My family and I have had the privilege of hanging out with some unbelievably awesome single guys lately. A big reason I say they are so awesome is that they actually care about winning the battle with lust. Most men gave up long ago. Titus talks about Cretans whose “god is their belly.” In our culture, deity seems to have migrated several inches south.

But these guys have a problem, and it’s a problem that we have to own as their sisters in Christ. Everywhere they go, women are unbelievably unhelpful. Flaunting. Revealing. Immodest. Out in the world, we wouldn’t really expect anything else, but when it’s women in the Church, that’s a different story. Over and over, our friends have lamented that Christian women just don’t seem to understand what they’re doing to their brothers. I think that’s because no one is out there trying to teach them. And guess what, ladies, that’s OUR job. The Bible says that it’s up to women to teach other women how to be discreet and chaste (Titus 2:5).

But so many women can’t muster much passion about this issue. It conflicts with other values, or it just isn’t on the radar screen. So, in honor of awesome guys everywhere, I would like to present my Top Ten Reasons Why Modesty Gets a Yawn in hopes that all of us ladies can wake up, start being “teachers of good things” and consider how to provoke other women to love their brothers by making the gathering of the saints a safer place for battle-weary soldiers of purity.

10. I’m too old to be a problem.

You’re never too old to be discreet and chaste. Just because you don’t look like a teenager doesn’t mean that you don’t still need to be careful. When you’re bending over in tight jeans, your crow’s feet don’t show anyway. And if your cleavage is spilling out of your neckline, it’s likely to be a challenge whether or not you have a few gray hairs.

Even if, for the sake of argument, you really ARE too old to ever cause anyone to struggle, you’re still not too old to set an example for the younger women who are naively exhibiting themselves. After all, if their mothers and grandmothers are doing it, why shouldn’t they?

9. I don’t have a body like a Victoria’s Secret model, so who would ever lust after me?

This one is similar to #10 and reveals a way in which most women don’t understand men. Women think that they have to have a perfect total package to provoke anyone to lust. Actually a man will feel a twinge of arousal from seeing ANYthing that is hyper-accentuated and immodest about a female body even if something else is less than perfect.

8. But my husband wants me to dress immodestly.

Usually, when husbands express this, it’s because one of two things is happening (sometimes both at the same time). Either you are not paying attention to satisfying his deep desire for visual stimuli when you are alone. (And wives, when you’re alone, go ALL OUT!) Or he’s a lust junkie who’s getting a buzz anywhere and everywhere he can and is annoyed that he isn’t getting the same buzz from you. A man that is fighting hard will not want you to be as inconsiderate and unloving as all the women he has to put up with all day. But a man who’s wallowing in other women’s immodesty will want to pull you down into the pit with him with absolutely no regard for how many men you cause to stumble along the way. If your husband doesn’t care if other men are lusting after you, it is a HUGE red flag that he is probably lusting after everyone else.

7. Are you saying that if a man is lusting after a woman, that it’s HER fault?!

Nope. Not even close. Lust is a sin. And if a man is committing it, God holds him and him alone accountable. I’m not advocating the Islamic stereotype “blame the woman for her own rape” kind of mentality that says that men are not responsible for themselves in the presence of a beautiful woman.

But we CAN help our brothers. Being immodest is like throwing a party for a bunch of recovering alcoholics and deciding to have an open bar. If your guests got totally smashed it would, of course, be their fault, but no one is going to think for a minute that you really loved them or cared about their struggles.

6. But my husband never has any trouble at all with immodest women.

Apparently, there really are a few men out there who are totally oblivious. I don’t personally know any of them, but I’ve gotten enough comments from wives insisting that their husbands are in this category that I’m willing to acknowledge the possibility. However, just like I am taking your word for it that your husband has no difficulty, you might want to consider taking my word for it that a lot of other men do.

5. If Christians look like freaks no one will want to be a Christian.

People who don’t want to be Christians don’t want to because the Gospel sounds outlandish, or because they firmly believe something else, or even sometimes because they they don’t understand their own sinfulness and what they need to be saved from. That “Christians are too weird” is just an excuse, as evidenced by the “Christians are no different from anyone else” excuse that we hear equally often. God frequently asks His people to do things that make us look weird (turning the other cheek, not lying, esteeming others as better than ourselves, for example). We need to be concerned with what’s right, not what’s normal.

4. But I want to dress like my friends.

Sure, but somebody has to be a leader. Imagine how much easier it would be for your friends to be considerate in their dress if you were already doing it.

