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Enjoy Life, Enjoy God


Dale Patterson

APPEARANCE

August 17, 2012

 What would Jesus look like? What would the Messiah, the Christ, what of his appearance?

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
--Isaiah 53:2,3 TNIV

We are a people and live in an age given to appearance. Yet more than two thousand years ago Isaiah cautions us, that Messiah, maybe even the ways of God are not about appearances. In fact, God's presence will not be winsome, appealing, or "relevant..." "nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."

How can we follow God's ways today when we are so conditioned, so trained to appeal to appearances? Churches design their entire ministries and facilities to be about appeal, appearances, yet here in God's Word we are given this caution. Yet we also read in this famous Isaiah 53: "Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering." (v. 4) Praise God, and beware of our own fascination with appearances.

Joyfully,

Dale Patterson