You are now listening to a foster of log podcast.

How’s it going, everybody? I hope you’re having a wonderful evening, afternoon, morning, whatever time it is when you were listening to this, um, today. I’m going to talk about something that I think I might have mentioned before, but I can’t quite remember if I have. It’s been a really long time, so I’m going to talk about it again.

As you know, this whole podcast, or this segment of my podcast, Is talking about masculinity, it’s talking about different aspects of manhood, about how men are supposed to act based off of the Bible and the interplay between men, women, other things like that. So I’m going to talk about men’s issues, I’m going to talk about things that relate to men, issues that might pertain to women, um, things that men do that pertain to women.

What we do to women, um, and things like that. So it’s a very wide variety of things and a large, broad topic. Today, I want to talk about dress. Now this might seem odd for a men’s podcast, but the way we present ourselves, the way we dress, is one, very important. And two, a, an area that a lot of Christians tend to get very judgmental about.

I’ve grown up in the West Coast, I moved to the South, and during my time in both areas, I have seen a lot of judgment. When it comes to how someone dresses, if they have earrings, nose rings, rings in general, bracelets. And what I’ve started to notice is that none of these are biblical. There is no biblical passage that talks about how a man or a woman should or should not dress, minus two passages that are more for religious purposes.

So the first one is found in the Old Testament, and it has to do with, you know, there’s one section about the priestly garb, what a priest was supposed to wear when they worked in the temple. That does not matter to us anymore. We are not physical priests. We are not workers in the temple. We are the church.

It’s a different thing. A few, uh, sections that talk about, you know, cultural dress. Again, that does not apply to us. We do not live in the second, first centuries B. C. And then there’s one in the New Testament that I can think of. And if there’s more, please let me know. But there’s one that talks about directly to women, and it says, and this is where Paul is telling women that, you know, they shouldn’t wear extravagant clothes and an overabundance of jewelry.

I might say jewelry at all, I don’t quite remember. But what he was saying there was that don’t put that first. Don’t put your outward appearance before your inward appearance. Become beautiful on the inside. Before you try and make yourself beautiful on the outside. And he’s also saying that this might have been his belief.

And I kind of agree with him that a woman is more beautiful when she is not, uh, over adorned in. Stuff. Makeup. Jewelry. I think woman is most beautiful when she is simple. And now, I’m not saying, you know, women don’t wear makeup, don’t wear jewelry, I don’t care. But, women that enhance their own natural beauty through makeup instead of trying to change the way they look through makeup, I think are more beautiful.

But that’s a side note. So, Paul and the rest of the Bible have Never told people how to dress. There’s no list of just like this, just like that. You can wear skinny jeans on these days, slacks on Sunday. That’s the God given command. It doesn’t exist. What we are told is that we need to dress modestly. Now I’m not going to get too much into this at this podcast.

I may make the next one on modesty because that’s a whole can of worms within itself, but modesty. Is a very vague term. What is modest in one area is extravagant in another area. And that makes things very difficult when we are. Discussing what modesty is and modesty is supposed to be

the, uh, the, uh, dismissal of, or withdrawal of something that is tempting to somebody else. So, you know, men don’t wear things that are going to make women think about. You know, draw forth their lustful desires and women’s more so to men, that’s a more common one. Women don’t dress in a way that’ll make your brother stumble.

That’s told all the time to women, never told to men. And I disagree on that part. Men can dress. to tempt women. We’re seeing this more and more as the rise of uh, internet consumption for women in a certain area and women are becoming more and more uh, engaging in this practice where men have been doing it for a long time and that’s showing women are just as prone to these things as men.

Um, it just may look a little different. They are still there. So, when it comes to modesty, it really just depends on your cultural moment and where you live. So, in America, what we look at is going to be very different than what a French person looks at in France, or even more so than in the Middle East.

You know, there’s the whole joke about the ankle in the Middle East, you know, oh, she revealed her ankle. It’s the same thing as, you know, revealing your whole midriff. Or maybe some cleavage in the United States, like it’s very different. So modesty is not a blanket thing, but I’ll talk about more of that in the next episode, like I said.

So what we’re given are these general categories of how we should dress and It is really damaging to the Christian walk when people take a cultural concept like the southern standard of dress and apply that in a biblical way and they tell people you’re not dressed the way I think you should dress based off of where I live.

And since you don’t dress like that, you are less spiritual than me. You dress more provocative than I think you should dress. And since you dress like that, you clearly cannot be a strong Christian. So you need to dress, change how you dress so that your spirituality can increase. And that’s ridiculous.

Or we say, you know, you have too many piercings or you have piercings in the wrong places. You have a nose ring, you have a lip ring, you have an upper cartilage ring. And because you have rings in places that aren’t holy, and the only place that is approved by God is the earlobe, and since God does not approve of these other places, You are again not spiritual and this goes towards men and women, you know, I have one ear pierced and I can’t wear it in certain areas Because it’s not deemed the way men should have the way we should present ourselves.

I work at a Christian school It’s a good school, but I can’t wear it there because it’s not deemed appropriate In a Christian setting, women can wear pierced earrings or have their ears pierced, but, you know, a man can’t, even though historically men and women have had their ears pierced for almost the exact same amount of time, it has been a large display of the human condition for most cultures throughout most of history.

We have always presented ourselves. Through piercings and clothes. That is how cultures develop. It’s developed in every culture. So the fact that suddenly, because of the modern American way of thinking that started, I believe, with the Puritans, and again, I’ll go into that more another time, because of our way of thinking, we’re like, well, that’s not holy anymore.

So you can’t do that. You’re a man. You shouldn’t have any piercings, and if you want to work here, if you want to attend to this church, You have to get rid of those or your spiritual walk cannot increase, and that’s ridiculous. And again, if you don’t like them culturally, that’s perfectly fine. I, we all have our cultural conditions.

We all live within the worlds that we live in. And if you don’t like it culturally, if you just don’t like the way it looks, that’s perfectly fine. We all have opinions. But, if you translate those opinions into concrete biblical stances, that is where the problem arises. That is where we have issues. These things are not biblical.

And we should not condemn people based off of our personal opinions of what should or should not be. This is damaging to new believers. It is causing people to stumble and leave the church because they see judgment and condemnation where it does not belong. And they get confused or run out. And they…

They equate that type of behavior to Christianity in general, and that is not the way it’s supposed to be. We are not supposed to be the heavy handed, uh, people of judgment. We’re supposed to be the people of love, not the people of acceptance. That’s a very different thing, but we’re supposed to love people, draw them in, and through our actions, cause change, not through our condemnation.

Thank you for listening to a foster the vlog podcast. You can like, follow, share on whatever social media you listen to. And if you would like to follow all of my social media, it’d be highly appreciated. Every follow increases my reach and allows other people to hear the message that I am trying to preach.

Thank you and have a wonderful day.