This material was originally presented to a high school audience in PowerPoint format. If you have questions or would like a copy of the original PowerPoint files, drop me an email at robert.fox@alltel.com
[Relationships – Beauty]
Slide Graphic – drawing of beautiful woman – Leonardo Da Vinci
Slide Text –
Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self… (1 Peter 3:3-4a)
Today, we’re talking about beauty. What is it? How do you know if you have it? How do you get it? This is really about your self image – how happy you are with what you see when you look in the mirror?
Traditionally, people talk about girls struggling with this, and I think it’s fair to say that women spend a lot more time worrying about their appearance. But I think it’s also fair to say that every guy struggles with this also. Maybe guys don’t stand in front of the mirror asking themselves if they are beautiful. [audio clip – chorus to “You’re Beautiful”, by James Blunt] Maybe they don’t worry so much if those jeans make their butts look too big. But guys struggle with their self image, too.
Both guys and girls are told by society what standards they are expected to live up to. Magazines full of pictures of tall, thin models. Actors with six-pack abs and cleft chins. Who can live up to that? Do those actors and models really even live up to that?
Who decided that this is what is beautiful? Who decided that was the standard by which every person on the planet is judged? “Society”? Have you seen the latest crowd of celebrities? Society is not a good judge of appearances. Did you know that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest – and came in third.
[Depressed about her appearance]
Slide video – “Depressed about her looks” clip from www.bluefishtv.com - I downloaded it for $1.99, and it is perfect for this discussion. Very powerful.
Slide graphics – graphitti “I’m Worthless”
Slide text – You are altogether beautiful, MY darling, and there is no blemish in you (Song of Solomon 4:7)
Listen to what this young girl is saying:
“I look in the mirror and I see a fat ugly blob, without form or anything”
“They all have these different definitions of ‘pretty’, and I can’t ever fit all of those categories”
Is she fat” Is she ugly? No! But do you know people who feel this way? Do you sometimes feel this way?
She seems to despair that she can’t fit all of the different definitions of “pretty”. Whose definitions? Doesn’t this sound as if she is waiting for other people to tell her whether or not she is worthy to be called “Beautiful”? She is allowing society to judge her. And she admits that society has so many different definitions that she can’t possibly live up to them. She is stressed out and depressed.
When she looks in the mirror, she sees a formless blob, without shape. Why can’t she see herself? Because she has no internal self-image – no convictions of her own about whether or not she is pretty. She doesn’t know who she is and is waiting on society to tell her. Without someone to tell her who she is, she is a formless, shapeless blob.
She blames God because he doesn’t make her live up to societies standards. She’s even thought about suicide, because she doesn’t know who she is. She is missing a rather large point. The standard she is measuring herself against is the one society has made – not the standard that God uses. God is not in the business of making you conform to this world. God has a different standard for you.
God already made you beautiful. God doesn’t make factory seconds. We seem to have the impression that God made a handful of beautiful people, then made the rest of us as “filler”. You are a unique creation of God, and he made you beautifully.
I don’t know this young lady. Maybe God made her a natural athlete, and artist or a writer. Maybe she can sing like an angel, or maybe she has a heart capable of making people feel welcome and encouraged. But however God made her, she’s missing out on it by ignoring the way she was created and attempting to conform to a worldly standard of beauty.
Many of you can sympathize with her. Think about this: wouldn’t she be much more attractive if she just didn’t worry about all that. If she was happy and confident – unstressed? I mean, if the outside appearance was not changed at all, but her heart was changed instead? Of course. In worrying about whether she measures up to the worldly standard of beauty, she has ignored her heart, and has, in fact, made herself somewhat unattractive. She doesn’t seem like a fun person to hang with at the moment.
[Worldly Beauty]
Slide graphic – picture of guy kissing the face on a magazine cover. Picture of the Dr Pepper logo.
