Secure in Christ

Why: A scientific study

For most of history, people thought the reasons for wearing jewelry were obvious: beauty, status, and belonging. But over the last 40 years, consumer psychologists have recognized a deeper pattern linking jewelry to something much more personal than merely fashion.

In 1982, psychologists Robert Wicklund and Peter Gollwitzer introduced a theory called symbolic self-completion.¹ The idea is simple: when people feel incomplete in some part of their identity, they use external symbols to show themselves and others that nothing is missing. For example, a man who doubts his professional skills might buy a luxury watch. A woman who feels unsure of her worth might choose bold jewelry. These objects don’t fix the insecurity—they just cover it up.

Since then, other researchers have built on this theory. The results are clear: when people feel insecure, they often become more materialistic.² If someone’s self-worth is shaken, they want to buy things that show their status.³ No matter if the threat is about life, money, or relationships, the outcome is similar.⁴ People want more money, better looks, and higher status. Many studies show that people with low self-esteem are more likely to be materialistic, while those with higher self-esteem feel less need to show off.^5,6,7,8,9

In cultures that value showing off possessions, people often use what they own to feel more secure about themselves.

Research shows this creates a cycle. Someone notices a gap between who they are and who they want to be. They feel uncomfortable, so they try to fill the gap by buying and showing off things. This helps for a while, but it doesn’t fix the problem, so the cycle repeats.

John Wesley understood this hundreds of years ago.

In the late 1780s, when he wrote his sermon “On Dress” from 1 Peter 3:3–4, Wesley saw the same cycle. He did not use the term “symbolic self-completion.” But his observation was remarkably precise: “Nothing is more natural than to think ourselves better because we are dressed in better clothes; and it is scarce possible for a man to wear costly apparel, without, in some measure, valuing himself upon it.”¹⁰

He went further. He told the story of a pagan philosopher who, wanting to corrupt a poor man’s character, started by giving him fine clothes. The man immediately began to assume his own superiority. Wesley’s point was clear: the adornment did not reflect pride that was already there. It created it.

Today, researchers call this a feedback loop. Wesley described it as a trap. Both words point to the same problem.

But the research also offers hope. Recent studies by Gasiorowska and others found that gratitude, which helps people look beyond themselves, actually lowers the desire for material things, especially for those who usually care a lot about possessions. This is because feeling connected to others or to a bigger purpose makes the urge to fill the gap with things much weaker.¹¹

The Bible Touches on the Heart as Well

The Bible doesn’t treat jewelry as a small issue to be solved with policies. Instead, it weaves the topic of adornment through the whole story, from Genesis to Revelation. Each time it comes up, the same theme appears:

Going Higher Means Letting Go

In Genesis 35, God speaks to Jacob after the terrible events of Shechem (his sons had slaughtered an entire city): “Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there” (v. 1). Bethel means “house of God.” This is a call upward, literally and spiritually. Closer to God. Higher ground.

Jacob’s immediate response is striking. He turns to his household and says, “Put away the foreign gods that are among you, purify yourselves, and change your garments” (v. 2). “So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods which were in their hands, and the earrings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the terebinth tree” (v. 4).

Exodus tells the same story. After the golden calf disaster—where the earrings of the people were cast into an idol (Exodus 32:2–4)—God tells Israel: “Now therefore, take off your ornaments, that I may know what to do with you” (Exodus 33:5). Read that line again. God was not saying, “Take off your ornaments because I am angry.” He was saying, “Take them off so I can know what to do.” The ornaments stood between Him and His people.

How did Israel respond? “So the children of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments by Mount Horeb” (v. 6).

In each of these stories, when God called His people into His presence, they were told to remove the ornaments they had used to make themselves beautiful. Instead of relying on their own efforts, they were invited to rest in Him. It’s as if the jewelry showed an inner insecurity and a trust in human effort for security and beauty.

But when we come into God’s presence, we no longer need these man-made decorations. John Wesley summed it up well: “Aim at pleasing God alone, and all these ornaments will drop off.”

The Bible’s Call for Security

To the prophets, adornment was an outward sign of a deeper need for healing and security. It was the symptom, and they were blunt about the disease itself.

