bikini-less and better for it.

A funny thing happens as kids get older; they start being able to reason and ask questions about the boundaries and rules set by their parents. Sometimes, when this happens, the parents realise that the rule or boundary they set was arbitrary and meant for a season of life for a practical reason (bedtimes, for example). Other times, parents know that the boundary or rule is not arbitrary, but is in fact very important. In this instance, things usually go one of two ways: either the parents have thought carefully and biblically about the reason they established that rule and are able to defend themselves logically to their children, or the parents realise that even though it may be a good rule, they have not thought carefully or biblically about it and are not able to defend their position to their children. In the first situation, the child may not like the rule, but they understand that they are to follow it because their parents have presented it well and the child respects the authority (even if they may choose to attempt rebellion as they get older). In the second situation, parents often cave because children are persistent and stubborn, and ultimately want their way; in this situation, the child has discovered a point of weakness and will press their parents until they achieve the desired result. This, I fear, will be the increasing challenge in our home as our kids get older.

Which brings me to the point of this post. As a mother, I have a responsibility to think carefully and biblically about my role and authority. I have a duty to make sure that the non-arbitrary rules I make can be well supported by Scripture and that I am able to defend my position to my children, whom I am raising to be ambassadors for Christ in the world. More formally, I need to make sure I have solid orthodoxy to support my orthopraxy. I need what I believe and know to be true about God and his Word to be worked out before I put anything into practice, especially in relation to my children. This is reaches even into the clothing we wear. I have rules for our children about what they can and cannot wear. I have boundaries and guidelines. And while, to many, this may appear to be an arbitrary area of life, I am fully convinced that it very much is not. I have an orthodoxy here that undergirds my orthopraxy.

This doesn’t start merely with clothes. It starts with Creation. To understand why what we wear matters, we need to understand why our bodies matter. Nancy Pearcey does an amazing job of outlining this in the beginning of her book, Love Thy Body. Ultimately, the thing we often forget as we live among the world is that God’s created intention was a unified person; a body and soul that harmonized and were intimately connected in all functions of life. The Fall of Creation introduced disharmony where God created unity and, thus, we often view ourselves as embodied souls; placing undo emphasis on the soul to the exclusion of the physical person, separating out the intention of the body from the desires of the heart. Not making this connection has devastating impact on many areas of life and can lead many Christians to treat lightly the body God gave them to steward. This point, in and of itself, could be a whole post on its own, but I would refer you to Nancy Pearcey’s book, which does a much better job than I would of laying it all out in a comprehensive way. The reason this matters on the topic of attire is that if we do not start with a right view of the body, we will not have a right view of how we should clothe and present our bodies to both God and the world around us. All things must begin at the beginning and this is no different.

Because I am a woman, that is the perspective from which I am going to be presenting this topic. And going back to the beginning, I need to acknowledge that the first woman was not made to be appreciated or lusted after or pursued by all other creation; she was made for one man. Her whole self, harmonized soul and body, was made for the one man; her husband. Sure, some can argue that there wasn’t any other man with which she could share herself, but I would argue that that is a moot point. We are explicitly told in the creation account that the entire intention behind the creation of woman was that she be a suitable helper to the one man; she was fit for him. This is the first marriage. And in it the two functioned as equally valuable, in unity, as a husband and wife. Each uniquely made to reflect God differently and gloriously. Each with different strengths and weaknesses, each with different features. This is what God called good. However, we know that this is not how it remained. With the first disobedience, the first sin entered the world and the harmony and intention were disordered by the Fall. Now, the nakedness that was a physical representation of the harmony and unity of the couple became a problem. Sin touched even how they viewed their own bodies. They were ashamed of the nakedness. Nakedness in a world of sin introduced lustful thoughts, disordered understandings of the body and how we view it. Nakedness was no longer good in this disharmonized and fallen world. It needed to be covered.

That is the biblical course of events. Looking at our culture today, however, you might think that nakedness is not actually a problem. We are so steeped in displays of flesh that we have become calloused to it. Even, sadly, in reference to children. Having four daughters, I can tell you that is it extremely difficult to find clothes that appropriately present children to the world as children. The number of crop tops available to young girls, encouraging them to display copious amounts of themselves to whoever desires to look, is appalling. And don’t even get me started on the shorts. The culture has made everything about sex. Everything. Right down to how people are encouraged to identify themselves. This is why the LGBT+ conversations are so hard; sexual preferences and proliclivitlies have become the root of cultural identity. The culture encourages the degradation of the body for the pleasure of others, encourages selfish attention seeking by placing the good thing God created on uncensored display, and it is being widely accepted. The standard of even a few decades ago has dropped; the bar is moving ever lower.

And this at a time when the prevalence and accessibility of pornography has increased catastrophically. The average age that most children first encounter porn is cited by many sources as 8 years old. Read that again. Add in the number of tv shows and movies and Instagram accounts that ever so casually incorporate what 30 years ago would have been considered soft-core porn, and our entire culture is steeped in a lustful bath of flashy flesh. We are so used to it we almost don’t even notice anymore. Our ideas of true purity have been washed and watered down to the bare minimum of virginity, which few people ever actually expect to maintain. And don’t think that the church is far from this mess. Go do a little research on the number of professed Christians who struggle with porn addiction and you will realise that this is not just an “out there” world problem. This is an everyone problem. What I am trying to say here is that there has probably not been a time in our recent history where how we clad our bodies matters more to our testimony. The Romans may have lived with pornographic images on their kitchenware, but we all have access to it 24/7 basically wherever we look. The bodies of the people around us are saying something, and it isn’t anything good.

