Building Community Through Love and Connection

``You see, our scripture today tells us that we will live if we do two things. Love God. Love people. And it just so happens that Lego bricks are built to do exactly two things. To connect upward and to connect outward. And it's a perfect example of this scripture. Jesus tells the lawyer that what we will do to inherit eternal life is that we must build up our relationship with God. That we must connect with each other in relationship. We must love our neighbor as ourselves. In other words, we must learn to connect with other people. [00:30:12] (47 seconds)  #ConnectUpConnectOut

If you spend any time playing with Lego, as you're doing right now, then you know that not every block looks the same. As a matter of fact, they're very varied. They're varied with color. They're varied with shape. They're varied with all kinds of things. But every block has the exact same purpose. And that is to connect with other blocks. It's just what they do. There are no stand-alone Lego bricks. Not one Lego brick is meant to be on its own. Every Lego block, every brick is built to connect with each other. And y'all, so are we. We are built to connect with each other. [00:31:00] (53 seconds)  #BuiltToConnect

You see, just like Lego bricks, if we are using love to connect ourselves to our neighbors, the ways of connection are virtually endless. There are varieties of ways that love can be expressed. And each expression of love gives us even more connection and more relationship to others. [00:33:06] (23 seconds)  #LoveInAction

After all, what good is building a world without people? The same is true of our church. To the degree that we value and love people will be reflected in the way we engage in our community. If we truly are loving our neighbor as ourselves, then we will have to spend time with people, we will have to put in effort to get to know people. It's not just the people that we like, but it is all people from all different socioeconomic levels, people who look different, people who are the most attractive and maybe the least attractive. All of these people are our neighbors. [00:35:43] (44 seconds)  #LoveAllNeighbors

If the early church had the same attitude about sharing the gospel that we have today, would the church have spread? I sometimes think, no. They'd have kept it in their little buildings. They'd have kept it in individual houses. They wouldn't have taken it and shared it with anyway. It would have dwindled away into nothing if the Christians of the past shared it the way that we share it. [00:36:27] (27 seconds)  #BoldFaithSharing

You see, Lego bricks are built to connect multi-generationally. And that means that the original brick that was built in 1950 will still connect with the same brick that was made this past Friday in a factory somewhere. Lego is multi-generational. We as Christians are just like Lego bricks. We come in a wide variety of sizes and colors and shapes. Lego bricks come from different sets of boxes. I'm sure on your table today, as you've sorted through them, as you see what is there, you see some that came from Lego sets. You see some that are just plain bricks. You see all different kinds of them. Christians are just like that. We all come from different backgrounds, from different faith experiences, and yet we all get to connect. [00:39:28] (56 seconds)  #MultiGenerationalFaith

Like Lego, we connect brick by brick. We disciple each other brick by brick, connection by connection. It's how we go through the world around us, one person at a time, engaging, equipping, empowering the people around us. I challenge you to think about how we're building community. How we're building community, not just here at Crossroads, but how are we building communities in Fayetteville? How are we building communities in the neighborhood around us? How are we building communities in the greater Fayetteville area? How are we reaching out from this place to connect with all the places around us that need our connection? You can't build community without showing up. [00:40:30] (55 seconds)  #BrickByBrickDiscipleship

You see, without the appropriate foundation, Lego bricks just couldn't build anything that reached too high, that got too big. It needed the foundation to build on. In 1955, the Lego company launched the very first Lego system of play. It was called the Lego Town Plan. And from that point on, Lego bricks could build just about anything. And the same is true for us in our discipleship relationship. We have such a strong foundation, and when we have this strong foundation that is rooted in God, that is rooted in loving God and loving each other, that foundation is our relationship. And when we have that strong foundation, then we can build anything. We can grow to anything. [00:42:03] (56 seconds)  #StrongFoundationStrongFaith

And I think that is one of the most important things that we need to take away from Lego is that sense of awe, that sense of joy, that sense of what it means to become as a child and to embrace the excitement of life, the excitement of connection to each other, the excitement of connection to God, the excitement because we forget to be joyful, y'all. We forget that we are below children of God and we have so much to be joyful about. [00:49:29] (46 seconds)  #ConnectAndLove

So I encourage you today to love each other with gusto, to live in the joy of being a child of God, to live into loving each other and loving God. Amen. [00:50:17] (22 seconds)