Christianity Uncensored: Love Uncensored

Series: Christianity Uncensored
Message #3: Love Uncensored
By: Jud Wilhite



I don’t know about you but every time I go to the grocery store I’m set off a little bit as I stand in the line and look at the magazine racks. Everyone I look at is beautiful. Have you ever felt that way? You look at these photos of people and think, “That’s just not right.” They are all beautiful and they all want to tell you how to lose ten pounds. Every magazine you look at it’s the same thing. This has been going on for years now. It never changes. I guess we keep buying it thinking it’s going to work for me.



We look at these photos and what we often don’t realize is that these photos have been edited. They’ve been airbrushed. They have been cleaned up and reworked in a significant way so that people look the way they do on the magazine. Now just to give you an example, we’re going to put a photo up here of a particular woman. You can see her. She looks peaceful and well rested. Her skin is absolutely flawless. You won’t find a flaw hardly anywhere on this picture. Now, this is after it’s been touched up. Let’s look at what the actual picture looked like before it was touched up. Look at that, she looks like the rest of us now, doesn’t she? Look at the bags under her eyes. She needs some rest. Quite a difference, isn’t it? That’s the art of digital touching up.



Now let’s take another image here. This is a blonde you might see on the magazine rack. She’s smiling and happy. If you buy her product you will feel and look like that. But let’s go to the before image. Check that out, her head grew! You can actually change the shape of a person’s head by digital imagery. Now, I thought we had to be fair so let’s pull a guy up. It’s a cool, handsome, sleek looking guy. This is the after shot. Look at his gut. Now look at the before shot. Ha, ha…look at that! I want that camera! That’s what I’m talking about. You can do all kinds of things with digital touching up and imagery.



For instance, Michelle Pfeiffer, years ago, was on the cover of Esquire magazine. It said on the magazine, “What Michelle Pfeiffer needs is absolutely nothing.” There is a picture of her looking beautiful and perfect. It took ad busters to actually reveal that Diane Scott and Associates charged Esquire magazine fifteen hundred and twenty-five dollars to touch up this image that was on the cover photo. Here are a few things from the actual bill: Cleaned up the complexion, softened her eye lines, softened her smile line. They added color to lips. Trimmed the chin. They removed the neckline. They softened the line under her ear lobe. They removed stray hair. They adjusted the color. They added hair on the top of her head. I’m all for adding hair on the top of the head. It was this type of photo that caused Cindy Crawford to say, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.” Think about that for a minute. She can’t of course, because this is achieved from lighting and digital work and all kinds of airbrushing that they used to make those photographs look the way that they do.



We’ve been in a series in James called Christianity Uncensored. We’ve been saying that we live in an edited world that’s cleaned up and made to look pretty. Let’s just peel the facade away. Let’s look at what it means to be an authentic follower of Jesus Christ. What does the Bible