I fully acknowledge that it is extremely difficult to get back to a right biblical understanding of purity today. It is really hard to silence the voices of the society around us long enough to dig in and align our hearts and minds with God’s call to purity in our lives. This is not just an outward action, this is an inward surrender that allows our hearts to remain soft in spite of the callousing affects of all that we see around us. It is a plea to not lose God’s high call and ideal for our bodies and the intentionality with which they were made. It is a call to hold to the highest standard; that we wouldn’t use the low bar around us to allow ourselves to venture into areas we have no business going. The “it could be worse” excuse does not fly when we bring it before the Throne. The standard must always be God’s, not ever a slightly better version of the world’s.

This is what undergirds my approach to attire for our daughters. To teach them that God cares how they clothe themselves, that they are to present themselves as a “living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” Would any of us be able to stand before God in a crop top and short shorts, defiantly telling the I AM that it could be worse? Is that treating thoughtfully and carefully the body that God gave me? Is that presenting myself as a living sacrifice that is pleasing to God? I think we often forget the sacrifice part. The point of being a living offering is not that it is easy or always fun. The point is that, in reaching for the best and aiming for the harmony intended with creation, I am to set aside myself and pick up God’s standard. Being a fragrant offering is not easy. It requires me to give up the desires in myself that are contrary to God’s desires for me.

We all have to admit the reality that what we wear tells a story to the world. The story that much of the world is telling right now, especially the women, is that they really don’t care about their bodies, about purity, about chastity, about honour, about respect. The message we generally receive is that anyone is free to objectify anyone else. And they make it as easy as possible by putting on display as much of themselves as possible. And this at younger and younger ages. Worse than that, I fear that many Christian parents have not thought carefully about this topic and are thus making compromises for themselves and their children that leave very little distinction between the believer and the unbeliever. To be clear, I am not saying that how we dress is what saves us or contributes to our salvation. Rather, how we dress says something about the condition of our hearts and how we view the bodies God gave us to care for and inhabit. How we adorn ourselves says something about God.

I am not here to lay out guidelines that I think everyone should follow. That is not my place. And I know that there are areas within Christianity where this has been taken too far and assigned too much weight. Rather, I would challenge us all to think carefully and honestly about our motives and desires when we choose clothes for ourselves and our children. Am I seeking to inspire glances of jealousy or desire from the people I encounter with what I wear? Am I hoping that men might look a little longer? Am I trying to use my apparel to fit in, to some degree, with the world around me? Am I seeking approval from man rather than approval from God? Is my heart truly right? Am I seeking to flaunt something? Am I trying to display a body that I have worked hard on to the glorification of myself? Am I thinking carefully about how I can help the men around me avoid sin by what I wear? Am I seeking to robe myself in outward splendor? There are a plethora of excuses we have filed away in order to give ourselves permission to do that which is not beneficial. We might have freedom in Christ, but we are also told that not everything is good for us. And that doesn’t just mean we could do harm to ourselves alone. We also are encouraged to not draw a fellow believer into sin. As a woman, while I can fully agree that I am not responsible for the lustful thoughts of men, I am responsible for how I present myself and how that encourages or discourages the lustful male gaze. I need to be honest that my body was designed to be attractive to a man. But I also need to remember that the man I am to be desired by is my husband alone. And while I may dress one way before my husband to please him, I may not dress in that same way outside of my home to please all men. Even were my husband to express his delight in the jealous gazes of other men were I to appear in public in a less than appropriate outfit, I am not to have my pride gratified by this declaration. Rather, in this case, my husband would be revealing an area of sinful weakness in his own heart. I am not to encourage this. Rather, I am to make myself more attractive to my husband by my chaste and pure conduct; by reserving for him alone the gift that is my body. And this applies both to married and unmarried women: the body you were given that men will delight in is to be reserved for the delight of your husband alone. If you aren’t yet married, remember that God made you for the delight and pleasure of one man. Don’t be willing to easily and openly share that with all.

I know that this is hard to think about, hard to be honest about, and an area in which it is hard to make changes. I fully admit that I have not always been careful. I fully admit that this has become more important to me as my young daughters have gotten older. I want to set a good example for them. I want to show them that we are to care less about what the world thinks about how we look and dress, and more about what God thinks. And I can also confess that I am often tempted by the sinful and wrong desires of my heart to gain attention through what I wear. At this stage of my life, when marriage has settled into comfortable routines, I sometimes long to feel the frisson of excitement at being noticed and desired. I sometimes am tempted to say, like so many others, that I can wear what I want, I have autonomy, and the lustful thoughts of others aren’t my problem. But I have also talked to mothers of young men. And I know that this battle is especially hard for them. What this comes down to is this: I am called to live my best for Christ regardless of the world around me and in spite of the wrong desires of my heart. I need to be prayerful and ready to follow God’s leading, especially when it goes against my natural bent. I need to aware of the fact that my body and how it is robed tells a story; and I need that story to be God’s not mine. I need to allow God to change my heart so it desires His way, not my own.

As Abraham Kuyper once said, “There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” And my body is not excluded here. Every square inch of it belongs to Christ, it has been bought with a price. How I dress is not excluded. I belong to Christ, the whole person of me. And that demands from me more careful thought and consideration than I often give. I may not need to throw away everything I own, but I do need to take careful stock of my wardrobe and ask myself what story I am telling when I leave my house each day.

One thing I can say with confidence: I am bikini-less and better for it.