Jesus In Space | Greg Basch

Happy birthday, Overflow church! 11 years.

You are 11 years old.

It's so good to be with you today.

I don't mean to correct you on your birthday, Alex, but I have preached at Overflow before.

If you were with us 10 years ago in that tiny narrow little room we had with the bricks on the main street, on the square, I preached way back in the day.

And I remember that room was so narrow, I felt like I was in a subway car or something like that.

But look at you now.

Look what God has done.

It's so good to be back with you guys.

I come from Charleston, South Carolina.

Have you ever been?

It's great.

Come visit, come see us.

I'll show you all the good food.

In Charleston, South Carolina, we say if the water is fresh, there's alligators in it.

And if the water is salty, there's sharks in it.

So you gotta be careful wherever you go.

Let me show you a picture of my family.

You'll like me better if you see their face.

That is my wife Kristen, our older daughter, Isla, who started kindergarten just a few weeks ago.

Are you kidding me?

She was just a tiny baby.

And now she's in school.

And then that's our youngest one, Freya, and she is adorable, but don't let her fool you with that cute face.

She will stab you if you make her mad.

She is our wonderful little uh chaos goblin.

Alrighty.

Hey, let's jump in.

It's such a huge honor not just to be with you, but specifically on this day as you celebrate 11 years of God's faithfulness.

I mean, I wish we could just put the sermon away and tell stories and pass the microphone around and hear all the things that God has done in your life and in your family by being a part of this church.

In fact, can we just take one moment, raise your hand if you would say, man, God has done something powerful in my life through this ministry?

Take a look around.

If you serve here, if you give here, how incredible this is that you get to be a part of.

And um, you know, it's one thing to look back and celebrate all the good things that God has done, but there is a risk.

11 years in, if we're not careful, this might become too normal to us.

We might become too used to it.

And as much as we talk about being close to God, drawing near to Jesus, I do think there's a danger that we can get so close and so familiar that we forget how special this is.

And we forget how big God is, and we forget that this is not normal, that this would be happening in the middle of Mackenzie, Tennessee, and I've been all around the block now.

I've been in Paris, I've been in Martin, I've been everywhere.

And for God to be pouring out favor and blessing on your church here in McKenzie, Tennessee, this is a move of God.

I hope you know that.

Can we give God praise just for a moment?

Amen.

We cannot let this become too normal to us.

So, my goal today is to try to expand how you see God once again.

I was thinking about uh in our dining room at our house in Charleston, we have a big Monstera plant.

Anybody plant people in the room?

And we're not very good plant people.

Uh, we forget to water these things, but it will tell me when it needs water because it starts to sag.

Its big, beautiful leaves start to sag.

Gravity is dragging them down towards the floor.

And this is what happens to our faith if we're not consistently watering it and replenishing our vision of who God is as we start to just sag and cave in on ourselves, and but then you get water and you watch this plant go and look up and open up and get big again.

That's what happens to our faith when we remember how good God is and how big God is.

So that's the goal today.

Let's jump into our scripture: Colossians chapter one, verses 15 through 20.

I was promised that uh this would be the best note-taking church I have ever preached in.

So no pressure, okay?

And I was also told that the 8 a.m.

is the best service of all three.

So we're starting on a high note.

And I'm gonna tell the other services.

I'm gonna tell them that and see if they want to compete with you.

Colossians 1, verse 15.

Colossians 1:15

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

For in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together, and he is the head of the body, the church, he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.

The title of my message today is this Jesus in space.

Let's pray.

God, we love you so much.

We're so thankful that we get to gather today in celebration of all the things that you've done in this place, all the things that you've done in our lives.

And God, this morning we pray that for a few moments we could just be fully present in your presence.

That our hearts and minds could be open again to what you want to speak to us.

God, we pray that this morning you would strip away our preconceived notions, our certainties, the areas where we have become too familiar, too close.

God help us to step back and look up again.

We love you in Jesus' name.

Amen.

That was floating out in space.

It was the furthest humans had been off of Earth at the time.

And you heard the voices of the astronauts that were on board Apollo 8, uh, mission command down on Earth had told them, you need to give some sort of address to the American people.

