According to Carolyn McCulley, single women can go to two extremes when it comes to physical beauty.

When we're younger, we have a tendency to invest a lot more in our looks, confident, or at least hoping that this will be something God would use to draw a man's attention to ourselves.

And yet I've seen, as women get older, there's also this temptation to kind of give up and not

really put any effort in at all to be feminine.

It's Thursday, June 16th, and you're listening to Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Lee DeMoss.

Here's Nancy.

Have you reached the age yet where you've discovered that whatever measure of physical beauty you may have had when you were a young girl is rapidly fleeting?

The truth of what scripture says that outward beauty is fading. Well, I've reached that age, and some of you have as well, and we want to talk about that today with our

guest, Carolyn McCulley, who's written a book called Did I Kiss Marriage? Goodbye, trusting God

with a hope deferred. And today we want to talk with Carolyn about this whole matter of physical

beauty and inner beauty as well. Carolyn, welcome back to revive our hearts.

Thank you. Carolyn, in your book you devote a whole chapter to the subject of beauty. You

call it deceptive charm. Why is the whole thing of beauty such a deceptive charm?

I think particularly for single women, we can be tempted to bank on our physical beauty as a way of attracting men. And if we see it fading, then we start to think, well, there's no way now. Look at this. You know, look at these crows feet. Look at that gray hair. Look at those upper arms waddling in the breeze. Whatever it is, we can start to think that that is going to limit God and his purpose and his plan for us in our lives. And yet we're always in a race against the decay of these physical bodies. It's true. What Paul had to say was very right. Outwardly, we're wasting away, but I'm banking on that inwardly. We're being renewed day by day. And that's the kind of beauty we want to talk about here in a few moments. But let's go back to this matter of physical beauty. We've talked about this before on Revive Our Hearts. And this is a subject that really applies to all women, whether married or single. We tend to go, I think, to one of two extremes. Either we become a slave to the mirror or we come to the place where we say it doesn't matter at all and we disdain the idea of doing anything to take care of our bodies physically.

And I think you see that as a trend in single women too.

When we're younger, we have a tendency to invest a lot more in our looks, confident, or at least hoping

that this will be something God would use to draw a man's attention to ourselves.

And yet I've seen as women get older, there's also this temptation to kind of give up and

not really put any effort in at all to be feminine.

I'm not talking about being a stunning beauty.

I'm just talking about basic femininity,

making an effort at hair and makeup and things that men do notice. They notice when we make an effort.

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