Photo Credit: Eric Joe, Creative Commons
As a teacher, I’m around teenagers more than what’s good for the soul and run into awkward moments of “sexiness” too often. They splatter into my life through wanton paper notes dropped on the floor, Snapchat screenshots sent to the wrong crowd and blabbing mouths labeling anything visually attractive as “sexy.”
Every time I collide with these uncomfortable moments, I want to take sexy back from their twisted minds and place it where it should be—in their hearts.
But, we do it too, don’t we? We slap “sexy” on things that are, well, really not sexy at all. We’ve allowed sexy to become what we think we see, rather than the essence of how we feel.
For example, ladies often see washboard abs, a clenched jawline, or butts in tight jeans and say, “Mmm…he’s sexy.” Or, it springs from something a guy does; the way he strums a guitar, glides down the street or pounds a hammer as sweat glistens along the ridges of his muscles. It’s sexy.
Guys are no better—their definition of sexy is even more misplaced with what their eyes see and anything but what their heart feels.
What if we found a way for sexy to be meaningfully attractive rather than explicitly distracting?
Sexy isn’t how you look or the things you do. It isn’t a feeling you get when your jaw-drops and eyes roll back. Sexy isn’t when someone wants to know every inch of your body. That’s what the world has made it out to be—sexy involves sex appeal.
Sexy is a pure attraction of the heart that can’t be captured by a quick look. As young Christians, we’re supposed to set an example in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity (1 Timothy 4:12). But our hearts aren’t pure and our life is blurry when we are looking through eyes that reroute sexiness to other parts of our body.
Sexy is…
Unclothing someone’s heart instead of their body
Loving on all the people in this world rather than hitting on the sexually appealing ones
Flaunting your flaws instead instead of revealing your body
Sexy is…
Not the way he plays guitar, but how his heart moves in harmony with something he’s passionate about
Having pure intentions guided by a pure heart
Seeing Jesus in someone before noticing their sin
You see, sex isn’t a bad thing—God designed us to be fruitful and multiply. But sexy in today’s world holds hidden powers of lust and deceit, allowing us to think we can look or get with no harm done. It’s a lie we fall into, it’s a sin we don’t recognize, it’s a problem (we enjoy??) we’d rather not fix.
By bringing sexy back from its dirty connotation, we can move it forward into something that matters. Move it towards not what we see, but what our heart feels–because when we live life connecting hearts rather than bodies, people change for the better. And that’s sexy.
