There is an Outer You: your skin, your hair, your face, your body. Then there’s an Inner You: your character, your personality, your soul.

The Outer You is what everybody sees. The Inner You is not always so visible.

The Outer You is temporary; the Inner You is eternal. That’s going to last forever.

But there’s another thing you should know about the Outer You; the Apostle Paul puts it so well:

Outwardly, we are wasting away… (2 Corinthians 4:16, NIV)

Our physical being is gradually decaying… (GNB)

Sooner or later, "Old Man Wrinkles" is coming for everybody. If you have any doubts about this, just take a look at the person next to you right now! From about the age of twenty-five on, certain changes start to kick in to the Outer You. Your bones start to lose their calcium, and they get brittle. Your skin starts to lose its elasticity and shrivel up. Your weight starts shifting from the poles of your body towards the equator. You look down at your hands one day, and you say, These are my parents’ hands or feet on my body! You start losing brain cells at an alarming rate. If you’re over thirty, you lose about 3 million brain cells a day, and if we are all very, very quiet, you can hear some of them dying right now! Outwardly, we’re wasting away…

Now some of you young people may be thinking, ‘That will never happen to me!’ But Ive got news for you! You can fight Old Man Wrinkle all you want, but this poem says it well

You can do whatever you like to the Outer You. You can exercise it, diet it, tan it, nip and tuck it, dress it up at Glassons; but one day the Outer You will just be very expensive worm food. Old Man Wrinkle will win out in the end!

The Outer You is temporary, but the Inner You is eternal. Its your character, the real you, that’s in the process of becoming something important. It may be something unbelievably good, or something unimaginably dark. That something is what God sees when He looks at us, and that is what matters most to God. The Bible says so in many places.

One time God sent a prophet named Samuel to anoint the next king of Israel. God said that this future king would be one of Jesse’s sons. Samuel sees one of Jesse’s sons who is a really impressive guy, a real hunk, and he says,

Surely this is the man. But God said to him; Pay no attention to how tall and handsome he is. I have rejected him because I do not judge as people judge. They look at the outward appearance, but I look at the heart. (1 Sam 16 v6-7, GNB)

Our society is obsessed with, almost idolises, people whose outer appearance is considered attractive, as if they have done something to deserve it! Just look at the glossy magazines and movies. We get real fired up about what happens to the Outer Us. But God does not. Your character, who you are becoming, is infinitely more important to God than how you look or what you do.

Now, of course, the Inner and Outer Me are all mixed up together, and we’re not able to separate them out. But its your character, the Real Inner You, that will last forever.

As Paul writes to the church at Corinth,

It’s what’s going on inside that matters, says Paul.

It’s like the opposite of what’s happening on the outside. Outside I’m dying a little every day, but inside it’s like I’m coming alive. It’s the strangest thing. I keep changing and growing. I keep getting stronger in faith, more joyful, more hopeful, even though I know my body is going to die. Love just keeps getting more powerful in me and the generosity factor keeps going up. It’s the strangest thing. I’m dying on the outside, and on the inside, I’m coming to life. Outwardly I’m wasting away. Inwardly, I’m being renewed day by day. It’s wonderful! Just amazing!

What Paul and other writers of Scripture say is that it can also happen to you and me. That, in fact, it is God’s purpose for you. We’re studying together God’s purposes for us over these 40 Days, and we’ve seen how God made us to Worship and made us to be part of a Community, but God also created us to live the way that Jesus would live if Jesus were in your place.

The challenge that comes out of this purpose for us today is this: Will you spend at least as much time and effort and intention on your Inner Being as you do on your Outer Being.

Will you give at least as much focus, at least as much attention, to that part of you that will live forever in eternity as you give to that part of you that is going to become worm food? That kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? I want to suggest three ways to do this, and they are all parallels of things that we do for our Outer Self.

