful” and “someone who is on his knees.” You think of humility. You think of compassion.
Just a few weeks ago, Barbara and I were talking to Ann Graham (Ann Lofts is her married name). She is married to Danny Lofts, who is just a great guy. Ann is Billy Graham and Ruth Graham’s daughter. She is a wonderful person. She was telling us that when she was growing up, “It would have been impossible,” she said, “to not believe.” “It would have been impossible to not believe in Jesus Christ,” she said, because of her mom and dad. She said, “because they had humility before God,” and she said it was very visible day-by-day. She said that also because the compassion of Christ was SO in their hearts that she felt it and experienced it through her years growing up.
You know, I think God wants us to understand that humility and compassion—those beautiful inward qualities—are critical for of our relationships. Our relationships with our children. Our relationships with our husband or wife. Our friends. Humility and sympathy. Let us close with a word of prayer.