Slide text - Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7)
A lot of people, both men and women, go through their entire lives desperate for worldly popularity and recognition to tell them that they are worthwhile.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation – (Henry David Thoreau)
The thing I remember most about my teenage years is that they seemed to be a series of “trying out” different personalities, trying to find one that made me unique. Some of the things I did were really embarassing, in retrospect. But I wanted to find the thing that made me, me. I spent a huge amount of my time in pursuit of this.
I think it is a good thing to try to find out who you are, how you are made, how you are gifted. That by itself is a worthy and noble pursuit. What makes it in to something stupid is that we are trying to find the thing about us that made us acceptable to the world. We want to be unique and different, but in a way that gains the approval of the crowd. Isn’t that kind of self-contradictory? Is it still like this today?
I remember this Dr. Pepper commercial that used to play all the time in the 70’s (when I was a lad). This guy would take a big drink of Dr. Pepper, then get up and sing and dance down the street. Everyone would join in. “Be a pepper, drink Dr. Pepper. It’s the most original soft-drink ever in the whole wide world”. The whole point of the commercial was that this guy was so original, because he drank Dr Pepper, and you too could be original just like him, joining the growing crowd of original people all drinking the same original drink. I kept thinking, “surely this is just a joke. Is this supposed to be tongue-in-cheek?” [audio clip – 1970’s Dr Pepper jingle]
Dr Pepper commercials aren’t quite so bad today, but they do still say much of the same thing. Here’s one from last year’s Super Bowl, with LeAnn Rimes and Reba Macintyre. [Play video clip] The new slogan “Dr Pepper is the taste of originality. Be you. Be original. Drink Dr Pepper” Apparantly, it even has the power to give you a personality.
[We weren’t created to be all the same]
Slide graphic – girl’s head in the idle of a bunch of Barbie heads.
Slide Text –
But my dove, my perfect one, is unique (Song of Solomon 6:9a)
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful I know that full well (Psalms 139:14)
This is crazy! We weren’t created to be a bunch of clones. The bible says we are wonderfully made – each unique and perfect.
It makes no sense for every woman on the planet to strive all their life to look like Barbie.
John Grey is the author of Men are from Mars and Woman are from Venus. He wrote about how in his counseling, he discovered that there were men who were married to women that looked like models, but these men lost complete interest in their wives. They were not attracted to them. John Grey thought this was strange. So he did some research. He discovered that in order for a man to be attracted to his wife for the long haul, the man has to connect with his wife on four levels – the emotional level, the intellectual, the physical, and the spiritual level.
This was considered revolutionary relationship advice. Oddly enough, the Bible says that in your relationship with God, you must love with all your heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 12:30, Luke 10;27). This is the model for all of our earthly relationships. God created us for a relationship
Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. (John 17:3)
You were created to find experience closeness in relationships in four ways:
heart – emotionally
soul – spiritually
mind – intellectually
strength – physically
True intimacy requires closeness in all four areas. We are attracted to the beauty in a person in all four areas. You can’t build a lasting relationship to someone to whom you are only attracted to in one of these ways. And the reverse is true – you can’t be attractive to someone in just one of these ways and expect the relationship to last.
Today, society stresses just physical beauty above all else. Unfortunately, physical beauty is the most fleeting of the four.
One thing I’ve noticed is that physical beauty blooms early and fades quickly. It takes much longer for most people to develop emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. It seems that external beauty mainly serves the purpose to keep you from being totally repulsive until your inner beauty matures.
People say all the time that it’s a good thing that babies are cute. If they weren’t, few would live to reach adulthood.
Think about the girl we watched in the earlier clip. She is attractive enough physically, but she is very immature emotionally. That’s not attractive. If she stays like this all her life, people are not going to want to be around her.
[Physical Beauty is Fleeting]
Slide Graphic – Flower in bloom, but the shadow on the wall behind it is of a flower drooping
Slide text – Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised (Proverbs 31:30)
Physical beauty is fleeting! I’m not saying that the babe that turned your head yesterday will be turning your stomach next week. But I am saying that physical attraction doesn’t last.
