Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: I believe that one of the least celebrated, least appreciated of all virtues in contemporary America is modesty. And yet it is fundamentally important to the development of character and of a culture.
Hello, I'm Mark Rutland. Welcome to the Leader's Notebook. I'm in the middle of a series called Character Matters. It's based on my book of the same title.
I hope you're enjoying this series. Of course, the previous episodes are archived. I hope you can if you missed any of them, you'll go back and find them and that you'll also tune in for the the episodes to come.
I want you also to have the book itself.
At the end of this podcast, the announcer is going to tell you how you can receive the book simply by making a contribution to our girls homes. Global Servants girls homes in Southeast Asia and West Africa are called the House of Grace. We have one in Chiang Rai, Thailand, and one in Kumasi, Ghana.
My wife and I began the one in Thailand in 1986. Our son began the one in West Africa.
He is now the president of Global Servants.
And I have devoted my speaking honorary love offerings and all book sales to those girls homes. I'm paid a salary as the executive director of the National Institute of Christian Leadership. And everything else that I bring in goes to support those girls homes. And I want to invite you to make a contribution to those girls homes today in order to bless these little girls and secure their future apart from sex trafficking. I invite you to do that and that you'll receive this book, a contribution of any amount. I hope that you'll be generous, as generous as you possibly can, and invest in the future of these little girls. But regardless of the size of the donation, you will receive this book. My office will put the book in the mail the next day.
Now, today's episode is dealing with modesty. Let me tell you a story. I was speaking at a conference in South Georgia one time and I was standing talking to a man, a very wealthy man, Mr. Jim Blanchard. He was the CEO and chairman of the board of Synovus, a multi billion dollar corporation. He's a man of great wealth and of tremendous influence.
And as I was talking to him, a man came up, obviously a blue collar worker.
And he began to talk with Mr. Blanchard as we were standing there. And he just asked about things, and Jim Blanchard asked about him.
The conversation was unaffected.
It was just man to man, and I was very, very impressed.
Afterward, I was in a convenience store in Columbus, Georgia, near where this conference was, and somehow Jim Blanchard came up and the man behind the counter said, oh, I know him. And I said, well, what do you think about him? And he said, I'll tell you about Jim Blanchard. Blanchard is real people.
That's perhaps the highest compliment for a truly modest man.
Jim Blanchard, while quietly comfortable with his own success, walks in cool balance, falling neither to prideful self promotion nor to that particularly nauseating false humility of the inwardly arrogant. He is real people, and that means he's a man that understands modesty.
He's just who he is. A successful man, blessed of God, using his resources at his command, for God and for good.
Resisting the flashy flamboyance of many people less wealthy than he is.
Blanchard walks in authentic modesty. I've never forgotten that the early Christian community was Jewish.
Its struggle was not to know how to live a holy life. Since remotest antiquity, the law of Moses Torah had prescribed the tiniest details of family, business, social life, everything.
The struggle for those early Jewish Christians was to comprehend salvation by faith in the gracious Messiah.
As they met on Solomon's porch, early Messianic Jews were not seeking a radical change in lifestyle.
They were celebrating the love and liberty of the Holy Spirit while awaiting the return of the king.
However, as Jesus delayed his return, Jewish Christianity was forced out of the temple, out of Jerusalem, and finally out of Israel.
Gradually, the Christian movement began to puncture the soft underbelly of the Greco Roman world.
The gentile world. The insularity of Jerusalem hardly prepared them for the jaded decadence of the decaying remnants of imperial Rome.
Rome had become a tired old prostitute whose depraved appetites corrupted not only its flamboyant royalty, but also the general population as well. The culture of Rome was beset with dry rot. It reached its courts, its businesses, its theaters, and the families of the old Roman world.
In the blazing revivalism of Ephesus recorded In Acts chapter 19, the impact of Christianity was an immediate change in lifestyle.
Huge collections of magic books and paraphernalia were burned.
The Ephesians were idolatrous Gentiles, not legalistic Jews. Their idols, mostly silver statues of the goddess Diana, were destroyed. They refused to purchase more.