We all use mirrors for our bodies. Girls do it deliberately and often and boys pretend they don’t but always try to catch their reflection in a window! I’ve read that in top class hotels and stores, they put mirrors in elevators and dressing rooms, but they keep the lighting subdued. Do you know why they do that? It’s because we want to see ourselves, but we don’t want to see the reality. We don’t want to see the work of Old Man Wrinkle. Paul wrote to the Romans,

I want you to consider your souls (the Inner You) with sober judgment. (Ro 12 v3)

Ask God to help you see what’s really happening or not happening in with your Inner Life, because it’s possible for people to go on for years without taking an honest look at who they really are. Sometimes those of us in churches are the worst of all in this. We may know were saved, we know we’ve committed our life to Christ years ago, but we never move on we never mature, to become who God made us to be. I read this true story recently:

A woman is being tailgated by a stressed-out bloke. She comes to an intersection and the light turns yellow. Now a Yellow means prepare to stop, right? Well it does for women more than for guys! She stops and the man behind her goes ballistic! He’s abusing her out the window and blasting his horn at her, when a policeman walks up to his window. He takes the driver to the police station where he is fingerprinted and photographed and locked up in a cell.

After a couple of hours, they let him out and the arresting officer says, I’m very sorry for the mistake. Here’s how it happened. I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing the horn and using bad gestures and speaking bad language, and then I noticed the "What Would Jesus Do?" bumper sticker on your car and the "Choose Life" number plate holder and the Christian fish symbol on your boot. And naturally, I assumed it wasn’t your car; that you’d stolen it. Ouch!

Jesus was hardest on the people who tried hard to look really godly on the outside but inside were unloving and judgmental. And the world is also quick to notice and criticise us as well. What our world really needs is followers of Jesus who are being transformed on the inside more the outside, who are learning to live and love more like Jesus Christ.

And I’ll tell you something else: You and I need this too. Some of us go years without ever honestly facing the truth about our true character. So, here’s the challenge. This week, when you look in the mirror, take a moment to think about the real you, the You that is going to last.

• Do I have any habits that need to be changed?
• Have I been pretending to be someone that I’m not?
• Is there anything in me: pride, anger, judgmentalism, selfishness, stubbornness, unforgiveness, fear - that I’ve been refusing to face up to?

This week, let a mirror remind you that this is the practice of personal reflection, of self-examination. It is a very important part of being a Christ-follower.

And maybe there is someone in your life, perhaps in your small group, that you could ask to help you, to be kind of a mirror for you. Are there blind spots that I need to look at? Look in the mirror at the real you. - Now here’s a second challenge:

I heard a physical trainer say that diet is not rocket science. You are what you eat! You can put all foods into two categories: Good and Bad. On one side are broccoli and peaches, and on the other are cream doughnuts.

You can, if you want to, eat plenty of doughnuts and fill your body with fat and raise your cholesterol and do damage to your heart; and it tastes really good!

There has never been a civilization in history that has been more conscious of how we feed our bodies and less conscious about how we feed our souls. You are feeding the Inner You all the time. Every conversation I have, every time I read a book or a newspaper, every TV Show or movie that I watch, every song I hear, every fantasy that I entertain, is constantly feeding the Inner Me.

There is a big con in our days: I can just feed the Inner Me whatever I want to and still live according to the values that I hold to.

No, you can’t. You are what you eat. So this week, be at least as conscious of what you feed the Inner You as you are of what you feed the Outer You. It can be a real simple process. Just take a simple thought from the Bible that the Inner You needs to hear.

Maybe you need peace. Feed on the words of Paul in Phil 4 v7. And the peace of God…

Or you may wrestle with fear. Take another statement from the Bible and feed on that:

Or the verse to memorise for this week: Let your attitude be the same as that of Christ Jesus.

This week, every time you sit down to feed your body, just let that thought feed your Inner Person. You can do that while you’re driving, when you go to work, when you wake up first thing in the morning, when you go to sleep last thing of the day. Your soul is going to be around forever. Feed it really well. Feed it good stuff. - Look in the mirror. Care for what you eat.

