the modest posture

chapter one

the two ditches

There are two ditches on this road, and the church has spent the last hundred years or so careening back and forth between them like a teenager with a learner’s permit. I want to start by naming both, because almost everyone you will ever talk to about modesty has driven into one or the other, and is usually quite proud of the ditch they chose.

In the first ditch is the rule-keeper. She has a chart. She knows how many inches above the knee is acceptable, whether straps must be two fingers or three, and exactly how a swimsuit must be engineered to qualify a woman for heaven. She will tell you that if a man stumbles, it is very likely your shoulders that did it, and she will say the words stumbling block with the gravity of someone quoting the Sermon on the Mount. She means well. She is also, as we shall see, reading a verse about jewelry and wealth as though it were a verse about hemlines, which it is not.

In the second ditch, and we tend to forget this one is a ditch at all, because it feels like freedom, is the woman who has decided she may dress however she pleases and that no human being is permitted to think a single thought about it. She wants to wear whatever she wants and to be furious at anyone whose eyebrows so much as twitch. She has been told, by a culture that is very sure of itself, that consequences and impressions are a form of oppression, and that the truly liberated woman floats through the world leaving no impression at all unless she has personally authorized it.

Here is what I want you to see before we go a single step further: both of these women are doing the very same thing. They are both trying to control what other people think, only from two separate angles. And neither one of those is any of her business, nor within her power, and the exhausting project of attempting it is precisely what has robbed both of them of the thing the Lord actually offers here, which is freedom.

Both women are doing the same thing from opposite directions: trying to control what other people think. Neither one is her business, and neither one is in her power.

Because that is what this little booklet is really about. Not hemlines. Freedom. But to get there we have to climb out of both ditches, and the only way out is straight through what the Bible actually says, which, I promise you, is nothing like what you have been told it says.

chapter two

what the word actually says

Go to the famous passages, because there are really only two of them that everyone reaches for, and I would wager that nearly everything you have ever heard preached about them was about the one thing they do not actually mention.

Here is Paul to Timothy.

Now read that again slowly, and tell me what the list is. Braided hair. Gold. Pearls. Costly array, that is, expensive clothing. Do you see what Paul is actually putting his finger on? It is not skin. He is not measuring an inch of anything. He is naming the woman who walks into the assembly dripping with gold and pearls and an elaborate hairstyle that took three servants and half the morning, the woman whose entire ensemble is engineered to announce how wealthy and important she is. Paul’s concern is the showing off. It is ostentation. It is a heart that came to worship and made the morning about herself and her bank account.

And that word modest, which we have soaked in a century of meaning it never carried, the Greek behind it is kosmios, and it means orderly, seemly, well-arranged, the opposite of chaotic or showy. It is actually the adjective formed from kosmos, the ordered universe, the very word from which we get cosmos. Paul is not saying cover more skin. He is saying do not turn yourself into a walking spectacle of wealth and vanity. Those are not the same thing. They are barely even cousins.¹

Now hear Peter, who does the very same thing, so plainly that I am amazed we ever missed it.

There it is, in the clearest words imaginable. Peter sets the outward against the inward, the braided hair and the gold and the fine clothing on one side, and on the other side the hidden man of the heart, a meek and quiet spirit. He is not handing you a dress code. He is telling you where a woman’s true adorning lives: not on the body at all, but in the heart. The jewelry of a daughter of God is a spirit that is gentle and unanxious and at rest, and that, says Peter, is what God considers genuinely precious.²

Here is what the rule-keeper in the first ditch never quite reckoned with. The two great modesty passages in all of the New Testament are not about how much of you is covered. They are about your heart, about vanity versus humility, about showing off versus a quiet spirit, about whether your outward self is a billboard for your ego. The church took two passages about the heart and turned them into passages about the hemline. It is one of the great bait-and-switches in modern Christian teaching, and it has done a world of harm.

The church took two passages about the heart and turned them into passages about the hemline.

