You Need Better Relationships | Crossroads Church

Well, great to be with you this weekend, everyone. My name is Allie and I'm one of the teaching pastors here at Crossroads. If you're new, it's great to be in community with you this weekend. We're taking a few weeks and we're talking to our future selves, future you, future me. And we're asking the question, like, is there a way to wise up about how we're living our lives today and what we're planting in our life? What will it grow later? Jesus put it like this. If you sow thorn bushes, you're not going to pick a fig from it. And the Bible talks about this kind of wisdom that we need to wise up a little bit in terms of reaping and sowing. Whatever we sow today, we're going to reap tomorrow. And some of the fruit of our life, we can actually foresee. But most of us have a long list of like, oh, I should have seen that one coming. You know what I mean? I have this list. I will admit, as a parent, I'm the one with the longer list of, man, shouldn't I have seen that coming. In our household, I tend to like to say yes to things. Like, sounds like a great idea. Let's give that a shot. Like my kids, when they were little, came to me on a summer afternoon and said, can we make a water slide out of our swing set? And I was like, sounds great. Let's do it. So we turn the hose on full blast and point it down the slide. And I just plopped a baby pool at the end of the slide. What could possibly go wrong here? What could possibly go wrong? So my first kids go down the slide and they kind of landed in the baby pool. It was sort of working.

And I really didn't think about how a lighter, younger, smaller child was going to do on this little scenario. So my youngest daughter goes down the slide and flies off the end of it and face plants into the retaining wall about five feet away. When my husband came home and found this kid, he was like, are we serious? Are you serious? You did what? Didn't you see that coming? I guess the answer was I was willing to take the risk. I'm not sure I really did. We tend to live our lives like that. Like we just either don't want to see or don't want to do whatever it is that we would be doing today in order to get good stuff out of our life tomorrow. And there really is quite a bit of wisdom in the Bible that goes something like this. If you do something dumb, you're going to face plant in the retaining wall. You know, and we're trying to get a hold of that for our lives and our relationships. Because I believe much of the fruit of our life is actually foreseeable because it's linked to exactly the seeds that we are planting today. And I think that God has more life for us. He actually wants our lives to be on a trajectory where through all the ups and downs, we are becoming more and more and more alive. And if I think about that through the lens of our relationships, we are becoming less and less lonely, more and more purposeful, more deeply satisfied, more deeply fruitful. That is the trajectory that I believe God wants to put your life and your relationships on. And so we're going to ask ourselves the question today, are there things I could be doing in my relationships right now, right here today that will have great fruit five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? And I think the answer to that is yes, but I'm not sure we're always sowing the seeds of it. I was at a Reds game last week and I was sitting there watching. Like it was sadly not a great game till like the last inning or two. But I'm watching this game. It's a gorgeous day. There's a group of people I had my eye on and they were clearly like a group of friends. And most of them were sitting there with their phone right in front of their face, not looking at each other, not looking at the game. And I just thought, how often do all of us do that?

And we don't recognize that's a seed. The question is, what's it growing? What's the relational fruit that we are actually growing with all kinds of tiny little seeds like that today? So we're going to talk to our future selves and look at two things. And these two things are deceptively simple sounding, but we're going to dive into them. I think there's two things if current us did, future you would be very thankful. First of all, decide who, decide who you want to be in your life. And the second thing is to show up for them. There's some very specific ways that the Bible tells us to show up in order to develop great relationship in our life. So we're going to look at both of those today. And the first one is to decide who. I don't know if this is good news or bad news for you, but I think for me, it's a relief. But I think future, I'm sorry, current us is actually carrying too many relationships. We're trying to hold on to probably a lot more relationships than we actually have space for. The truth is we are limited relationally. I think usually we kind of figure this out at some point. Like I just can't be best friends with everybody. You know, we say things like that when we realize that. Well, we hit a relational wall at some different points in different kinds of relationships. But the question is, do you actually know where those are? Are you doing it on purpose? Are you deciding who is in your life on purpose in a way that recognizes what your threshold is, what your capacity is? I wrote a book a couple of years ago on the relationships in the life of Jesus, and I didn't really set out to write a book on that topic. I rather just read the gospels and got curious about what I was watching Jesus do.

