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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Sally Sartin

Dress To Live

Thank you, Lucinda, for inviting me to come and speak this afternoon on Dressing to Live is the title of my presentation.

I also regret not being able to make it to many of the meetings and plan on doing so in the near future.

And I do appreciate Kathleen Sparks' remarks on how we should be living above our culture and studying to see how we can live according to the culture of heaven.

So today I'm going to be addressing our dress with biblical principles that are found in both the Bible and the Spirit or prophecy.

And it's just my prayer that this will help us to move closer to being part of the heavenly family and culture.

And so first off, what I did was I broke up my presentation into 4 major sections, 4 major parts, using the word live as my acronym.

And so first and foremost, L equals love.

The foundation of everything that we do, the governing factor, the motivating factor, the driving force in all that we do is our love for God in response to His love for us.

Now I want to remind us, of course we know this verse very well, but John 3 16, for God so loved the world, for God so loved you, for God so loved me, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever should believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

In response to this great love that God has for us, we love him back.

And the first illustration of what Christ was going to do on the cross for us was illustrated in the Garden of Eden.

Genesis 321 talks about how God covered Adam and Eve with coats of skin representing Christ dying in our place and covering our shame and nakedness.

Again, this message is repeated in the last book of the Word of God, Revelation, in chapter 3, 17 and 18, where he describes condition of the Last Day Church as being naked and miserable and blind and he wants to cover us all of us of our shame and nakedness with his robe of righteousness.

And so in response to his love for us, we respond back with all of our hearts, mind, and souls.

In Deuteronomy 6, 5, like I said, it says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul.

John 14, 15 says, if you love me, keep my commandments.

It's only because we love God that we want to keep his commandments.

It's only because we want to follow Christ and imitate his character that we do what he says for us to do.

In Ministry of Healing, it says all who love Jesus and keep the commandments will seek to avoid the appearance of the very appearance of evil not because they are constrained thus to do but because they are copying a pure model and feel averse to everything contrary to the law written in their hearts.

Love begets love and it's not only love to God, but hatred for sin.

Now when we talk about love, it also applies to how we deal with other people, love to man.

And since we're addressing the issue of dress, our first question is, how are we showing our love to God in the way we dress?

Our second question is, how are we showing our love to man, to others, by the way we dress.

And Matthew 5 27 28 says, Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery, but I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." You see, God created man's nature to be stimulated by the sight of female nudity versus woman's nature who that is more responsive to tenderness and touch.

And so, God never intended for man to be stimulated outside of the marriage chamber.

And so God created woman with an inherent nature to be modest, to have reserve.

If we love our neighbors as ourselves, we will not dress in such a way that will cause others to sin or to tempt others to sin.

Satan, on the other hand, had studied the way that God created the nature of man, the nature of woman, and destroyed much of that inherent modesty that God had created in us.

An example of this is taken from a newspaper article.

Lukenstein, a physician at Tombs Prison in New York City, quotes, the so-called crimes of passions are increasing alarmingly and will continue to do so until the principal cause is eliminated.

This, it seems to me, is the present style of dress, which, to say the least, is immodest.

Immodest dress has a direct bearing on crime incitation, no matter how innocent the wearer may be.

So here we can see the implications, the consequences of how women dress in causing others to sin and being more easily tempted to yield to their baser passions.

Of course the foundation of everything we do should be driven by love, our love for God and our love for man.

But we need to be able to make intelligent choices.

Intelligent choices in who is guiding us in what we wear.

Intelligent in how we spend our time and money.

Intelligent in the taste and quality that we choose for ourselves, and intelligent in the example and influence that we set by how we dress.

So first off, who do we want our guide to be?

What is our choice in who we want to help us choose what we dress?

First Kings 18 21 and Elijah came on to all the people and said, How long, halting between 2 opinions?

Who are you going to choose to help you guide in how we dress?

Now God, especially in the tabernacle service, especially in the sanctuary service, had specified how Aaron, the high priest, should dress because it was symbolic of Christ's ministry in the heavenly sanctuary.

And so as Christ followers today, Ellen White says that we too should be dressed in such a way that is symbolic.

In all things, we are to be representatives of him.

Our appearance in every respect should be characterized by neatness, modesty, and purity." So, my point here is God has certain specifications.

Are we going to look and search and study what God, how God would have us to wear or are we, would we allow other dominating factors to come in.

So God has certain specifications and Satan on the other hand has his ways of influencing the world of how to dress.

And of course 1 of the powerful ways he does this is through fashion, the ever-changing fashion, the styles of dress.

And he knows that while women are trying to catch up with the varying styles of dress that change, Their moral sensibilities are weakened, and they cannot be aroused to realize their true spiritual condition.

Fashion has a powerful way of influencing many people and how to dress.

And 1 example is the invention of miniskirts.

Mary Quant, does anybody have any, has anybody heard of Mary Quant?

Well she is the invention of miniskirts in London, England and in an interview she was asked so Mary, what kind of person does today's woman want to be?

She displays her sexuality instead of this coy business of hiding it.

And so her idea of inventing this miniskirt was actually to encourage this behavior of being asexual, of promoting of sex and being provocative Here's a quote and I'm sorry, I don't have the reference But it says we stand or fall by the deliberate action of the mind to obey or reject it.

The influence of provocative dress, so if we continually and habitually dress in such a way, it kind of takes over our mind, And it's not fortified with the Holy Spirit, of course.

And so we need to be intelligent and understanding.

Because We don't want to fall into the trap, of course, of following the example of beings like Mary Quant who want to encourage provocativeness.

The other influence of fashion, or the other thing that the fashion tries to do is to blur this distinctness between how a man should dress and how a woman should dress.

In Testimonies, Volume 1, it says, God designed that there should be a plain distinction between the dress of man and woman and has considered the matter of sufficient importance, this is important to God, to give explicit directions in regard to it.

For the same dress worn by both sexes would cause confusion and great increase of crime.

And so here, it's clear that as fashion is doing this, is blurring the distincts and causing ambiguity, causing confusion, it will increase the rate of crime.

But with this, there is even amongst Christian women, there's an increasing tendency to dress and appear as near like the opposite sex and to fashion their dress very much like that of men, but God pronounces it abomination.

Now that's pretty serious and I'm not here to step on any toes.

I'm not here to tell you what to wear, what not to wear.

Please take these into prayer and consider it and Bring it to the Lord.

And so she quotes 1 Timothy 2.9, and like manner also that women adorn themselves in modest apparel with shamefacedness and sobriety.

So just to go over, the 2 things with fashion is that it promotes provocativeness.

And the second thing it does is it blurs the distinction between how a woman should dress and how a man should dress.

Now if you study the spirit of prophecy there are many quotes regarding in Ellen White's time the extremes.

There was the dress that dragged on the sidewalk, and then there were the extreme short dresses.

And so in order to address this issue, she quotes, she says that, You know, I mean, both extremes are to be shunned.

Because if you're going to wear dresses that are long and dragging on the sidewalk, it clears the filth of the street.

And of course, I mean, you're going to gather all the dust and dirt into your dresses, that they won't last long and they'll cause diseases.

And so she says that to address this issue, that the dresses should be an inch or 2 above the sidewalk so that they wouldn't drag, and that they should be modest and kept clean.

Now later on I'll talk about the other extreme and what she says about that.

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Dress To Live

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