There is a cousin to that bait-and-switch I have to deal with here, because you will meet it everywhere, and it grabs these very verses to do its work. It is the camp that takes Paul naming gold and pearls and braided hair and concludes that jewelry itself is worldly, that a Christian woman ought not wear it, that earrings and ornaments and the like are of the flesh. Some of them go further and come after piercings too, and wave a verse in Leviticus about it. I want to take this apart, because it is a plain misreading, and the whole Book undoes it the moment you actually read it.

Start with what Paul is actually doing. He is not banning gold; he is naming a woman who came to worship dressed to broadcast her wealth and her standing, dripping with it so that every eye in the assembly would land on her and know how rich and important she was. That is the sin in view: the showing off, the pride, the making of the morning about herself before men. It was never the metal. It was the motive. And you know this is right, because if the mere wearing of gold were the sin, the Bible would be at war with itself from one end to the other, and it is not.³

Go and look at how God Himself treats adornment when the heart behind it is right. When Abraham’s servant came for Rebekah, he brought out a gold ring for her face and bracelets for her hands, and the Word calls these good things, tokens of a holy betrothal. And more than that: hear how God speaks of His own love for Israel, when He pictures Himself as a husband adorning His bride. He says He decked her with ornaments, put bracelets upon her hands and a chain about her neck, a jewel upon her forehead and earrings in her ears and a beautiful crown upon her head, and decked her with gold and silver. That is God doing the adorning, with His own hand, as an image of His delight in His people. Isaiah says the same, that the redeemed soul is decked as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels. You cannot call a thing filthy that God takes up as the very picture of His love. The Israelites wore earrings and rings and ornaments, and God never once rebuked the wearing of them; what He rebuked was the golden calf, which was not adornment at all but idolatry, the same gold turned to a false god. The metal was never the matter. The heart behind it always was.⁴

Then there is the one about piercing, and it deserves a straight answer too. The verse they reach for is in Leviticus, where the LORD says His people shall not make cuttings in their flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon them. But read it in its own light. That is one verse in the middle of a long list of pagan practices Israel was to have nothing to do with, and the cuttings and the markings named there were mourning-rites and idol-marks: the gashing of the flesh for the dead that the surrounding nations did to grieve and to appease their gods, and the branding of the skin to show whose deity you belonged to. It is two things, really, cutting for the dead and marking for idols, bound together by the paganism behind them. It is not a general statement about a woman putting a ring in her ear. To haul that verse over and aim it at earrings is to tear it clean out of its own sentence.

And there is a larger thing to say, which the last chapter of this booklet will open all the way, so I will only set it here for now. That verse is in the law of Moses, and the believer is not under the law of Moses. All Scripture is for us, every line of it profitable, but not all of it was spoken to us; the law was given to Israel, and its ceremonial and civil particulars were the schoolmaster of that people until Christ. So even where a command like this one sits, the Christian does not come to it as a rule still binding on her conscience; she comes to it as a mirror and a lesson, and reads it for what it meant. And what it meant was never a war on jewelry. It was a wall against idolatry. Get the context right and the whole objection falls to the ground.⁵

So do not let anyone bury you under a pile of verses that, read in their own place, say nothing of the kind. The rule-keeper here is doing what the rule-keeper always does: reading her own fear back into a text that was talking about something else entirely. It was pride the text named. It was idolatry the law walled out. It was never the earring, and it was never the gold.

There is no chart. There was never a chart. There is a heart, and a posture of that heart, and that is a far harder and far better thing to talk about.

Which is why I will not be giving you a chart. There is no chart. There was never a chart. There is a heart, and a posture of that heart, and that is a far harder and far better thing to talk about.

chapter three

his eyes are not your job

Now let me speak to the first ditch a moment longer, because there is a particular cruelty in it that I want to drag into the light.

The rule-keeping culture does not merely measure hemlines. It tells a woman that she is responsible for what goes on inside a man’s head. If he looks at her and lusts, well, what was she wearing? Did she cause it? Is she a stumbling block? A girl raised on this learns to walk through the world as though every man’s thought life were a fragile vase balanced on her shoulders, and one wrong sundress might shatter it. It is a heavy, shaming, anxious way to live, and I want to tell you plainly that the Lord never laid that weight on you.