3. I want to look cute and stylish.

This is a hard one. Probably every woman really wants to have everyone think she’s beautiful, but at what cost? Is following fashion so important that it’s worth placing a stumbling block in your brother’s path? When we decide that our own sense of style matters more than helping men avoid lust, fundamentally, it is just selfishness on our part.

2. Guys won’t pay attention to me if I’m dressed in a sack.

Yeah, a lot of them probably won’t. But you have to ask yourself what kind of attention you really want. Are you looking for a godly husband or a long trail of panting, drooling puppies who will abandon you in a heartbeat just as soon as another piece of meat strolls by? Quality men want virtuous women. The problem is that the world is mostly populated by non-quality men, so virtuous women necessarily get less attention. This isn’t really a problem when you consider that drooling puppies make lousy husbands (assuming they ever quit playing video games long enough get around to marrying you). You’re wasting your time if you’re trying to appeal to them.

1. But I don’t see any men lusting after me!

Ha! Yes, there are a few creepy guys out there who ogle women openly, but 99.9% of the men out there are much more subtle. They know that it’s socially unacceptable to stare, so they don’t. In fact, most men will not look at your body when you are looking at them. If your attention is on them, they’ll look at your face, nod politely, play the gentlemen. But turn around to talk to your friends, and they’re watching you out of the corners of their eyes, and it is NOT your face they’re looking at this time. You have NO idea how many surreptitious second (and third and fourth…) looks are being stolen. You also have NO idea how many of your brothers in Christ are fighting hard not to take those second looks and are feeling really beaten up by how aware they are of your body.

Our brothers’ fight deserves much more than a yawn. Be modest yourself. Share the truth with your sisters. Let’s wake up and help each other out.

And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works –Hebrews 10:24

Body image. Ouch. I spent a long time suffering under its tyrannical thumb. When I was a teenager, I didn’t quite have the self-discipline to be anorexic, but I was constantly on a diet, and constantly dissatisfied. Those years seem like a lifetime ago, but I still remember.

Squirming under the heavy weight of glossy photographs, I shifted in my waiting room chair. I had come to have my braces tightened, and I had picked up Seventeen. There, from the pages they stared up at me, with perfect make-up, and flawless skin, and curves, gorgeous curves in all the right places. I flipped through advice on back-to-school must-haves, and how to get sexy hair, and always they looked out at me, with heartless, silent laughter. The orthodontist’s assistant called my name, and I walked through the door, with a lump in my throat, believing I would never be good enough.

When we’re little girls, we want to be brides and mommies, queens of households. We get older and we want to be cherished, wanted, adored. And as we grow we get some idea of the type of girl who gets that much attention. We hope we’ll grow up to be beautiful, to have the sort of bodies that men are shopping for, that the magazines tell us are hot. And day by day, the blossom opens, until we stand in front of the mirror, all grown up, and many of us, especially those who have been steeped in the idealism of retouched images and skinny models, are crushed by what we see.

Some of the hopeful ones go on trying to follow the dictates of magazines and television, becoming increasingly immodest and plasticized as they compete with pixelated perfection for the attention they desire. The less hopeful just get depressed. And body image is tossed around as a buzzword for a secret feminine pain. We’re so liberated, but not really. In a large sense, women are still commodities, our worth defined by our bodies.

I want to share some of the things that have helped me start to get victory in this area, both to help anyone else who is struggling, and to help those of us who are moms know how to help our daughters understand themselves as women in this body-obsessed world.

Put yourself on a low-lie diet.
Certainly, women have coveted each other’s beauty for generations, but nowadays we have more provocation to covet than ever. Women today are surrounded by lies, the twisted half-truths of marketers hoping to profit from the feelings of inadequacy their lies create. They don’t care if you cry yourself to sleep over your imperfect skin as long as you shell out your money for Noxema or Oil of Olay. They don’t care if feeling outdated in the clothes God has provided for you makes you ungrateful and jealous of other women just as long as you send a little money their way for the latest issue of In Style. They don’t care if despair over not being as thin, or as busty, or as leggy as their cover girls leaves you borderline suicidal as long as you buy the new jeans in the ad on page nine. They want you to covet what you see in their pictures. They’re selling things, products and information, and the first rule of selling is that you have to create a need. That need is born in women’s natural desire to be desired and is fed by images of an unattainable standard. The marketing is designed to provoke you to covetousness, so that you’ll pay money to have a chance at measuring up. But you never will measure up because then you would stop needing their products and information.

