Beauty Treatments For the Bride speaks with the ring of authenticity. Christine Beadsworth has lived this book. It is not the result of spiritual conjecture, of someone just theorizing about how God works. It is her story and the story of all who have waited patiently, and sometimes impatiently, for God’s promises to come true and to experience His presence passionately.
Jesus Christ is the heavenly bridegroom, waiting for a bride without blemishes and signs of aging. How does the church transition into this bride? Christine Beadsworth finds the answer to this New Testament question in the types and shadows of the Old Testament.
The readers get their first clue with the menorah on the cover of the book. It’s a photograph of a banner Beadsworth made following a vision. The seven-branched lamp stand is constructed of the ingredients of the holy anointing oil in Exodus 30:23: myrrh, cinnamon, calamus, cassia and oil. These substances of vision speak of how the bride is to look, but she only arrives at this beauty through the pain of death.
Beadsworth puts it this way:
“God desires to purify and heal His Beloved, bringing about a time of breaking down so that He may build on a pure foundation; a time of cutting open and removing of scabs that all infection may be washed out and true healing may take place; a time when the ax is laid to the root of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that has borne bad fruit in our hearts.”
These scabs can include selfish ambition, bitterness, and other unspiritual qualities we may be able to hide from the world but not from God. We must be brutally honest about ourselves and repent, dying to these inroads from the other kingdom. God has the final say about when the process of beauty treatments is complete.
There’s a special chapter about Joseph called Delays, Detours, and Disappointments. Joseph longed for his time of breaking to be complete all those years in Pharaoh’s prison. When he was finally released, Joseph was so in tune with God that he took no revenge on Potiphar or his wife. He also treated his estranged brothers with kindness. Joseph’s time of maturity had begun when he would use his prophetic and other giftings for God alone.
Beadsworth makes a distinction between the church and the bride. One comes from the other. She puts it beautifully when she says, “…it is time for each member of the Body of Christ to stop looking at the pulpit of its mother, the Church, and to begin to sit at the Father’s feet and receive personal instruction under the guidance of the Spirit.”
Beauty Treatments For the Bride is not a fast read. There is much “meat” in each chapter, requiring consideration and action. Don’t be in a hurry. It takes time to prepare for the King.
A Review of Christine Beadsworth’s Beauty Treatments For the Bride