Because a man’s eyes are a man’s responsibility. They are his to govern, before God, full stop. This is not my opinion; it is the consistent witness of Scripture, which always sets the duty of self-mastery on the one doing the looking, never on the scenery.

A man’s eyes are a man’s responsibility. They are his to govern, before God, full stop.

Mark who makes the covenant. Job does. Not the maid. Job does not say, I commanded all the young women of Uz to dress so that I would be spared the trouble of behaving myself. He says he made a covenant with his own eyes. The job of guarding a man’s gaze belongs to the man, and when the Lord Jesus spoke about lust in the Sermon on the Mount, He aimed every word of it at the heart of the one who lusts and not one syllable at the woman he looked upon. The men have their own work to do here, and I have written to them about it elsewhere, and it is real work. But it is theirs.⁶

You may lay that vase down. You were never meant to carry the contents of every man’s imagination, and the teaching that told you so was not protecting anyone; it was just handing a fully capable man or boy an excuse and handing you a burden, and calling the swap holiness.

You were never meant to carry the contents of every man’s imagination.

chapter four

you cannot stop the thin-slicing

But now I am going to climb down into the second ditch and step on some toes there too, because fair is fair.

The culture, and a great deal of the modern feminist telling of it, has sold women a lovely-sounding lie that goes like this: you may dress however you wish, and no one is permitted to form a single impression of you on the basis of it, and if they do, the fault is entirely theirs and the impression itself is a kind of violence. It sounds so freeing. It is also, I am sorry to report, complete nonsense, and not the way a single corner of reality has ever worked.

Everything we do communicates. How we dress, how we speak, how we carry ourselves, how we groom, all of it sends signals, and every human being who has ever lived reads those signals and forms a quick impression, instantly, automatically, about everyone they meet. The researchers even have a name for it: thin-slicing. We take a thin slice of information and our minds build a fast picture from it before we have consciously thought about anything at all. You do it. I do it. The woman insisting no one should do it is doing it about the very people she insists should stop. It is simply how human beings are built, and you are not going to repeal it by being indignant. Fallen or not, and however wrong those snap impressions can sometimes be, the thin-slicing itself is a plain fact of life.⁷

So no, you cannot dress however you like and also dictate the conclusions in every head that turns. You can have the freedom, you truly can, and we will get there, but you cannot have the freedom and also a guarantee that the world will see you exactly and only as you wish to be seen. That guarantee was never on offer to anyone, about anything. The man in the rumpled suit is thin-sliced. The woman in the power blazer is thin-sliced. The fellow with the neck tattoo is thin-sliced. Welcome to being a person among persons.

Here is where I must be very honest with you, because this is the cake-and-eat-it-too of it: you do not get to wear whatever you want and be outraged that anyone thought anything. Pick one. If you are at peace before the Lord with how you are dressed and you understand that some people will read it one way and some another, wonderful, walk on in liberty and pay the chatter no mind. But the woman who wants to dress for maximum attention and then deliver a lecture on how no one is allowed to notice is not asking for freedom. She is asking for the universe to revolve around her preferences, which is a different request entirely, and one the universe has a long history of declining.

Do you see how both ditches have now been named? The rule-keeper tries to control what women wear. The culture-girl tries to control what people think. The way out of both is the same: stop trying to manage other people, and bring the whole matter home to the one place it actually belongs, your own heart, before your own God.

chapter five

why are you wearing that?

If there is no chart, and it is not your job to police the men, and it is also not the world’s job to pretend you are invisible, then what on earth is the actual question? Here it is, and it is the only one that matters, and it is one nobody else on the planet can answer for you:

Why are you wearing what you are wearing?

That is it. That is all of it. Not how short, not how much, not how it scores on somebody’s chart, but why. The reason this is the question is that it is a heart question, and the heart is exactly where we established the Bible puts modesty in the first place. Two women can put on the identical dress and stand side by side, and one of them be in perfect liberty and the other deep in vanity or rebellion, and the dress will tell you absolutely nothing, because the matter was never in the fabric. It was always in the why. Which is, incidentally, the final nail in the coffin of the chart: a rule about cloth cannot possibly measure a thing that lives in the heart.

