One Thing

Remember the 1991 movie City Slickers starring Billy Crystal and Jack Palance? It’s a classic. At one point Jack Palance’s character, Curly, asks Billy Crystal’s character, Mitch, “Do you know what the secret to life is?” Mitch says, “No, what?” Curly responds holding up his index finger, “This.” Mitch says, “Your finger?” (Classic Crystal by the way) Curly continues, “One thing, just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean #$%*.” Mitch says, “That’s great, but what’s the one thing?” And Curly responds, “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”

Original movie poster from Columbia Pictures

What’s the one thing? For most of the world the default answer is success. Success can take different forms, but usually it’s money, power, and fame. Cue music and hundreds of ballet dancers in 1980 New York City: “Fame! I’m gonna live forever! I’m gonna learn how to fly!” I think fame has become primary these days. Social media, especially the likes of Tik Tok and Instagram have made the prospect of becoming famous seem more and more attainable. Take Bad Bunny for example. Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican reggaeton rapper/singer, who basically bypassed the typical industry route to music super stardom. He posted his songs to Soundcloud and got tons of listens and next thing you know he’s offered record deals. Now he’s one of the biggest music star out there. His last album surpassed Taylor Swift’s! It is just a new form of the American Dream. Instead of the cliches of the actor from Oklahoma moving to L.A. to make it big or the singer from Ohio heading to New York to try to get gigs and and get noticed in the big city, now it’s posting your stuff online, into the huge black abyss of the internet hoping that it will go viral.

This accessibility to an audience has led so many to try find success and fame through “building a brand” online. It’s the new wild west…the present day gold rush. Where some will make it big, but most will come up empty handed. It’s nothing new. Just the same old desire in us to find our worth and purpose in our prosperity whether that be popularity or wealth. Funny thing is that we have all heard the stories and seen the movies that depict the super-successful/super-wealthy person as ultimately unhappy…still missing something in life after conquering their professional world. It’s basically a cliche nowadays, and it usually ends with romance. If it’s not success, then it is romantic love, that’s the one thing. One of my favorite movies, Sabrina, the 1995 version with Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond, depicts this well. Linus Larrabee (Ford) is a billionaire that has everything, including my dream home on the North Shore of Long Island, but he lacks one thing, love. Enter Sabrina, the chauffeur’s daughter…the beautiful romantic free spirit, who literally saves Linus from his gilded cage. Still it helps to have unlimited resources if you want to live the romantic bohemian life in Paris…just saying. There’s much more to the movie, so if you haven’t seen it, watch it immediately!

Romantic love is so close, so very close to the one thing. The faithful love of another human being can carry you quite far. Another Billy Crystal movie testifies to this as well. In The Princess Bride, Crystal’s character, Miracle Max, says, “True love is the greatest thing in the world!. . .except for a nice MLT - mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, when the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. They’re so perky. I love that." We truly need love, we’re built for it, as I’ve said many times before on this blog. In fact, so much of what lies behind our desire for fame, once you get past the obvious financial benefit, is love. We want to be popular because we want everyone to think we’re great, to love us. But, as I have also said, our love so often goes very wrong and can become a great source of pain in our lives. Just look at the tabloids in the check out line, and you’ll see the very dark side of popularity and fame…and often times the dark side of romantic love too. Miracle Max has a point, an MLT sandwich doesn’t carry the potential heartbreak and disappointment that love can often bring with it.

Still, when romantic love is good it is great, but even at its best it is just a shadow of the true one thing. One of the interesting lessons after being married to the love of my life for 22 years is that our romantic love actually serves more like a road sign than a destination. It helps point us in the right direction, an indicator that yes we need love and there is a higher, stronger love than even this. We both know it. We love each other deeply, as fully as we know how, and at the same time we know that we cannot actually fulfill the need for love in each other. Our love tells us there is more, and it’s even better!

In his first letter, John tells us that “we love because [God] first loved us” (4:19). All love that we experience in this life is a gift from God no matter if you believe in him or not because as John says, “God is love.” Love does not exist apart from him. It is part of his common grace to this world that he made us for love and to experience love, and we are blessed when we get to love and be loved. It is a fundamental need, part of being made in his image. And, at the same time, John explains that the true one thing is not just any love, but God’s gracious love for us. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (4:9-10). John moves us from common grace to special grace, the love that transforms, that brings new life…his love for us in Jesus Christ.

And that word “propitiation” that John uses is super important because it removes any of the potential pitfalls to love. This isn’t a love that might land us on the front of a tabloid someday about our terrible breakup. Propitiation means that Jesus has taken away the wrath of God against our sins. It is our inability to love the way that we should and the way that we need (sin) that causes all of the death and destruction in the world (Gen. 3). I know you might think that’s an overstatement, but it is not. The source of all the tabloid drama, of poverty, war, division, heartbreak, pollution, murder is our inability to love to love each other and this world in which we live, not to mention God himself. That sin rightly warrants wrath and judgment according to any sense of justice. God is just to be angry and full of wrath at our inability to love because it not only destroys everything and everyone around us, it destroys us too. Were we to only live in a system of justice, then we would be very right to be terrified that this whole love story between God and us is not going to end well. We would have to love perfectly all the time to insure we’d get God’s love instead of his wrath. The very thing we cannot do.

But John tells us God’s love is much more powerful than that. It goes far deeper. In Jesus God took our sin upon himself on the cross and took all of his own just wrath against our sin too. There is no more anger, no more judgment, no more fallout for us because of Jesus Christ. All we get is mercy and love, and it’s never going to change because he never changes. . .and after all he loved us first. We’re responding to him, not the other way around. This is his special grace. The one thing of which all of our love stories are just a shadow. The ultimate love story of God coming after us, giving himself for us to forgive us and to destroy the thing that was destroying us. The result is the opposite of before. Where our inability to love caused death and destruction, his love brings life and freedom (4:9). This is the one thing, the love that sets us free from our cage of performance and success, the true love that is greater than anything else in the world even an MLT sandwich. God’s special grace in Jesus Christ for you. Amen.

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