Relationships based on physical attraction are doomed from the beginning. I assume that if you ever marry, you will want that relationship to last the rest of your lives. The physical beauty that attracted you at twenty will change over time. It happens. That’s a shallow and temporary thing to base your relationship on. The 16 year-old cheerleader will one day be a granny in a rocker - that’s life. Physical beauty fades. Plastic surgery and hair color may hold that day off for a while, but time always wins in the end.
Some of the greatest and most admired people in the world were not that physically attractive. Abraham Lincoln was a goofy looking guy. Albert Einstein was a funny looking old man. Jesus Christ, according to the prophet Isaiah, was not an attractive man.
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him. (Isaiah 53:2)
The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling, a scrubby plant in a parched field. There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look. He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. One look at him and people turned away. We looked down on him, thought he was scum. But the fact is, it was our pains he carried our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. (Isaiah 53:2-5 MSG)
And yet, despite that fact that Christ was not an attractive man physically, we sing songs like this [audio clip – chorus to “Beautiful One”, by the band “By the Tree”] There’s one thing that doesn’t fade over time. The character of Christ. This is the beauty we were designed to crave. There’s something fresh and wonderful about the person who is daily becoming more Christ-like.
[Inner Beauty]
Slide graphic – closeup of girl’s face – mainly eyes.
Slide text –
Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:3-4a)
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched-they must be felt with the heart (Helen Keller)
We’ve been brainwashed into believing what our culture says about success and beauty. Just think about little kids who haven’t been indoctrinated by our culture on what Beautiful looks like. Before they are spoiled, what do they think is beautiful?
A fourth grade teacher who asked her class to write “My mother is……” Almost all of them wrote “My mother is beautiful.” When the teacher had thought about the mothers that she had met through school activities, made her think that in the eyes of many they did not have outward beauty. She realized the children were talking about warmth, security and acceptance which they knew was beauty to them. Beauty comes more from what we are and do than what we look like. Kids understand this Truth. We lose sight of it as we grow up. The kids have it right. Caring, warmth, accepting, encouraging, forgiving, merciful – this is the character of Christ. Everything that is beautiful in this world comes from Him.
We become beautiful through Christ. He does not change our nose, figure, hair color or make us taller or shorter but He comes into change our hearts and changes our character.
The girl on the video we watched earlier felt betrayed because God did not make her in a way that lived up to the world’s standard of beauty. Of course not. She’s missing the point. The world’s standard of beauty is false. No one lives up to it, and those who pretend to are not finding any happiness in it. They live in conflict between the mask they are showing to the world and the reality inside.
Peter said that real beauty comes from inside. It comes from being true to who God made you to be. Then there is no conflict. You are yourself, inside and out. That’s what Peter means by a gentle and quiet spirit. He doesn’t mean meek and timid – he means people who are not stressed out, depressed, overwhelmed, and desperate to become something different than God made them. Like the girl in the video.
People use this verso to say that jewelry is evil. I don’t see that. What peter is saying is that your beauty doesn’t come from jewels – it comes from what’s on the inside. Jewelry is right or wrong – it’s just irrelevant to how you should feel about yourself.
[The Reality]
Slide graphic – a picture of a very overweight man, desperately in need of a belt, seated behind a table selling romance books.
This world is full of stressed out depressed people. People who measure themselves against the world’s standard and come up short.
Like this picture, the world promises, but it doesn’t deliver. The books say one thing, real life shows another.
The world sells us this imaginary thing and calls it “beauty”. They make all of us feel like we need to have that in our lives. The real world is a very different place than what you see in magazines and on TV.
That world doesn’t exist. Those people don’t exist. I’m not saying they are rare. I’m saying they don’t exist.