Examine the why with me, because most of us have never once stopped to do it. Here are the usual suspects, and I say this as a woman holding the mirror up to her own face right along with you. Are you wearing it for the gaze, to be looked at, wanted, to turn the head of a man or of every man? Are you wearing it to be fashionable, because it is the trend, because it is current, because you would rather die than be caught in last season? Are you wearing it because all your girlfriends wear it and you would feel exposed in a different way, the way of not matching the flock? Or are you wearing it, if we are truly honest, simply because it is what you have always worn, the inherited default of however you happened to be raised, a thing you put on every morning and never once chose?

Look hard at that list, because here is what every single item on it has in common: not one of them is freedom. Every one of them is somebody else holding the pen. The gaze, the trend, the flock, the upbringing, in each case your clothing is being dictated by something outside you, and you are merely the one carrying out its orders. That is not liberty. That is the longest leash in the world, but it is still a leash.

Every one of those reasons is somebody else holding the pen. That is the longest leash in the world, but it is still a leash.

Here is the freedom I actually want for you, the thing on the far side of the question. Find what you genuinely love. Find the style, the aesthetic, the way of putting yourself together that is truly yours, that makes you feel like yourself and delights you because you find it lovely, not because some man will approve, not because it is trending, not because the other girls have it, not because your mother did it that way. There is nothing wrong with loving clothes. Nothing is wrong with wanting to look nice; the Lord made beauty and a great deal of it. The freedom was never in covering up or in stripping down. The freedom is in the heart that chooses for honest reasons before the Lord, rather than dancing on the end of someone else’s string.

I will tell you my own, since it is only fair that I climb into the mirror too. I love a great many earrings stacked right up the ear. I like to keep my hair quite long. In fact, I sometimes enjoy wearing it mostly swept to one side, with a few tight braids running close along the other side so that from across a room that side reads almost like it is shaved, a bit of an edge, and it keeps my earrings on display, which is the whole point. I love that soft, pretty, slightly Southern aesthetic. And I wear all of it for exactly one reason: because I love it. It is mine. It makes me feel like me. Not because it is in, not because somebody will look. Because I genuinely like it. That, and not an inch of fabric one way or the other, is what freedom in dress actually looks like.

chapter six

the anomaly we swim in

Now I have to do the thing I always do, the thing that runs through every booklet I write, because it is the only honest way to think: when the whole world is doing something, and doing it with one loud voice, a daughter of God does not get to simply float along on the current unbothered. She stops. She looks. She asks what exactly she is swimming in.

Here is what we are swimming in, whether we have noticed or not: a degree of bodily revelation in everyday Western dress that is, historically speaking, a striking anomaly. I want to be careful and fair here, because the careless version of this point is false. It is not that no one in history ever showed any skin; cultures the world over have had their warmer climates and their freer styles, and there is nothing new under the sun about a bare arm. But the sheer extent of it in the modern West, and the speed at which it arrived, really only across the last century and the sexual revolution that crowned it, is genuinely without much precedent. Bathing and swimming, to take just one example, were for most of Western history a thoroughly separated, gendered affair, and the casual mixed near-undress of a modern public pool would have stopped nearly any prior generation in its tracks. We did not arrive here gradually over millennia. We sprinted here in a handful of decades.⁸

Now read me carefully, because the rule-keeper will try to grab this paragraph and wave it like a banner, and she may not have it. I am not saying the modern way is therefore wicked. I am saying it is recent, and that recency alone ought to make a thinking woman pause, the same way she would pause at any belief or fashion that the world suddenly adopted all at once and then insisted had always been the obvious truth. Recognizing that you are standing in an anomaly is not the same as condemning it. It is just refusing to mistake the water you happen to be swimming in for the ocean itself.