Everyone is watching, everyone's looking up, everyone's imagining you guys in space.

What message do you have for the rest of us down here?

And they said, Well, I don't know, what do you want us to say?

And they said, Whatever you think is appropriate.

Whatever you think is appropriate.

And these three men, they decided the only thing we can say that's appropriate for what we are beholding is to read the story of God creating the world in Genesis.

Less than a year later, on July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Is anyone old enough to remember?

Was anybody watching that day?

How cool Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong could get off of the ship and get on their uh land rover and walk on the moon and all that sort of stuff, uh, the the mission command had told them you have to stay on for a while and rest and kind of acclimate to the environment.

So they were sitting in the ship for a couple of hours before they actually put on their suits and got out.

And Buzz Aldrin was a devout Catholic, and he had planned that when he went up on the moon, he wanted to take communion.

He wanted to take communion, and he had brought a little chalice from his church, he had brought a little piece of bread, he'd brought some wine, and before he stepped foot on the moon, he read from John 15 5, which says, I am the vine, you are the branches.

And he poured himself the wine and he pulled out the bread.

The first liquid poured and the first food eaten on the moon were the Lord's Supper.

How cool is that.

We went back to space.

Artemis II set the new record for the furthest human beings have been off of Earth, and they went around the far side of the moon.

And when they came back down, they were being interviewed about their experience.

Everyone wants to know what's it like to be up there?

And this is what one of the astronauts said.

I'm not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything.

So I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come visit us for a minute.

And when that man walked in, I'd never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his on his collar and I just I broke down in tears.

Like that it's very hard to fully grasp what we just went through.

And in these short, you just said it's been a week since we've been back, but it's been a week of medical testing, physical testing, doctors, science objectives.

I would like, we have not had that decompression.

We have not had that reflection time.

So I'm basing this on what we saw.

And when the when the sun eclipsed behind the moon, I think all four of us, I turned to Victor and I said, I don't think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we're looking at right now because it was otherworldly and it was amazing.

The only thing I would add is I am a religious person, but everything else is the same.

Um, there is something in there, and as we start to process, I'll have to tell you next week.

I haven't had a chance to really unpack it all yet.

I'm giving you these different space images because it's the most dramatic way that we can possibly think about scale and perspective and altitude.

And years ago, NASA uh they they actually came up with a term for that experience that you just heard these two men talk about.

They called it the overview effect.

The overview effect.

It's a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.

That's a lot of words to say that if you get some altitude, that if you can get higher, you will be in awe and you will see things from a different vantage point.

Some of the common things that uh those who have gone up in space have commented about their experience, they have this overwhelming sense of wonder that they are incapable of fully processing and understanding.

They become aware of the fragility of life.

When you can see Earth from a distance, you realize, wow, it's out here in all this vast, endless blackness, and yet we get to live.

They also have this incredible sense, this profound sense of deep unity.

And for all our divisions and all our conflicts and all the things that we worry about, and politics and geopolitical warfare and things like this, and you know, um arguments with coworkers, whatever it may be, when you get some altitude, when you get some perspective, you realize how small those things really are, and how kindred we really are with one another.

We're all humans trying to make our way in the midst of space.

And so coming back to the scripture in Colossians chapter one, I look at this passage and it's almost as if Paul is trying to give the church in Colossians some altitude.

He's trying to give them some perspective, he's trying to help them zoom out and see a bigger picture, like he's trying to give them an overview effect about Jesus.

So, just some context: Paul is in prison when he writes this letter, as he was when he wrote many of our New Testament books, and he's writing it to this church in Colossae, which uh was in somewhere in Asia Minor, okay?

So modern-day Turkey.

This was a new church, this was a budding church that Paul did not start.

Someone else started this church, and Paul heard about it later.

So he's visited in prison, and someone is explaining to him the issues that this church is dealing with.

How many know that every church deals with issues?

If you haven't found that out yet, just wait, it's coming.

You're gonna find out.

Um, and so Paul decides to write this letter to help them deal with some of the things that they're running into.

And the primary thing was confusion.

Confusion.

There was a small group of people that were gathering, probably not dissimilar from the group gathering in the house that we saw on the screen earlier.

