⁹Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, ¹⁰but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.

Women need instructions also, but Paul, rather than speaking about prayer, focuses on their outward appearance having to do with attractiveness. We cannot hope to delve too deeply into this subject, but we can note how frequently we use the word “attractive” to describe women. While this may sometimes be used of men, it is way more common for women. Paul refers in another place to a woman’s glory being the glory of humankind (1 Cor. 11:3–16), a clear tip of the hat to gender distinction in the natural order of things. Of course, one can always argue exceptions. We live in a fallen world where what is, falls short of what God desires. At the root of human existence is the movement toward the attractiveness of beauty. God made it that way. In terms of the sexes, our contemporary world indeed affirms this reality (case in point:  the cosmetic industry invests far more into women’s beauty products than men’s grooming). One hardly needs to argue the point. The fact that we get it wrong so often proves our fallenness.

Paul instructs godly women to scale back their attention to their own attractiveness, the essential meaning of modesty. Don’t dress or act ostentatiously as though the most important thing is your appearance. A woman might argue, “Why should I have the responsibility to dress so as not to cause men problems with lust? Men should control themselves!” Males, on the other hand, argue, “Why would a godly woman want to dress in a way that incites a man’s natural tendency? Why make it difficult for us?”

Add to this the pressure on women who can never measure up to the airbrushed beauty of the media and movies with the resulting insecurity and poor self-image, and the pressure on men from a pornographic world that easily enflames desires—and one can see the problem is much deeper than the surface fashions. Without writing an extended thesis on the subject, Paul’s comment here to women is simply to give focus to the more important thing, namely “good works” that relate to “godliness.”

In a world that so emphasizes outward beauty in women and macho-manliness in men, these words of Paul to Christian men and women are revolutionary: be people of prayer who do not draw attention to yourselves; live together as the family of God.

Lord, help me focus on how I should live among the family, the church.