We pause, and we look, and we go to the Book, and we find, as we already saw, that there is no verse setting a measure of skin. There is no hemline in Scripture. Rather than invent one, which is the rule-keeper’s career, we are honest: the Bible simply does not legislate this. Which throws us back, once again, onto the heart and onto wisdom, because that is plainly where God meant the matter to live.

You can wear the clothing of your culture as a free woman who lives in her own age, or wear it because the world owns you and you never thought to ask. Same dress. Entirely different woman.

How do we hold liberty in something the world has gone strange about? The way Paul held it. He became all things to all men, without sinning, mind you; he took on the dress and the manner of the places he went, a Jew to the Jews and as one outside the law to those outside it, that he might by all means win some. There is no sin in dressing like the time and place you live in, we are sent into the world, after all, not into a costume museum. The whole of the Christian posture is the old line: in the world, not of it. And the difference between in and of is never the fabric. It is the heart. It is, once again and always, the why. You can wear the clothing of your culture as a free woman who simply lives in her own age, or you can wear it because the world owns you and you never thought to ask. Same dress. Entirely different woman.⁹

chapter seven

wisdom where the bible is quiet

Here is a thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to learn: the Bible does not forbid it is not the end of a conversation. It is barely the beginning of one. Because liberty is real, but liberty was never the same thing as wisdom, and the Christian life is lived in the enormous territory of things that are permitted but not therefore always wise.

Paul himself said it twice, and I have never gotten over the bluntness of it.

Liberty settles the question of sin. It does not settle the question of wisdom, and a mature daughter of God learns to ask the second question long after the first is happily answered.

Lawful, but not always expedient, not always profitable, not always wise, not always the best use of my liberty. So even here, in a matter where I have just spent five chapters defending your freedom and tearing up the rule-keeper’s chart, I am not going to pretend that there is no verse against it settles every question for every woman in every setting. It settles the question of sin. It does not settle the question of wisdom, and a mature daughter of God learns to ask the second question long after the first has been happily answered.¹⁰

The wisdom reaches further than just you, which is the part we forget. How you carry and present yourself is teaching somebody, whether you mean it to or not. There are younger eyes on you, daughters, nieces, the girls in the youth group, the little ones who think you hung the moon. They are learning what womanhood looks like partly by watching you, and they are learning it far more from your freedom and your peace and your good sense than from any lecture. You are modeling a posture, and you get to decide what posture you hand down.

There is a word of real hope folded into that, especially if you did not get a healthy model yourself. It does not matter whether you were raised in a home so strict the women practically wore drapery, or one so loose that anything went and no one ever thought about it. You are not a prisoner of either ditch you were handed. You can become, right now, by the grace of God and the wisdom of His Spirit, the woman who hands the next generation something healthier than what she received, neither the anxious legalism nor the absorbed worldliness, but a free woman with a modest heart and good sense. The chain of whatever you inherited can be broken with you, and a better thing handed forward.

chapter eight

from the inside out

Let me tell you a story that has stayed with me, one that Dr. J. Vernon McGee used to tell, because it holds this whole booklet in a single picture. There was a young woman who worked as a cocktail waitress, and she came to know the Lord Jesus Christ. And she came to McGee with an honest and anxious question: now that she was saved, ought she to quit her job? And his answer was not what the rule-keeper would have given. He did not hand her a list. He told her to wait on the Holy Spirit, that if the Lord wanted her out of that work, the Lord Himself would convict her of it, and when He did, she was to listen to that, and not to all the voices of all the people around her. And so she waited, and she walked with the Lord, and after a few months she came under conviction about it on her own, and she quit, and went and found other work.¹¹

Do you see what happened there, and what did not? Nobody clamped a rule on her from the outside. The Spirit did a work on the inside, in His own timing, and the outside followed, and because it came from within, it was real, and it held. That is the entire difference between the way the law works and the way grace works. The law works from the outside in: change the behavior and hope the heart eventually catches up, which mostly produces either a hypocrite or a rebel. Grace works from the inside out: the Spirit changes the heart, and the life follows along behind it, genuinely, because it grew rather than because it was bolted on.

