There’s an old saying, “Beauty is only skin deep.” And believe me, it’s true. I hadn’t really thought about it until I saw a person on TV, by way of an x-ray, and it showed the person chewing and then swallowing the food. It wasn’t pretty.

And you know, our skin covers up all the parts of the body that are necessary for life, so it certainly has its value. Of course we know that even the pores of the skin are necessary for getting waste products out of the body and so on.

And as ugly as we are inside, it’s all part of the person we are, so we don’t want any part of it to go bad, despite it keeping our doctors in the money.

Of course, that saying, that beauty is only skin deep, really has another meaning. it’s saying that the heart and soul of a person…their likes and dislikes…the way they treat themselves and others…all of that is the real beauty of a person. You can take off the flour sack cress and put on a Fifth Avenue gown, and have your hair done by one of those guys, and get matching shoes and purse, and all those other expensive things, and they’ll really doll you up. But that person inside is still you.

So we come to that verse in the Bible, that Christ looks on the heart to see who we are. He’s the only one who really knows each of us…much better than we know ourselves, even. Because we don’t really know ourselves until we’ve gone through tragedy and death and war and all those things that try us. How good that it is Christ who handles our final judgment, because He knows all the facts. Face it…we humans can find something wrong with every person in the world. Heaven would be empty if we did the final judging…except for one person…our self.

Leave that to the Lord, and if you haven’t turned your life over to Him, this is the moment. The smartest thing you’ll ever do.

37BT Bill Thornton June 16, 2007