And so I was noticing, oh, he has some patterns of relationship. There's a few people that are really close and he only does certain things with them. Then there's this other realm and he does a different sort of thing and he gives them more of this. And then there's these other people. And so I just started noting he's got patterns, he's got ways, he's got methods of how he seems to be interacting in relationship. And I just got curious, started to sketch some things out. And as I did the research for that book, I came across a modern social relational theory that is pretty widely accepted. I think gut level, you're going to agree it kind of checks out. It's called Dunbar's number. So some research was done, presumably by somebody named Dunbar, and came up with this theory that we actually have relationship thresholds at some different points in our capacity to hold relationships. And Dunbar's number is 150. That's like the max in terms of honest to goodness social relationship of people you can sort of carry along and truly know. There are some realms outside of that I didn't bother to put up there because the 150 is sort of the max threshold. But then below it, there are some other ones. Five of what he called intimates, closest people, 15 close friends, 50. He found there's a threshold at 50 that is something that Dunbar called a personal network. We'll talk more about that in just a minute. And I was really interested in this. So I just kind of tucked it away and considered it. I wonder if there's something like that in the life of Jesus that I could see

because I was already sort of mapping out these relationships. So I gave it a shot and turns out it's strikingly similar. In Jesus's life, we see that he has in the years of his public ministry where we have a good record of his relationships, right? So this is the years that we're looking at. He seems to have three that get full access, Peter, James, and John, Peter, James, and John, Peter, James, and John. If you read the books of his life, you'll hear those three names over and over again and notice they get more of him. Then he's got a line at 12. This is probably the most common group to us that we look at. It's his disciples, the people he was shoulder to shoulder with all the time. He taught them, he traveled with them, he worked with them, he ate with them. You know, this is his gang. And Dunbar had this number at 15, called it close friends. These are your people. And then Jesus had a line around 72. We'll take a look at that one in just a second. And then I tried to count up all, it gets a little squidgy because sometimes people are mentioned in groups and you don't know exactly how many are there. You know, that kind of thing. But we are in the ballpark and this got me thinking, what if there's a design? What if God designed us intentionally with limitations at different points, at different thresholds? And yeah, sure, we might vary a little bit around those numbers. We don't need to follow those off a cliff, but what if there's a design? Does that mean that today if you and I made some choices inside that design, our relationships would be better off for it? I had somebody when I was talking to some people about this, like, hey, does this check out in your own life?

I had somebody tell me that she was absolutely convinced that she had 22 best friends. And I was like, I don't think you do. I'm pretty sure you don't. And she was firmly convinced, but we carry people along for all different reasons and we don't make decisions about who gets access, who gets time, who are we actually planting seeds with in each of these spaces. And I wish so much, I wish so much that I could take you into everything I saw, everything I learned about all these spaces, but I can't. And I picked one for us to jump into today. together because I believe it is our biggest opportunity. It might be the least defined realm and the most powerful if we would plant seeds and actually invest in this space for our relationship future. It's the third layer of both of those charts. Dunbar called it your personal network. I called it, in the life of Jesus, I gave them names of core, circle, comrades and community. So this would be the comrades realm, the 72. Now this is a very interesting relational realm and one that I'm not sure in our life we actually give a lot of thought to. I think rather it's more common that we just sort of have a haphazard collection of people, like outside of our good friends, we're like, and the rest of them, you know. What if you did some things on purpose at this threshold in your life? Let's look at this in the life of Jesus in the book of Luke. Here we have this peak at this group that all we know is that they're called the 72.

They sort of appear as if from nowhere. And they're not really detailed, or are they? Or are they? What if these 72 are not some random people that pop out of nowhere in the Gospels? What if they're the faces and the names and the stories that we're reading about all along? What if these are the people who interacted with Jesus while He was doing His Father's business? And He taught them and He healed them. And they asked if they could follow Him. And so He gathered them up into a group while He was doing His Father's work. And they become this group of 72. So you probably would be able to know some of the faces and names that were in this group of people. And Jesus certainly did. These were not strangers to Him. We just don't have the benefit of a list, you know, an attendance list of this 72. And they became the people that Jesus was on mission with. The entire definition of this realm of relationship in Jesus's life, and we actually do get some specific names if you know His life, some of the closer ones in this realm might be a brothers, sisters trio, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. They're named. He clearly spends time with them. He's clearly on mission with them, but they aren't His best friends. They don't travel with Him.

