My Lego Sermon

I think a lot of Christians know the Bible like a bag of legos: they know a verse here and there, but they've never put the whole thing together so that it makes sense.

I thought of this sermon illustration a few years ago and I wanted to use it with our students. . .but I didn't know if any of them had every seen legos, much less played with them. I knew the only way I could make this work would be to buy a lego set and show them the difference. So I bought this box of legos in South Africa (you can see the corner of the box sticking up out of the green bag). Then I divided out the legos into two zip-loc bags so that each bag had exactly the same legos in it. And then, from the legos in one bag, I built something.

I used this illustration a couple of years ago and preached in chapel to the students from Romans 3. This past Sunday, I preached in a local church plant--they're still meeting in this tent, you see. At the beginning of the sermon, I held up both bags of legos and told them, "Both these bags contain exactly the same thing! Do they look the same to you?" People responded that they looked different. Somebody said, "There's a figure in that one." "What kind of a figure?" I asked. "It's a human being."

I explained that it's easy for us to concentrate on learning favorite verses from the Bible; few of us ever put those verses together to make sense of the whole thing. And it's true: think about it. We like to meditate on John 3:16; or we find our favorite proof texts and hammer home our take on doctrine. We seldom trace Paul's arguments from the beginning of Romans through to end to find out the point he's making. Or we don't even know that the unifying principle of the gospel of John is the description of 7 miracles that persuade us to "believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

So I proceeded to read Romans 5:12-19 and tied it all together into one coherent argument. And then, when I was finished, I told them, "See, I have built you a man! These verses are no longer scattered about, but we've connected them to each other to make something familiar, something that makes sense."