And they're gathered around this idea of worshiping Jesus, but they don't really know how to make sense of Jesus.

They're trying to figure out what do we do with Jesus?

How do we fit him into our concept of the world?

How do we put him into a category?

Is he like the Roman gods?

Like there's a lot of those, and they all have different kinds of powers and things that they're responsible for, but they're they're also created and they're kind of uh petulant.

Or is he more like the Greek conception of gods, this like detached uh logos, this word, this reason, this order of the universe that doesn't really have a personality uh but is behind all things?

Is is Jesus that unmoved mover?

Or is he more like is he the Messiah that the Jews have been looking forward to for thousands of years, the one that would come and restore Israel and restore God's people and overthrow the Romans and cast out the oppressors?

What do we do with Jesus?

What box do we put him in?

So Paul reads this, Paul writes this letter to help them address this challenge that they have.

And I want to read back through this passage again.

So starting in verse 15, he says, the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

Now, to be clear, that word there, firstborn, does not mean to Paul what it means to us.

When we say firstborn, I could say Isla's my firstborn daughter.

That simply means she came first.

She's the first one, all right?

But firstborn in this context has less to do with chronology or order, and it has more to do with supremacy.

So when Paul says he is the firstborn over all creation, what he's saying is there's nothing higher.

There's nothing higher than this Jesus that we're considering.

Verse 16, for in him all things were created.

Everyone say, all things.

Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things, everyone say all things have been created through him and for him.

You've probably heard this passage before if you've been in church for a while.

But do we ever stop and really consider what this is saying?

It's that creation happens through Jesus.

And everything in the world exists to glorify him.

It's for him.

He continues in verse 17, he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

All things hold together.

If you were to take Jesus out, everything would fall apart.

Everything would disintegrate.

I wonder if you live the kind of life where I'm so centered around Jesus that if Jesus stepped out, everything would fall apart.

Verse 18 says, He is the head of the body, the church.

He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things.

Everyone say, all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.

Paul is trying to take them up on a spaceship and help them understand there is no category that can contain him.

He's not just another religious figure, he's not just another deity, he is everything.

This is all about him.

And anywhere you see power, anywhere you see authority, it is all submitted to him.

The stars and the galaxies, the kingdoms and the nations, all matter, all space, all time, dimensionality, reality, all of it is for him and was created through him.

And all of our categories, all our philosophies, all our religious ideas are just like little buckets trying to scoop up the sea.

But he is the sea.

You cannot contain him.

The average human body contains approximately seven octilion atoms.

Some of y'all have more than that.

That's a joke.

That means uh seven billion billion billion atoms.

Or it would be the number seven plus twenty seven zeros after it.

It's a number that is so far beyond our ability to comprehend, it just doesn't even make sense to us.

Seven octilian atoms, and every single one was made through him, is held up by him, and radiates his glory into the earth.

Jesus is awesome.

Awesome in a way that is so far beyond how we typically use that word.

I'm gonna go watch the Carolina Panthers play football today, and Ted Roller McMillan's gonna catch a touchdown.

He might catch three.

I hope you're not a Chicago Bears fan.

That's who we're playing today.

But when T Mac catches a touchdown, I'm gonna go, he's awesome.

And it's a it it's nowhere in the same universe of what we mean when we say that Jesus is awesome.

See, the Colossians, they were just trying to get their heads wrapped around this Jesus figure.

Uh, and that may be you today.

Maybe you're new to the faith.

Maybe you recently realized there's something in this.

There's something to this God stuff, there's something in this person of Jesus that I'm drawn to, and you're trying to figure out what do I do with him?

How do I make sense of him?

Or you might be on the other side of the spectrum, like we talked about earlier, where you've been in church your whole life.

Maybe you've been at Overflow since the beginning.

Maybe you've been here 11 years and you you serve God and you pray and you read your Bible, maybe you are at risk of becoming too familiar.

See, sometimes the danger is not that we will reject Jesus.

Sometimes the danger is that Jesus becomes too common to us.

Us and that we shrink him down to a size that we can manage.

I was in the airport the other day flying over here, and I'm in line at TSA.