They're not in His circle of disciples. So who are they? Well, they're in this realm, maybe among the 72. And this group of comrades, as I called them, in the life of Jesus was entirely defined by mission. The mission of the kingdom, the mission to spread the good news that Jesus had come to spread. Now, do we have people in our lives that we purposely keep in our lives because of the mission of God? I don't know that a lot of us do have that. I called them comrades for a very strategic reason. We don't use that word very much, right? It's sort of an old timey word. Maybe the only reference I had for it when I chose it was comrade in arms. Anyone ever heard that phrase, a comrade in arms? It's like an old sort of military or battlefield term. Yes, exactly. There's a common mission. There's a commanding officer. There's a set of weapons. There's a fight that's taking place. There's an enemy, a common enemy that's being faced. This is how Jesus defined this realm in His life. He trained them. He prayed for them. He worked with them. He encouraged them. And then He sent them out to experience the life of God. This, this might redefine how you experience your entire life.

Because for us, this is the church. And I don't mean crossroads by that. I mean, you're brothers and sisters that also follow Jesus anywhere all over the world. And I believe that God has a personal network of them for you. That was the term Dunbar used for this group, a personal network of 50 people. Who are those 50? Well, Dunbar doesn't say, but Jesus makes it clear that these people could be, with the right seeds, the people that you push the kingdom of God forward with and who actually helps you be on mission. Know what your life is for. Experience the life God has. for you, become more fruitful, go deeper in your faith. What, what if, what if he had a personal network for you? I want, I want you to meet one of mine. Her name is Hannah. You may recognize Hannah. She was the host of our Run journey just recently here at Crossroads on video. She did a fantastic job. I met Hannah years and years ago now. And she said, after we got to know each other, a couple of years in, she goes, you know, no offense, but when we first met, I wasn't really looking to be friends with a, you know, 40 something white lady. She's like, there's a lot of them around here. And I wasn't really looking for that. And I was like, fair enough. No offense. But how did we discover each other?

We discovered each other because we were working on the same mission. And while we were doing that, we kind of were like, oh, you, you. Oh yeah, I noticed you. Like you, you kind of follow Jesus like I do. You kind of care about some of the same things I do. You kind of have some of the same gifts that I do. And while we were moving in the kingdom of God on the mission of Christ, like with other believers, we're like, oh, you, that's interesting. I wonder, I wonder if we should know each other. Yeah, the answer is we definitely should have. And now years later, she actually mentors one of my daughters who would have been like a baby at the time that I met her. You never know what God has planned for these kinds of relationships and you can't foresee them. All you can do is begin moving in his mission and start to look around and go, who else are you bringing around me? And here's the thing about the gospel, it really doesn't care what your personal preferences are. When the gospel binds us to people, it's not people necessarily like us at all. Why would that be? Well, let's think about what the gospel actually is. When we receive as truth that the Son of God took on flesh, came to earth, lived a perfect life, died on the cross in our place for our sins, rose from the dead to welcome us into the eternal life of God by the presence of his spirit within us. And that spirit is in every piece of his body, every single believer, every single brother and sister in Christ that you have has the same spirit bound together by the same love. They really don't care if your algorithm will feed you their social media page. If they look like you, if they're your age, if they're your life stage, if they have kids and you don't, if they're single and you're married, it does not matter.

