On Tuesday, February 7, Lebron Raymone James, Sr. broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career points record — 38,387 points — and became the NBA’s all-time scoring leader.

Perhaps the defining image of the night was captured by Andrew D. Bernstein. Look closely, and you’ll notice the photo has something in common with so many iconic images of the last decade: behind the indelible moment in focus, there’s a towering wall of raised arms holding small, metallic rectangles. Nearly everyone in the frame is reaching, straining to grab their own picture. Why would that be?

Surely all 18,997 in attendance that night knew that this moment would be thoroughly captured from every conceivable angle, by a small army of professional photographers, wielding the best equipment available. So why would thousands of amateur photographers, with less sophisticated cameras, at far worse angles, risk missing the moment for an inferior photo?

Because, deep down, this historic moment was not first and foremost about Lebron James, or the Los Angeles Lakers, or professional basketball, or even history — it was really about me. It was about the Instagram post and a couple dozen likes. Many are not even watching the play they paid hundreds to witness; they’re looking at their phones.

“Sin has always taught us to put ourselves at the center of everything — even the gospel.”

The smartphone, of course, did not invent this pervasiveness of self-centeredness. It’s only given our personal Babel-building newer tools (and fed it plenty of apps). Sin has always taught us to put ourselves at the center of everything — even the gospel.

Unless We Start with God

We can trace this innate self-centeredness back to the first sin. When Satan surveyed Adam and Eve’s vulnerabilities in the garden, notice what hedges he attacks: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Why are you content to live in his world? Reject him, and all this could be yours. It could all be about you. Satan tries the same play against Jesus in the wilderness (Luke 4:5–7).

Even after Jesus comes and dies for self-exalting, God-belittling sins like ours, we’re still tempted to listen to his gospel and hear a story centered on us. But the gospel from beginning to end — from the garden, through the fall, beneath the cross, outside the tomb, and into glory — is meant to lift our eyes away from self to God. As John Piper warns,

Unless we begin with God in this way, when the gospel comes to us, we will inevitably put ourselves at the center of it. We will feel that our value rather than God’s value is the driving force in the gospel. We will trace the gospel back to God’s need for us instead of tracing it back to the sovereign grace that rescues sinners who need God. (The Pleasures of God, 8)

I remember when this dichotomy first leveled me — and then lifted, thrilled, and strengthened me. Of course I could love a God who bent the universe because he loved me. But could I love a God who loved me because he loved his own glory? Could I love a God who chose to love me, not because I could ever deserve such love, but to display his perfect patience and unrivaled mercy?

Slowly, I came to see that God’s love for me — and he really does love me — was even bigger, stronger, and sweeter than I realized precisely because it wasn’t all about me. I learned to put the phone back in my pocket and focus instead on enjoying him — and nowhere more than in each chapter of his glorious, grace-filled gospel.

Creation: For God

When you were woven together in your mother’s womb — arms, legs, intellect, personality — you were made by God, in the image of God, so that others would see you and worship God. Listen to how God himself describes what he has made:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–27)

In one sense, he made everything else — fish and birds and livestock and lady bugs — as one wild, enormous frame for the crown of creation, the ones that would be like him and make him visible, hearable, knowable in his world. That means we are not even the center of our own lives, much less the universe. We were made for God.

Fall: Against God

But we all rejected that God-centered purpose for our lives. We weren’t the images of his glory that we were meant to be. We sinned. As Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Before sin says something about us and our guilt, it says something slanderous about God. It throws shade over his value.

Almost everyone alive can acknowledge that they have done, said, or thought things they shouldn’t have. Almost everyone has experienced guilt, shame, and regret. That’s often why the gospel gets the hearing it does. Far fewer, however, know that all of that guilt, shame, and regret is rooted in how they’ve treated God. After committing adultery and conspiring to kill the woman’s husband, King David says to God, “Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51:4). In one sense, all of our sin (and any given sin) is first and foremost against God.

This is the only reasonable explanation for hell. Eternal conscious punishment wouldn’t be just for anything less than sin against the infinitely valuable, the infinitely merciful, the infinitely good God.

Redemption: To God

We were made for God, and each rebelled against God, deserving the wrath of God — but God.