Praise God for TSA.

Um, that's also a joke.

And I'm approaching the guy who's gonna scan my boarding pass and look at my ID, and I saw on his desk he had this tiny little baby Jesus.

I think we have a photo.

Oh, it's behind me.

There it is.

Um and I had to take a picture.

I was like, oh, this is so good because I'm gonna talk about how big Jesus is, and then we have this little thing.

And it's a silly illustration, but we do this.

We shrink Jesus down, we shrink God down to a place where we can manage him, and then we create these memes of Jesus, we create these caricatures of Jesus.

Sometimes he's our therapist, he's the one who helps us work through our trauma or something like that.

And he is that, but he is so, so much more.

Sometimes we shrink him down and make him our life coach.

Jesus is the one who will help us step into our potential and be successful and thrive and build a big business and make more money and have a healthy family and all that sort of stuff.

And some of that may happen, but he's so much more than that.

Sometimes we make Jesus into our mascot.

We love to do this in the political world, where we go, well, Jesus would be behind this person or this party or this position, and then the other side saying the exact same thing.

Meanwhile, Jesus is saying, I'm everything.

How dare we take Jesus, who is so awesome, who reality itself was created through him and try to shrink him down to be a mascot for our political dispositions.

Sometimes we shrink him down to be a vending machine.

If we think if I just pray the right way or I pray enough times, if I put enough coins in the slot, he will give me what I'm asking for.

And when we do that, we are making Jesus a supporting character in our story.

We are making Jesus a planet that orbits us rather than where we should be.

He's the center.

We're just satellites.

Or we make Jesus into a textbook.

I'm a big fan of theology and worshiping God with our minds and trying to grow in our understanding, but we have to do that knowing that we will never reach a finish line.

I had a professor one time who said, All earthly theology is preparation for embarrassment.

Beware anybody who is too convinced that they fully have figured God out.

They're gonna walk into heaven one day and be floored by what they got wrong.

And be floored by how small their conception of God really was.

He will overwhelm them.

Evelyn Underhill once said, if God were small enough to be understood, he would not be big enough to be worshipped.

We shrink Jesus down.

And why do we do this?

We like control.

We like to be able to understand.

It's uncomfortable to live with mystery.

It's uncomfortable to live with the unknown.

It's uncomfortable to think about how big space is.

It's kind of unsettling.

You think about how much emptiness there is.

How far it goes.

It's uncomfortable, but that's why it requires faith to trust in a God who is so much bigger than any category our minds could conceive of can ever contain.

Another reason, though, that we make God small is because we are enormous.

And I'm not talking about your physical uh, your physical body.

I'm talking about how big are you in your own life.

We live in an age of unprecedented self-consciousness.

We live in an age where everything has become about me.

There's incredible levels of individualism in the West.

We have social media, which is just another way for us to compare ourselves and judge other people and make it about ourselves.

And we live our lives constantly ruminating about these questions like how do I look?

How do I feel?

What do they think of me?

Am I successful?

Am I fulfilled?

What's wrong with me?

Why do I feel this way?

What does this mean?

What do I want?

What's my dream?

How can I be fulfilled?

Me, me, me, I, I, I, and I become bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

And the bigger I become in my own eyes, the smaller God becomes.

It's like I'm staring in the mirror, and the closer I get to the mirror, the less I can see anything else.

And we push God out into our orbit rather than asking, how do I become small in comparison to the magnitude of who God is?

How do I get myself into his orbit?

We need a revelation, a restoration of the awe of God.

The awe of God.

When was the last time you were awestruck?

When was the last time your breath was taken away?

When's the last time you were astonished?

When's the last time you were undone with wonder at how great God is?

I love the scene in Isaiah chapter 6.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

He has this vision where he sees God in the throne room.

He says, I saw the Lord high and exalted, seated on a throne, and the train of his robe filled the temple, and the angels surrounded God, and he's so great that they can't even look at him with their eyes.

They're covering their eyes with their wings, and they're singing, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.

The whole earth is full of his glory over and over and over to be in his presence.

You cannot help but cry, holy.

And Isaiah falls on his face and he says, Woe is me, I'm undone.