3. LOOK AT HOW YOU EXERCISE.

We are blitzed with messages about exercising our bodies. Its one of the vital aspects of keeping fit and healthy, but it can become obsessive. Ive read somewhere that if you exercise it will add, on average, two years to your life. Trouble is, you’ll spend those two years exercising as well! Winston Churchill, who lived to be well over ninety, said that the only exercise he ever got was serving as a pallbearer for his friends who died while they were exercising!

Now God gives us many tools and uses every life situation to exercise and develop our character. The process of developing our character is what the church has called throughout the centuries, our sanctification. Our coming into relationship with Christ is called our Salvation. Our becoming like Christ is our sanctification (or today we’d say transformation). Our going to be with Christ is called our glorification.

God’s purpose from the beginning has been that we would come into relationship with Him, a relationship of love and trust and obedience, and that we would mature into the likeness of his son Jesus. This is not about making us all uniform or clones of Christ. God’s given us all a unique personality and mix of gifts, and that will remain forever. But Jesus is our standard in character development, the one against whom we measure the Inner Me.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians (chapter 4 v13 & 15)

"and (we) become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." (NIV)

"we shall become mature people, reaching to the very height of Christ’s full stature….we must grow up in every way into Christ." (GNB)

"Then we will be mature, just as Christ is, and we will be completely like him…Then we will grow in every way and be more like Christ the head of the body." (CEV)

And to the Romans (chapter 8 verses 28 & 29)

"We know that in all things God works for good with those who love him, those whom he has called according to his purpose. Those whom God had already chosen he also set apart to become like his Son, so that the Son would be the first among many believers." (GNB)

This was God’s purpose from the beginning and God gives us many tools and uses every life situation to exercise and develop our character to be like Jesus. Rick Warren discusses them very well in this week’s chapters of his book. God uses the Bible; we need his truth to transform our minds and heart attitudes, and to show us how to live and love. God uses his people, our fellowship with other Christ followers as we thought about last week. The fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives can only be developed in relationship with others. We cannot say we are loving, unless there are others around to whom we can show love. Anyone can claim to be loving if they live entirely alone!

And God also uses every situation and circumstance of our lives to help shape us and grow us.

Weve just read in Romans 8 v28, that "In most things God works for good…" No it says "In ALL things God works for good for those who love him…". This is NOT saying that God causes all things because God doesnt; or that all things that happen are good because they are not. But it does say that God uses, and works within, the bad times over which we have no control, and in those situations caused by our own mistakes or bad choices or sinful behaviour.

What it does say is that God uses all situations, works in all situations, for our good and for developing in us the character of Christ. As Warrens book discusses so well, God uses Troubles to teach us to trust him, Temptations to teach us to obey him, and the Trespasses of others which hurt us to teach us how to forgive like Jesus. Because friends, if youre going to be involved with people, youre going to be hurt, offended, criticised and judged at some time. And God only has one way to get free of it – through forgiveness. Otherwise, we remain a victim to and under the control of the one who hurt us. We are most like Jesus when we show forgiveness to those who hurts us.

We cannot become like Jesus unless we learn to trust and obey and forgive. But no-one can do these things on their own. We need a partnership with God’s Holy Spirit living within us. We need His prompting, His empowering and encouragement, to make Christ-like choices in attitude and behaviour.

To receive the gift of God’s Spirit to help us in our lives, to help transform our characters, we have to first admit our own self-centred lives, our failure to live God’s way of trusting and obeying God wholeheartedly. We need to turn away from our wrong attitudes and behaviour. We need to recognise that we can only be forgiven by God and enter a relationship with God, through trusting in Jesus as our rescuer, who died unjustly but willingly the death we deserve. When we do so, God gifts us his Holy Spirit, brings us into His family and begins to work with us, to transform us into being and living and loving like His Son, Jesus the Christ.