God Just Wants to Be Your Everything

Can God speak to us through a 1977 disco hit? I think the answer is an easy “yes.”

I am a child of the 70’s. My high school years and most of my first run at college were in the 1970’s. Couple my age with a predilection for nostalgia, and you’ll not be surprised that I often listen to music from that era. This Sunday, as I was driving to church, I had the radio on (listening to a rebroadcast of Casey Kasem’s American Top Forty), when I heard Andy Gibb’s international smash hit, “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.” As I listened, I realized that songwriter Barry Gibb’s lyrics can teach us something about God’s love for us.

If we pay attention, we can find God’s fingerprints nearly everywhere, but especially when we encounter beauty, mystery, and expressions of love. I often notice hints or reflections of divine love in love songs. This should not surprise us. God is love, and since we are created in God’s image, divine love must be a fundamental part of who we are. Yes, that imprint of divine love is obscured and smeared by our fallen natures, but it remains a part of us. Whenever we love, no matter how imperfectly, we are reflecting God, and when we write or sing about love, we are, in some way, singing about God. Now, back to Barry Gibb’s words as sung by brother Andy.

As I listened, I was struck by the title refrain: a man singing to his beloved, “I just want to be your everything!” I could imagine God singing that lyric to me, “David, I just want to be your everything.” He doesn’t want to be important to me; he won’t be satisfied with being my “number one.” He wants to be everything to me. God’s desire to be our everything can be hard for us to understand because of the impurity of our own loves and desires.

God’s love is pure; ours is tainted by neediness and self-interest. It is rare for us to love without wanting to get something out of it for ourselves. We may want the reciprocity of being loved in return. We may want others to think highly of us because we love so well. We may just want to feel good about ourselves, basking in our expression of “selfless” love. Large return or small, we always seem to want some return on our investment of love. And if that return is not given (or is taken away), we are hurt; we feel diminished. We may become bitter and even hate what we once loved. Not so with God.

We take our needy expression of love and project that onto God. But the triune God is complete; he needs nothing. His love is utterly giving and completely unselfish. He has nothing to gain by loving or by being loved; he loves because of who he is. He is not diminished when his love for us is not reciprocated. Unlike us, he never tires of waiting for us and will never become embittered when he is rejected by his beloved. He can, and does, desire to be my everything. That desire will not be extinguished or diminished by the passage of time and the fickleness of my love for God.

The chorus of the song continues with:

Open up the Heaven in your heart and let me be
The things you are to me
And not some puppet on a string

There is gold for us to mine here, as well. Heaven is indeed in my heart, by virtue of being made in the image of God. And I often have that heaven closed up and put away. If I can open the heart of love that is my birthright, I can let God be my everything.

God wants to be the things I am to him. Sit with that for a minute. When you connect the dots, God wants to be my everything, and I am his everything. That is hard for most of us to accept. Again, this is because (among other reasons) the tepid, conditional nature of our love for others. We love those who deserve love. I know that I don’t deserve God’s love, so it is hard for me to accept that I am everything to God, the creator and sustainer of the universe. But I am — he died for me.

Finally, God does not want to be “some puppet on a string.” Of course he doesn’t! No one, let alone God, wants to be someone’s puppet. But that doesn’t stop us from trying to make him just that. We want to take God on our own terms; we want him properly constrained and controlled. We want a tame God that we can call up at need. But a God who is our everything is in control; without him, we are nothing. This is true whether we know it or not, and whether we acknowledge it or not.

If we pay attention, we can hear echoes of God’s love in our love songs. The songs that touch us deeply are likely truer reflections of God’s love. Can you hear God saying to you, “I just want to be your everything?” Can you open up the heaven in your heart and let him be all the things you are to him?