There's a lot of body image content around the internet that is very helpful to women who struggle with their appearance and self-perception. However, I've seen few discuss God's perspective on body image and self-esteem. After all, He is the one who created us, but not all believe in Him. For those who do believe God is the Creator of everything we see, we should turn to Him for help with body image and self-esteem struggles. There is no issue that God doesn't care about, we can bring Him all our problems no matter how big or trivial it may seem.
Secular Body Image vs. Christian Body Image
Secular Perspective
I am not completely opposed to secular body image content as I believe it can all be helpful in certain aspects. The risk with this perspective is that it fails to acknowledge the full picture. Secular perspectives have the idea of taking matters into our own hands and using willpower and extreme focus to fix ourselves. It promotes various self-help methods that are founded on human wisdom and frail human experiences.
While this may help for seasons in a person's life, it poses the risk of never truly dealing with root issues that have injured a person's soul. It may acknowledge and give grace to traumatized people but it offers no real solution for healing and cleansing the soul of iniquity and sinful behavior. Secular body image provides temporary solutions for spiritual problems.
A person can go their entire lives living on the principles of human wisdom and self-help tactics and never reaching a transformation that heals them once and for all eternity. The peace on earth and "within ourselves" is not truly felt when we are only living on carnal philosophy.
Christian Perspective
The Christian perspective of body image focuses on what the Bible says affects human behavior. For any Believer in Christ, it is essential to give greater attention to the spiritual root causes of our struggles. The Bible tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:4 that "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God for pulling down strongholds,". This tells us that there are things strong enough to hold us hostage and we can't fight them with human wisdom and self-help principles.
Christian body image helps turn the focus away from ourselves and instead redirects it toward God. Learning to set our mind on things above will help put everything that seems "wrong" in its proper place. With the word of God and His Holy Spirit, we can have constant guidance and insight into the root issues keeping us from experiencing freedom.
And the best part is we don't have to rely on our human strength to heal body image and self-esteem issues. By looking toward Christ, we are permitting ourselves to take the heavy burdens off our shoulders and place them in His hands.
Conclusion
Although many choose not to believe in Christ and His teachings, we can all agree that neither of us is completely self-made. We were created and given a unique identity before our birth. Therefore it is highly unlikely that we hold all of the answers. But we have One who does and who is eager to support those who draw near to Him with a humble spirit.
Listen to this message to learn more about God's desire for your life and body.