Isaiah 3 runs through the finery of the “daughters of Zion” in exhausting detail: anklets, crescents, pendants, bracelets, veils, headbands, perfume boxes, charms, rings, nose jewels (vv. 18–23). The jewelry is not the charge. The charge comes first, in verse 16: “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with outstretched necks and wanton eyes.” The ornaments only make visible an inward condition, a confidence resting on a woman’s own beauty instead of on the God who gave it.

Hosea sharpens it. Describing Israel’s unfaithfulness, God says, “I will punish her for the days of the Baals to which she burned incense. She decked herself with her earrings and jewelry, and went after her lovers; but Me she forgot” (Hosea 2:13). The earrings are part of the costume of betrayal. Israel has dressed herself for someone other than God.

Ezekiel 16 goes furthest. God recalls finding Israel as an abandoned infant, raising her, lavishing beauty on her: “I adorned you with ornaments, put bracelets on your wrists, and a chain on your neck. I put a jewel in your nose, earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown on your head” (vv. 11–12). He gave every piece of it. Then the verdict: “You trusted in your own beauty” (v. 15). Her beauty was never the trouble. The trust had moved from the Giver to the gift.

The psychology lines up with this. Researchers say people use adornment to make up for a sense of lacking in their identity. The prophets say Israel adorned herself because she forgot who she was and to whom she belonged. The words are different, but the diagnosis is the same.

In his sermon on dress, Wesley listed six harms of outward adornment, and they closely track the prophets. Pride: it inflates a person’s sense of self. Vanity: it feeds the hunger to be admired. Inner unrest: outward display and inward quiet pull against each other. Inflamed desire: attention to the surface stokes appetite instead of contentment. Stolen resources: money spent on display is money taken from the hungry, the naked, and the sick. And a stalled inner life: as long as the focus stays on the outward adorning, the inward work of the Spirit goes nowhere.

All together, these create a downward path. Pride leads to vanity, vanity takes away peace, restlessness stirs up desire, spending uses up what God meant for service, and the inner life stalls. The prophets saw this in Israel, Wesley saw it in his time, and researchers see it today.

The New Testament Diagnosis

Peter and Paul add no new rule when they take up adornment. They carry the prophets’ principle into the life of the young church.

Peter writes:

Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

1 Peter 3:3–4, KJV

Here, the translation makes a difference. Some modern versions, like the New King James Version, add the word merely before “outward,” as if Peter is saying, “Do not let your adornment be only outward.” But that word isn’t in the Greek. Peter’s actual statement is more direct: don’t let your adornment be outward at all. He isn’t asking us to balance outward and inward beauty. Instead, he draws a line between two sources of worth and asks us to choose: Do we find our value in what people see on the outside, or in what God values on the inside?

This was Wesley’s anchor text, and he read it without softening. He set outward adorning against a meek and quiet spirit as two settings that cannot share the same heart: “You never can thoroughly enjoy this, while you are fond of the other. It is only while you sit loose to that outward adorning that you can in patience possess your soul.”¹⁰

This is a strong pastoral claim: fondness for outward things doesn’t just exist alongside inner unrest—it causes it. Modern research backs this up. Studies show that trying to fix insecurity with things like possessions or adornment only brings short-term comfort. These things might ease feelings of inadequacy for a while, but in the end, they make the problem worse by keeping the cycle going. The research says these actions don’t really solve the problem and can even make it worse over time. Wesley understood this long before psychologists described it in journals like the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2017.¹²

Paul carries the same conviction to Timothy: “In like manner also, that the women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly clothing, but, which is proper for women professing godliness, with good works” (1 Timothy 2:9–10). The godly woman’s adornment is not finer jewelry; it is good works. The contrast is between display and service. Jewelry says, “Look at me”; good works say, “Look at what God is doing through me.”

Two Women, Two Kingdoms

Revelation sets the whole contrast in two women, each standing for a kingdom.

The first appears in Revelation 17:

The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls.

Revelation 17:4

Babylon’s identity is built from the outside in. Gold, stones, and pearls—everything about her beauty is something she gathered and displayed. She tries to prove her worth. It makes sense, since Babylon’s whole system is based on human ideas and tradition. Without a foundation in God’s truth, it tries to make up for it with outward luxury.