I'm overwhelmed to be in the presence of this great God.

The Mount of Transfiguration, there was a similar scene when Peter and John go up with Jesus on the mountain and he transforms.

He gives them a glimpse just for a moment of his glory.

And it says, His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light, and they fell on their face, terrified of what they had seen.

Moses, who had been as close to God as anybody could be, begged to see God's face.

God, will you let me see your face just for a moment?

And said, God said, You can't handle my face.

It's too great for you.

It's too glorious for you.

You would be struck down by the weight of glory if you saw my face even for a moment.

And God said, Here's what I'll do: I'll walk past you and you can see my back.

I'll let you see the back of me, because if you saw the face of me, it would be your undoing.

This is the God we come to worship.

He's that big, he's that great, he's that glorious.

God, what can we do to help just expand how we see you again?

God, forgive us of the ways that we've shrunken you down, that we've made you like a little figurine we can carry in our pocket.

Come along with me, Jesus.

How do we step back and behold the weight of your glory again?

I want to show you a video of the universe.

It's not a real video because the universe is far bigger than we could ever send a camera.

But it's our best um attempt to create a visualization of the universe, of the scale of it.

I'm gonna show you this, and as I do, I'm just gonna read some scriptures over you.

I want you to approach this as a prayer.

You don't need notes for this, you don't need a phone for this.

Could you just take a moment and let this wash over you and ask, God, would you stretch wide the tent of my understanding?

Okay, give me altitude, give me perspective of who you are.

Go ahead and play the video.

And does not live in temples built by human hands, and he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything.

Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.

The sun is the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

He was with God in the beginning, through him all things were made.

Without him nothing was made that has been made.

In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you from the beginning?

Have you not understood since the earth was founded?

He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.

He stretches out the heavens like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.

No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner do they take root in the ground than he blows on them, and they wither, and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

To whom will you compare me?

Or who is my equal, says the Holy One.

Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens.

Who created all these?

He brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name.

Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them?

Human beings that you care for them?

Hold on to your seats for this part.

We need to hand out drama mean when people walk into church.

Five things that happen when we stand in awe.

Number one, we become smaller.

We become smaller.

There's a uh psychologist, a researcher at UC Berkeley, his name's Dakar Keltner.

He has done a bunch of research on the emotion of awe, and it's fascinating.

And they've actually looked at what happens in your brain when you are in awe.

There's a particular region of your brain known as the default mode network.

The default mode network.

That's the part of your brain that is associated with self-referential thinking.

It's where you think about yourself.

When you're worried about yourself, when you're anxious about yourself, when you're comparing yourself, when you're pitying yourself, when you're arrogant about yourself, that's the part of your brain that's going, going, going, going.

And for most of us, it never shuts up.

And we become bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

But when we are in awe, that part of our brain quiets down.

They've seen it on brain scans.

We become smaller.

And at first glance, you might think, well, isn't that bad?

I don't want to shrink.

We live in a world where everything is about you becoming bigger, you becoming your best self, you accomplishing your dreams.

None of those are bad.

But if we're not careful, we become the main character of the story, and we're not meant to be the center.

We are meant to orbit the one who is.

We become smaller.

Number two, our perspective expands.

That's what we saw with the astronauts.

They're undone by the scale of things.

We realize we're a part of something bigger.

Number three, our problems right size.

And don't get me wrong, I know that there are some people going through some really hard things in this room today.

And I don't want to diminish that for even a moment.

But if you can zoom out, if you can go up, if you can get some altitude and some perspective, it doesn't make your problems go away, but it puts them in proper perspective.

It puts them in their place.

And when you realize that the God who made all this is on my side, I know that none of these things I'm worried about right now can take me out.

Number four, when we are in awe, our gratitude grows.

Our gratitude grows.

See, if you don't believe in Jesus, if you're not a Christian, you might see a video like that and feel completely insignificant and worthless.

But in Psalm 8, the psalmist said, When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them.

The same God who made all that with just a word from his mouth loves you and cares about you.

You are on his mind.

And when I remember that, it makes me grateful.

And finally, when we are in awe, we can't help but worship.

We can't help but worship.