The love of the gospel binds totally unlike people into one mission with one commanding officer and begs us to participate in the amazing, powerful life that that can actually bring. And so many of us go through life and we're like, I went to church, they're fine. You know, nice people. And then we go back to the real people that we live our lives around. What if the love of God was a different kind of love? There's four different words for love in the Bible. We only have one in the English language. We got to, you know, got to up our game here. It's so helpful to realize that the love that God has for His family, it's called storge love. It's a very specific kind of love. It's an automatic bonded love like from a parent to a child. I don't love one of my kids more because they have a certain kind of personality, because they prefer certain things or they like certain activities. This is an automatic, completely bonded, deep love through the spirit of God. That's the kind of love that brothers, literal brothers and sisters, pieces of the body share with one another. And really, I don't think God cared at all that Hannah was much younger than me, was single at the time. We had nothing alike. We had no friends in common. It just doesn't matter in this realm of relationship in your life. What God is concerned with is who He wants to connect you to on His mission so that you experience the life that He actually has for you. Comrades really aren't built primarily on compatibility, but on covenant. It's like this bonded promise from God that you're together. So if you want this realm of relationship in your life to be more strategic, to develop over time, there's one thing that we have to start doing

and it's showing up, showing up in a very specific kind of way. Now, I think we discourage, when I say we, I mean the like royal we here at Crossroads. We say things like, show up and you'll find your people. But how many of you have shown up somewhere and you're like, they weren't here? Whoever those people are, they weren't here. Those people weren't my people, you know? And that happens a lot and I think we accidentally discourage the continual showing up to develop these kinds of relationships in our life. So I've rewritten it. I'm gonna give you a new version of it. See how you feel about this one. Show up consistently over a couple of years and you will discover an interesting collection of 50 to 75 people who will slowly become an unexpected clarifying presence and strength in your life but it's gonna take a while. How do we feel about that one? Better? I don't know, do we like that better or not? But that has actually honestly been much closer to my experience but there are some very specific ways that we can begin showing up for each other. If you want comrades, you want this realm of personal network in the kingdom of God, you've got to show up. And I just have to say a word to you. I'm a Gen Xer and I'm noticing something below Gen X,

all y'all, we've softened what it means to show up. Now, if you give a boomer an RSVP, they're doing it. They're gonna, they're doing it. They're gonna check their calendar, they're gonna put it right there and they're gonna tell you within 48 hours and if someone gets sick, they're gonna change the number. That's a boomer RSVP if I've ever seen one. Yes, now, below Gen X, not so sure. RSVP, you mean you want me to tell you I'm gonna come? Now, are you serious? Are you kidding me right now? We had this babysitter for years when my kids were little and we adored her. She went off to college at one point and we went to visit her and we were just talking about college life and how it worked and I made the comment to her at the time that my husband and I went to college when no one had a phone. Like, you didn't walk around with a phone. And she goes, how did you find your friends when you went out? And I said, now, no, hold on, brace yourself. Brace yourself, I'm gonna tell you the secret. And I said, we made a plan and then we showed up. And she goes, no, that would never work. And I said, she goes, you mean that like, you just decided and that was it? And I was like, we did.

We just said, I'll see you at Mac and Joe's at 11. And she goes, well, what happens if they didn't come? I was like, well, then, sorry. She goes, you mean if they were like somewhere else in the bar, it was crowded and you never saw them, that was it? I was like, that was it? She's like, again, definitely wouldn't work. We had the funniest conversation. There's like, we've softened what it means to kind of actually show up somewhere and our devices aren't really helping us because they, you know, they let us like, you know, we can reach anybody, anytime, any place. You don't really have to commit. We'll see, it'll be later. I don't know, maybe. Future you needs to know what it looks like to show up in actually all of those spaces. But we're particularly talking about what it means to show up as a comrade, as somebody who's trying to grow relationship in the kingdom of God. There's a few verses in the book of Romans 12 that Paul writes and I'm gonna highlight four of these verses. The whole passage is great. He says a lot of different things, but I think these four verses contain some insight into our biggest opportunities,

given like the culture we live in. If we want these kinds of relationships, what sort of seeds should we be planting? Now, Paul has just said at this point in time in the book of Romans, he's just kind of reminded them, you're part of a body, you're part of a family of God. And then he says this. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit. Serve the Lord. rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer, contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality." He goes on to say some other things. But these four verses encapsulate, I think, what might be our biggest opportunity to start planting seeds, to start showing up in these spaces so we've got something good that's growing. The first thing he says is love one another with brotherly affection. I'll give you three guesses as to what kind of love he's referring to. You're only going to need one. It's store gay love. It's the bonded, connected, automatic love of God that flows through his family. Love one another like this. And then the words that he gives here, they are not emotional words.