The second woman appears in Revelation 12:

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars.

Revelation 12:1

Her adornment is completely different. She didn’t get it for herself; it was given to her. She wears the sun, the moon, and the stars—a glory that comes from outside herself. She didn’t buy or earn any of it. She simply received it.

These are two ways to build an identity. One looks outward for symbols to fill an emptiness, while the other receives her covering from above.

One is decorated by her own efforts. The other is clothed by what she’s been given.

Each of us chooses, in the end, which woman to resemble. Does our sense of identity come out of the jewelry box, or down from the One who gave His life to save us?

The Day We Are Living In

There’s a detail that keeps coming up in these passages. Every time the Bible mentions people removing ornaments, judgment is part of the story.

In Exodus 33 the link is open. After the golden calf, God tells Moses, “I will come up into your midst in one moment and consume you. Now therefore, take off your ornaments, that I may know what to do with you” (v. 5); the earrings came off because judgment was near. The same holds in Genesis 35, where Jacob’s family, with “the terror of God” upon the surrounding cities after Shechem (v. 5), buries its earrings on the way to stand before God at Bethel. And in Isaiah 3 the whole catalog of ornaments sits inside a judgment oracle, as God announces He will strip the finery from the daughters of Zion.

The clearest case is the Day of Atonement, the judgment day of the Hebrew calendar. Once a year the high priest laid aside his garments of gold and precious stones, entered the Most Holy Place in plain white linen, and made atonement for the nation (Leviticus 16:4, 23). The most ornately dressed man in Israel set his glory down to stand before God in humility. The people, meanwhile, were told to “afflict your souls, and do no work at all” (Leviticus 16:29). On the very day their salvation was being secured, they were to stop working for it. Atonement was not theirs to produce; the priest secured it on their behalf, and their part was to humble themselves, lay down their own effort, and receive.

So the pattern continues. When God’s people face judgment, they remove their ornaments, not as a punishment, but to get ready. The ornaments represent the old life and a self-made identity, and judgment calls for all of that to be set aside so God can work freely.

Seventh-day Adventists hold, from Daniel 8:14 and the sanctuary pattern of Leviticus 16, that this antitypical Day of Atonement began in 1844, when Christ entered the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary to begin His closing work of mediation. Revelation 14:7 sounds the hour: “Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come.” Every earlier hour of judgment in Scripture called God’s people to lay their ornaments down, and this hour carries the same summons.

Yet this judgment is less a threat than an invitation. In that courtroom Christ does not stand against His people; He stands for them, as their Advocate and High Priest. He told a parable set in exactly this moment. A king comes in to inspect the wedding guests and finds one of them without a wedding garment (Matthew 22:11–12). By the custom of the day, the host supplied the garment, so the man had not failed to make a covering; he had declined to accept one. He had come in his own clothes, his own works and his own identity, and they were not enough.

Zechariah was shown the same gospel acted out on one man. Joshua the high priest stands before the Angel of the Lord, accused, “clothed with filthy garments” (Zechariah 3:3). He says nothing in his defense and earns nothing. The verdict comes from the throne:

Take away the filthy garments from him. … See, I have removed your iniquity from you, and I will clothe you with rich robes.

Zechariah 3:4

Those filthy garments are the best a guilty man can weave for himself, the “filthy rags” Isaiah assigns to “all our righteousnesses” (Isaiah 64:6). They come off at the word of God, not by the priest’s own effort, and the rich robes are handed to him as a gift. Heaven re-dresses the most adorned man in Israel while he stands still.

This is what adornment is really about. At its core, jewelry is a way of trying to create worth and beauty on our own. The wedding garment is the opposite: it’s the righteousness of Christ, freely given and placed on the believer by God. Letting go of self-made adornment during judgment makes space to finally accept the garment the King has been offering all along.

Love not Works

That conviction about adornment did not die with Wesley. It carried forward into the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where it found its clearest pastoral expression.

