Stick Together – The most basic thing you will ever learn about magnets is that they stick together.  Put two magnets anywhere near each other, and they’ll stick together you pull them apart.  Sticking together is an important part of friendship and friendship is at the very core of what it means to be a Christian.  Before Christ completed his ministry on earth, he told the disciples this in John 15:14-15: “You are my friends if you do what I command.  I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business.  Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” Sticking together means sticking with each other through good and bad, praying for each other, encouraging each other, and having fun with each other.

Attract – Before magnets ever stick together, they are attracted together by the magnetic fields they create.  The church and everyone in it was built to attract more friends.  We are not in an exclusive or members only club.  But we are not what attracts new people, God is.  It is only through God acting through us that anyone gets attracted.  And the best way we can do that is to follow the command Jesus gives a formerly possessed man who asks to be a disciple in Mark 5:19: “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”  We don’t need to be Billy Graham to attract, we just need to be open and honest about the saving grace of God at work in our lives. Attracting means bringing in new friends to our existing group of friends by sharing what Christ has done for you.

Supercharge – The most powerful magnets out there are electromagnets.  Electromagnets work by passing an electrical charge through a normal piece of metal that isn’t magnetic at all.  But once the mechanism is created and the electricity is flowing, electromagnets can pick up cars and other really heavy stuff.  We’re the same way.  On our own, we don’t do much.  None of these magnetic aspects of our lives are possible unless we are powered by God.  That’s why it’s important to be listening to God and training ourselves to be disciples.  Paul put it pretty well when he told Timothy to “Exercise daily in God—no spiritual flabbiness please!  Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever” (1 Timothy 4:8). We supercharge our life when we are constantly immersed in God’s words and spending time with him.

Elevate – So far we’ve talked about what happens when two or more magnets’ poles are pointing in opposite directions.  So, what happens when they point in the same direction?  They end up repelling each other.  However, some scientists figured out this idea could be applied to transportation and bring us to those floating cars we were supposed to have in the year 2000.  In France and Japan you’ll find trains that levitate off the ground thanks to magnets.  Since there’s no friction, they can travel upwards of 500 miles per hour!  In the same way, when we live lives that honor God all of the time, we can make something amazing happen as well, a little bit of levitation ourselves.  All it takes is lining up with God rather than the world.  What does that look like in the Christian life though?  We often think of worship as an hour on Sunday mornings, but this is the true essence of worship.  Paul puts it this way in Romans 12:1: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.  Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.” We elevate when we live a life that, instead of being mired in the world, is apart from the world and lived with the goal of pleasing God: we will serve and sing and laugh and cry and dance and get hurt and look dumb and get strange looks and be free and have fun, all for the glory of God (and with a little help from our friends).

Point – Compasses are tools that have been used by explorers and travelers for centuries.  They operate by letting the north pole of a freely moving magnet point where it wants to point: the North Pole.  But the trick is to actually move in the way the compass is directing you.  All of our lives are pointing towards something, some good and some bad.  We can all acknowledge that pointing to God is what we really need to be doing and no one can deny that he gave us the talents, gifts, and passions to make that possible.  What this comes down to is ministry, the idea that God created us to point in his direction and our pointing can also help others to point as well.  Paul says it best in Ephesians 2:10: “He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten us ready to do, work we had better be doing.”  We were designed by God to do something that only we can ever do! Pointing is orienting ourselves to God so that we can see where he is leading us to use our talents, gifts, and passions.