When you use your flesh as currency you will always end up paying a higher price than you anticipate. These days even the youngest among us are responding affirmatively to the media machine’s marketing of all things surface. There is an absolute mania surrounding appearance. The last thing anyone wants is to look like who they naturally are.
The effort and resources exhausted to keep up with the latest look is debilitating and the ones who fully succumb to every bit of beauty hype are lost to the world of true fellowship and left to wander in a shallow dimension of superficiality. The reason I mention it is because I am as antithetical to this dimension as you can get without living on the streets as a filthy vagrant and I dearly miss so many people I once knew before they abandoned themselves to world of the fashionable.
Do not misunderstand me, I desire to be desirable like everyone else, I just remind myself it is a trap and I need only please my Lord. The ones who spend so much time covering up who they are with the thinnest layers of meticulously applied self esteem are unwittingly headed directly to the last place they want to find themselves. Surrounded by a crowd of the coolest people imaginable with the sudden realization they are as lonely as they have ever been. They are advertising their vulnerability to rejection and catching the eyes of those who consume flesh of other for their own pleasure.
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.
(Gal 5:13-26)
