Sermon Illustrations

2. How important are we to God? God, the Creator of the all the universe, looked through out all creation and took notice of man made in His image and likeness, of you and me, living here on planet earth.

a) The earth seems pretty big to you and me. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles (I think it’s fair to round that off to 25,000 miles). Now that seems big—bigger than I can wrap my mind around. I think it would be easier to image our earth as the size of a golf ball. I can get my mind around a golf ball—for that matter I can pick it up and examine all sides of it. (The only thing I can’t do with a golf ball is hit it straight!)

b) So let’s picture the earth as the size of a golf ball. And now imagine yourself shrunk down to the size that you can stand on that golf ball. Can you see yourself on that golf ball making its way through our imaginary universe? God can. He never loses sight of you. He knows exactly where you are in the universe He made.

c) So if the earth is the size of a golf ball then how does it compare to our sun?

1. The earth is 93 million miles away from the sun (that’s a long way). Now if we shrink the sun down in proportion to our golf ball sized earth then we are only 1,642 feet away from the sun (that’s just about three tenths of a mile or about 547 yards—a long par five for you golfers).

2. The sun is 109 earths wide (and is as high as it is deep). That means that the sun could hold 1.3 million earths inside of it. Now to help put that into perspective, if the earth were a golf ball then the sun would be a ball 15 feet in diameter. Another way to think of that would be imagine a school bus filled with golf balls from floor to ceiling. Our sun is pretty big. You and I are standing on just one of those 1.3 million golf ball sized earths. God knows exactly which one and knows exactly where you and I are at on it because we are the center of God’s universe.