We saw Reed, what was his name, the astronaut who said, I'm not religious, but I can't help but react to this.

How many times do we come into church and we're like, I guess I should raise my hand because Jacob told me to?

But if you can get a revelation, if you can get some awe in your life, if you can step back and get some altitude, how can I not, how can I not worship this God who created all of this?

All of it came through him, all of it is for him, and he's here with us right now.

How can I not praise him?

We can't help but worship.

So one very simple challenge to you coming out of this sermon today is to look up.

Are you like that monstera in my dining room that is just so consumed with what's right in front of your face?

And maybe we hope that Jesus can step in and help us and give us a little blessing and give us a little favor here and there.

Can you look up?

Can you get some awe back in your life?

Can you remember that God is so much bigger than you've made him?

Can you remember that his glory fills the earth?

Not just what you can see at the atomic level, his glory is radiant in the earth.

Wow.

Look up.

Psalm 19 says, the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech, night after night they reveal knowledge.

The Franciscans say that creation is the first Bible.

The first words God spoke were to create the world that we inhabit.

Long before we got the Word of God, the Bible that many of you are holding today, God was speaking words that were creating our world.

Creation is the first Bible, and everything in creation is like a whisper of the creator who made it.

Can you look up?

I was driving in this morning over from Martin, and the sunrise was stunning.

Did you see it?

It was foggy, it was misty, it was the sun was so orange, and it was just spilling these pillars of light across the trees.

Stunning.

I couldn't help but thank God.

That's so glorious, but it's almost nothing to who you are.

Beauty and glory are all around us.

We've just become so used to them that we don't even see them anymore.

We're like fish in water.

Fish don't wonder about water.

Fish don't even realize there's water.

It's just normal.

But could you step back and realize we're swimming in glory?

His presence is all around us and within us.

It's holding us up, it's sustaining us.

God, open my eyes.

That's the prayer you ought to pray.

God, open my eyes.

In closing, we've talked about Jesus in space.

We've talked about the magnitude and the grandeur and the glory of God.

And we have to get that.

We have to get a sense of awe about God in order to understand the reality of the incarnation.

The God who made all of that, the God whose glory is radiant at the atomic level and the cosmic level and beyond, came to Earth as a baby.

What?

There is no category that can contain that.

James Irwin is another astronaut who was on board Apollo 15.

He was the eighth man on the moon, and he was a skeptic, a religious skeptic, before he went to space.

After he went to space, he couldn't help but worship God.

And he had this to say: the entire space achievement is put in proper perspective when one realizes that God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon.

The one who created time stepped into time.

The one who created space came into space.

The one who created matter took on a body.

The one who created atoms became atoms.

This is the miracle that we celebrate in the incarnation.

When the God who is infinite, who made all of this effortlessly, became one of us and came down to be with us.

He loved you so much that he was born into the earth and he went to the cross and died so that nothing could ever separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Father God, thank you so much for who you are.

Thank you that you cannot be contained by any concept we could ever come up with.

Lord, overwhelm us today.

Blow our minds all over again.

Open our eyes, Lord.

Help us to see the glory of who you are.

We love you in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Would you guys stand up on your feet and thank Greg for that?

While you're standing, if you're scheduled to be in our prayer team today, I want to go ahead and invite you to make your way down and along the sides of the room.

When we dismiss here in a moment, if you need prayer for anything at all, even if it has nothing to do with what you just heard, we want to make sure that you do that, that you take that step.

It's going to be intimidating and it's going to take some courage, and you should do it anyways.

This team is ready to serve you in any way that you need to be served.

But before we get out of here, I want to give you 60 seconds to just, as we're standing here, reflect on what you heard, and maybe even allow the Holy Spirit to begin speaking to you and expanding your mind.

And so when you close your eyes and we pray today, I don't want you to do this.

I want you to do this.

We're going to look up.

You got it?

All right.

With eyes closed, Lord, begin expanding our minds.

In any way that we've limited our view of who you are, we pray that you'd begin showcasing that.

Speak to us over the next few minutes.

Help us to just enjoy your presence.

In Jesus' name, take one minute and just stand in the presence of God.