They're not showing up emotionally for somebody. I think that's great. I'm sure it's embedded in. Part of what's going on here, but what he chooses are effort, energy, action language. He says outdo, honor, serve, contribute, show hospitality. He's talking about actually doing the work of the kingdom of God together. Now, the things that he names here happen to also interestingly be, they appear in a different form on other lists that Paul writes, gifts of the Spirit. So he's basically saying gifts of the Spirit like hospitality, prayer, compassion, giving, service. These are things that the Spirit of God that runs through the family actually empowers us to do. And we just start doing them together. And as we do them, comrades are not so much chosen. Remember, we're not auditioning and selecting the ones we like. They're revealed to us as we do that. As we begin to use the gifts that the Spirit empowers us to do and we actually show up to do them, that's when we begin to have revealed to us like, oh, that's one of your people. It's not so much about chemistry as it is about consistently showing up. Now, I'm going to go super old school right now and say I love a Zoom as much as the NextGal. I like the flexibility that sometimes online gives us. It's definitely a blessing in some ways.

It is not a blessing to these relationships. We need to actually be around one another doing the things of the kingdom of God together in order to develop this relationship realm in our life. And so where your feet are is where you're going to find those people. I found one of them really unexpectedly. I would call him a comrade of our family. We got to know him years ago. His name is Kent. This is Kent. And that's him with my oldest son a handful of years back. And yes, they're holding a fathead. My son was a senior. I'm the kind of mom that makes fatheads your senior year and shows up and waves them around at things. That was, I think, his 18th birthday dinner. So we had met Kent years before that. And we would pick up our kids from the fourth, fifth grade room or one of our kids was in the room at the time from the fourth, fifth grade room at Crossroads Eastside. And so every time we would come to pick him up, Kent would be at the door. He was a regular volunteer in that room. And, you know, they got to find their shoes or their friend or whatever. So you exchange pleasantries. So we got to know Kent's face and name that way. And then he moved over and his volunteering was in high school ministry about the time that that son was in high school. And he began to come to his basketball games, probably his sophomore year, I'm going to guess, definitely several seasons in a row. So Kent started showing up at the basketball game. Let me describe the progression for you.

First season, it was like, oh, there's that guy from church. Oh, hey, what's up? And he would be there all the time, every game. And I thought, oh, that's really nice. I think he's coming to watch Andrew. That's super cool. Nice guy. Probably, but hey. Second season, it was more like, this is our friend Kent. And we would sit together more often than not. Small talk, you know, we learned what did he do? You know, where's he coming from? Where's he going? What's his family like? You know, just small talk. And by the third season, my husband or myself would text him from the parking lot. Like, we're running late. Can you save us seats? And also don't get under the blower. I hate it when it blows on my hair. And, you know, just like, what are you doing after? We're really hungry. We forgot to eat. Do you want to go get some pizza with us? And now he like makes us cheesecakes on our birthdays and stays in our house while we go on vacation. You know, how did that happen? Well, he showed up. He just started showing up. And it's crazy how that happens, because what was he doing?

It's interesting we met him as a weekly volunteer. I'm not sure exactly what he would say if you asked him like what gifts he thought he had, but clearly a student thing. You know, fourth, fifth grade, high school. He's just showing up doing the things presumably that, you know, he can do inside the church on God's mission. I don't know what language he would use for it. And boom, there's people next to him all of a sudden. And we got to kind of pick him up and carry him along with us. That's sort of how God develops this network of people or this personal network in the kingdom of God. What did Paul say? You're part of the body of Christ. Well, we all want to know what we can do with our life. And Paul's answer is you're a body part. Start being your body part and look around. These are the people that I want to connect you to. I think that God is constantly telling us that. Now women, Crossroads women, I have an invitation for you to develop these relationships one step further. And it's at the Ignite Conference coming up in a handful of weeks. It's on June 6th. Crossroads Eastside is the host site this year. And that's exactly what we're doing. One day, not even a whole day. And what we're going to be doing is asking, what has God equipped me to do? And how can we coach and encourage each other to take steps forward and actually do that? And oh, by the way, there's going to be like 2,000 other women

