Today I’m sharing from my heart about changing the garments of your heart from all forms pretense to the beautiful garments God provides for us when we become His daughters.
Sometimes we cover up what’s really going on inside with pretense on the outside but that’s not God’s plan!
Isaiah 52:1–2 says, “Awake, awake! Put on your strength, O Zion; put on your beautiful garments… For the uncircumcised and the unclean shall no longer come to you. Shake yourself from the dust, arise… Loose yourself from the bonds of your neck, O captive daughter of Zion!”
I love the book of Isaiah because it is a picture of Christ’s redemption of His Beloved Bride—the church. That’s us!
When Isaiah spoke these words to the children of Israel, though they were God’s chosen people, they had been lured away into a place of physical and spiritual bondage because of their desires to be more like the people around them who did not have a relationship with the one true God.
Even though God loved them, accepted them, and called them beautiful, they were still drawn away by their own lust.
Their once-beautiful garments had become the filthy garments of sin and captivity. God in His loving-kindness still offered them a way back to Him and new beautiful garments to change into.
This is what Christ does for us, His Beloved Bride. He takes our filthy rags and gives us a wardrobe full of new beautiful garments regardless of what we wore in the past.
The only catch is: before you put on your beautiful garments, you have to take off your old garments.
Jesus put it this way, “No man puts a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new makes a tear, and the piece that was taken out of the new match with the old” (Luke 5:36).
You will never be able to fit into your new clothes until you take off the old!
Changing into your beautiful garments means doing away with your old-self, your former conduct, and the hurts and offenses you’ve tried to cover up and putting on Christ. It’s washing clean from your past with the Word of God and clothing your heart with His promises. This lets the world know you have chosen to be known as God’s daughter and no longer want to be identified as being “of the world.”
Changing our garments isn’t a one-time deal. This is obvious in the story of the children of Israel.
We have to continually return to God to be cleansed because we live in a fallen world with outside influences. The beautiful thing is, however, that we can always return, and God is always willing to take us back and wash us clean. He cleanses our hearts from sin, heals what is broken in us, and we actually become beautiful instead of settling for just being pretty.
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