Today was my day off, so we made some homemade pizza and sat down to watch a Redbox movie we rented for fifty four cents. The movie I chose was “Mars Needs Moms.”  This isn’t meant to be a full-on review of the movie, but there are some minor spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you may want to wait to read the rest of this post until you do.

The movie is about a boy named Milo who is very disrespectful and unloving towards his mother, but when she gets abducted by Martians, he gives chase. He gets to the spaceship and stows on board just before it leaves for Mars. Then he tries to rescue her.

Backstory: The ruler of Mars is an old Martian woman who long ago got tired of men and their ways, so she threw the men down the trash chute (chute #3), and the male Martians had to live in the garbage down below while the female Martians lived in the upper levels.  Babies are “hatched” (possibly test tube babies or something), and separated into boys and girls.  The boys are lowered down to the males in the trash, and the girls are raised by “Nanny-bots” which are given their programming instructions by “downloading” the brain of an Earth mother (yes, it’s farfetched, but just stick with me here).   The Martians have forgotten what a “family” is, and they don’t know what “love” is.

Milo has to rescue his mother before the machine downloads her brain and kills her. It’s a Disney movie, so he succeeds, but there was a moment that I found very moving.  Milo and his mother are running across the surface of Mars when he trips, and his helmet breaks so that he can’t breathe. As the Martians look on, and Milo lies there gasping for the oxygen that his body needs, but cannot find, his mother takes off her helmet and puts it on him.  When he objects, she breaks the handle so he can’t remove it and give it back to her.  She falls to the ground as she is now unable to breathe. She willingly sacrifices her life so that her son can live.

After the movie, we had our family devotional time right before the kids went to bed.  I told them that we had just seen a good example of what real love is.  Love isn’t a mushy-gushy feeling that makes you feel all warm inside.  Love is sacrifice.  Parents love their children, so they do their laundry, change their diapers, clean up after them, teach them, discipline them, etc.  Parents love their kids so they go to work and do things that sometimes they don’t want to do so that their kids can go to a good school, eat good food, wear good clothes, and live in a nice house.  Love is when you give up something that you really want so that someone else can benefit. Love is sacrifice.

God loves us so much that He gave up the thing that was most precious to Him:  His only Son Jesus Christ.  To use the analogy of the movie, Jesus Christ was living in Heaven with no problems, no sin, surrounded by love and worshipped day and night by thousands of angels.  But He sacrificed all of that.  He jumped into garbage chute #3 and landed down here in the sewer and muck that is Earth, lived among us and died for us so that we could live for eternity.  He gave His life on the cross so that you and I could be saved from certain death in Hell forever.

That, my friend, is love.  John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.”  This idea was illustrated in the fictional (and silly) movie called “Mars Needs Moms.”  It was lived out in real life two thousand years ago on a hillside just outside of Jerusalem.  The only question is this: how will you respond to God’s love for you? Please e-mail me with any questions.