Created To Connect Series

Created to Connect

How many of you grew up with Lego? Not me, I had the little soft red building blocks when I was kid. Other kids had Lego, but I had these little red building blocks.

They looked like bricks but they only connected at two points and those points were square, so everything you built had to be square.

You couldn’t do all the cool things with them that you could do with Lego. Like, you couldn’t build a car, but you could build a wall. And you couldn’t build a spaceship, but you could build a wall. You couldn't build a person, but . . . you could build a wall.

And I built many a wall when I was a kid. And I remember being at a friend’s place and discovering Lego for the first time. All the different sizes and colours, and the different ways they could connect. Suddenly my walls were unlimited in their potential, all because of the ways the Legos connected.

A few years ago, I was reading a book called “The Sticky Church” and the author Larry Osborne made the observation that most people were like Lego blocks and had a finite number of connections that they could make. And when their connections points were full that they couldn’t add any more meaningful relationships without removing one or two of the existing connections.

And in the same way that different Lego blocks have different numbers of connection points, 2 4 or six we are all different in our capacity for relationships.

Some folks seem to be fine with only a couple of those relationships, and that's really all they can handle. Others are like those Lego mats and the point of connection seem unlimited.

And there have been building blocks around since a carpenter figured out there was a market for smooth symmetrical pieces of wood. But they didn’t connect, they just stacked.

The difference between Lego and traditional building blocks, is that Lego was designed and created to connect.

And people were designed and created to connect as well. When God created each of us, he created us with a need to connect with others.

If we go back to the scripture we started with we find ourselves in the Garden at the point of creation.

Which is our first point We Were Created

Now if you are familiar with the creation account of Genesis then you are aware that there are some differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Genesis 1 begins with these words Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

And then we read the account of creation. The Creation of the universe, the creation of the world and all that is in the world.

That is called intelligent design. Didn’t happen with a big bang and it didn’t happen by chance, it was a choice and it was the decision of the God of the Universe.

And you can believe in the evolution of the complexity of humanity from a single cell creature that miraculously appeared tens of millions of years ago. But I just don’t have that much faith.

I was talking to Euan McGinty an optometrist the other day and he mentioned that for him the complexity of the eye itself was evidence of a creator. Each aspect of what we are and who we are points to a creator.

3000 years ago David wrote these words Psalm 139:13-15 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.

I love that David would talk about being knit and woven together even though it wasn’t until 1953 that James Watson and Francis Crick would discover the DNA Helix that literally knits us together in our mother’s wombs.

200 years ago William Paley wrote “Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity” and in that work he pondered creation and speculated that if you found a watch, you would assume there was watchmaker. Which seems to make sense.

Noted atheist Richard Dawkins has tried to refute Paley by stating “All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind force of physics, albeit deplored in a special way”

As I said earlier to believe that all this was created by the blind force of physics requires more faith than I have, but that is a sermon for another time.

So let’s go back to our story, the account of the the creation of people and we find that in two verses, Genesis 1:26-28 Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like ourselves. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”