who are trying to live the kind of life that you're trying to live. Why don't you come? Like, why don't you take a step and see maybe God will have somebody there that day that He intends to connect you to as part of your kingdom network. We've had those stories all the last couple of years when we've done that conference because that's exactly what we're there to do. We need to experiment. It's okay not to know what body part you are. You just start experimenting and something actually kind of incredible happens when you show up consistently, in person, with your gifts. There's this net that gets kind of pulled together under your life. That's how I would describe it. My honest to goodness experience kind of with this realm of relationship over the last 20 years is that I try something and it might fit or I might discover something, but I usually find a person to take with me. I was a student ministry volunteer. Middle school is maybe not quite my vibe. But I learned in that space, I love to teach and I also picked up a couple of young women who are still in my life today. I was a greeter here for a while and I learned that some of you want to hug everybody. I only want to hug some of you. But I learned powerful, powerful to begin to see the same faces. We tend to come through the same door. I'll bet you're sitting in the same section. You know, I'll bet you're with the same people if you're at a site or you're online.

I'll bet you're doing it the same way you usually do it and you begin to experience like, oh, this is interesting. And the waves of loneliness that come at all of us, do you know, that if you ask someone they would absolutely verify that the same voice that talks to you, talks to them, you're alone. Nobody knows if you're here. Nobody cares what you do. That voice comes at all of us. It makes a run at every single person in every single life. And the more I showed up and allowed God to begin to connect this network in my life, the more reluctant I was to believe that. Because even if I was lonely in some way, I began to see like I have this net that's being woven under my life of people that I'm beginning to take with me as this network in the kingdom. I went to a woman camp this last year. I'll share this picture with you. And I've been at most, I think almost every woman camp and most of them I am working, but I'm also experiencing camp too. And I had a campsite this year and it was some people that were also working camp, but we took fire time just like everybody does at camp. And there was just some awesome stuff that happened around our fire. And I thought there's something special about the connection that this campsite is experiencing. I wonder if I could just carry some of these women with me. Like, I wonder what God will do. And I've learned to be on the lookout for it now. And I experienced something. I was like, God is, I think, connecting us. interesting way. So I have a fire pit and I thought they could just come to my house.

We'll just have another fire. I didn't have a big plan. I just invited them over. And so we did that a few times through the fall after woman camp. And, you know, we're not alike at all. A couple of us are married, a couple of those people are single. Some of us have kids, some of us don't. We're different ethnicities, we had different jobs at camp. And yet the Lord was doing something interesting, connecting our lives. One of them is from far away and just moved here not too long ago and ended up spending Thanksgiving with our family because they couldn't make it home to their own. One more step. So God begins to tie these relationships together so that we experience increasingly this strength of this network in his kingdom. And it's all from showing up, deciding who God is pulling out of the crowd to us and just taking that person one step further. I have a final encouragement from the book of Galatians. Same guy, Paul, that we've read in the book of Romans. He says this, he kind of doubles down on some of these same concepts. We heard this at the beginning. So then as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone and especially to those who are in the household of faith. Who's the household of faith? Your brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul is saying if you keep doing good, you keep showing up, you keep after that group of people, you will reap. There will be a harvest, there will be a network, there will be a community, there will be days where your relationships are deeper, less lonely, and much, much, much more fruitful.

That's what God wants for us. And so I know that this is the kind of message where you get to the end and you're like, I should totally do that. Let's do it and then we leave. I don't want that. Instead, I want you to walk out with one tiny little seed. So I'm going to give you about 15 seconds, 25 seconds to ask God just quietly by yourself, what is the one seed that you want me to plant for those kind of relationships to grow in my life? Because it could be anything. Only He sees what's coming in five, in 10, in 20 years. You and I have no idea, but if we ask Him, He'll tell us the seed. So let's do that. Father, I ask that you would be very specific, very specific about one tiny little seed for each of us that you know what it's going to grow. We don't see, but you see. And help us to do what it is that we need to do to plant that seed and water and tend it and believe that you have a harvest for us, Lord. I believe that. I know that you want us connected to you and to one another and to expand your kingdom together, Lord. Would you bring those relationships into full bloom in our life? In Jesus name, amen.