"They say, 'Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.' Therefore prophesy and say to them: 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them I will put my Spirit in you and you will live...." (Ezekiel 37:11-14).

Feelings are not primarily to promote our happiness but to make us sensitive to all that we encounter pleasant or unpleasant. Through them we identify with our environment and we gain a sense of the personal situations of the people we meet, their states of joy or sadness, well being or suffering, prosperity or need. Feelings are to make us thoughtful and responsive and in our human relationships they are meant to build up fellow-feeling.

In other words, in its general sense, modesty is about humility and seeking to avoid offense - which is the opposite of egotistic attention-seeking. As we examine the more specific area of sexual modesty in dress, it is important to keep this more general definition in mind. In our foolish vanity, we human beings tend to focus on outward appearances. Not God. Scripture is clear: it's what's on the inside that matters.

Jesus reminds us that evil is still at work, that life is not fair, that bad things happen, even though he has come with the good news of the kingdom. God is not the only one at work. Not all actions in the world can be attributed to God. God often gets blamed for every event that occurs, but he is not the cause of every event. There is moral evil which is caused by the free will of individuals. There is natural evil which is caused by the structure of the material universe.