The silversmiths who made the statues knew that this new lifestyle for for the Christians meant an end to their industry and their revenue.
And predictably, a riot resulted in Jerusalem. However, no bonfires of the Torah were burnt.
There was no particular industry that depended on pervasive sin.
Christianity was a theological issue in Jerusalem. In Ephesus, Corinth and Rome, the question was how to live as a Christian in the putrid atmosphere of decaying paganism.
Christians in Jerusalem in AD 33 were asking, when will he come again? And what will the restoration of David's kingdom look like?
Christians at ephesus, less than 30 years later were asking entirely different set of questions.
How do we do business?
Should we buy meat dedicated to pagan gods? How should we treat slaves?
Should we have slaves? How should our women dress?
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Western civilization had been to a great extent Christianized.
Certainly that does not mean everyone was a Christian.
It means rather that the mores and values and ways of living were profoundly informed by Christianity.
Not everyone was honest, but there was a societal consensus about what honesty was. Not everyone went to church, but going to church was considered a good thing.
Likewise, not everyone was modest, but modesty was considered a virtue.
That's not necessarily true anymore.
Modesty is now more often considered the neurotic repression of both sexuality and individuality.
In fact, many reason that if America is about individual liberty, modesty may be called not good, but bad.
Part of the problem the Church faces today is that in addition to being misunderstood, modesty has been applied narrowly by the Church itself.
Now we are in the post Christian era of the West.
The moral decay around us is forcing Christians to come up with answers and that are no longer cultural givens.
Fending off the old legalism of Jerusalem, on the one hand, we must also resist the libertine corruption of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, in many ways we are headed back to Ephesus.
So what is modesty?
Modesty is living within limits.
Most modern Americans understand the word modesty to have reference only to to one's manner of dress. And even then it is mostly used with regard to women.
Yet modesty actually has far more to do with self respect and self control than with how revealing one's garments are.
Style of dress is an application of modesty, not the definition of modesty.
Modesty in its classical sense means living within limits.
Modesty submits to the boundaries of propriety.
It is the opposite of being bold eyed, putting oneself forward in the sense of being overly aggressive or presumptuous.
Modesty has to do with being Other than boastful and arrogant.
Modesty springs from a tempered and humble estimation of one's own importance.
It is unobtrusive, but it is not bashful.
Modesty acknowledges the fact that there are limits of propriety on life and that it's good to submit to those.
Modesty sees restraints not as being negative hindrances, but as being positive safeguards. Modesty keeps my life inside the white lines.
Immodesty denies responsibility to law, culture, authority and tradition.
Immodesty is personally offended by signs that say keep off the grass.
Modesty says, there are things in this world that are right for me to do and things in this world that are not right for me to do. I am not too good, too big, too rich or too powerful for someone else to point those out to me.
And modesty means that I listen and pay attention.
Modesty is not mindless subjection to authoritarianism. It is rather the conviction that there are correct limits in life.
In addition, the modest learn to set their own limits.
Modesty has a great deal to do with one's self view.
Let me read something to you from Romans chapter 12. This is the first three verses of Romans 12. And it actually has to do with modesty. Listen to what Paul writes. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
And be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
For I say, through grace, through the grace given unto me to every man that is among you, or to every person among you, not to think of themselves more highly than they ought to think. That last part, that's the essence of modesty. That's it.
That passage was written to help pagans in ancient Rome and modern Americans understand that modesty means more than how a woman dresses.
Paul says, I beseech you therefore, brethren, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.
Obviously, then we are precious, we are important to God.
Otherwise the sacrifice of our lives would be totally unacceptable to God. And Paul says it is acceptable. If your body is a sacrifice that is acceptable to God, then treating your body with respect is also important to God.
Verse 3 is the key verse for us dealing with modesty. Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought.
In other words, a sacrifice is acceptable to God only as long as it's on the altar.
When it is presented unto God, it finds its meaning withdrawn from the altar of God and reclaimed an arrogant, presumptuous self ownership.
