Bigger Than Big, Part II

Genesis 1: 1, 2

Colossians 1: 16, 17

January 11, 2026

I am thankful to Mark Batterson for catching this dialogue for his book A Million Little Miracles.

At the end of Prince Caspian, one of the books written by C.S. Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia series, there is this dialogue between Lucy and Aslan, the great lion that represents Jesus in the book series. They haven’t seen each other in more than a year when Lucy says to Aslan, “Aslan, you’re bigger.” Aslan responds, “That is because you are older, little one.” Lucy asks, “Not because you are?” Aslan responds with a great truth. “I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

“Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

We understand in the book that Lucy is a young girl. In the series, Lucy is the youngest of the four Pevensie children, the first to find her way to Narnia through the Wardrobe and is the closest of the four children to Aslan. “Every year you grow” is not a reference to Lucy growing into adulthood. Instead, her growth is about growing more and more into the likeness of Christ. Aslan is talking about spiritual growth. Aslan is suggesting that as THAT growth increases, Jesus can’t help but get bigger. But not always.

Friends, how big is your God? How big is your Jesus? How close is your Holy Spirit? I fear that as we get older and older, theoretically more educated and sophisticated, more and more certain about the things we think we know, perhaps more and more jaded and cynical as we experience some of the difficulties of life, I fear that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit actually get smaller for far too many of us.

We are so busy looking around - guiding, shaping, deciding, conquering - that we never look up, that we never seek to count the stars, that we never move beyond the tent that we have created, the tent that represents our world, the tent that represents our understanding of the world and our place in it.

I guess some of that is inevitable. As we get older, more educated, much of the physical world becomes more understandable, more explainable. Correspondingly, as we become capable of formal thinking, of being able to think in the abstract, our ability to understand the world philosophically or theologically also expands, also becomes greater.

To maintain the metaphor from Batterson, and his book A Million Little Miracles, we become quite proficient at building our own tents. We are satisfied with the results. Our tent provides adequate, even comfortable lodging. It provides us some measure of protection. Life from within the tent that we have created seems to be enough. Correspondingly then, we grow as masters of our own universe - creators of our own tent. In that world, God can’t help but shrink.

And for a while that seems okay.

For many of us, we have been educated, successful, and live lives that most of the world can barely imagine. We live with a degree of protection, of self-determination even, that seems our due. After, it is all the result of our own hard work, right? We studied hard, worked hard, most of us feel we deserve the life, the tent, we have created. And I don’t want to minimize that effort, that hard work, the sacrifice it took to get where you might be.

But most of us live our lives thinking we have hit a home run all the while forgetting that we were born on at least second base, if not third. We live our lives thinking that we have been the sole creators of all of our benefits.

There is an old story of a conversation held by God and a group of accomplished, highly respected scientists - really a group of thinkers that collectively represent the intellectual highpoint of humanity. It goes like this:

A group pf scientists came together, pooled their wisdom, and then collectively told God, “We no longer need you. We have advanced to the point that we can create anything we need with our own ingenuity.” To that, God responded, “You want to put that to a test?” The scientists said, “Sure. What do you have in mind?”

God said, “Let’s each make a human being, just like I did in the Genesis story. I’ll go first.” Then God blew life into the humanity that God had created from the dirt.

The scientists were very excited. They were sure that together they could collect enough dirt out of which they then could create humanity. After some conversation, the scientists leaned down, each collecting a handful of dirt so that they could replicate the work of God.

“Wait a minute!” said God. “Go get your own dirt!”

Carl Sagan is famously quoted as saying, “To really make an apple pie from scratch, you must begin by inventing the universe.”

Yes, we may have worked hard. Yes, we may have sacrificed to gather and develop competencies that have served us well. Yes, we may have studied, wrestled with and accumulated knowledge that has made our worldly success possible. But it is inexcusably arrogant to think that we are solely a creation of our own making.

Each of us are an accumulation of God given gifts, talents, abilities, and passions. We may be good stewards of these gifts. We might be diligent in exercising our physical and intellectual muscles to build them up. But we start – not in creating, but by using – gifts already given to us by God.

One of the important first steps out of the tent and out into God’s Creation is taken when we realize just how big our God is and, correspondingly, how small we are. Smallness here does not correlate with insignificance. Does not this very communion table demonstrate how important we are in God’s eyes?

But to begin to understand just how big God is - and notice that I only said to begin – to begin to understand how big God is to give birth to a holy sense of awe. Batterson quotes Dr. Dacher Keltner when he writes “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

Holy awe is a sense of smallness in the presence of greatness. Art, music, nature – these things can all produce a sense of holy awe. Human behavior can, at times, provoke a sense of awe as that behavior brings forth something great or meaningful.

For me, there is nothing like being in Israel. I can never go there enough. Being in a land that was called the Promised Land. Being at sites where God’s great redemptive plan in Jesus unfolded. Seeing the accumulation of almost 2,000 years of believer’s veneration of the stories and sites. I get caught up in a feeling of being a part of something so much greater than myself.

I have to know more, explore more, see more because Jesus just can’t help but grow bigger when one has been to the Holy Land.

For you maybe it’s music. May it is art. Maybe it is the physical world in all its beauty and splendor. Whatever it is; whatever it might be, seek it out, develop that sense of holy awe, begin to consider just how big God is and yet, at the same time, just how much that God loves you and me. To quote Batterson, “This is how heaven invades earth.”

Friends, today on this Baptism of our Lord Sunday, we enter into a story that invites us to consider just how big Jesus has been, is, and is becoming in our lives. Our world is filled with a million different miracles that testify to the presence of our awe-inspiring God. If we have eyes to see. Amen.