Dressed Up in the Gospel

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION

“Clean shirt, new shoes

And I don’t know where I am goin’ to

Silk suit, black tie

I don’t need a reason why

They come runnin’ just as fast as they can

‘Cause every girl’s crazy ‘bout a sharp-dressed man.”

~ZZ Top, “Sharp Dressed Man”

“[One] realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing… There is no power without clothes.”

~Mark Twain, “The Czar’s Soliloquy”

“And yet another man can be so beautiful,

he looks like an immortal, but his words

are empty of all grace. That’s how you are.

Your appearance is extremely handsome—

a god could hardly make that any finer—

but your mind is empty.”

~Odysseus to Euryalus in Homer’s The Odyssey, Book VIII

“We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at each moment will look when the irresistible light streams in upon it; that light which is so different from the light of this world and yet, even now, we know just enough of it to take it into account. Women sometimes have the problem of trying to judge by artificial light how a dress will look by daylight. That is very like the problem of all of us: to dress our souls not for the electric lights of the present world but for the daylight of the next. The good dress is the one that will face that light. For that light will last longer.”

~C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night

SERMON PASSAGE

Galatians 3:23-29, Colossians 3:9-11, Romans 13:11-14 (ESV)

Galatians 3

23 Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. 24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

Colossians 3

9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.

Romans 13

11 Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. 12 The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.