Covetousness is a sin, a destructive poison that separates us from God. The first step in overcoming the demon of body image misery is refusing to listen to the lie that you need to look a certain way to be OK. Go on a media fast and detox. Turn the television off. Stop watching movies for a while. Quit reading the magazines that give you trouble. When I first realized how much the world’s impossible ideal was hurting me, I put a little Bible in my purse. In waiting rooms, I didn’t look at the magazines, I read the Bible instead. Even in the checklane at the supermarket, I refused to look at pictures that tempted me to covet what other women looked like. I pulled out my little Bible, and glued my eyes to it.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do our best to look beautiful. We absolutely should! Looking neat and clean and put together is a good testimony, a delight to our husbands, and a big emotional boost to ourselves. I’m just saying that if we’re feeling bad about ourselves, it can really help to shut of the voices that are screaming at us about not looking good enough.

Worship the Lord.
Covetousness is idolatry (Colossians 3:5), and coveting other women’s appearances means that we’re worshiping a false god of beauty, thinking that if we only looked thinner, or curvier, or had better hair that somehow we’d be happier, that our lives would be better. But true happiness is only found in God. Our lives are best when they are poured out in service to Him. When we are worshiping the true God, we weaken the power that false gods hold over us. And when we’re delighting in the Lord, it’s a whole lot easier to see that the world’s offers of happiness are counterfeits.

Trust your husband to the Lord.
For a lot of women, the “voices” that scream the loudest are the eyes of men. These women want desperately to be married, but they don’t feel like the type of woman that turns heads. Or, maybe they are married, but their husbands are always looking at other women. (I also talked about this situation in this post.) The women in the media just serve to further convince these women of all the ways they aren’t good enough for the attention they long for. Let me be a little blunt, when men are staring at women, taking long looks and second looks, they are almost always doing it for that little floaty zing it makes them feel. And that is just old-fashioned lust. It’s looking at a woman for the purpose of feeling sexual feelings. The Bible talks about this here:

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. –Matthew 5:28

And guess what? Any woman is powerless to hold onto a man who is in this state. Men who have given themselves over to lust are going to look at every pair of x chromosomes that walks by, hoping for a zing. We women often think that if we were just prettier, if we just dressed a little better, if we just lost a few more pounds and looked more like those girls on the magazine covers then we’d win the great beauty pageant of life and be crowned with a husband’s unswerving attention. It just isn’t so. Men in that state are like women in a shoe store. It doesn’t matter if they have the perfect pair of strappy sandals tucked under their arm, they’re still going to linger over the half-price pumps.

A godly husband is from the Lord, and that’s true whether you’re hoping to be married, or you are broken over a current difficult marriage. Faithful, honorable men happen, not when their women reach a pinnacle of beauty that satisfies them so much they are never tempted to look at anyone else, but when the Lord get a hold of a man’s heart and teaches him to say with Job,

I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid? –Job 31:1

Work on being adorned with good works.
Last of all, we should put our focus on what God thinks is beautiful, developing meek and quiet spirits (1 Peter 3:4), and being adorned with good works (1 Timothy 2:10). If you’re not married, this will greatly increase your chances of attracting a quality man, instead of a lust muffin anyway, and if you are married your husband will be blessed. Best of all, you’ll feel much more beautiful because you’ll be pleasing the Lord instead of obsessing over how you don’t measure up to the vanity of the world.

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised. –Proverbs 31:30

When I talk to people about pornography, I am frequently amazed (and saddened) by the number of people who just don’t get it. They don’t see porn as a big deal, don’t understand why it upsets women so much, and figure that anyone who is opposed to it must be a Victorian prude. Naomi Wolf has written a great piece that busts right to the heart of the matter, The Porn Myth. The fact is, porn makes men want real women less.

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn….

…The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

What’s her solution? Wolf can’t bring herself to actually recommend modesty, but she does a pretty good job of praising the wisdom behind it and shares a powerful vignette from a visit with an Orthodox Jewish friend in Jerusalem.

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Due to the nature of the subject matter, I’m definitely not recommending this to younger readers, and I do suggest that you exercise discernment. However, given how pornography has swept our society, it would behoove us (especially those of us with sons to raise) to understand its true effects so that we can adequately warn our children. It all reminds me of what C.S. Lewis wrote in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,

Nothing spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.

If you want to appreciate fresh fish and potatoes, stay away from the Witch’s Turkish delight. If you want a steamy sex life, stay away from porn.

It works.

Read the full article here.