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. . . . But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved. (Ephesians 2:1–5)

Notice how little we contributed to our own resurrection. Yes, we were physically moving, breathing, talking, living before we found Christ, and yet we couldn’t offer God more than a dead man could. Spiritually, we were colorless, unmoving. But God — he stepped between the fallen image of God and the burning wrath of God and did what only God himself could do. He sent his Son to bleed and die in our place so that we might sit with him in his — “to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:6).

And nothing makes this grace sweeter and more glorious than that we get God. Jesus “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Forgiveness isn’t the final prize of this good news; neither is escape from hell. No, forgiveness means that souls made by God to know and enjoy God, who then rejected and insulted that God, still get to have God.

Commission: From God

When grace invades and brings life, one of the clearest evidences is that God has replaced self as the sun in the galaxy of our soul. Notice how we used to live before Christ: “He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15). This verse describes who we were by default — and by recreation. We’re born living for me, making all our decisions, big or small, based ultimately on what will serve, satisfy, and advance self. But then we’re raised to live for him. We spend our time and money differently. Our neighbors and coworkers watch and wonder why we live like we do.

This is true no matter how and where God has gifted us. “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:10–11). Gifts (and lives) stewarded well, whatever they are, inspire others to give greater attention and devotion to God. If you dig deep enough into the happiest, most fruitful, most fulfilling lives, the driving engine and center of gravity will be the grace and glory of God.

Consummation: With God

The God-centeredness of heaven was my first discovery on the way to seeing the God-centeredness of everything else. The life-shattering quote came from (God is the Gospel)[https://www.amazon.com/God-Gospel-Meditations-Gods-Himself/dp/1433520494/]:

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. (47)

“The only heaven to come, the one Jesus bought with his blood, is one orbiting around God.”

It would be hard to overstate how much these lines shook my still young faith — in the very best ways. I imagine it was like Jesus upending the tables in the temple. It was forceful and merciful. You will not make this house of worship about you. And to me, two thousand years later, you won’t turn heaven into a flea market for your hobbies and cravings. The only heaven to come, the one Jesus bought with his blood, is one orbiting around God.

This is the paradise God has prepared for those who love him: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3). If you can imagine a world better than that one, if you think you would prefer an eternity built around you, you haven’t yet grasped what it would mean to live with this God.

Nine-year-olds tell it straight. A boy in my morning class once asked me, “Miss, why do you look like you just woke up?” Another day he walked in sighing and clutching his chest. “I’m just so glad you aren’t wearing a wig again today!” The wig? My new bangs, hidden behind a headband.

Unlike adults, most kids don’t have a category for off-limit topics regarding appearance. While most adults would cry conversational foul play, bad haircuts, weight gain, and receding hairlines are all fair game for fourth graders. Why do kids feel free to describe beauty in both its presence and its absence?

At least in part, kids talk about appearance because, in their eyes, it’s just that. When students tell me how I look, that’s exactly what they’re doing — telling me how I look. They make no claims about who I am. If my ponytail looks “super weird today,” they say so — because my hairstyle does not undermine my identity as their beloved teacher.

Too often, however, we invest physical beauty with far more significance. We treat beauty as a means to self-worth: how we look is who we are. But if we would only gaze upon God’s word with the eyes of a child, we might unlatch beauty from its worldly contortions and fasten it instead to the God who is Beauty himself.

Beauty by the World

Left to our own devices, we define beauty a lot like the Evil Queen. We stand enraptured before the mirror, waiting for it to tell us how our appearance measures up to others across the land. In sin-twisted kingdoms, to be beautiful is to be attractive to as many human eyes as possible.

“We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).”

But beneath those eyes lie hearts whose visual appetite is insatiable. They flit from post to post, screen to screen, trend to trend — idol to idol — waiting to be satisfied. Nothing will do. That’s why an attractive-and-therefore-beautiful appearance, both as a personal possession and cultural definition, expires. We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).

While describing my teenage years to a group of girls, I mentioned how “thin and lanky” I was. They looked at me in horror. Cutting me off, one student exclaimed, “Miss, you are not thin! You’re perfect.” The other girls agreed. “Yeah, miss! Don’t say that. You are not thin. You’re beautiful.” Their words struck me silent. The teenage me had lived in a world where beauty required thinness; in their world, beauty required not thinness. I heard in their words not a compliment, but a truth claim: worldly beauty is fickle.

