One’s responses might be, “I’ve tried!” “I’m still trying.” “I’ll trust that I’ll be forgiven, so just won’t There is an Outer You: your skin, your hair, your face, your body. Then there’s an Inner You: your character, your heart, your soul. The Outer You is what everybody sees. The Inner You is invisible, at least to those who don’t know you well. The Outer You is temporary; the Inner You is eternal. Paul puts it this way,”Outwardly, we are wasting away.” (2 Corinthians 4:16) From about the age of twenty-five on, certain changes start to kick in to the Outer You. Your bones start to lose their calcium, and they get brittle. Your skin starts to lose its elasticity and shrivel up. Age spots begin to multiply. You will look down at your hands one day, and say, “When did the hands of my parents show up on my body?” As you age, you start losing brain cells at an alarming rate. If you’re over thirty, you lose 3,000,000 brain cells a day. For some of us, that explains a lot. As you get older, the weight starts shifting from the poles of your body towards the equator. Hair will stop growing where you want it to and boldly go to places no hair has gone before. People will begin to buy you things like nose hair trimmers for Christmas. You won’t ask for them, mind you, people will just start buying them. I know some of you reading this are in your teens or twenties, and you are thinking, “That will never happen to me. I will never grow old like you.” Those of us who are older want you to know we understand, and we love you. But it will happen to you. And frankly, we’re looking forward to it. You can exercise your body, starve it, Rogaine it, stretch it, lift it, nip and tuck it, tan it, dress it up in expensive clothes, but one day our bodies will fail all of us. The Outer You is temporary, but the Inner You is eternal. It is your being that will never cease to exist. Your spirit—the inner character and the real you—is in the process of becoming something. It may be something really good, or something really dark, but you are becoming something. That something is what God sees when He looks at us, and that is what matters most to Him. Join us this weekend as discuss the critical importance of tending to your inner self, not just the superficial stuff on the outside.