The law works from the outside in. Grace works from the inside out. Only the second kind of change ever lasts.

And this is exactly how it will go with you on a matter like this one, where there is no verse to hand you. You may wear a thing today in perfect peace, with a clean conscience, and you are not fooling yourself, you are truly free in it. And then a season may come when you feel a small check about it, a quiet discomfort that was not there before. When that happens, do not panic and do not run to other people. Take it to the Lord and search your own heart honestly: is this a legalistic tug, the old fear and the old chart trying to creep back in? Is it a worldly tug, wanting more of the gaze? Or is this You, Lord, gently leading me to set this particular thing down? And if it is truly Him, then you listen to Him, and not to the chorus on either side. Conviction can come later than conversion, and it can come about one thing and not another, and the timing of it is His business and not the church’s.

Change from the inside out, never the outside in. That is the Lord’s way, and it is the only kind of change that ever lasts.

chapter nine

freedom on the rails

We arrive, then, where I told you at the very beginning we were going, which was never the hemline but the heart, and past the heart, to the thing the whole matter was always pointing at: freedom in Christ. I will tell you plainly that if you take hold of what is in these pages, you will taste a freedom you may never have tasted in your life, because you will at last stop carrying things you were never built to carry.

But I have to ground that freedom, or you will hear me wrong, the way our age always hears the word, as though freedom meant simply doing as you please. We are not under the law any longer, that is gloriously true. But understand what the law was for. The law was the mirror. It was given to show us how far short we fall, how thoroughly we cannot keep it, how desperately we need a Savior. No one ever kept it, no one but the Lord Jesus Christ, who fulfilled every line of it perfectly, and could therefore become the spotless Lamb, the only one qualified to take our place. And in His finished work the mirror has done its job and given way to grace. We do not earn; we are loved. We do not perform; we are free.¹²

But hear what kind of thing that freedom is. Think of a train. A train is a magnificent, powerful thing, and it is most gloriously free when it is barreling down the track at full speed, but only on the rails. Take that same train off the rails in the name of liberty, set it loose to roam the open field wherever it likes, and it does not become freer. It stops dead in the mud, a useless mountain of steel. Its freedom and its power were never opposed to the rails; they depended on them. And so it is with you. Your freedom in Christ is not the freedom to leave the track. It is the freedom to run, with everything in you, on it.

The train is most free when it is barreling down the track at full speed. Off the rails, in the name of liberty, it only stops dead in the mud.

And the rails are the Lord, His Word beneath you and His Spirit guiding you. Where the Bible speaks plainly, you have your track and you stay on it. But where the Bible is quiet, as it is on the very matter of this booklet, you are not abandoned to guess. The Spirit Himself guides you, and I want you to know how He so often does it, because we are forever waiting for thunder and missing the whisper. He leads, much of the time, in the still, small voice, the quiet thought that drifts across your mind, the gentle check in your spirit, the soft hmm, perhaps not this that you could so easily talk yourself out of. That is Him, more often than we think, leading His daughters through the thousand small choices the Book does not spell out.¹³

How do you keep your ear tuned to a voice that quiet? You stay close. You are in His Word daily, not as a chore but as the place you actually live. You keep a soft and repentant heart. And when you sin, for you will, we all do, you do not lose your salvation; that was settled forever at the cross and is not up for renegotiation every time you stumble. But sin does break your fellowship, the way a child who has been sullen with her father is still entirely his child but is not, for the moment, enjoying him, and so you go to the Lord and you make it right and you restore the fellowship, and the line goes clear again, and you can hear Him. Kept close like that, in the Word, tender of heart, quick to restore, you will hear the still small voice, and He will lead you, and step by step He will make you more like the Lord Jesus, which was the whole point of saving you in the first place.

So lay down the chart, My Friend. And lay down the lie that you can dress as you please and answer to no one’s gaze or thought. Lay down both, climb out of both ditches, and bring the whole thing home to a heart at rest before God, examined, honest, free. That is a modest posture. It was never about the hemline. It was always about the heart, and the heart, set free and set on the rails, can finally run.