Your body loses its meaning and therefore its value.
Hence, in being yielded as a sacrifice under the ownership, under the actual lordship of Jesus Christ, I find meaning and explanation. When I take my body and my life in my own hands, I make my life, my own self, meaningless and valueless. My life becomes an unending search for ways to convince myself and the world of my significance.
Right now, some in our society are screaming, it's my body.
The sin, therefore, is self ownership.
Modesty is unassuming and genuinely humble.
The immodest announced by their demeanor, yes, by their dress, but also by their attitude to everyone in general and to the opposite sex in particular, but to the world, look at me, look at me. I'm what's important in this place.
Modesty keeps its emotions under appropriate control.
There is an emotional immodesty that indulges itself in extravagant displays of emotion.
To the emotionally immodest. Their every tragedy is the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody in the whole history of the world.
Where a balanced person may be mildly happy, the immodest are careening off the walls.
Emotions need expression. I'm not talking about repression.
But the acceptance of limits is the key to balance. In life and in emotional health, there are certain limits outside of which the expression of emotions is simply improper and even dangerous.
Modesty has no inordinate need for attention because of calm self acceptance and self possession.
Modern Americans, for example, have made heroes out of bragging. Extravagant, arrogant athletes in victory, excruciatingly boring, and in defeat, sullen and graceless.
Such athletes reveal, on the field, in the end zone, and in their own lives, a character unshaped by by the virtue of modesty.
Modesty teaches that it's not necessary for a 13 year old boy to enter every room. Like an entire roller derby team.
Boys must be taught that doors need not be kicked open.
On the other hand, we dare not squelch their childlike enthusiasm for life. Modesty is not passionless living.
It is passion under control.
It is passion that accepts and lives inside the limits of propriety.
We usually think of modesty mainly in connection with clothing and fashion.
It is uselessly legalistic to ask questions like how short can your skirt be? How long can the hair be? The more important questions about modest dress have to do with being showy or inappropriately seeking attention.
Immodesty may have as much to do with excessiveness as it does with brazenness. In that sense, then, one might have an immodest hairstyle that is excessively flamboyant and demands attention.
I believe that modesty is one of the most ignored, least celebrated of modern virtues in the modern world.
It would be easy, wouldn't it, if there were just 97 rules from God about modesty Somewhere in the Bible that's what the Pharisees thought that they had.
They were wrong and in their wrongness they became legalistic and hateful. Their modesty was, in its own way, as fleshly and as flashy as a prostitute's immodesty.
There are no rules like that because God will not give them.
Instead, we must make decisions about makeup, clothing, attire and how we celebrate a touchdown.
All of these are related because matters of our heart, our home, our lives and our bodies must be seen as a living sacrifice to God, just as Paul told us.
Thank you for joining me today on the Leader's Notebook.
Hope this teaching on modesty is useful to you.
I want you to have the book on which these teachings are based. It's called Character nine Essential traits you need to succeed. Stay tuned now and the announcer is going to tell you how you can receive this book for a contribution to our girls homes. Until we meet again.
I'm Mark Rutland and this has been the Leader's Notebook.
[00:18:22] Speaker C: Wow. Another great episode of the Leader's Notebook. Hello, I'm Ronnie Brannon, the Chief of Staff at Global servants and as Dr. Rutland said, we want to send you your copy of his book Character Matters. You can receive your copy by contributing any amount to Global Servants through our Secure Give app on our website. Go to globalservants.org, click the Donate button and then click Give Online and then leave your contribution under the Podcast Gift tab.
Next, please click Add a Message and include your name, email address and the mailing address where you would like your book delivered. As soon as your donation is processed, we'll send you an email confirming the delivery address and we'll get your book in the mail to you by the next business day. Again, thank you for subscribing to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland and helping make a difference for those around the world and helping save little girls for big destinies.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: You've been listening to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review today's podcast. You can follow Dr. Rutland on Twitter @DoctorMarkRutland or visit his website, Dr. MarkRutland.com Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
