a word before we begin

Modesty, My Friend. There is scarcely a word in all the church that has been so badly mishandled. Half of us flinch when we hear it and the other half reach for a measuring tape, and both halves have been handed something that is not what the Bible actually says. I want to warn you at the outset that this may step on your toes no matter which of those two camps you have lived in, because I mean to walk straight down the middle of a road most people have driven into one ditch or the other of. If you came up under the rules and the charts and the shame, there is freedom waiting for you here that you may not believe at first. And if you came up sure that you may dress however you please and that no one on earth is permitted to think anything of it, well, I am going to step on those toes too, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But stay with me through both, because what waits on the far side of this is not a new set of rules and not a license to stop thinking. It is something better than either: a heart at rest before God, and the kind of freedom that only ever comes from laying down the burdens you were never meant to carry in the first place.

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.

what the word actually says

is waiting for you

Every booklet is free. Sign in with your email and we send you a code.

sources & notes

  1. The word kosmios (1 Timothy 2:9), rendered ”modest” in the KJV: the word means ”orderly, well-arranged, seemly, decorous,” and is the adjective formed from kosmos, ”order, arrangement,” the same root behind the English cosmos. It is used again in 1 Timothy 3:2 of a bishop ”of good behaviour,” i.e., of a well-ordered life. See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry ”Modest”; Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon (Strong’s G2887); and Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, which describes the word as pointing to ”an inner self-control that tells a person what is good and proper.” The passage names braided hair, gold, pearls, and costly array: ostentation and the display of wealth, not a measure of skin.
  2. 1 Peter 3:3-4, setting the ”outward adorning” (plaited hair, gold, apparel) against ”the hidden man of the heart, the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.” The Greek kosmos appears here too (of the outward ”adorning”), the noun to which kosmios in 1 Timothy 2:9 is the adjective. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, s.v. ”Adorn, Adorning”; Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. 6.
  3. 1 Timothy 2:9 and 1 Peter 3:3 target ostentation, the display of wealth and status before others, rather than adornment as such: the objects Paul and Peter name (gold, pearls, costly array, elaborately plaited hair) were the recognized markers of conspicuous wealth in the Greco-Roman assembly, and the fault addressed is pride and self-display in worship. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, s.v. ”Modest,” ”Adorn”; Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary (1 Timothy 2; 1 Peter 3). That the heart’s motive, not the material, is the matter in view is the consistent reading of the expository tradition and follows from the whole testimony of Scripture on adornment (see note 4).
  4. God’s own positive use of adornment forecloses reading jewelry as inherently worldly. Rebekah was given a gold nose-ring (nezem) and gold bracelets by Abraham’s servant, called ”good things,” Genesis 24:22, 47, 53. Most strikingly, God pictures Himself adorning Israel as a bridegroom decks his bride, ”I decked thee also with ornaments, bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy neck, a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head, decked with gold and silver,” Ezekiel 16:11-13. Likewise the redeemed soul ”as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels,” Isaiah 61:10. The sin of the golden calf (Exodus 32) was idolatry, not adornment, the same gold turned to a false god; and Israel’s stripping off of ornaments in Exodus 33:4-6 was an act of mourning and repentance after that idolatry, not a verdict on ornament itself. Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Genesis 24 and Ezekiel 16.
  5. Leviticus 19:28 (”Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD”) stands within the Holiness Code’s catalogue of pagan practices Israel was to reject, and the cuttings and marks named are those of heathen mourning and idolatry, the ritual gashing of the flesh ”for the dead” common to the surrounding nations, and the branding of the skin to signify allegiance to a deity. The Hebrew term rendered ”mark” (qaaqa) occurs only here in the Old Testament and is bound to that idolatrous context. It is not a general prohibition of piercing, and the two clauses (cutting for the dead; marking for idols) are distinct pagan customs joined by their common paganism. See Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Leviticus 19; and the standard treatments in the lexicons (BDB). On the further point that the believer stands not under the Mosaic law but under grace, all Scripture being profitable for us though not all spoken to us: Romans 6:14, Galatians 3:24-25, 2 Timothy 3:16, developed in chapter IX and note 12.
  6. Job 31:1, ”I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?” The duty of guarding the gaze laid on the man himself, not on the woman looked upon. With the Lord’s teaching on lust in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:27-28, which aims every ounce of the command at the heart of the one who looks. The Sons of Adam companion booklet takes up the man’s side of this at length.
  7. ”Thin-slicing” is the term popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), for the mind’s capacity to find patterns and reach conclusions ”based on very narrow slices of experience,” forming a rapid impression before conscious deliberation begins. That human beings form quick impressions of one another automatically is a commonplace of social psychology and not in dispute; Gladwell simply gave it a memorable name. No one can dress in a way that forbids others to form an impression at all.
  8. The historical novelty of the modern West’s degree of everyday bodily exposure is the claim in view, and it is a limited one: not that skin was never shown in any culture (it plainly was), but that the extent and speed of change in Western dress across roughly the last century, culminating in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, is without much precedent. The historic norm of sex-segregated bathing, and the relatively recent arrival of mixed public swimming in modern swimwear, is well documented in histories of dress and of leisure; see general treatments such as those in the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion and standard social histories of the swimsuit and the beach.
  9. Paul ”all things to all men”: 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 (”unto the Jews I became as a Jew, to them that are without law, as without law, that I might by all means save some”), the pattern of adapting to the culture one is sent to, without sin. ”In the world, not of it” distills John 17:14-18 (”They are not of the world, as I have sent them into the world”). Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Wise (1 Corinthians).
  10. 1 Corinthians 6:12 and 10:23, ”All things are lawful, but all things are not expedient”: the distinction between what is permitted and what is profitable or wise, and the warning ”I will not be brought under the power of any.” On the further reach of wisdom, the care not to wound a weaker brother or to teach the watching young by careless liberty, Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8, on the believer’s liberty held under love.
  11. The account of the young cocktail waitress who came to Christ and was counseled to wait on the Holy Spirit’s conviction rather than to act on the rules of others is one of Dr. J. Vernon McGee’s familiar illustrations of the Spirit’s inward work in matters of Christian liberty, told in his Thru the Bible teaching (in the setting of Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10, on doubtful things and the leading of the Spirit). It is recounted here from that teaching to illustrate change worked from the inside out.
  12. The law as a mirror and schoolmaster that drives us to Christ: Galatians 3:24 (”the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ”), Romans 3:20 (”by the law is the knowledge of sin”), and James 1:23-25 (the Word as a glass in which we see ourselves). On Christ fulfilling the law perfectly and becoming the spotless Lamb, Matthew 5:17, 1 Peter 1:19, 2 Corinthians 5:21. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Free (Galatians); and McGee, Thru the Bible (Galatians).
  13. The ”still small voice” is from 1 Kings 19:11-12, where the LORD is found not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in ”a still small voice.” On the Spirit’s leading of believers, Romans 8:14 (”as many as are led by the Spirit of God”) and John 16:13. On assurance of salvation resting on Christ’s finished work and not on the believer’s performance, John 10:28-29 and Ephesians 2:8-9; on sin breaking fellowship (not sonship) and restoration through confession, 1 John 1:9 with the father-and-child picture. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Real (1 John).
medium