[Warped perception]
Slide video – Dove soap commercial video clip of a rather plain girl, in fast-forward, being made up by an army of attendants, then the resulting picture being altered dramatically in photoshop before appearing on a billboard. Ending tagline “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted”
The person on that billboard doesn’t exist in real life. And yet thousands of people pass that billboard every day, people like the young girl in the first clip, and measure themselves against that standard of beauty – a standard that not even the model ever met.
[God looks on the Inside]
Slide graphic – picture of x-ray skeleton listening to ipod. Picture of x-ray glasses.
Slide text –
You’re like manicured grave plots, grass clipped and the flowers bright, but six feet down it’s all rotting bones and worm-eaten flesh. People look at you and think you’re saints, but beneath the skin you’re total frauds. (Matthew 23:28)
Jesus Christ talked about people who pretended to live up to some worldly standard of success, but were completely different on the inside. These people were frauds!
He said they were like tombstones with a fresh coat of paint. Pretty on the outside, dead on the inside. The inside is what matters most. Heart, mind, soul, and strength – relationships are about emotional attractions, intellectual attractions, spiritual attractions, and physical attractions. And the physical is the least important, the most temporary.
Don’t spend your life imitating a false standard - if you want to imitate something, imitate Christ:
"Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." -Ephesians 5:1-2
[Let down your veil]
Slide video – clip from movie “Hidalgo” just after the young girl is rescued from the dessert robbers.
Dialog:
Girl - “I wish you to look at me”
Girl - “Why is it that, when you look at me, you truly see me, when others do not?”
Cowboy - “well, my horse likes you”
Cowboy - “Even a blind man could see that you are beautiful”
We all, both guys and girls, live our lives behind a veil. We hide our real selves from the world and put on a mask of conformance. We hide what we really look like and pretend we look just like the worldly standard.
[What’s the point?]
Slide graphic – picture of middle-eastern man taking a picture of a group of women all of whom are covered head to toe in robes. No part of them is visible.
What’s the point in wearing a veil and conforming to the pattern of this world? Do we really all want to look the same? How can we ever be truly beautiful if we are al exactly identical to one another.
[Ugly Betty]
Slide graphic – scenes from television series “Ugly Betty”
Slide Audio – Jason Mraz, “The Beauty in Ugly”
Slide text – This above all, to thine own self be true – Shakespear, Hamlet
Letting down your veil means showing that you are different. Showing that you think you are better than the worldly standard. That’s a risky thing to do. The world will tell you, no matter what you actually look like, that you are ugly – unacceptable. Not because you are a failure, but because you have ignored their standard. It takes a great deal of courage to be different. It takes a great deal of confidence to believe that you are better than that.
You’ve got to believe that
• Being real
• Being smart
• Being honest
• Being kind
• Being true to yourself
Is a better standard that the world is using. It takes courage. It takes passion. Do you have the courage to be ugly in the eyes of the world? Do you have the passion to be true to yourself?
[To thine Own Self Be True]
Slide graphic – picture of a headless man trying on heads at a department store.
Slide text –
Beauty is being in harmony with what you are. (Peter Nivio Zarlenga)
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” (Albert Einstein)
• Don’t define yourself by the world’s standards
• God made each of you unique. Be true to yourself. Have the courage to be ugly to the world.
• Judge yourself by the standard of Christ’s character
• You will only be beautiful when the character of Christ reflects from your true self
• You will never be truly beautiful by covering your true self with a generic copy of a worldly ideal. You’ll never be beautiful behind a veil.
• Don’t be part of the problem – don’t judge people by the outside.
• Don’t automatically admire people because they seem to live up to worldly standards.
• Don’t automatically look down on people because they don’t live up to worldly standards.
• Give people the freedom to be true to themselves. This is especially true in close relationships.. If you care about someone and they care about you, there will come a day where they drop their veil and tell you that they want you to see the real them. This takes a great deal of courage. Don’t mess it up. Give the people you care about the freedom to be ugly in the eyes of the world.