A story about Wesley catches the spirit of what God is calling for. He and a fellow preacher were once guests in a home where the host’s daughter, a young woman, had been moved by his preaching. Over dinner, the other preacher took her hand, pointed at her sparkling rings, and asked, “What do you think of this, sir, for a Methodist hand?” The young woman flushed; Wesley was embarrassed too. He looked at her and said warmly, “The hand is very beautiful.” She came to the service that evening without her rings, and went on to a strong Christian life.

What God Offers Instead

Here is where the research and the theology converge on the same truth from opposite directions.

Psychology says people adorn to make up for a felt deficit in identity, reaching for something visible to fill the gap. Scripture says God saw the deficit long ago and offers something that closes it instead of covering it over.

He starts with identity.

Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!

1 John 3:1

That identity is received, not performed. No one earns it by good behavior or signals it with gold; a Father hands it over, having named His children before they owned a single piece of jewelry.

Then move to covering.

He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.

Isaiah 61:10

This image is intentional. God doesn’t leave us to make our own covering; He wraps us in His own. Like the woman in Revelation 12, our beauty comes from outside ourselves and is greater than anything we could create.

And then the specific promise that Peter makes:

The incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God.

1 Peter 3:4

The world usually calls gold precious. God uses that word for a gentle, trusting spirit: “That is precious to Me.” The Greek word polyteles means “of great price,” the same word used for the costly ointment poured out in worship. God values a peaceful heart the way the world values rare gems.

The research on gratitude is important here. These studies show that gratitude and feeling part of something bigger make people less likely to seek attention through outward display.¹¹ The gospel is the deepest form of belonging. When someone knows who they are in Christ, the desire to build an identity with jewelry fades, not because of shame, but because something more real has taken its place.

Earlier this study set jewelry on the side of works and the wedding garment on the side of faith. The contrast reaches further than that. A ring says, I am valuable. A necklace, I am beautiful. A bracelet, I belong. None of these is a wrong thing to want; they are among the deepest longings a person has. Jewelry just tries to meet them with the work of human hands.

Faith answers that those longings are already met, not by anything a person puts on but by what God has done. “By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Paul put a question to the Galatians that fits anyone who has tasted grace and drifted back to self-effort: “Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3).

This is the oldest divide in Scripture, shown in what people wear. Paul describes it clearly: Israel, “seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God” (Romans 10:3). The same idea is behind the jewelry box. Reaching for the ring is trying to prove your own worth and beauty. Setting it down means letting God’s verdict stand without adding to it. Paul writes, “To him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt, but to him who does not work but believes … his faith is accounted for righteousness” (Romans 4:4–5). Adornment works for a reward it can never earn. Faith simply receives what it was looking for, as a gift.

So taking off the rings is not so much a gift we give to God, but a statement to ourselves: I trust the beauty God has given me, and I will stop trying to make my own covering when He has already provided one. The book Christ’s Object Lessons describes it well: “This robe, woven in the loom of heaven, has in it not one thread of human devising. Christ in His humanity wrought out a perfect character, and this character He offers to impart to us” (Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 311). Not one thread of human devising. Jewelry, on the other hand, is a thread of human devising.

Seen this way, taking off jewelry is the opposite of legalism. Legalism is the exhausting work of trying to make yourself good enough, beautiful enough, or worthy enough. Faith is the rest you find when you believe Jesus has already made you enough, held by God instead of supported by what you wear. Taking off the rings doesn’t take anything away from your life; it just lets go of a burden you were never supposed to carry. It means stopping your own efforts and entering His rest, as it says: “he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His” (Hebrews 4:10).

None of this is a loss. It’s simply what happens when someone finds something better. Like Jacob’s family on the way to Bethel, those who follow God let go of the old things because they know where they’re headed.

It was never really about whether we take off the jewelry; it’s about believing we are already loved, already named, and already covered. We are. And when that truth takes root, letting go happens naturally.

If you feel moved to respond, try bringing this to God in prayer. You can ask Him to show you where your identity truly rests and to help you see yourself as He does. A simple, honest conversation with God, like saying, “Lord, help me understand my value in Your eyes, and give me peace to let go of what does not define me,” can open the way for change led by grace. Let God’s love and assurance guide your next step.