“Why do you waste your time going to church?”
Sam asked this question. Sam made no bones about the fact that he had been in church exactly twice in his life. One time was when he was baptized, and the other time was when his wife insisted on being married in the church.

Well, by various devious means, we got Sam into church for the third time.

The question posed by Sam . . . “Why do we waste our time going to church” might be a question for all of us to back off and answer once in awhile.

Another way of asking the same question is probably to say, “Why do we believe in God?” I think it follows that if we believe in God, we probably will wind up in church.

Is there a power greater than we are? Is there really a God that we worship, or are we just wasting our time? Have you ever doubted there really is a God?

I certainly have many times, and I admit it freely.

I think perhaps this is part of our growth pattern in Christian life that we do doubt sometimes.

We may doubt that there is a God, and we search our minds for signs that we really believe and that we should believe in Him. Through such questioning of ourselves, I think we may ultimately become better Christians.

When I was selected for the space program, one of the first things we were given was a booklet. This booklet, a space handbook put out by the Government Printing Office, contains a lot of information about our space. But there was one paragraph that concerned the hugeness and enormity of the universe that impressed me very much.

There is only one technical fact that you have to know to be able to understand this particular paragraph. You have to understand what is meant by a light year, that is, a light year of distance.

Probably you remember that light travels at about 186,000 miles a second, or about 7 times around the earth every second. Now if you start that light ray out straight and let it continue on out a light year of distance for a year’s time, then that distance is a light year of distance.

Let me quote one source on the subject of how big our universe is:
“When we recall that our galaxy is
some 100,000 light years in diameter, the sun being an insignificant star some
30,000 light years from the galactic center, circling in an orbit of its own every 200,000,000 years as the galaxy rotates,
we realize that even trying to visualize the tremendous scale of the universe beyond the solar system is difficult, let alone trying to attempt physical exploration and communications.

“Nor is the interstellar space of the galaxy the end”, for beyond are the millions of other galaxies, all apparently rushing from one another at fantastic speeds.

The limits of the telescopically observable universe extend at least 2,000,000,000 light years from us in all directions.

This shows us a little bit about how big our universe really is. It’s tremendous.

Still, we come back from something of this size to what we know of atoms, the smallest particles we know of. They, too, have a great similarity to our solar system and to the universe in that they have electrons rotating about a nucleus in regular patterns.

Now, what’s the point I am making?
It’s the orderliness of the whole universe about us from the smallest atomic structure to the greatest thing we can visualize: Galaxies, millions of light years across, all traveling in exact prescribed orbits in relation to one another.