A Different Kind of Beauty

The King will desire your beauty.
PSALM 45:11
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A Different Kind of Beauty
Our beauty does not consist in our own virtues nor even in the gifts we have received from God, by which we exercise our virtues and do everything that pertains to the life of the Law. It consists in this, that if we apprehend Christ and believe in Him, we are truly lovely, and Christ looks at that beauty alone and at nothing besides. Therefore it is nothing to teach that we should try to be beautiful by our own chosen religiousness and our own righteousness. To be sure, among men and at the courts of the wise these things are brilliant, but in God's courts we must have another beauty. There this is the one and only beauty—to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. He removes all spots and wrinkles and makes us acceptable to God. This faith is an all-powerful matter and the greatest beauty, besides which there is no beauty. For without and outside Christ we are damned and lost with everything we have and are.

From Lectures on Psalm 45 (Luther's Works 12:280)
June 23
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