What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy – full of greed and self-indulgence! You blind Pharisees! First wash the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside will become clean, too. What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness. – Matthew 23:25-28 NLT

I remember my mother exercising in our living room in the sixties as she watched the fitness expert, Jack LaLanne, on TV. In the seventies, exercise and physical fitness became a trend, and health and fitness centers began to spring up around the country as a popular way to keep our bodies fit. Mom and I joined the local fitness center that opened in our town and exercised together. Back then exercise was about being fit and keeping healthy, but, over the decades, exercise became more about sculpting our bodies to look sexy.

Our culture has become obsessed with the appearance of our outer body to the point that it now seems to outrank the condition of our inner being, which is who we truly are. Some people go so far as to suffer the pain and expense of surgeries to enhance and further sculpt their body to achieve a “perfect” or more appealing appearance according to today’s culture. Schools have to teach programs like Character Counts while the children are being bombarded with the opposite message everywhere they turn.

But Jesus teaches a different message in Matthew 23. He says that we should have a good and clean inner self as well as the outer. His message echoes that which God gave to Samuel when leading Samuel in choosing the next king. “When they arrived, Samuel took one look at Eliab and thought, ‘Surely this is the Lord’s anointed!’ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.'” (1 Samuel 16:6-7 NLT)

So, Jesus asks us to look at the condition of our inner cup. We must ask ourselves, “On which am I  more concerned and do I spend more care and time? My outer or inner self? What is the condition of my inner self? As God looks at my heart, is He pleased?”

I encourage you to reject the pressure and message of our society that teaches outer appearance is what really counts and rather choose to follow what pleases God. As Jesus teaches, if we choose to humble ourselves before God and clean the inside of our cup of greed, self-indulgence, and other impurity, then the outside of our cup will also become clean and acceptable to God and will glow with His countenance (which is better than an itty-bitty waistline or bulging muscles).