Be true to yourself. Maybe you are an athlete. Maybe you are a comedian. A fighter or a builder, a healer or a teacher. Maybe you are a musician. Maybe you are a writer. There are a million different things you might be inside. But you will only be beautiful by finding who that is, being true to that, and living a life that allows the character of Christ to reflect off you in a unique way onto the world.
[Fields of Beauty]
Slide graphic – My wife Tammy in a field of daffodils
Slide audio – chorus to Joe Cocker “You are so beautiful to me”
Slide text –
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety: other women cloy The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 2)
Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.(2 Corinthians. 4:16 )
I fell in love with Tammy. I didn’t fall for her because she was a carbon copy of a thousand other people. I fell for her because she was unique and wonderful. She went her own way. She’s really smart. She’s passionate about everything. She’s fiercely protective of the people she cares about. She knows what she wants out of life. She knows what is right and what is wrong and isn’t afraid to hold the entire world up to that standard.
I see the character of Christ reflected in her love of people, in her love of the truth, in her willingness to swallow a hurt and honestly forgive. I see the character of God in her when she shows mercy where she has the right to judge.
I don’t worship her or put her up on a pedestal. I think that’s a horrible thing to do to someone you care about – to say to them that your happiness is dependant on them – to make them responsible for your emotional state for the rest of their lives. No, I am ok with her being only human, with human frailties. But she is the most beautiful human I have ever met, and I thank God for her every day.
Have you ever been to the top of Wye mountain in the spring when the daffodils are out? There’s a place up there where the entire side of a mountain is covered with daffodils. It’s incredible. Thousands and thousands and thousands of these little flowers, as far as the eye can see. Every one of those flowers were planted by hand. They weren’t planted over night. They’ve been planting more every year for more than 50 years. Individually, they are pretty small flowers – too small to notice if you drove past one growing by the side of the road. But they have accumulated year after year until it looks like a slice of heaven.
That’s what life with Tammy is like. She plants seeds of mercy, forgiveness, passion, and truth every day. Over the years, the beautiful seeds she has planted have made a little slice of heaven on earth. There’s a song that talks about “Fields of Grace”. I understand that. Tammy has shown me what that looks like.
I can still picture one of the first times I met Tammy. I remember going on a church trip to float the White river, and seeing Tammy like an angel in a white swimsuit. She is so beautiful. But the beauty that comes out of her life overwhelms the physical attraction like the light of the sun overwhelms the moon.
You hear stories all the time about men married to gorgeous women who for one reason or another get dissatisfied and go looking elsewhere. Shakespeare wrote in Antony and Cleopatra that the things men find attractive in most women lose their appeal after you have access to them for a while. That charming laugh gets so irritating that it drives you insane. Maybe it used to be really sexy that she sat really close and hung on every word you said, but after a while you wish she would just leave you the heck alone for five seconds.
But Shakespeare said there was another kind of beauty. One that doesn’t grow stale with age. One that, the more you are exposed to it, the more you find you can’t live without it.
This is true beauty. The Bible says that our outward selves are getting older and less attractive every day, but, if we are close enough to Christ to reflect his character, then that internal beauty is being renewed and refreshed every day.
[Free to be Me]
Slide graphic – young man standing next to a self portrait in clay of his own head
Slide audio – Keith Green, “Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful”
One thing I ask of the LORD,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple. (Psalms 27:4)
Single minded, whole hearted, one thing I ask
That I may gaze upon your beauty Oh Lord
That I may seek your Holy Face
That I may know you in an intimate way
And follow after you all of my days
All of life comes down to just one thing
and that’s to know You oh Jesus and make You known
(Charlie Hall, One Thing)
• You are unique
• You will never be successful trying to live up to the world’s standards
• You have to find the courage to be true to who God made you to be, even though it means being ugly in the world’s eyes
• True Beauty, true success comes from being true to yourself and allowing the unfading beauty of the character of Christ to reflect off you, renewing you day by day
