HOW BIG IS GOD?

HOW BIG IS GOD?

As you prepare your hearts for worship tomorrow, I share some thoughts
of the bigness of our awesome God from Louie Giglio's powerful book, "i
am not but I know I AM -- Welcome to the Story of God" published by
Multnomah.

Ponder these thoughts with me . . .

"And God said, 'Let there be light!' . . .

"The warmth you feel on your face when you walk outside one a sunny
afternoon is light that left the surface of the sun eight minutes ago.
If you wanted to repeat the 93-million-mile-journey and return to the
sun (not a good idea given that the temperature at the sun's surface is
ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and it would vaporize you long before
your arrival), the trip would take you seventeen years flying nonstop,
twenty-four hours a day, in our fastest jet.

I don't know about you, but a beam of light covering 93 million miles in
eight minutes is pretty hard for me to comprehend. Much less the news
that a team of astrophysicists recently discovered what is believed to
be the farthest object from earth, a tiny galaxy that is 13 billion
light years away.

If you want to put that distance in perspective, consider that a light
year (how far light travels in 365 days) is equal to 5.88 trillion
miles. If it helps, that number again is 5,880,000,000,000 miles. That's
a lot of zeros, and frankly, a number too large to really mean anything
of significance to most of us . . .

The folks at the California Institute of Technology are fairly certain
their newly discovered galaxy is 13,000,000,000 times 5,880,000,000,000
miles away. That qualifies us as the oldest visible light in all
Creation, and the farthest thing from earth our eyes have ever seen.
Actually, since a light year is more about TIME than distance, when we
gaze at this most-distant-yet galaxy, we're looking at light that left
there 13 billion years ago. That means we're actually looking back
across time, deep into the past.

But let's bring things closer to home -- our galactic neighborhood, the
Milky Way. Our cozy little corner of space, the Milky Way Galaxy, is
somewhere between 100,000 and 130,000 light years across. So to get from
one end of our neighborhood to the other, all you have to do is zoom at
186,000 miles per SECOND for 100,000 plus years. Our galaxy is home to
hundred of billions of stars, only one of which is our sun. Our solar
system -- whose star is the sun -- is located about twenty-five thousand
light years from the center of the Milky Way. And just as the planets in
our solar system orbit the sun, so our sun and all the other hundreds of
billions of other stars in the Milky Way orbit around its center -- a
galactic revolution that takes our sun 250 million earth years to
complete.

We have no idea just how big the universe is, but it's so big we have to
use a ruler that's 5.88 trillion miles long to measure stuff. The ruler
is called a light year. The farthest thing we have measured so far with
the help of a mighty telescope is 13 billion light years away. Somewhere
in the midst of it all is a spiral galaxy call the Milky Way, which is
made up of hundreds of billions of stars.

One of those stars is our sun, rotating around the center of the Milky
Way every 250 million years. One of the planets circling our sun is
Planet Earth. And two of the more than six billion people on this planet
are you and me . . . Along with you and me, there are six billion other
human beings dotting this minute ball we call earth, which is orbiting
an average star in a tiny solar system that's hovering on the outskirts
of the Milky Way, one of billions of galaxies in the known universe, the
size of which exponentially expands out latest measurements every time
we manage to build a more powerful telescope . . . "

And the God who created this universe -- created YOU and me, and died
for YOU and ME! As I contemplated Louie's words, I was reminded of one
of the worship songs that Robert and Joyce Hayes have been teaching us:

How Great Is Our God
------Chris Tomlin

The splendor of a King, clothed in majesty
Let all the earth rejoice
All the earth rejoice

He wraps himself in Light, and darkness tries to hide
And trembles at His voice
Trembles at His voice

How great is our God, sing with me
How great is our God, and all will see
How great, how great is our God

Age to age He stands
And time is in His hands
Beginning and the end
Beginning and the end

The Godhead Three in One
Father Spirit Son
The Lion and the Lamb
The Lion and the Lamb

How great is our God, sing with me
How great is our God, and all will see
How great, how great is our God

Name above all names
Worthy of all praise
My heart will sing
How great is our God (x2)

How great is our God, sing with me
How great is our God, and all will see
How great, how great is our God (x3)

Sorry for the length of today's Freedom Fighter. I thought it was worth
the "time and space!" God bless you.