God warned us. Thousands of years ago, he said, “Beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30) — or according to some translations, “fleeting” (NIV). The adjective’s literal meaning packs the greatest punch, as the Hebrew word heḇel denotes “breath.” From the perspective of an eternal God, beauty vanishes with the rise and fall of a chest. If we put our hope in beauty, it will betray us — and quickly.

Does that mean God wants Christian women to toss out the mascara and throw in the washcloth? No makeup, no dyed hair, no new clothes, no gym membership — nothing? Shall we consign ourselves to a life of bedhead, wigs, and super weird ponytails? These aren’t bad questions, but they are the wrong ones. Instead we should ask, How does God’s definition of beauty change our pursuit of beauty?

Beauty from God

In God’s economy, beauty does not fret over itself, or talk about itself, or make purchases for itself, or dawdle over pictures of itself. For God-defined beauty cannot be seen in a mirror. Rather, it pulses: “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Beauty flows from a heart that beats with moral goodness — love for, delight in, and submission to God (Acts 13:22).

Unlike our pursuit of physical beauty, we cannot fret, talk, purchase, or edit our way to heart-level beauty. The Beauty — with a capital B — for which we ought to exert the most energy, the Beauty on which we ought to spend the most time and resources, is one we cannot powder onto our faces. It is a Person we must pursue.

This Person is Jesus, the only man whose heart sought God perfectly for a lifetime. In him we find, and from him we receive, true Beauty. And it is not the beauty of appearance:

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,     and no beauty that we should desire him.He was despised and rejected by men,     a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;and as one from whom men hide their faces     he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:2–3)

Rather, it is the Beauty that loves and sacrifices itself for others, in which God delights:

He was pierced for our transgressions;     he was crushed for our iniquities;upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,     and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

This is the Beauty that does not perish upon makeup removal or spoil from one trend to the next. It is the Beauty that endures with laughter the aging process and the innocent comments of children (Proverbs 31:25). For regardless of appearance, its identity is secure: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Beauty as Possession and Pursuit

Dear women: If we call the beloved Son “Savior” and “Lord” (Romans 10:9), we possess this Beauty forevermore. For in God’s sight we have been clothed for all time with Christ’s sacrificial love (Galatians 2:20). There is no need to fuss over becoming and staying beautiful on this earth. Christ is eternal Beauty Himself — and our lives are hidden in him (Colossians 3:3).

We still labor for beauty — but not now for the beauty of appearance. If we possess Beauty in Christ, we will pursue the Beauty of Christ. We will strive, as those who are free from the world’s fickle fashions, to emulate an everlasting Beauty — to live as if God’s glory is real, precious, and worth pursuing, now and always.

Becoming more like-hearted to God’s beloved Son will never go out of vogue. We can exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of Christ’s Beauty, sure that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). When the day ends, we will not crawl into bed with less money and more products. We will drift off radiating God’s Beauty in Christ, satisfied.

Beauty as a Means

As Beauty becomes ours ever more in Christ, beauty — with a lowercase b — will take its rightful place as a God-given, God-exalting gift. God cares about visual beauty because, well, he makes and sustains its every expression. He made us in his image, to image him. For our part, we humbly, happily use what he has made to exalt him who made it (Colossians 1:16).

“If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.”

As with any morally neutral hobby, we seek to use earthly beauty to illumine heavenly realities. As we dab at our faces in the morning hours, we can wonder at the way God paints the sky (Psalm 19:1). We can adopt new styles with hearts enthralled by the God who has provided us with an imperishable garment — the righteousness of Christ (Isaiah 61:10). We can enjoy beauty without self-obsession when we seek to enjoy its Fount.

I’m not saying we have to pair Scripture and meditation to all our beautifying. Many activities whirl past us unexamined. But we all can agree that beauty — like many other endeavors, such as athletics or a career — has great capacity to be self-centered. If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.

As my students discover lip gloss and T-shirt dresses, I pray they learn to use beauty as a means to enjoy and exalt God rather than self. I hope they know the beauty with which God already has created them and the Beauty to which he beckons them. Even so, they cannot learn what Christian women neither understand for themselves nor model for others. Let’s see beauty for what it is, as we lay hold of Beauty for who he is.

Part 7 Episode 164 When humans exchange the glory of God for disordered sexual desires, the consequences are profound. In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens Romans 1:24–28 to show the relationship between God’s judgment and homosexuality.